The FBI and Rauchian reality

Eli Lake writes,

The most blatant example of Rauch’s failure to grapple with elite epistemic failure is his treatment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In fact, former FBI Director James Comey is one of the people who blurbs his book. Rauch’s brief mention of the 2019 Justice Department inspector general report on the FBI’s surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page says it “found procedural errors but no political bias in the FBI’s investigation of Russian efforts to influence the Trump campaign.”

This is a complete misreading of the report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

I think that in general Rauch has a blind spot with respect to the political biases of the FBI.

My review of Noise

It begins,

Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, and Olivier Sibony (henceforth KSS) argue that inconsistency in human judgment is widespread, not well appreciated, and very costly. Sentences differ for similar crimes. Underwriting decisions differ for similar loan applicants. Hiring decisions differ for similar job candidates. Performance evaluations differ for similar employees.

I found their book worth reading, although if you read my review you will see where I quibble.

One definition of CRT

From Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001)

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

This is from the 2016 edition, but it is identical to a paragraph quoted by Max Eden and attributed to the first edition in 2001. The way I see it, the characterization of CRT by its critics today is reasonably close to this definition, which comes from two of its prominent proponents twenty years ago.

Eden quotes another paragraph that is slightly different in the 2016 edition. Here is the more recent version:

Although CRT began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists who use CRT’s ideas to understand issues of school discipline and hierarchy, tracking, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multicultural education, and alternative and charter schools. They discuss the rise of biological racism in education theory and practice and urge attention to the resegregation of American schools. Some question the Anglocentric curriculum and charge that many educators apply a “deficit theory” approach to schooling for minority kids.

I will put more quotes from the introduction to the 2016 edition below the fold.

Last week, I had a jarring experience the day after I heard Jonathan Haidt talk to a conference of mostly high school educators. He had some disparaging things to say about CRT.

The next morning, I was supposed to do a workshop on The Three Languages of Politics to a small subset of conference attendees. Innocently, I decided to start with Haidt’s distinction between Discover and Defend, as analogous to my distinction between political rhetoric that is intended to persuade (which we rarely observe nowadays) and rhetoric that is intended to demonize. I said that I might end up repeating a lot of what Professor Haidt had said the previous evening.

“I hope not!” a woman in the audience piped up. It turned out that his talk had angered many in his audience. They pegged him as a straight white male (correct) and as a hard-right ideologue (wrong–at least for now).

Figuring that I was not going to get any traction otherwise, I let the teachers vent. Among their complaints was that CRT was misrepresented by Haidt and by other opponents.

I came away from my close encounter with teachers marinated in CRT thinking that there is no stopping them. They have their excuses ready when CRT is criticized. They claim that their critics are right-wingers out to distort CRT and suppress discussions of race.

I could have refuted these teachers by reading the two paragraphs above, but I did not have them handy. From now on, I will be able to find them doing a quick search of my blog.
Continue reading

A recommended book

I review Andrey Mir’s PostJournalism. [link fixed]

But relatively placid stories do not motivate people to pay subscription fees. Today, people can get news for free. They can get sports scores, financial information, and entertainment without going to newspapers. Mir argues that nowadays people pay newspapers to validate their worldviews. Newspapers do this most effectively by highlighting stories about the outrageous actions of their subscribers’ political adversaries.

An excerpt cannot do justice to my review. And the review cannot do justice to the book.

McWhorter on Murray

John McWhorter speculates,

In the 1960s, a new and powerful fashion in black thought, inherited from the general countercultural mood, rejects championing assimilation to proposing that opposition to whiteness is the soul of blackness. Meanwhile, white leftists encourage as many poor black women as possible to go on welfare, hoping to bankrupt the government and inaugurate a fairer America. Soon, being on welfare in poor black communities is a new normal – hardly the usual, but so common that people grow up seeing not working for a living as ordinary. Then at this same time, a new War on Drugs gave poor black men a way of making half of a living by selling drugs on the black market, amidst a violent culture of gangland turf-policing. This feels more natural to them than it would have to their fathers because 1) the new mood sanctions dismissing traditional values as those of a “chump,” 2) it no longer feels alien to eschew legal employment, and 3) the Drug War helps make it that most boys in such neighborhoods grow up without fathers anyway.

I think McWhorter is being shockingly uncharitable* to progressives with the sentence that begins “Meanwhile, white leftists. . .” I don’t think anyone wanted to maximize the number of poor black women on welfare. But regardless of intent, one can argue that the consequences of the War on Poverty were that work and marriage were strongly discouraged. I think that to this day, in spite of the (temporary) “end welfare as we know it” turn under President Clinton, the implicit marginal tax rates on the poor of all races are very high. That is because benefits like Medicaid and food stamps fade out as income goes up. For a woman, the financial advantage of a husband who earns about $30,000 a year can be close to nil.

[*UPDATE: I am wrong about this. See Handle’s comment. McWhorter knows what he is talking about, apparently.]

The larger topic of McWhorter’s essay is Charles Murray’s latest book. McWhorter writes,

in the end, Murray avoids stating too directly what the obvious implication of his argument is. He thinks that we need to accept an America in which black people are rarely encountered in jobs requiring serious smarts. We need to accept an America in which almost no black people are physicists or other practitioners in STEM, have top-level jobs in government, or are admitted to top-level graduate programs at all. Black people will invent little, there will be many fewer black doctors and lawyers, and many fewer black experts in, well, anything considered really intellectually challenging.

I agree with the complaint that Murray is not being forthcoming. In yesterday’s post, I called it “ducking and dancing.”

To repeat my own views, I would like to see us treat people as individuals and not pay attention to group outcomes. That approach may not be perfect, but other approaches strike me was worse.

But suppose you told me that it was unrealistic to ignore group outcomes, and you insisted that I offer suggestions for improving outcomes among blacks. My thoughts would be along these lines:

1. I take the Null Hypothesis seriously. I would not put a lot of my chips on formal education as a solution.

2. I take incentives seriously. So I would get rid of Federal poverty programs and replace them with (a) a small UBI that lowers the heavy marginal tax rate on the working poor; and (b) community programs to identify and support families with special needs.

3. I take cultural forces seriously. Personality traits and social norms differ markedly across groups and over time. We don’t know a great deal about the process by which these factors change. For example, when marriage rates decline, we have great difficulty disentangling the many possible causes and effects. There are many arguments to be had about what is a good cultural trait and what is a bad one. And there is no policy dashboard sitting in front of us with buttons and dials that allow us to steer culture. But culture should be the focus for research and policy experiments.

I note that McWhorter’s ideas about violence in poor black communities fall within this framework.

Rauch is un-FIT

I write on Jonathan Rauch’s new book here.

I doubt that his exhortations and calls for a return to twentieth-century values in those fields will work.

I think that if we are going to fix the problem with social epistemology, we are going to need new prestige hierarchies to replace the old ones. The Fantasy Intellectual Teams project offers a more radical way of overcoming the corruption of the intellectual status game.

There is much to like in The Constitution of Knowledge. I especially like the focus on social epistemology–especially after my disappointing dialog with Michael Huemer on the topic.

But Rauch’s book also annoyed me a great deal. Perhaps if I am in a better mood when I write a full review, I will put a higher weight on what appealed to me and a lower weight on what annoyed me.

Signs that we face an epistemological crisis: book titles, 2021

Some book titles in 2021, in chronological order.

February. Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

March. Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us

April. Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t

May. Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, and Oliver Sibony. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

June. Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

September. Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

So far, I have only read Galef and Sunstein, et al. I read some of Morson and Schapiro, but it was less than I hoped for. I expect to read Rauch and also Pinker when they become available. But what does it say about contemporary culture that so many heavyweights are writing on epistemology? This seems to me an indictment of: social media, certainly; political discourse, certainly; higher education, probably; journalism, probably.

This may fit with a historical pattern. The barbarians sack the city, and the carriers of the dying culture repair to their basements to write.

Not exactly on this topic, but pertinent, I am curious to read Heying-Weinstein A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, due in September. And McWhorter’s Woke Racism, due in October.

Null Hypothesis Watch

In his new book, Facing Reality, Charles Murray writes,

Because we have not talked openly about group differences, we have kidded ourselves that the differences are temporary and can be made to go away.

Scott Alexander writes,

maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural. If that’s true, I think it would be even more interesting – it would mean there’s some set of beliefs and norms which can double your income and dectuple your chance of making an important scientific discovery. I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be – as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview. But if I’m wrong, figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems like crime or education or welfare (nobody expects good policy in these areas to double average income!).

There is a folk theory that says that cultural differences explain group differences in academic achievement. Jewish and Asian culture places a premium on academic achievement, while African-Americans who do well in school are derided by their peers as “acting white.” I don’t know how to test the folk theory rigorously. You can’t randomly assign children to different sets of parental and peer influences.

I doubt that the folk theory explains a lot. But I am a bit surprised that both Murray and Alexander slide past it.

Another folk theory is that differences in school quality explain a lot. On the contrary, I believe in the Null Hypothesis. As Murray puts it,

no one has yet found a way to increase cognitive ability permanently over and above the effects of routine education. The success stories consist of modest effects on exit tests that fade out.

Murray says that the purpose of his book is to get society to treat a black individual primarily as an individual. Instead, identity politics puts all the emphasis on black.

Murray admits that it is “paradoxical” that he is devoting a book to analyzing differences in group outcomes in order to get people to stop focusing on group differences. He wants to convince people that we should blame differences in group outcomes largely on immutable characteristics. Call that option A. But we might be better off with what I might call option B: stop paying attention to differences in group outcomes.

Neither option A nor option B is palatable on the left today. But I bet that option B stands a better chance of becoming accepted in our society.

Another Burgis remark

In Wanting, Luke Burgis writes,

One hundred years ago, there was a much wider gap in knowledge between someone who had a doctoral degree and someone who didn’t. Today, with the world’s information at nearly everyone’s fingertips, the knowledge gap between people with a great amount of formal education and those with less has narrowed.

. . .Today value is largely mimetically driven rather than attached to fixed, stable points (like college degrees). This has created opportunities for anyone who can stand out from the crowd. This has positive and negative consequences.

We used to think of expertise as embedded in prestigious institutions. But attachment to a prestigious institution no longer guarantees expertise.

Another concept that Burgis introduced to this reader is the self-licking ice cream cone. This phrase was coined by Peter Worden of NASA to refer to an institution whose main purpose is sustaining itself, having lost sight of its higher mission.

Peacetime armies tend to degenerate into self-licking ice cream cones. The CDC and other bureaucracies that were supposed to help us deal with the virus turned out to be self-licking ice cream cones.

Harvard University once had a higher mission of selecting and training leaders for politics and business. But Harvard has degenerated into a self-licking ice cream cone.

We need new and better institutions.

Burgis on Girard: note who you want to fail

I’ve finished one pass-through of Wanting, by Luke Burgis. The book is an attempt to spread and build on the ideas of Rene Girard. I liked the sections of the book that I thought I grasped. Other sections did not reach me, but perhaps I will get more out of a second reading.

The Burgis-Girard view is that we all have models, meaning people to whom we compare ourselves. What Girard calls mimetic desire is the tendency to want what our models want. That can make us jealous of our models, especially if they inhabit our intimate world rather than our remote world.

Here was one interesting aphorism:

think seriously about the people you least want to succeed

Some remarks:

1. I think of my friend from high school who, a few months before the 2020 election, said that he would never take a vaccine “developed by Trump and his cronies.” Clearly, he (along with many other Americans) really wanted President Trump to fail. That probably means that Mr. Trump was a model for my friend, in that my friend was comparing himself, consciously or not, with Mr. Trump. Incidentally, my friend was voted President of our student body our senior year.

2. I think of a situation from almost 30 years ago at Freddie Mac. I wanted to be in charge of a project, and when someone else was put in charge, I really wanted him to fail.

3. If I resent the success of Olivier Blanchard, Paul Krugman, or Ezra Klein, then that probably means that I treat them as models. Because I have met them, I cannot emotionally dismiss them as being part of the remote world.

4. I think that social media have crunched together the intimate world and the remote world. Burgis agrees that social media creates amped-up rivalry. He says that we are all like new college freshmen–feeling insecure and competing to stand out in a crowd of people who seem similar.

5. Think of someone who has had a nasty divorce. How would they feel if their ex were to be happy in a new relationship?