Category Archives: Three-Axes Model

Eric Weinstein on the IDW

Posted on by

He speaks and futzes with a coffee mug in a twenty-minute video, in which he explains the origins of the intellectual dark web. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

My thoughts.

1. Weinstein speaks of “we” as if the label IDW was concocted by a a conspiracy of folks sitting in a room kicking around ideas for names. I doubt that it happened that way.

2. I think that my post following the Bari Weiss article mostly got the IDW’s philosophy correct. I wrote,

Really, the principles of good intellectual debate are not that obscure. Just make arguments as if you were trying to change the mind of a reasonable person on the other side. I believe that the reason that we don’t observe much of this is that most people are trying to raise their status within their own tribe rather than engage in reasoned discourse. It’s sad that reasoned discourse does not raise one’s status as much as put-downs and expressions of outrage.

Although he uses different terminology, Weinstein seems to suggest that institutions of the mainstream media–he names CNN, NPR, the NYT, and “magazines like The Atlantic“–have degenerated into put-downs and expressions of outrage at the expense of reporting the news. Stories that would reflect badly on the ability or moral conduct of oppressed groups, or that would reflect favorably on the moral conduct of privileged groups, cannot be processed by these institutions that hitherto were fairly reliable curators of news. The IDW is a reaction against, or an alternative to, the dereliction of duty on the part of the mainstream outlets. Not an alternative news source, but an alternative source of discussion and analysis.

3. Weinstein thinks that the mainstream media will not appreciate a rival. But it is worse than that. The oppressor-oppressed narrative is a main binding tribal force for progressives. I would say the main binding force. I doubt that these folks can tolerate someone who claims to be on the left but challenges that narrative. The Jonathan Haidts and Eric Weinsteins of the world are going to be chased out of their village with spears and rocks.

4. After watching the video, I would say that the IDW is making a wager. The bet is this: we know that we will be branded as racists or troglodytes by the mainstream media. Our wager is that the public will see us as the decent human beings we are, and the attacks will rebound to discredit the mainstream media rather than discredit those who identify with the IDW.

I know from watching other videos that Weinstein is far from confident that he can win such a wager. But the attempt is to his credit.

What I’m Reading

Posted on by

Uncivil Agreement, by Lilliana Mason. It will certainly make my list of best books for 2018. My review on Amazon says,

Uncivil Agreement addresses the topic of polarization from the perspective of political psychology. The author advances the view that social identity is more important than opinions on issues as a driver of political behavior in general and polarization in particular.

The book is timely because it can help to explain the high levels of political anger that we see around us. The book is convincing in part because it makes intuitive sense (at least to me) but mostly because of the author’s clever and careful empirical research. Even a skeptic should find her studies persuasive.

We might naturally assume that our political selves are shaped by our interests and our views of policy. The alternative that Mason proposes is that our political selves are shaped by our sense of where we fit in socially.

From this alternative perspective, the increase in polarization arises from the fact that people are becoming more certain of where they belong in the social sphere. Our social class structure has become more segregated. Fewer people cross the bridges between status groups defined by location, education level, wealth, race, religiosity, etc.

As the social structure solidifies, political antagonism increases. People who are locked into their identity as Democrats only care about seeing Democrats win and Republicans lose. Republicans, too, have come to care more about winning than about issues. I would note that Democrats loved Barack Obama’s victories, even though at the state level the party hollowed out while he was President. By the same token, Republicans love Donald Trump’s victory, even though it seems to be devastating the party’s future.

Another trend is an increase in what Mason calls “blind” activism. That is, political activism driven by anger and enthusiasm, rather than by reason and practical considerations.

I think that the publisher is wrong to position this as a purely academic book or textbook. It should be of value to the many people who have a general interest in the nature of political behavior. I read the Kindle version of the book, and I found that I had to squint to read the graphs. But it was still very much worth it.

Finally, I cannot resist saying that if you like this book, you may also like my own more amateurish effort, The Three Languages of Politics. Although my book is very different in style from Uncivil Agreement, I think that the two books share some of the same underlying psychological outlook.

I think that there are libertarian implications that the author does not mention. If homo politicus acts tribally, rather than on the basis of self-interest or policy preferences, then surely this warrants some disenchantment with voting as a mechanism for guiding society.

Note: Handle has a comment on an earlier post that goes against Mason in some important respects. I will discuss this next week.

Polling illustrates three-axes model

Posted on by

Matt Grossman writes,

Liberals perceive more racism and sexism than racial minorities and women say they experience. Experiments show that liberals perceive tests where men or whites perform better as less credible than equivalent tests showing women or minorities doing better, even though conservatives rate them equally credible. Liberals are thus predisposed to believe discrimination is the cause of disadvantaged group disparities.

Pointer from a reader, who saw this as saying that progressives are inclined to the oppressor-oppressed axis. The overall article is somewhat rambling and indecisive. For me, the most interesting point is that progressive academics design surveys that with questions that they think measure people’s sensitivity to oppression when conservatives interpret those surveys in terms of civilization vs. barbarism. This survey results are meaningful, but the survey-takers provide biased interpretations. When a conservative says that racism is not the main problem holding back minorities, the progressive academics say that the conservative is showing “racial resentment.’

Demonizing those who disagree

Posted on by

C Thi Nguyen writes,

An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders. In their book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2010), Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Frank Cappella offer a groundbreaking analysis of the phenomenon. For them, an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy. A cult member’s trust is narrowed, aimed with laser-like focus on certain insider voices.

It is one thing to say, “Joe said X, and X is wrong.” It is another thing to declare “You cannot trust anything Joe says.” The latter approach seems to dominate our political discussions, unfortunately.

The author suggests that you can only extract someone from cult thinking if you have first gained their trust. Not so simple. Anyway, I think that my three-axes model is in the spirit of trying to get people to detach from their echo chambers.

A pro-civilization faction?

Posted on by

Jacob Lyles writes,

ProCiv probably favors a daring approach to institutional reform. Institutions like governments, universities, and the health care system represent society’s collective intelligence. When they are operating well, society is effective, productive, and nimble in addressing crises. When they are operating poorly, they can suck up infinite money while producing less and less benefit, a process sometimes referred to as “institutional sclerosis”. There is good evidence that American institutions are quite sclerotic. Infrastructure is slow to build and expensive compared to the past. Education and medicine are skyrocketing in price while most of that extra money goes to hiring administrators and regulatory compliance. A ProCiv point of view advocates for paying the cost to make bold reforms now in exchange for upgrading our collective intelligence to manage the challenges of the coming decades.

Read the whole post. The idea is that conservatives, concerned about the survival of civilization, ought to focus on avoiding catastrophic global risks while encouraging a lot of limited experimentation.

But I am afraid that “daring approach to institutional reform” and conservatism are not a natural match.

It seems that that what you would want would be to preserve institutions and norms that are helpful and to reform those that are harmful. Other things equal, conservatives have a bias toward preservation. Progressives have a bias toward reform. If we are lucky, then conservatives will preserve good institutions and norms while gradually accepting reforms that get rid of bad institutions and norms.

But what happens when the bad institutions and norms are cherished by progressives? Think of higher education, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or being non-judgmental about people who have children outside of marriage. The progressive does not see the need for reform, and the conservative is hesitant to attempt radical change.

Seemingly related: Scott Alexander’s summary of readers’ comments on Jordan Peterson.

The Anti-tribal tribe

Posted on by

David Fuller writes,

Recently a new meme started doing the rounds on the Internet — the “Intellectual Dark Web”. The phrase was coined by the mathematician Eric Weinstein. It seems to have caught on — showing that whatever it is, quite a few people are recognising it — even though there’s a lot of discussion about what exactly it means.

. . .one of the things that unifies many of the thinkers in the IDW is a belief that the evolutionary strategies that got us to where we are now are unlikely to get us any further — particularly our hard-wired tribalism.

He links to the intellectual darkweb site, which is sort of a self-appointed unofficial hall of fame for the IDW. Also to a piece by Meghan Daum that appeared in a mainstream media outlet, the LA Times.

Reading Fuller’s essay and Daum’s column, I believe that my Three Languages of Politics book is in the IDW spirit. Also, at least a couple IDW hall-of-famers have read it.

Some challenges that the IDW faces:

–how to be non-tribal while opposing tribalism

–how to expose and overcome smugness without becoming smug about it

TLP makes a cameo appearance

Posted on by

in a new book by Eunice and Sabrina Moyle, called Be the Change. In the section of the book that discusses political activism, they write,

Arnold Kling says that people tend to act according to a dominant axis–a trade-off between two ideas. On one end of the axis is what you want. On the other end is what you don’t want. When people make decisions, they tend to rely on their dominant axis to make a quick decision.

My remarks:

1. In a book that will appeal primarily to those on the left, it is nice to see an attempt to un-demonize conservatives and libertarians. I hope that readers stop and think about these pages and don’t just skip over them.

2. They cite Jonathan Haidt as well, and in fact they replace the oppressor-oppressed axis with Haidt’s care/harm dichotomy. That is an interesting shift. I think that oppressor-oppressed better describes the loudest voices on the left, particularly on college campuses. On the other hand, care/harm represents a less militant and more tolerant form of progressive expression, but one which is not so prominently on display.

3. Without the discussion of the three-axes model (and perhaps even with it), progressives might be inclined to use the book as a “how-to manual” for political action along the lines of the recent nationwide high school student walk-out to support gun control.

4. As a nitpick, I would prefer to replace “tend to act” with “seek a sense of moral certainty and political tribal solidarity” and I would prefer to replace “make decisions” with “communicate to signal approval and disapproval.”

5. The book has very rich graphic design. It reminds me of the look that many publishers are trying to achieve for “family seder” books for Passover. I guess I should not be surprised that the design is striking, given that this is what they do in their cards and stationery business.

Trump and TLP

Posted on by

Handle points out that the emergence of Donald Trump has scrambled the model of the Three Languages of Politics. For example,

Even since Trump started his campaign, it seems to me that the progressives have been using “civilization vs. barbarism” rhetoric all the time. Not just the “breakdown in civility,” but also complaining about “chaos” and the potential collapse of the “international order” that was based on American strength guided by a progressive vision and set of values.

My thoughts:

1. I do think that Trump created a new axis, of Bobo vs. anti-Bobo.

2. I think that progressives want to throw everything possible at Trump at see what sticks. But they have certainly not given up on the oppressor-oppressed frame. They still make the “white nationalist” charge.

3. As Jeffrey Friedman pointed out long ago, libertarians go back and forth between arguing for liberty as a value in itself and arguing for it as instrumental to social improvement, particularly economic prosperity and growth. I don’t think we are seeing anything new from libertarians. They argue differently depending on the issue, putting more emphasis on liberty as a value in discussing free speech and putting more emphasis on economic consequences when arguing for free trade.

4. Libertarians have got to be feeling pretty badly these days. I cannot imagine anyone talking about a “libertarian moment” without being laughed out of the room. In Europe, it looks more like a “fascist moment” nowadays. In the U.S., referring to Google, Facebook, et al, Joel Kotkin writes,

Whether one sits on the progressive left or the political right, this growing hegemony presents a clear and present danger. It is increasingly clear that the oligarchs have forgotten that Americans are more than a collection of data-bases to be exploited. People, whatever their ideology, generally want to maintain a modicum of privacy, and choose their way of life.

And of course, everyone’s idea of fighting the corporate hegemony involves enhancing the hegemony of bureaucrats in Washington.

Beyond ideology, revisited

Posted on by

My recent post beyond ideology seemed to annoy people more than I expected.

I see “level 3 thinking” as cultivating emotional detachment from your political beliefs. I argue for detachment in The Three Languages of Politics. That means that if I choose to adopt the conservative position on an issue, I take a charitable view of those who take a progressive position or a libertarian position. I don’t want to demonize opponents. I don’t want to get so defensive that I cannot appreciate that my views might be wrong or at least questionable.