The scout welcomes contrary information as helping to correct this map. The soldier uses reasoning to defend one’s map of reality. The solider fights contrary information as if to stave off defeat.
It looks as though this is going to be a good year for new books. Galef’s is one of the best so far.
My latest essay explains my outlook for inflation.
But in 2020, the U.S. Budget deficit was 17.9 percent of GDP (source here) and in 2021 it will be 9.8 percent of GDP. According to the helicopter drop model, this should raise prices by more than 25 percent.
My latest essay is on health care policy. My views have not changed since my book was published fifteen years ago. But my understanding of why my views are not going to be accepted has increased over time.
While many other governments limit the availability of the expensive tests and treatments that are routine here, I would prefer instead to see individuals face more of the costs of these procedures and make their own choices to forego them. But this idea runs afoul of the moral dyad that most people use when thinking about health care.
I review Shelby Steele’s White Guilt.
In the United States, whites abused blacks for many decades. Legally, this abuse ended with the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. But those acts did not erase the sordid history. Steele’s thesis is that sensitivity to this history produces white guilt and fuels black anger. The result is that blacks have become the abusers, and whites—liberal whites, especially—have become the abused.
Among the relevant psychological characteristics that humans developed in the Pleistocene were our propensities toward tribalism, egalitarianism, and zero-sum thinking. We evolved in small bands composed of 25 to 200 individuals. We all knew and were often related to one another. Everyone knew who contributed to the band’s survival and who shirked his or her responsibilities. Cheaters and free riders were targets of anger and, sometimes, punishment.
…To summarize, the psychology that evolved when our ancestors lived in small hunter-gatherer groups prepared us to cope with a world of personal cooperation and exchange in small communities. It did not prepare us to cope with a world of impersonal cooperation and exchange between millions of people (i.e., a typical advanced economy) or billions of people (i.e., the global economy). In a way, the complexity of the modern economy outran the ability of our Stone Age minds to understand it. Yet it is that transition, from personal simplicity to impersonal complexity, that makes capitalism so effective at producing great wealth. To complicate matters further, the extended marketplace of millions or billions of people enables enterprising individuals with value-creating ideas to amass greater wealth than they would be able to amass while catering to small communities. That resulting wealth inequality rubs against our egalitarian predispositions and zero-sum thinking. Finally, our tribalism helps to explain why, even when we do consent to trade with other nations, we often continue to resent them and suspect them of thriving at our expense.
I have written a lot about this, both in Specialization and Trade and in essays such as Camping Trip economics vs. Woolen Coat economics.
One reason I suspect that people are reverting back to sub-Dunbar thinking is that smart phones have confused the intimate sub-Dunbar world and the remote super-Dunbar world. Corporate CEO’s used to be part of the remote world, and you did not care about them personally. Now they show up on the same screen as your friends. So they have to take positions on social issues in order to remain on your good side.
Contrary to appearances, I argue that the center-left did not win in 2020.
As of 2021, both the Democratic and Republican establishments are reeling from what Martin Gurri calls The Revolt of the Public. Both the left and the right must reckon with an illiberal, religiously fanatical constituency. On the right, Mr. Trump bullies and insults anyone who is less than worshipful toward him. The large body of his supporters that is willing to comply with his demands for personal loyalty represents the illiberalism of the right.
On the other side, there are the young progressive activists who are so certain of their moral rectitude that they see those who do not share their positions as heretics. They are unwilling to allow heretics even to enjoy gainful employment while holding dissenting beliefs. These activists represent the illiberalism of the left.
We learn socially, so that most of our beliefs come from other people.
This makes the problem of choosing which people to trust the central problem in epistemology.
What Eric Weinstein calls our “sense-making apparatus” can be thought of as a set of prestige hierarchies, at the top of which are the people who are most widely trusted.
Our prestige hierarchies are based largely on credentials: professor at Harvard; writer for the New York Times; public health official.
The incentive systems and selection mechanisms in the credential-based hierarchies have become corrupted over time, allowing people to rise to the top who lack wisdom and intellectual rigor.
I proceeded to expand on these sentences.
In his book The Social Leap, the evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel writes, “a substantial reason we evolved such large brains is to navigate our social world… A great deal of the value that exists in the social world is created by consensus rather than discovered in an objective sense… our cognitive machinery evolved to be only partially constrained by objective reality.” Our social brains process information not only by examining the facts, but also considering the social consequences of what happens to our reputations if we believe something.
Later on,
In her recent book Cognitive Gadgets, the Oxford psychologist Cecilia Hayes writes, “children show prestige bias; they are more likely to copy a model that adults regard as being higher social status- for example, their head-teacher rather than an equally familiar person of the same age and gender.” Hayes cites a 2013 study by Nicola McGuigan who found that five-year-old children are “selective copiers.” Results showed that kids were more likely to imitate their head-teacher rather than an equally familiar person of the same age and gender. Young children are more likely to imitate a person that adults regard as being higher status.
and later,
researchers Ángel V. Jiménez and Alex Mesoudi wrote that assessing competence directly “may be noisy and costly. Instead, social learners can use short-cuts either by making inferences from the appearance, personality, material possessions, etc. of the models.”
In my view, these observations/findings make the philosopher’s approach to epistemology seem wrong-footed. The philosopher wants to ask when I should believe my senses. I want to ask when I should believe Jack, especially when he disagrees with Jill. Or Fauci when he disagrees with Mowshowitz.
I pay attention to social learning because of my reading of Henrich and Laland. This predisposition is reinforced by what I found in the Henderson piece. I had an exchange with Michael Huemer on this after this post. I still think that philosophers ought to pay more attention to the issue of how one decides who is trustworthy.
From my first substack essay:
I want to encourage a non-tribal intellectual style. I am eager to read Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset. Based on the reviews, I would agree with her praise for what she calls the scout mindset and also with her disparagement of what she calls the soldier mindset.
I have gone so far as to devise a scoring system for op-ed pieces, podcasts, long blog posts and essays written by public intellectuals.
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Reviewing the book Boomers, by Helen Lewis, I write,
Helen Andrews portrays the prominent boomers as anything but wise. The talent they share is a talent for gaining attention and recognition. They are grandmasters of self-promotion.
a recent study from the UK Biobank, which has a collection of genotypes of individuals together with measures of their social characteristics, supports the idea that there is strong genetic assortment in mating. Robinson et al. (2017) look at the phenotype and genotype correlations for a variety of traits – height, BMI, blood pressure, years of education – using data from the biobank. For most traits they find as expected that the genotype correlation between the parties is less than the phenotype correlation. But there is one notable exception. For years of education, the phenotype correlation across spouses is 0.41 (0.011 SE). However, the correlation across the same couples for the genetic predictor of educational attainment is significantly higher at 0.654 (0.014 SE) (Robinson et al., 2017, 4). Thus couples in marriage in recent years in England were sorting on the genotype as opposed to the phenotype when it comes to educational status.
The paper is entitled “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls.” Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The conclusion points to a very strong Null Hypothesis view of all forms of social intervention.
n aspirations that by appropriate social design, rates of social mobility can be substantially increased will prove futile. We have to be resigned to living in a world where social outcomes are substantially determined at birth.
Clark has been finding evidence for heritability and for the broader Null Hypothesis for some time. See my essay on The Son Also Rises.
He is one of the few people doing this sort of research. Here is why. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.