Photoshop is Obsolete. Long Division should be next.

This is a post about why I hate long division. But to get there, we have to talk about Photoshop color modes.

When you open an image in Photoshop, you have the option of choosing one of three color modes (plus grayscale if you want it to be black and white). The default is RGB, which stands for red, green, blue. Any color that shows up on your screen can be reduced to a value between 0 and 255 for red, green, and blue. For instance, an RGB of 53, 94, 59 will give you a nice hunter green color.

The other popular color mode is CMYK; or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (the k actually stands for “key” but for all intents and purposes let’s call it black). Same thing: you give a value to each of the four colors and that unique combination will produce whatever color you are looking for. This is the color mode used for printing. Open up any commercial grade printer and you will see four toner cartridges labeled, you guess it, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

Photoshop also offers a color mode called Lab. The L is for lightness and the a and b are a range of colors, green to red and blue to yellow, respectively. When I was going to Photoshop conferences (a real thing) the Photoshop gurus (real people) were super excited about Lab.

Normally, if you wanted to adjust the lightness of an image (make it darker or brighter) you would use a Photoshop tool like Curves or Levels. Sometimes this had the unintended effect of also changing the value (ie shade) of the colors. So lightening an image might accidentally turn a red pixel into a pink one. Lab solved this by putting lightness on its own channel. Finally, a solution to a problem that only 1% of people actually notice!

Crowding In

All of this is to say that I have a deep knowledge of Photoshop. Most amateurs are interested in learning Photoshop because they want their images to be brighter, darker, sharper, or just to “pop". I had learned myriad ways to get inside images and make them pop.

Then Instagram filters came along and suddenly everyone could do what I could do. Even the default photo editing app on your phone does a good job. At first, I found ways to criticize these techniques; “this isn’t print quality” or “it looks fake,” but it is serving the intended purpose of the user; making it pop so they can share it online.

This trend has continued with Canva, turning any amateur into a halfway decent graphic designer. In fact, this trend started with digital photography in the ‘90s, which made it easy for anyone to be a decent enough photographer. Most non profit marketing teams don’t have a photographer, they just hand a camera to someone (usually the media relations guy) and say “figure this out.”

And he does. It’s not that hard to take “good enough” photos.

All of this has been bad for people who built their careers being highly-sought after professional photographers, graphic designers, and photo editors. But it’s made it really easy for people who cannot afford these services who can now do a “good enough” job and produce more content.

That is the crux of my point; the democratization of the tools didn’t kill my job. I do more digital than print content now, so I just spend less time tweaking photos in Photoshop and more time producing content, which is really what my job is.

Bad Math Dad

I have a ten-year-old who occasionally (when my wife is unavailable) asks me for help with his math homework. Sometimes I can help, but usually I get incredibly frustrated and launch into a tirade about how pointless it all is.

I usually stop there, but this time I decided to lean into my own self righteousness and develop a solid argument for why it is pointless, which you are now going to read.

The fact that I can’t remember complicated long division or how to multiply fractions is a pretty good indicator that learning it was useless for me. That’s not to say math is useless; it’s incredibly important. I use it every day. I just do it with a calculator.

You might counter that not all math can be done via calculator, and that’s exactly my point. Why do we waste time teaching kids things they will end up doing on a calculator? Why not just teach them how to use a calculator to solve simple problems.

Fast Tracking Innovation

Social media managers don’t need to understand color correction in Lab mode. They just take a photo on their phone, make adjustments, and post it to Instagram.

I read somewhere that society advances when we increase the number of things we can do without thinking about it. So how much quicker could we move students along to doing really exciting things in math if we aren’t wasting time with trivial things like memorizing times tables?

There is a story about an elementary school that dropped math from the curriculum, beyond some teaching some basic practice in measuring and counting. Those students rejoined the rest of the district in middle school, with students whose elementary schools had taught them math, and by the end of the year the non-math students' math scores had caught up with everyone else. 

The school dropped math for budgetary reasons, but what if money isn’t an issue for your school? How would you use those extra learning hours to advance knowledge?

My fear is that the reason we still teach these building blocks is the reason some photoshop mavens hate Instagram; it makes their deep knowledge and experience irrelevant.

But I think we have to put the kids first and get past all that. How many kids are we losing each year by forcing them to learn boring, rote memorization of pointless skills they will never use manually? How much sooner could the next generation of math whizzes reach breakthroughs and innovations if they didn’t waste so much time learning building blocks and instead stood on the shoulders of the amazing calculators our society has invented for our convenience?

Or maybe I just really suck at math and this is all cope.

Short Takes: Updating my Priors 2.2023

I once wrote a post pontificating that perhaps the reason US history was told with no contradictions, with America as the hero, was to create a myth to unite a diverse group of citizens. But I think a more likely answer is that a simple narrative is just easier to remember. 

As me move toward a messier, more complicated retelling of our story, my guess is that more students are going to lose track of the overall picture.

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New paper! Here's the one-minute version. There's a puzzle I've been thinking about for a long time. Wealthy countries tend to be happier... pic.twitter.com/LL2neJbiT4

— Thomas Talhelm (@ThomasTalhelm) January 24, 2023

Interesting thread on happiness that mirrors my post on trust. Some similarities, poverty and inequality lead to low trust and happiness. It also complicates two of my views: I'm okay with inequality as long as we take care of the people at the bottom. But I also highly value trust, which seems incompatible with high inequality.

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Speaking of trust and social capital, I’ve speculated a lot on the decline of social capital; why there is less face-to-face interaction with people outside our homes in younger generations. But maybe the better question is to ask why there was so much face-to-face interaction with the silent generation. 

And maybe the simple, boring answer is that civic participation and social interaction is driven by boredom. And entertainment and technology is so amazing right now that people are never bored enough to leave their homes and find other people to cure their boredom.

I also think this is a better explanation than the one offered by the Let Grow movement, i.e. that kids are stuck inside because their parents are too scared to let them out. My theory is that they don’t want to go out. The idea of meeting up with some neighborhood friends and building their own treehouse is less exciting than doing the same thing virtually on Minecraft.

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In my End of Culture post, I pointed out that the proliferation of new movies that are sequels (Top Gun: Maverick, etc.) and TV shows that are spinoffs (Velma, Wednesday, etc.) are a sign of a lack of creativity driven by the Gossip Trap. 

But I think there is a better explanation. 

Research shows that, given low information, a voter will choose the candidate with the familiar name. Likewise, given an abundance of streaming options, and the paradox of choice, a viewer will choose a familiar-sounding show. So spin-offs and sequels are a way for content makers to cut through the noise by giving the viewer a familiar-sounding name.

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In The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef uses the example of a climate activist using investment language as an analogy to change the stance of a climate skeptic who worked in finance. I was thinking of this when reading NYT’s "The Morning" when it quoted Biden’s line about going after “junk fees.”

Not knowing much about junk fees, I would have defaulted to feeling like this was some government overreach effort that is probably a net harm, especially if I read it in a column by a leftwing activist with language like "corporate greed" and "the evils of capitalism". But watch how David Leonhardt frames it.

“True, one company could call out another for using [junk fees]. But doing so often requires a complex marketing message that tries to persuade people to overcome their psychological instincts (like the appeal of a low list price). For that reason, Hilton can probably make more money by charging its own sneaky resort fees than by criticizing Marriott’s.”

In other words, our current, unregulated system penalizes companies that don’t engage in junk fees. If they want to stay competitive they have to do it too, even if they don’t want to. The government, in this case, is just resetting the nash equilibrium so there is no longer an incentive to opt out of the prisoner’s dilemma.

I mean, that worked for me. And it reminded me why viewpoint diversity is important for persuasion; you have to know how other people think and talk if you want to change the way they look at things.

The Beautiful

I’ve been struck by this passage from a rationalist essay. It imagines two people arguing over whether minimum wage laws are helpful or hurtful, both citing facts to support their respective cases. Then it zooms out and suggests that it’s really a conversation about aesthetics. In other words, they are really arguing about whether capitalism is beautiful or ugly, which is why facts are often unpersuasive.

(The lead photo of a dense collection of gas stations in Breezewood Pennsylvania is a meme that socialists like to use to argue that capitalism is ugly.)

In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt describes a patient who has brain damage affecting the emotional part of his brain. Ostensibly, he seems completely normal. But after several failed relationships, he sees a shrink. At the end of a session, the doc asks when he wants to book the next appointment. The patient lists the pros and cons of all possible dates, but cannot decide because he cannot assign any emotional valence to anything. He’s always stuck.

It’s an interesting case study because it suggests that humans actually need to be a little bit emotional in our decision-making. We need to see the beauty in things.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator describes his friend's relationship to his motorcycle. His friend bought a BMW because he didn’t want to deal with any problems. But they invariably happen.

The narrator tries several times to show his friend how to fix his motorcycle, but he stubbornly refuses to even listen. It’s not that he’s lazy or incompetent. Instead, the narrator describes him as a romantic thinker who sees the beauty of the motorcycle, but breaking down its component parts is ugly to him.

So it wasn’t a question about whether or not he should learn how to fix his own motorcycle, it was a question of whether the mechanical parts of a motorcycle are beautiful or ugly.

I think this framing is helpful because sometimes it’s the reason people in dialogue get stuck; they’re arguing about beauty. And you can’t, and shouldn’t, try to convince someone that what they think is beautiful is not.

Critical Thinking is Overrated

When you have low information, you rely on heuristics, or rules of thumb. As you become more educated, you find yourself telling these low IQ heuristic individuals to “read a book,” “do some research,” “believe in science,” or “trust the facts.” Then you come to realize that there isn’t much consensus among the scientific community and there are a lot of educated people with conflicting beliefs, ie Gibson's Law; “For every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD.” 

Eventually you come back to heuristics, only better ones.

I used to think that, eg Christian ethics was dumb, or the people who followed it were dumb. Because instead of trying to decide what was right or wrong (is abortion okay?), true or false (is man-made activity causing the climate to change?), they just did whatever some old book told them, or whatever some credentialed expert in the old book told them the old book said about said topic.

Stupid.

Instead, people should just be open to all ideas and judge situations on a case by case basis.

Also, stupid. Better yet, incredibly time-consuming to the point of debilitating. So heuristics it is.

Good rules and bad rules

The following tweet is instructive of two popular heuristics I see otherwise smart people do a lot: qui bono and the black box fallacy.

The explainer's dilettantish features are nicely surmised, but it's also worth adding that Yglesias is deeply incurious and a bad reporter, which is why he constantly gets stuff wrong (basis points, SBF, Santos, Andrew Yang as NYC mayor, etc).

— Alex Sammon (@alex_sammon) January 11, 2023

Yglesias has strong opinions and rising prestige, as evidenced by his popular Substack. So what does the gossip trap phenomenon tell us? People will respond by trying to pull him back in the bucket with the rest of us.

I have to assume the “carry water for the rich” line is in reference to Yglesias’ YIMBYism. There are countless examples of how policies that impact building homes impacts homelessness and the cost of housing, so I have to assume people against YIMBYism have low levels of information. So Sammon relies on the qui bono heuristic; if bad/evil people (ie rich developers) benefit then it must be bad. Which, it should go without saying, is a dumb heuristic. 

(After finding a way to circumvent the WaPo paywall and reading the story, it's more likely that the line is in reference to the story's insinuation that Yglesias has an inside track to influential politicians and writes blog posts that they want him to write; an unproven assertion that seems, I dunno, deeply incurious. But I have read others who argue that YIMBYism is bad simply because developers benefit. So the critique still stands, it just applies to people not mentioned here).

Black Box

The other bad heuristic is what I’m calling the black box fallacy, a reference to a SSC post. Basically, there are countless geniuses who had really dumb ideas. So dismissing Newtonian physics just because Sir Isaac thought there were hidden codes in the Bible would be a bad idea.

I highly doubt Mr. Sammon has a statistical analysis of the errors of journalists that shows Yglesias is among the worst. So he has low information here. Instead, Sammon is probably highly sensitive to the topics in which he’s discovered an Yglesias error, which is really just committing the availability heuristic, (ie his opinion of Yglesias is informed by the blog posts most readily available in Sammon's mind, the ones where he has discovered an error).

But what Sammon is really getting at here is an attack on Yglesias’ growing prestige, since Yglesias seems highly influential in areas that are, I imagine, at odds with Sammon’s beliefs. Sammon can’t possibly know that Yglesias is wrong in every subject he writes about, so Sammon relies on the black box fallacy: if he was really wrong in these instances, then he must be wrong everywhere and can be dismissed without further inquiry.

But more importantly, and I'm definitely impugning motives here, I get the sense that Sammon wants you to think that, because Yglesias was wrong in these instances, he must be wrong everywhere and can be dismissed without further inquiry. He wants to yank down Matt's prestige and influence.

Think Less

I write about situations I find interesting and I find them interesting because I’m not sure what the answer is. But I want to know what the answer is because I want to live my life. So I run through all these scenarios, not because I think judging everything with an open mind, on a case by case basis, is the right approach. I’m doing it to build out a moral framework so, like the Christians and their old book, I can consult my old framework for my response and not have to think.

Going back to the meme I posted at the top, I’m trying to develop heuristics that are are better than the Kahneman default heuristics. 

Here is one that I like: I call it the boring heuristic. If something seems off, and I have low information, instead of attributing it to something like malice, conflict, corruption, or stupidity, I try to come up with the most boring explanation possible and stick with that.

People in my town are mad that the town is slow to respond to the removal of public trees. We don't have a lot of information on the workings of our local government, so we rely on heuristics for an explanation. Most people default to the evil/stupid fallacy: we have incompetent, lazy people who don't respond to requests or we have corrupt officials who are laundering tax dollars into their own pockets and claiming that there isn't enough money. 

But a more boring explanation like: "There just isn't a lot of money in local government budgets and the town can only remove so many trees in a fiscal year," just seems more plausible to me.

He was right even when he was wrong

I also have a "people with reputations and money on the line are usually right" heuristic. The Matt Yglesias piece in question is paywalled but my super-sleuthing revealed this line from the story:

"At age 21, Yglesias was laying out the logician’s case for the invasion of Iraq, because how could the most powerful, informed men on Earth be so stupid? In May of this year, Yglesias declared that Bankman-Fried “is for real,” because why else would wealthy people risk their money?"

With hindsight, we can see he was wrong in both instances. But if your heuristic for distrusting the Iraq invasion is "never listen to the government" then you're probably going to be wrong a lot and will probably die from a preventable disease for which we have readily available vaccines.

Elsewhere in the article, the journalist praises Revolving Door Project, "which saw right through Sam Bankman-Fried." Good for you, Revolving Door Project. My question is: did you have information no one else did (highly unlikely) or do you have an "all tech people are committing fraud" heuristic (probably)? If the latter, I think you're going to be wrong more often than Yglesias. You just happened to be right w/r/t SBF. I'd be impressed if Revolving Door Project also predicted the Black Lives Matter fraud, but my guess is they were too busy targeting tech billionaire to notice.

I was too worried about finding a framework that would never lead me astray. But that's silly. It's better to settle on heuristics that will be right most frequently over the long haul. 

The only exception to these heuristics, other than having enough information to feel comfortable ignoring them, is the "What if I'm wrong?" question. Like, if following a heuristic leads me to believe Theory A rather than Theory B, I have to ask if choosing Theory A can have devestating consequences if I'm wrong. 

Otherwise, I stick with my boring heuristics. 

The End of Culture

My favorite podcast is called The Rewatchables, which is just three dudes rehashing what they love about an old movie. It has taught me how different subsequent viewings are from the first one. You pay more attention to subtlety rather than trying to follow the plot, because you already know what happens.

The first novel I read in years is called Station Eleven, which is the basis for an HBO series I’ve already watched several times. So I already had a sense of where the plot and character development was going and I could focus on the subtlety.

I just haven’t had the appetite for something new in a while and I don’t think I’m alone. On his Plain English podcast, Derek Thompson says:

“This year, the song of the summer is arguably Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”—which was released in 1985. It was launched by the most-watched global TV show of the summer, Stranger Things—an homage to the 1980s. In movies, the biggest hit of the season is Top Gun: Maverick—a sequel to the 1986 film. The ’80s was four decades ago!

The triumph of nostalgia and familiarity in culture is deeper than one summer. The five biggest movies of this year are the second Top Gun, the second Doctor Strange, the sixth Jurassic Park, the 14th Batman-related film, and the fifth Despicable Me.

The data now shows that more than 70 percent of the songs streamed are old songs." 

Similarly, in The New York Times Wesley Morris writes, 

“In “Maverick,” the comedy is that no one’s as qualified as Cruise. For a couple of weeks in August, our No. 1 movie was “Bullet Train,” an intermittently funny, mostly tedious crime-thriller that requires Brad Pitt to fight younger prospects — Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Zazie Beetz and Bad Bunny — ‌and casually kill most of them. They want what he’s got: a briefcase full of money, but his stature, too.”

Fearing what's next

The plot of Tenet revolves around some group of people in the future who are trying to reverse the flow of time, to make it run in reverse. Why? Something to do with climate change, I think. But the point is the future was bad and they viewed the past as better so they went to extraordinary lengths to reverse the flow of time to get away from the future.

I can’t help but feel that something similar is happening culturally. We seem to be afraid of the future and more nostalgic than ever. It’s even hurting creativity. Songs don’t even have key changes anymore.

People have been predicting that DALLE 2 will disrupt graphic designers. But all the AI does is take inputs and say “this looks like something a human would create.” As far as I can tell, AI doesn’t have the ability to innovate and create new artistic styles, its creations are based on existing styles. Maybe this is what AI really disrupts, creativity.

Cancelled

People like to say that you can’t say the type of things that George Carlin said anymore, it would be too controversial. But that’s not entirely true, because Dave Chapelle says controversial things and people have been trying to cancel him for years. But what I think is true is that no up-and-coming comic could do Chappelle’s exact act and survive. Chappelle, like Cruise and Pitt, has built up enough of a reputation and a loyal audience to make it worth it for Netflix to keep platforming him, despite the number of people calling for his head.

He has what Erik Hoel calls “immunity to gossip.” In a popular Substack post, Hoel coined the term “gossip trap” to describe the default setting of most social groups that prevents the formation of civilization, and how we seem to be falling back into it.

“Being in the Gossip Trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering.”

For him, civilization was a solution out of the gossip trap.

“For what are the hallmarks of civilization? I’d venture to say: immunity to gossip. Are not our paragons of civilization figures like Supreme Court justices or tenured professors, or protected classes with impunity to speak and present new ideas, like journalists or scientists?”

I applaud Hoel for using a simple term like “gossip trap” to describe the phenomena, rather than something nerdy and opaque like “socialized stigma inertia”. But I still think there’s a better way to describe what he’s talking about.

Surviving popularity

Gossip is done behind people’s back. That’s not what we’re describing here. What we’re describing is this: someone who holds subjectively dangerous/harmful views is getting too much prestige (trying to climb out of the bucket) and we respond by pulling them back down.

This blog post best capsulated what I'm talking about (you have to scroll down until you get to the Caviar Cope section). I saw The White Lotus and thought it was okay. But many people in my social circle loved it. They all shared similar traits: left learning, highly educated, white, middle to upper class folks who tend to hate the wealthy. 

The writer notes that viewers of Succession, The Menu, and The White Lotus have this internal monologue like this:

"I would love to own a yacht, but I'm too smart and mentally healthy to be that rich. So I'll just watch these pathetic losers on their yachts, to enjoy the experience, while also basking in my superior intelligence and well-being."

The White Lotus leans right into the gossip trap. It tells the viewer, "You know how all wealthy people are evil? Come watch this show where they all get humiliated and you get to laugh at them." The show is an avatar for pulling people back into the bucket.

The Cancel Paradox

Hoel’s idea of the gossip trap is his attempt to answer the sapiens paradox: why did it take so long for humans to invent civilization. But he actually does a better job of answering the origins of our current cancel/accountability culture (a common criticism of the idea of cancel culture is that "it's just people finally being held accountable." Fine, you agree such a shift in norms has occurred. You're just quibbling about it's label. In my effort to be inclusive, I've used the phrase "cancel/accountability culture.").

My understanding of Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature is that asking something like “why is there so much violent crime in east St. Louis?” is asking the wrong question when violence has been the norm for most of human history. Instead we should look at a quiet, low-crime community and ask why there isn’t violence.

So w/r/t the origins of cancel/accountability culture, maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Should be asking: how did we go so long without cancel/accountability culture? Hoel’s answer would be civilization, which involved building superstructures that create immunity from gossip/canceling. The cause of our current regression has been the age of information and transparency, which makes it easier to pull people back into the bucket with us and it’s made it harder for anyone growing up in this era to take creative risks when reputation management is so important.

From Lohan to Probst

But I’ve already said that gossip and high school culture isn’t the best metaphor for what’s going on. So what is? The TV show Survivor.

There are two ways to advance in Survivor. The easy way is to win competitions and gain immunity from being voted off the island. The other way is to not get voted off the island, which you do by getting people to like you, but not seeing you as a threat. 

This is where we are in our current culture. There is no more immunity so everyone is trying to be liked but not seen as a threat. (I should admit that I've never actually watched a full episode of Survivor.)

One of the most popular current comedians is Nate Bargatze. His secret? He never says anything offensive. Seriously, jump to the four minute mark in this bit he does about global warming. "Global warming, we gotta stop it. Or ... more of it? I don't really know which way we gotta go." He's gaining popularity because no one sees him as a threat. But if he ever works a political stance into a bit, watch the crabs come for him.

Civilization shrugged

This might explain our current cancel/accountability culture, but I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around Hoel’s point. He asserts that gossip is a “leveling mechanism” that has historically prevented, eg talented hunters from accruing too much power. These hunters are mocked and belittled by their peers and dragged back down into the bucket.

He then writes that civilization is a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms. This seems to suggest that what allowed us to crawl out of the gossip trap and invent civilization was allowing individuals to accrue too much power. That’s some John Galt/Ayn Randianism shit right there.

If hunter/gatherer life is about tribes sharing the resources available (ie food), then agriculture/civilization is about increasing the amount of resources available and not sharing the new supply.

If this is true, then the libertarian mantra “the most common human trait isn’t greed, it’s envy” might be right. Capitalism isn’t about greedy powerful men exploiting poor workers and squirreling away resources for themselves. It’s about, well, greedy powerful men creating new resources and not sharing them as the rest of us look on with envy.

A Way Out?

So what would a superstructure that allows for creative risks and protects reputation look like? It might be Ontario's Human Rights Code. If you've been following any of the culture wars lately you may have read about a transgender teacher teaching a class while wearing large prosthetic breasts with protruding nipples. The school board has defended her right to do so, as she is protected by the law.

As far as freedom of expression goes, this example is a weird hill to die on. But in our current cancel/accountability culture, the fact that this unpopular personal decision is allowed to take place is proof that we can still create structures to climb out of the gossip trap.

Steelman Time

This seems to apply for comedy and movies, but not TV. We are in the golden age of television where creativity doesn’t seem to be a problem. So I think the gossip trap only applies to individuals who gain too much prestige. And the fact that I’m resistant to starting a new book or TV series might have more to do with the paradox of choice than some “end of culture” phenomenon.

But we'll wait and see. Maybe writers and producers have been around long enough to build up a reputation that immunizes them against cancellation. We'll have to see if the creativity stagnates with the next generation of writers and directors. 

But for now this is the best explanation I can come up with for the current culture war.

Leaders in Truth, Leaders in Morals

From Inside Higher Ed:

“You have climate change, abortion, guns and COVID,” he said. “None of which should be positions that we will be neutral on, because these are all things that can be analyzed by academics and for which there is an academic consensus.”

The context of the above quote is in regard to a take that university presidents should publicly weigh in on national topics. First, I can't find anywhere that shows there is academic consensus on abortion or guns. Second, I don’t think abortion and guns can be analyzed in the same breath as climate and covid. Third, I don’t think it’s wise to weigh in on every topic.

Two-Telos Solution

Before I can go anywhere, I have to start with my oft-referenced Jonathan Haidt argument that a university can only have one telos (truth or social justice) and they should be upfront about which one they are so students can self-select.

While I commend his classical liberal solution, I have to chastise him for his framing. He took something abstract and universally-agreed upon as good (truth) and contrasted it with something specific and polarizing (social justice). I think it would have been fairer to compare apples to apples and pit Truth against Ethics or Morality. Or to keep everything in Platonic terms, True vs. Good.

When most universities were founded, most people belonged to a church. So they had a moral community. But now that church attendence is down, I think this is the best time for universities to fill in the void and adopt a moral framework. So I agree with Haidt that universities should declare their version of Good, I also think they can pursue both.

Because here’s the thing: Haidt’s two telos solution is a moral framework. It’s saying “We believe in Enlightenment Liberalism. We believe it’s more important to be tolerant of other views than to coerce people into adopting our own.”

And I have enough faith in universities that they can segregate their science departments from their philosophy departments so that one is guided by what is good while the other is guided by what is true. I promise you Professor Haidt, they can figure this out.

When to Weigh in?

So what does this have to do with the quote at the top? Climate change and covid policies (whether we’re talking about vaccines or public health measures) fall under science. We have systems in place to point us in the direction of truth. 

But abortion? I can’t help but feel like that is a question of morality. “Should a woman in the third trimester of her pregnancy be able to terminate her pregnancy” is a question that science cannot answer (and most of America disagrees with). So if there is academic consensus on this topic, all that tells you is that academics share the same morals. And therein lies the problem. (I’m purposely leaving aside guns, because I feel like there is very little research there. So any “consensus” is probably a moral stance and not scientific.)

We haven't come up with something better than the scientific method for pointing us in the direction of truth. But every few decades there is a new version of the Good, antiracism just happens to be the most recent (I'd argue that we haven't improved upon Humanism). So I'm very suspicious of anyone who claims that there is consensus on a moral framework (not to be confused with a policy position. "Slavery is wrong" is a policy position. It's undergirded by a moral framework [ie equal rights].)

The Pope weighs in on every topic because it’s his job to give moral guidance to Catholics. He isn’t persuading non-Catholics. So when a university president weighs in on a moral issue, he isn’t persuading public opinion as much as he’s providing moral guidance to his congregants. 

If universities were just humanities schools devoid of research departments, this would be fine. But they have a responsibility to science and the truth. So when it comes time to weigh in on climate change and vaccine uptake, you are trying to persuade public opinion. And when you’ve already weighed in on non-sciency topics, like abortion, you’ve lost credibility with those outside your congregation.

Go to your Rooms!

Maybe I'm unusually optimistic, but I think we can have it both ways. Universities should commit to truth and a moral framework. They will become churches to the unchurched.

But when it comes time to make public statements, presidents should defer to their deans. The Dean of Humanities will weigh in on moral issues to their students and alumni. The Dean of Science will weigh in on science issues to the general public.

The job of the president is to keep these two apart. You can use science to support ethical arguments ("policy X will reduce gun violence by 33%") but you cannot tell people there is a right way to think ("the second amendment needs to be repealed because science").

Likewise, humanities departments cannot prevent scientific research if it offends their sensibilities. You can make the case that, eg it would be wiser to study ways to lift more people out of poverty than trying to figure out how much of the racial wage gap is due to genetics. But you cannot try to stop anything that makes it through the funnel.

Steelmanning Virtue Signaling

From Wikimedia Commons

This blog is where I come to update my priors and so I'm here to admit that I've changed my stance on two issues. First, I  was wrong about virtue signaling. In the past, I've dismissed it as dumb, ineffective, and even potentially counterproductive.

But for the most part, virtue signaling is just taking behavior that you think is good and trying to make it a social norm. And I like social norms. They're a form of mass persuasion. Plus they are more effective and less coercive than mandates.

Like, you don't post a Facebook photo of yourself getting your Covid vaccine because you want to signal to the world how virtuous you are. You do it because you think vaccination is good behavior and you want to normalize it, to create the impression that it's something most people do.

I think employer-mandated diversity trainings are bad because they are coercive and counter productive. But I agree the status quo isn't great. So what should we do? What works?

Research from “Sohad Murrar, Mitchell Campbell, and Markus Brauer found that when you tell people that their peers "hold pro-diversity attitudes and engage in inclusive behaviors,” it makes them have more positive attitudes toward outgroups. In other words, it makes caring about diversity a social norm.

This study from American Economic Review looks at what happens when white and black college students are assigned as roommates. The white students significantly increased friendship & social interactions with black students, expressed greater comfort dating black students, showed greater cooperation in prisoner's dilemma game, and showed less implicit bias.

Meanwhile, the black students had significantly higher GPAs & were more likely to persist, regardless of their white roommate's GPA. The researchers' theory is that exposure to white students provided some psychological benefit, like reduced stereotype threat. Conversely, there were no negative effects on the white students. Win win.

Combine these studies and you have a formula that looks like this: interracial contact -> pro diversity views -> consensus among a group of individuals that most people are pro diversity -> a new social norm that is pro diversity.

But social norming isn't a magic bullet that creates a happy utopia where everyone agrees on all issues and the culture wars have ceased. There are two limitations.

The Right Amount of Contact

Another way of saying that a group of people have adapted to a shared social norm is to say they have assimilated. This is the idea behind Contact Hypothesis—the idea that actual interaction with members of diverse groups will lead to less prejudice—which has a lot of empirical support, including the AER study I mentioned above. But people don't always assimilate to the norm, sometimes they hunker down and rebel.

So it seems to be that the key to deploying social norms is figuring out when they work and when they backfire. In order to do that, you need to understand the context.

One of the most interesting phenomenons to me is how well an African American boy does in school is partially depended upon the racial makeup of the school. 

This study found that when black students from low-performing schools moved to high-performing schools, the girls did better. (lower arrests rates, improvements in education and mental health, and are less likely to engage in risky behaviors.) But the boys did worse! And they seemed to do worse in schools with more racial contact.

The possible explanation, oppositional culture identity theory or sometimes called 'acting white,' doesn't often happen but when it does it seems to depend on the racial makeup of the school. If more than 80 percent of the students are black then there doesn't seem to be a problem but an even split leads to worse outcomes (I haven't read a good explanation for why this only seems to affect black boys and not black girls).

How else do you explain goth culture, or emo culture, or whatever the hell it's called now? These kids aren't choosing this look because it accentuates their best features or signals their sophisticated tastes. They're doing it to signal that they don't give a shit what the cool kids wear. I can't find any research about goth kids, but my guess is that it's contact with Abercrombie & Fitch (or whatever the cool kids wear now) kids that predicts the likelihood of black eyeliner and green hair.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about something similar in David and Goliath. Some students do worse at Harvard than they would at a good state school. Being a small fish in a big pond is intimidating and can lead to worse test scores, but transfer to a less competitive school and those grades start to go up. Context matters.

It almost seems that if the numbers are small enough, the minority students will assimilate to the culture of the school. They get a little bit bigger and then they define themselves against the consensus. They become the majority and things level out again.

So virtue signaling to create a social norm is commendable behavior but you really have to pay attention to the group settings as it can make things worse if people don't already feel included.

Shame Signaling

The virtue signaling I've used as examples so far are of good behavior. What about behavior we think is bad? Instead of people trying to virtue signal a good behavior to replace the bad behavior, we get people trying to shame, censor, and deplatform the perceived bad behavior.

So let's say you think vaccination is good. Then you see Dr. Robert Malone go on Joe Rogan's podcast and talk about how the mRNA technology is unsafe, creating a norm against vaccination. If your reaction was to threaten Spotify to remove Joe Rogan and his disinformation, then you are replacing bad behavior (anti-vax speech) with more bad behavior (censorship).

My prior setting was that this reaction was always bad. I view this behavior through the conflict theory vs. mistake theory lens. As you recall, conflict theorists see bad things as the result of bad people engaged in conflict with you. Mistake theorists see bad things as the result of well-meaning people making mistakes.

The censorship people see behavior they don't like and register it as coming from the enemy in their conflict. And since the world is a battle to control the narrative, you fight back by doing whatever you can to control the flow of the enemy's information.

Previously, I would sit in my ivory tower with the other mistake theorists and say that censoring, shaming and deplatforming is wrong. While I agree that, eg normalizing anti-vax attitudes is bad, I see it as them making a mistake, not engaging in conflict with me. I would say that we need to keep an open line of communication so that we can show them they are wrong.

Speck in my eye

Well, I was wrong. At least, I was narrow in my view of things.

I could see that the problem with conflict theorists was that they saw everyone else as a conflict theorist, when in fact, sometimes bad things are the result of mistakes. But I could not see my own flaw; thinking every bad action was the result of a mistake and not that some people are actually engaged in conflict.

The truth is that some people lie, cheat, and steal ... knowingly. They care more about advancing their agenda than the truth. And I'm not sure they are worthy of a platform, or at the very least not worthy of my attention. Because they are not interested in learning that they are mistaken.   

I wouldn't publicly debate Alex Jones about whether or not the 2020 election was stolen because I don't think he has any interest in changing his mind. I also think it's quite possible he knows it's all a big lie. He is a conflict theorist and is not deserving of my time. 

I don't have a good heuristic for determining who is a conflict entrepreneur vs. who is making a mistake. It's kind of a "know it when you see it" thing. But if a conflict entrepreneur gets cancelled, I'm not going to fight for their right to be heard. But I should always support people who try to create a social norm of what they think is good behavior, even if I think they are making a mistake.

For example, people found this couple incredibly annoying. But if you are pro-choice, this is the least bad response in our pluralistic society.

If you want pluralism, you are going to have to live among people who disagree with your most deeply held beliefs about abortion. From there, you have three options. 

1. Laws that make a decision about abortion for you, angering half the country.
2. Social norms that try to shame and harass women who have or consider abortions.
3. Social norms that promote adoption as an alternative to abortion.

Love them or hate them, the "we will adopt your baby" people are the best version of social norming. They are trying to model behavior they think is good to replace behavior they think is bad.

Conflict by Design

The other thing I've discovered is that some systems are designed for conflict and we just have to play the game. A good example is the way judges are appointed. During Trump's four years, Mitch McConnell’s Senate majority confirmed three right-wing justices and 234 new judges overall, a blistering pace. Not to be outdone, under Biden, Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, has actually confirmed federal judges at a faster rate than McConnell’s at the time of the first midterm election.

If one person has the power to appoint judges who will carry our their will, the only way to respond is to take power and appoint your own partisan judges at the same rate. You can't point out that this is a mistake, you have to respond with conflict or you lose.

I am very pro bipartisanship. But I've come to believe that Obama's attempt to involve Republicans in the creation of the Affordable Care Act, in the name of bipartisanship, was a mistake. Republicans will not return the favor. They will pass partisan bills if they have the votes and will stymie any legislation put forth by Democrats to prevent them from getting a win.

So until we have a better system, like one with judicial term limits, you kinda have to play the prisoner's dilemma game by defecting until the other party decides to cooperate.