Epistemology is social. We decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. When we believe the wrong people, bad things happen. On race relations, for example, the wrong people have tremendous influence in academia, and this has spilled out into schools of education, corporate human resource departments, and elsewhere. I think that some (much?) of the loss of trust in news media and other important institutions is due to a general suspicion that the wrong people have achieved high status within those institutions. Therefore, I think that the problem of intellectual status inversion is worth trying to solve. Not by politicians, but by replacing academic credentialism and cronyism with a more rigorous process for evaluating intellectual quality.
I need to emphasize again that I do not want to put FITs in positions of political power. My thinking is that the political garden grows in cultural soil. Because of intellectual status inversion, that soil is only suitable for growing ugly weeds. If we can raise the status of intellectuals that really deserve our admiration and lower the status of those who don’t, then I think that the soil will be more hospitable to better plants.
Here is the idea for a game of FITs. You are the owner of a FIT. You compete with other owners to draft the best fantasy team of intellectuals. A team consists of the following positions. The number in parentheses is the number of each position that will be on your team.
(p) podcaster and/or blogger (2)
(b) from the world of business (1)
(e) academic economist (4)
(o) academic other than economist (4)
(t) think tank person
(c) regular columnist for newspaper or magazine (can be an online magazine)
(u) utility (5)
A total of 18 players on your team. All players must be currently alive. You can’t pick Hayek.
To be eligible as an academic economist or other academic the player has to have tenure.
Some players are eligible at multiple positions. You can treat Tyler as eligible to play t, e, p, or c. You can treat anyone as eligible to play u, including Tyler and others who are eligible at other positions.
I am not eligible to be on anyone’s team. I will be judging the teams.
Note that I don’t have a position for “tweeter.” Perhaps there are some good players on Twitter, but they are as rare as Korean baseball players who can make it in the major leagues in the U.S. Of course, you are welcome to draft a player at the u position based on tweets if that’s what you want to do. Same with politicians.
I do not yet have a formal scoring system. My goal in the short run is to get a better idea of what my criteria are for judging intellectuals. As of now, I would say that I value players who monitor their thought process, admit when they have been wrong, steelman other points of view, and show some humility. Good players are judicious about challenging conventional wisdom; they pick their heterodox points of view carefully. I am inclined to give low ratings to narrow specialists, unless they ask big questions that are of pressing interest to those outside of their narrow field. The “small ball” that is good to play if you want tenure does not help you in FITs.
The scoring criteria problem is not going to be easy. Sometimes when faced with a problem like that, it helps to invert it. What would constitute a bad score? Straw-manning; refusal to acknowledge any strong points of the other side or weak spots in your preferred theory; carelessly tossing around epithets, like “market fundamentalist” or “neoliberalism” or “cultural Marxism” that nobody uses to describe themselves; predictably speaking in just one of the Three Languages of Politics.
If some of you want to play, maybe we can hold a draft before the baseball season starts. If you have any questions about the rules, or you have questions about which positions certain players are eligible for, feel free to put them in the comments. I have over 50 FITs candidates, based on names people have left in the comments plus people I thought of off the top of my head. Feel free to suggest more.
In a Twitter corrupted intellectual culture where so much public discourse involves picking fights with other people, a lot of interesting thinkers will be disqualified by seriously considering your proposed score lowering traits Arnold. But that’s a good thing.
I suspect he’s already on your list but Russ Roberts comes to mind immediately for me.
>—“My thinking is that the political garden grows in cultural soil.”
I wish I had written that sentence and I hope this project gets the attention it deserves. This kind of thing is why I read this blog.
“I wish I had written that sentence”
+1
(p) Robin Hanson (blog), Russ Roberts (podcast)
(b) Any entrepreneur who effectively disrupts entrenched education system
(e) Edward Glaeser, Robert Pindyck, Stefanie Stantcheva, Robert Sugden
(o) Jon Elster, C. Behan McCullagh, Steven Pinker, Philip Tetlock
(t) Thomas Sowell
(c) City Journal roster
(u) Bryan Caplan, Julia Galef, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Rob Wiblin
PS: There is plenty of status in this list, so I wonder if status inversion is the right game.
I disagree about there being plenty of status in this list. I think this might be part of the problem- we confuse actual status with what we think it should be. Which of the people on this list have any influence on the culture? I am familiar with all them except for a couple of the academic economist list, but I am hardly representative of the people who have to actually take notice.
(e) Yes! Sugden is one of the most underrated economists alive (and perhaps not unrelatedly, among the most philosophical). Glaeser too. He’s my fantasy HUD secretary.
Martin Gurri’s on the City Journal roster now with Ed Glaeser and Coleman Hughes and Jonathan Haidt and Glenn Loury and Bjorn Lomborg and John McWhorter.
That’s got to be the quickest way to field a team. But nobody’s listed James Meigs and Arthur Brooks and Heather Mac Donald and Michael Shellenberger and Helen Andrews and Philip Hamburger and Joel Mokyr and Amity Shlaes and Steven Greenhut.
Nobody’s mentioned Vivek Ramaswamy for business, but he sometimes writes for the Wall Street Journal.
Joseph Henrich seems an obvious pick. Somebody should nominate Randolph Nesse. Cathy Young. Christopher Freiman. Paul Bloom.
There are lots of other people to nominate, but there are only so many spots per category. Buterin and Andreessen and Graham are are good choices too.
One of my criteria was not so much “humble” as “careful”, in the sense of usually having an awareness and anticipatory understanding of the kind of counterarguments that are already out there or could be, and addressing them, usually preemptively, and taking them seriously without dismissal.
I tended to discount anyone who seemed too emotionally attached to any particular moral perspective, especially if they wrote as if they were fragile and easily offended or thought opponents were bad people to whom bad things should happen. I am not averse to ethical or moral or even theological argumentation, but there is a cool headed, “amoral” manner of getting from assumptions to conclusions without beitoo too heavily reliant and loaded with moral judgements one views as incontestable.
I also tended to favor those who seem to me to be more able to “go meta” and dig deeper and reveal a more fundamental understanding of the true root causes behind some of our big problems.
I disagree with Dr. Kling’s criteria for FIT, so I’ll pick two teams: one based on his criteria, and the other based on my own criteria (in fantasy terms, if his criteria are better, his team should beat mine). I don’t agree with all of these names all the time, but they have always stimulated my thinking. Also note that if anyone else was holding this draft, I would include ASK in my team.
Team based on ASK criteria:
p: Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson
b: Mark Cuban
e: Sowell, Cowen, Russ Roberts, Robin Hanson
o: Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, John McWhorter, Steven Pinker
t: Coleman Hughes
c: David Brooks
u: McCloskey, Niall Ferguson, David Henderson, Glenn Loury, Jonathan Haidt
Team based on my criteria:
p: S. Alexander, J. Rogan
b: M. Cuban
e: T. Sowell, D. Boudreaux, P. Boettke, B. Caplan
o: J. Peterson, S. Harris, E. Weinstein, J. McWhorter
t: V. de Rugy
c: David Marcus (the Federalist)
u: P. Magness, B. Shapiro, S. Aaronson, J. Haidt, Coleman Hughes
If you don’t mind, could you please provide the background on why you chose Mark Cuban? This was the only pick that was a head scratcher for me and it got me curious.
FWIW – I’ve got John Mackey (Whole Foods) as my pick.
Mackey is a good pick too, but I haven’t heard enough from him that I feel that he has influenced me.
I picked Cuban because I admire his business acumen, which is evident on Shark Tank, and in many of his public statements. He has strong opinions, but is also willing to admit when he is wrong (admittedly, I am more aware of this as a sports fan, but my feeling is that this applies to him in business as well).
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I love Mark’s iconoclasm, but his ego is too off-the-charts for my taste. I live in the Dallas area so get to read about him frequently.
Absolutely not disqualifying, but Mark did go full BLM over the summer. It was his complete lack of nuance bothered me.
Cuban is an apologist for & a profiteer from CCP forced labor. If this was my game, that would be a negative points pick.
Well, I’ve got to admit I never would have guessed your top pick would be a vegan libertarian Hans but but I like it that you are not predictably tied to some cliched common basket of opinions.
Yeah, sorry about that…hope you didn’t spit out your coffee from the shock of it.
Just to clarify: Mackey would be my number one business leader pick, but not my number one overall pick. Reserving that for Jeffrey Friedman or Charles Murray.
I wish that Arnold had emphasized the key trait of *courage* in addition to the other trait of humility. We need more courage right now in line with what Goya and Trader Joe’s were willing to do over the summer to counter the Twitter mobs.
In that regard, Mackey qualifies. Nuanced, courageous and reasonably humble for a business leader. He got lambasted for this unpopular stance, but never backed down (as far as I know):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070
Disclaimer: I’m a silly MAGA conservative. None of the leaders or intellectuals noted above brought me to my current position. If anything, they have helped to moderate me from going completely off the deep end.
I don’t think my #1 pick has made the list yet:
Daniel Schmachtenberger on The Portal (with host Eric Weinstein), Ep. #027 – On Avoiding Apocalypses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b4qKv1Ctv8
My #2 pick would be Lex Fridman (https://www.youtube.com/user/lexfridman), not so much as an intellectual (although he is skilled, and highly dimensional), but as someone who is incorruptible – kind of like a ring bearer in LOTR.
Since we’re brainstorming…rather than simply nominating a FIT, hoping that they can actually be assembled into something tangible in the real world, and hoping that this message can get some morsel of mind share among all the other already popular influencers on a rigged playing field…why not change the playing field (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAXtO5dMqEI)?
In addition to the FIT team(s) initiative, why not build a proper “epistemology & perspectives platform” where this initiative would live, as just one component among many others. And instead of harnessing just the intellectual horsepower of the FIT team members, why not harvest the intellectual horsepower (via surveys, opinions, concerns, complaints, anything that makes sense) of the general public, load it into a traditional data warehouse alongside global statistics, aggregate and transform all of this data, and then rebroadcast it as high dimensional perspectives upon reality? One interesting perspective might be: “Here is what you (or, each tribe) are told about X, and here is what is True (to the best of our ability)”.
The reason everyone is going so crazy is that each individual is only able to perceive a small, often highly distorted slice (perspective) of reality, and all of these slices conflict with each other. So, is the obvious solution not to build something that aggregates and broadcasts all of these unique perspectives, allowing users to see a much wider spectrum of reality that is otherwise invisible to them (or worse: falsely represented in the media)?
In a righteous world this sort of thing would already exist by now – but we don’t live in a righteous world. The main problem I see with this idea is the cost – such an initiative would cost quite a bit of money (to initially build, and then to staff with competent curators for all the harvested data), and I suspect it’s not the type of thing that the government would want to fund.
Schmachtenberger is your #1 pick? Yeesh. That guy struck me as kind of a poseur.
Add: I don’t mean to criticize you here. I just think it’s interesting that two people can watch/listen to the same podcast and come away with vastly different impressions of what they just heard.
Oh, I don’t mind, no offence taken – differences in perception happens to be my main interest, like a strange hobby. It’s quite interesting once you get down into the implementation details, and before too long you start to see artifacts of it everywhere you look – discussions on sites like Reddit and Hacker News are an absolute treasure trove. I absolutely believe that the illusory nature of human perception is the true root cause of the epistemology or “intellectual status inversion” crises, if not most of the other problems we have. If one looks at these problems through this lens, they all become much more easy to understand.
As Scott Alexander puts it in Meditations on Moloch (his essay by far imho, I highly recommend it):
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
———————–
What’s always impressed me about this poem is its conception of civilization as an individual entity. You can almost see him, with his fingers of armies and his skyscraper-window eyes.
A lot of the commentators say Moloch represents capitalism. This is definitely a piece of it, even a big piece. But it doesn’t quite fit. Capitalism, whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen? Capitalism in whom I am a consciousness without a body? Capitalism, therefore granite cocks?
Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?
And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.
There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”
The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”
Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”
Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”
The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
…
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! **Moloch whose name is the Mind**!
Or, for another excellent take on the same general theme, “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace (well worth a read):
https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
https://aaronbergman.substack.com/p/we-need-a-netflix-for-news
(p) Scott Alexander, Sam Harris
(b) Elon Musk
(e) Scott Sumner, Miles Kimball, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan
(o) Jordan Peterson, Thomas Nagel, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt
(t) Thomas Sowell
(c) Matt Taibbi
(u) Coleman Hughes , Benjamin Studebaker, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robert Barron, Edward Feser
I’m not sure all of these people will be rated highly as individuals by Kling (some have relatively narrow focus), but from the perspective of a team I consider this group to have a lot of balance, with some players covering for blind spots in the other players. Also I’m not sure Elon Musk is much of a public intellectual per se, but he’s clearly brilliant and focused on the right problems.
My team of 18:
P = Coleman Hughes, Scott Alexander
B = Peter Theil
E = Tyler Cowen, Russ Roberts, Thomas Sowell, Robin Hanson
O = Jonathan Haidt, Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, Mike Munger
T = Ayan Hirsi Ali
C = Matt Taibi
U = Elon Musk, Jocko Willink, Jason Whitlock, Douglas Murray, Sam Harris.
Note: Eric Weinstein is the biggest heartburn exclusion here. But he doesn’t listen well and talks over others in his conversations too much. Brett Weinstein has somewhat of a narrower purview, but is a good listener and frequently admits to being wrong.
Would love to participate in a draft. Have a much longer list this was culled from.
Alexander is overrated, but Hughes? Please. He’s a kid who’s a novelty.
p) podcaster and/or blogger (2) John Podhoretz/Noah Smith
(b) from the world of business (1) Heiko Borchert
(e) academic economist (4) Deirdre McCloskey/Torben Mark Pedersen/Mark J. Perry/Casey Mulligan
(o) academic other than economist (4) James Scott/Andrew Erickson/Christopher Balding/Roger Pielke, Jr.
(t) think tank person Lyman Stone
(c) regular columnist for newspaper or magazine (can be an online magazine) Joel Kotkin
(u) utility (5) Matt Stoller/Matt Taibbi/Glenn Greenwald/Helen Pluckrose/Bjorn Lomborg
some changes to my roster:
remove Noah Smith and move Joel Kotkin into that vacated blogger slot
Wilfred Reilly into the columnist spot; he is actually an academic but he regularly contributes as a columnist
replace Glenn Greenwald with Theresa Fallon
John McWhorter fits “other academic” in my mind as an associate professor but I don’t think he has tenure at Columbia technically speaking.
Fantasy teams are made or broken at the bottom of the roster, not the top. So here’ are my choices for Late Round Sleeper All-stars. Most of the people on other lists are all ready pretty high-status folks. I’m going to try to pick people with lower profiles than Mark Cuban or Sam Harris
Podcasters: Nico Perrino and John Ross
Business folk: Karl Kassarda
Academic Economist: Wintercow
Academic Nonconomist: Eugine Volokh, Greg Nuckols, Eric Trexler, Mike Isratel (telling that 3/4 of them don’t work at universities…)
Think Tank Person: Greg Lukianoff
Columnist: Deviant Ollam, Tacticool Girlfriend, Neil Gorsuch*, Thomas Lee
*Ok, I know he’s high profile, but he’s high profile as Justice. Go read his book.
Yes, some of these people swim in the same waters, but that’s kind of the point. There are a ton of untapped bastions of intellectual value out there. These are just ones that I’m personally exposed to.
Alice Dreger and Freddy deBoer go somewhere on the list, but I have not idea where they are employed so…
I agree with your strategy. But you need to identify (disambiguate) John Ross
Haha. He’s from the Institute for Justice. Wasn’t thinking about how common the name is.
Now that I’m on a physical keyboard, here’s a breakdown of my choices.
Nico Perrino / Greg Lukianoff – Podcaster and President(??) of FIRE. Both consistent on freedom-based first principals when ‘their side’ is doing repressive stuff.
Karl Kassarda – Runs a successful Youtube et al media channel that proactively demonitized itself. Also established a niche shooting sport. Also sticks to his first principles when ‘his side’ is doing stupid stuff.
Wintercow – Author of The Broken Window blog.
Eugine Volokh – law prof and blogger at Volokh conspriacy. Legal nerd first, second, and third. Interesting libertarian pro-gun pro-speech polymath minority polymath fourth. Which is how it should be.
Greg Nuckols, Eric Trexler, Mike Isratel – Public intellectuals and occasional researchers in the “Science based fitness community”. All three ‘do science right’ demonstrating proper levels of skepticism, humility in the face of unknowns, etc. Also all three are wildly entertaining.
Deviant Ollam – physical security hacker, strong classic liberal vibe, and willing to take those priors to their natural conclusion (like hey we need to train sex workers and BLM folks on how to use these AR-15’s).
Tacticool Girlfriend – The vaporwave trans gun rights advocate we need, but don’t deserve. I probably disagree with her on a lot of her priors, but we come to a lot of the same conclusions. Her youtube channel does gun education right – starting with trauma first aid, safe ownership, mindset, etc.
Neil Gorsuch – His book really lays bare his belief that the law is there to protect *everyone* no matter who it is. Except the government, they don’t need his help. This shines through in his decisions. If I was on trial for murder, I’d want him to be my judge. Especially if I did it.
Thomas Lee – State Supreme Court Judge and advocate of ‘corpus linguistics’ in law, which is the rigorous study of historical documents to determine what words really meant back then. Requires significant humility to realize you don’t know everything. Especially from a judge. Especially for a member of a dynastic family (his brother is a Senator, he was considered for the Supreme Court). But his life project is getting it right over going with his ego.
(p) Judith Curry, Russ Roberts
(b) Peter Thiel
(e) Don Boudreaux, Dan Ariely, Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen
(o) Bjorn Lomborg, Steven Pinker, Sean Carroll, Scott Aaronson, John Ioannidis
(t) Richard Epstein
(c) Glenn Greenwald
(u) Alan Dershowitz, Matt Taibbi, John Stossel, Matthew Crawford, Matt Ridley
PODCASTERS/BLOGGERS: Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias
BUSINESS: Peter Thiel
ACADEMIC ECONOMISTS: Russ Roberts, Tyler Cowen, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman
OTHER ACADEMICS: Ed Witten (mathematics), Peter Higgs (physics), John McWhorter (linguistics), Saul Perlmutter (physics)
THINK TANKER: Robert Levy
COLUMNIST: Rod Dreher
UTILITY: Elon Musk, Bjarne Stroustrup (C++ originator), Eric Weinstein, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald
Instead of Peter Thiel for the business guy, maybe Ren Zhiqiang.
Just looked him up. 37 million followers! I’ll have to learn more about him. Love Peter Thiel, though looking at other people’s lists it wasn’t a particularly original choice.
Balaji S Srinivasan should be on the list in my opinion. Somewhat combative, doesn’t always take the “careful” approach but his prescience on the pandemic alone buys him a spot. Also has good insight into tech industry.
Here is his infamous tweet from 1/30/2020, quoted below: (https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1222921758375927808?lang=en)
“Going viral
What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years?
It would accelerate many pre-existing trends.
– border closures
– nationalism
– social isolation
– preppers
– remote work
– face masks
– distrust in governments
The JHU dashboard is concerning.
1) Exponential growth of cases inside and outside China
2) Non-China graph seems much lower, but is “only” about 2-3 weeks behind at same rate
3) Data updates ~every night, so apparent slowdown in cases may not be real
Countries are closing their borders and stopping flights, including Russia, Mongolia, Germany. There are calls in HK, Philippines, and now the US to follow suit.
This may be the event that swings 10-20% of the middle reluctantly towards border controls.
For a virus like this, the time to “overreact” is now, before it becomes pandemic.
However, some folks in the US media are acting just like the Chinese state media they claim to deplore — and minimizing the issue.
Don’t panic, do take decisive action.
“
Would add: Agree with Ben Thompson of Stratechery (cited by poster in last thread)
Thought experiment for assessing fitness on the FIT:
Response to GameStop…
1. What percentage of intellectuals gave analyses that were not entirely in alignment with their underlying view of the world?
2. What percentage of intellectuals even mildly aggravated their readers with their take
3. What percentage of intellectuals with zero experience in this field waited even 5 minutes / did some legitimate research on the topic prior to giving their “take”? What percentage upended their original takes with the release of information regarding clearinghouse, etc?
What an awesomely prescient tweet by Srinivasan. I’d not seen it before.
I’m game:
p1: Scott Alexander
p2: Steve Sailer
b1: Peter Thiel
e1: Robin Hanson
e2: Casey Mulligan
e3: David Friedman
e4: Arnold Kling
o1: Nick Szabo
o2: Steve Hsu
o3: Razib Khan
o4: Orin Kerr
t1: Charles Murray
c1: Christopher Caldwell
u1: Moldbug
u2: Michael Brendan Dougherty
u3: Tanner Greer
u4: Eliezer Yudkowsky
u5: Greg Cochran
Good luck everybody!
David Friedman
Excellent choice.
Back in 1999, he was the substitute teacher for one session of my econ capstone course at Santa Clara University. Dude talked so fast that I gave up on taking notes. Is any of this going to be on the final? It was an enlightening experience for sure and I wasn’t even an econ major.
I apologize, I broke at least one rule, so please allow me to make some substitutions.
Because it can’t be Arnold Kling, for e4, please replace with Thomas Sowell.
I think the rest of my e’s do indeed have tenure, but if they don’t, please let me know and I’ll pull another up from my bench.
I’m pretty sure Szabo, Hsu, and Kerr all have tenure, if they don’t please let me know, but Khan doesn’t. But Cochran does. So please swap Khan and Cochran.
Since when did the libertarians get so fixated on the rules?
As conservative, I hereby protest these silly rules.
Please write-in my vote for Arnold Kling. He challenges my silly MAGA mind every day and has the courage to do so under his real name with humility and patience.
And, it’s not like this is without precedent…
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/changed-my-mind/
+1
Thanks, glad to see that I’m not the only one. If Arnold refuses to count my vote, then I’m going to dispute the results of the FIT process. Rigged :)!
Providing some commentary and why and why not:
Bloggers.
* Just picking a blogger, I’d pick Ann Althouse, because she’s the best blogger around and seeing through the BS that people of all sides tend to spout.
* Scott Alexander. Obvious choice.
Business people:
* Elon Musk seems obvious because he’s put together so many novel and successful enterprises that you have to overlook the Hank Scorpio vibe.
Economists
* There should be value put on the ability to convince people of things. To give an example, I greatly admire (NOT) Bryan Caplan, and I think he’s right in most of his opinions, at least in a big picture perspective. But man… much as I love what he stands for, I think he’s terrible at standing for it. Remember when he went on that intellectual debate show a few years back? He started with an audience that agreed with his position and by the end of the debate, everyone was solidly against it. Oof. I find myself becoming more anti-immigrant when I read his pro-immigration posts.
* On the other hand, Scott Sumner annoys the shit out of me. I think he’s petty and often grossly inaccurate about important details of things that he talks about. But… on the one big thing that he talks about and he’s knowledgeable about (monetary policy) he’s extremely convincing and has almost single-handedly changed the public discourse in important ways. For that reason, I’d pick him.
* For similar reasons, I’d select Alex Tabarok over Tyler Cowen. Cowen gets all the credit as Mr. Smart and Sophisticated, and he is those things, but Tabbarok’s straightforward and full-throated arguments for the right positions on the most important issues of the day (vaccination, criminal justice reform) are, in the end, I think a lot more valuable than what Cowen brings to the table.
* Larry Summers is a really, really smart guy. He’s probably way too establishment for most people, but as far as being intellectual, I’d rather have him be a center-left sort of person than a jerk like Krugman or a crank like Stiglitz has become.
* Richard Thaler is another really smart guy who’s willing to try and figure things out.
Non-Economist Academics
* Barry Weingast
* Glen Loury (maybe cheating, but kind of a social sciences guy in addition to Econ)
* John McWhorter
* Sudhir Venkatesh
Think Tank
? Why is this even a separate category?
Columnist
* Could we appoint someone like EJ Dionne or Bill Kristol as a sort of Prince des Sots to consult and do the opposite of whatever they suggest?
Utility
* Roland Fryer
* Glenn Greenwald
* Sheryl Atkinson
* Rand Paul
* Ben Carson
Non-economist academics: I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Andrew Gelman yet. He and Philip Tetlock I think are two of the most important academics in social science right now imo. Both tend to push toward skepticism rather than certainty, which is probably a good thing.
Seconding the previous kudos for “cultural soil.”With that in mind, here is a rough initial draft list with positions ranked in order of priority and then then order at that position. Extra potential picks for each roster position. Will need to work up a pool in the admittedly unlikely case my top picks are all gone before my roster is full. Still rough. All the comments by others so far have been generating ideas. Not sure what to make of the Korean comment (Kim Soon-kwon might well be Norm Borlaug’s rightful heir and yes, if he were still alive Borlaug would be my top pick: pragmatism creates rich cultural soil and people who make a career of substantive contributions to human flourishing by addressing the needs of needy masses are intellectuals in my book and deserving of higher status than mere theoreticians, but nevertheless I am excluding physicians like David Baltimore because the list would be completely overrun with doctors ) but will try to include some Dominican, Cuban, and Japanese prospects anyway, hopefully without getting all google banner faux diversity-ish. Also am attempting to pick high quality players even if I disagree with them politically on everything.
(u5) utility: Ishihara Shintarō, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Marilynne Robinson, Roger Kimball, Naoki Inose, Judith Curry, Thomas Sowell, Nassem Talib, Matteo Salvini, Leonardo Boff, Mary Del Priore, Leandro Karnal, Matteo Salvini
(o4) academic non-economist: Robin Dunbar, Arend Lijphart, Barry Cunliffe, , Gary Saul Morson, Timothy Berners-Lee, Kim Soon-kwon, Alan Macfarlane, Jan-Werner Müller, Leon Kass, Robert P. George, F.H. Buckley
(e4) academic economist: Daniel Kahneman, Amartya Sen, Hernando de Soto, Ernst Fehr, George Akerlof, Angus Deaton, William Nordhaus, Dennis C. Mueller
(b1) business: Akio Morita , Aliko Dangote, José Andrés,
(t1) think tank: Bjorn Lomborg, Richard Epstein,
(p2) podcaster/blogger: David McWilliams, Don Boudreaux, Ann Althouse, Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire
(c1) columnist: James Freeman, Niall Ferguson, Victor David Hanson
Apologies. Didn’t realize that Akio Morita is no longer with us. RIP. Richest man in Africa, Nigerian business tycoon Aliko Dangote who is doing much to develop domestic industry is now top business pick.
What I feel like I am really missing is someone who could fill the intellectual hole left by Ernest Gellner, that is someone who recognizes the difference between an open and a closed society and who can talk about nationalism rationally. Who might that be? I am inclined to go with Jürgen Habermas whom I should have found a spot for earlier.
Matt Ridley gets another vote from me. He can be blogger. Dominic Sandbrook has a podcast, so that’s the first two.
From British business, Rory Sutherland.
British economists: Kristian Niemietz. Razeen Sally. Rupert Darwall. Tim Worstall.
British non-economists: Janet Radcliffe Richards. Vernon Bogdanor. Jonathan Sumption. Chandran Kukathas.
From the Institute of Economic Affairs, the historian Stephen Davies.
Niall Ferguson admits when he’s been wrong, and he has more humility than the playwrights give him credit for, so he could be the newspaper columnist. Except that I’ll pick Gerard Baker instead.
Utility: Alan Macfarlane. Douglas Murray. Richard Wrangham. Robert Plomin. Robert Tombs.
I suggest that Arnold’s criterion overemphasizes public w.r.t. intellectual. If that’s true, then many more suitable people will be overlooked because they are relatively unknown.
For example: for (o), consider someone like Stanford’s Barbara H. Fried, whose “scholarly interests lie at the intersection of law, economics, and philosophy.” She excels in not straw-manning her opponents.
I approve most of those already mentioned, but because they lean towards the well-known, I fear the deck/team may be sub-optimally stacked.
Good point.
Richard A. Posner’s book on “Public intellectuals” is still worth reading.
It would be interesting to see what the list would be like if you could only nominate people that “most people who read askblog have never heard of, or can’t identify.” That would exclude many public intellectuals who have achieved some recognition, and create more space for “unsung persons” who toil in relative obscurity.
Another thing–almost all of the names mentioned are in the English Speaking world. and, only 5% of the world’s population lives in the USA. There must be names that are getting crowded out because the list here is too “USA-Centric.” I think that’s partly a result of this game being recruitment for a team to work in USA.
Numerous people have noticed that the WWII American nuclear weapons project was largely a project of people of Hungarian Jewish origin, a number of whom had attended the same Lutheran gymnasium in Budapest. There must be some talent outside the US that we are missing as we list team numbers here.
“Largely” is a bit of an exaggeration. But they certainly were important. Scott Alexander famously wrote The Atomic Bomb Considered as Hungarian High School Science Fair Project.
Thanks for your reply.
The “Budapest, Hungary” factor can be over-rated, and perhaps it has been. It provides intriguing examples–there is a book by Kati Marton called _The great escape_ that opens with a few of the Hungarian exiles driving around NYC trying to find Einstein’s house on Long Island.
Two men (Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner) chattering away in Hungarian, looking for Einstein. They want Einstein to write a memo to FDR–FDR doesn’t know who they are but Einstein can capture his attention for a moment. They want Einstein to tell FDR that the atom bomb is possible, and Hitler might be making it. It’s July of 1939.
= – = – = –
The story may be apocryphal, or poetic license. I think there is a lesson, which we can consider as a hypothesis.
Hypothesis: At that time, under those circumstances, only scientists from the Continental Europe, not native to the Anglosphere, could have created the atom bomb.
= – = – = – =
Back to the our Fantasy Team: Who are we leaving out because they aren’t famous on the internet or in legacy media, and they aren’t famous in English? Any ideas?
Dominic Cummings. Rory Sutherland.
Some sleeper picks…
Reihan Salam (how has he not made anyone’s list yet?)
Arthur Brooks (very early to the bridging divides movement; always charitable and insightful)
Heather Mac Donald (definitely won’t be winning any humility awards, but definitely has courage and unique ideas)
Ben Shapiro (much more thoughtful than he is given credit for; was willing to live his values and get the heck out of California)
Megyn Kelly (super smart interviewer; knows what it’s like to get canceled and live to tell)
Ward Connerly (businessman and former UC regent; lifetime achievement and *courage* award for 1996 and 2020)
I would also propose a left-field slot for Joe Rogan on the grounds of extreme inquisitiveness and the ability have three hour long conversations on all topics, and to disagree in a friendly and constructive manner.
Others (UK flavour) who aren’t in this thread yet, though I can’t quite cram them into categories, would be Matt Taibbi, Jamie Whyte, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Christopher Meyer, Andrew Neil.
please disambiguate Christopher Meyer
Former British Ambassador in Washington. Not the businessman or the RnB singer
I would like to submit for the draft a friend of mine you have most likely never heard of. Greg Weiner is the Provost of Asssumption College, a small Liberal Arts Catholic College in Worcester, MA
https://www.aei.org/profile/gregory-s-weiner/
He has written some very well thought out and widely un-read books, and also had a few vary good editorials published in the Big Three newspapers (NYT, Wash Post, and WSJ)
Check him out. Like another local product, he could be a late round draft pick who takes your team to the Superbowl in his first season on the field
I would also like to add some other honorable mentions:
1. The was a “Peak LessWrong” era, in which the comments and posters were consistently excellent. Zvi Moscowitz is still around with high karma, but there are (or were) at least a few dozen others there who I would be happy to trade out for any of my picks.
2. I would have absolutely picked Gwern if there were just one more spot for him.
3. Alvaro DeMenard (“Fantastic Anachronism”) and Andrew Gelman would also be on my list, and there should be a whole category not called “replication crisis” but perhaps related to the problems for which that is a kind of catch-all euphemism, for people who understand the recurrent, deep, and fundamental issues negatively affecting the investigation and production of scientific knowledge these days.
> The was a “Peak LessWrong” era, in which the comments and posters were consistently excellent. Zvi Moscowitz is still around with high karma, but there are (or were) at least a few dozen others there who I would be happy to trade out for any of my picks.
I can’t comment on Zvi Moscowitz or the others posters directly, but I would like to introduce an idea for your consideration: the disciplined rationality that one observes in Rationalist forums may be somewhat deceiving. Speaking from experience (more so in /r/SlateStarCodex), the experience one gets from observing Rationalists discussing issues *on the internet, among themselves* may not be a highly accurate representation of their true nature/capabilities. If one is to competently/validly disagree with their analysis or conclusions (using the very same methodologies and principles that they proclaim to adhere to), the cool rationality you normally observe can have a way of evaporating very rapidly. Doing this in audio/video (ie: zoom) discussions, the effect is amplified, and may also often result in “circling of the wagons” or “piling on” behavior.
I don’t say this so much to discredit Rationalists, and yes I very much do realize that “everyone does this”, but I think that:
a) it is important to be precise and honest about the true nature of what we’re dealing with.
b) it is fair to be extra critical about those who proclaim to possess superior capabilities in rationality and general cognition (or: people tend to not realize how susceptible they are to the very same flaws for which they mock others – maybe even especially highly intelligent people).
Obv fun to brainstorm teams and roster construction (prob worth it just from people doing that), but will be interesting to see if/how this works in practice. Coming up with a scoring system/finding the equivalent of “games” to generate the stats you’ll be scored on seems challenging.
Also most commentators seem to be missing the idea that it’s a draft. I.e. players take turns picking players (1st overall Scott Alexander, 2nd John McWhorter). You don’t get everyone you want. Depending on how many teams there are, means people are going to have to go deeper into their reserve of intellectuals than they think.
Surprised a little by how few novelists, poets, and literary critics have been mentioned. Dierdre McCloskey’s virtue trilogy as I seem to recall included quite a bit of commentary on the importance of novelists and attitudes about the bourgeoisie. And even Piketty’s Capital offers a literary tour.
Perhaps a sad comment on the decline of the arts. Or perhaps film and TV have supplanted the written word. Does the draft pool appropriately reflect the import intellectuals from the modern arts? I don’t know but in film I would probably consider giving time to considering my personal favorite directors, Jim Jarmusch, Whit Stillman, Wes Anderson; favorite screenwriter/novelist Kem Nunn; actor Bill Murray; actress ?? Angelina Jolie? Drew Barrymore? (both had UN ambassador jobs). Or maybe not. Unfortunately I am unfamiliar with a lot of highly regarded TV but someone I trust suggests The Expanse is an intellectually interesting and challenging show. Not sure who the intellectuals are behind a TV show. Writers? Producers? Directors?
At any rate, if this fantasy league were held on a different blog or in a different country would the draft pool look much different? And would that be better or worse?
> Surprised a little by how few novelists, poets, and literary critics have been mentioned.
Or people from the religious / spiritualist (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, mindfulness/meditation, etc) or psychology/neuroscience communities. Intellectual performance derives from the human mind, and these people have genuinely superior insight into the weird, often counterintuitive manner in which the mind functions, especially under certain conditions, and when interacting with other minds.
Great point. I picked Marilynne Robinson in part because she is a two-fer in that regard.
I put a Catholic bishop and philosopher on my team (along with Thomas Nagel) to balance out the substantial number of adherents to orthodox atheistic materialism. Ben Shapiro almost made the cut as well. I rarely find Ben ever agreeing with someone on the left, and I don’t see him as agreeable to anyone on the left, which is why he didn’t make it. But in part he’d serve the same function if he had made it. Benjamin Studebaker made the list because I’m not on his side politically and I find myself thinking some of his points are insightful and convincing, even if his overall program isn’t to my liking. His ideas also seem fairly innovative, though in fairness I haven’t read all much leftist thought beyond Chomsky or the occasional piece in Jacobin. He in turn balances out the fact that the rest of my team
Doesn’t Sam Harris at least somewhat cover neuroscience/mediation? He’s mentioned on several lists.
> Doesn’t Sam Harris at least somewhat cover neuroscience/mediation? He’s mentioned on several lists.
I don’t *dislike* Sam Harris, he’s great – but despite his background in neuroscience, meditation, and even psychedelics, his outlook on the world seems somewhat narrow (with respect to his background) and often logically inconsistent. My intuition for why this might be has to do with his fondness atheism, although I can’t say if that’s a cause, or the effect of something else (I would guess the latter).
The Expanse is an excellent show. Sort of like a Star Trek that is more realistic than optimistic regarding human nature and technological progress. Not sure I’d put the writers on my team of public intellectuals though.
1) The Expanse is great, and is intellectually stimulating
2) because the show follows the book
3) where the authors do a great job of synthesizing Heinline, Niven, and that crowd who had something to say.
3) That’s not a knock. Good artists copy. Great artists steal. But most authors these days don’t have anything (I find) interesting to say.
if he was still alive, Jerry Pournelle would be on my list
Pournelle more fully explains more problems in the OECD world than anything else so succinct:
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
(my bold: control of the org)
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
There are lots of good answers here, and I enjoy many (most?) of them. I would add Robert Barnes, a lawyer with a populist perspective that isn’t covered by anyone else here that I’ve heard. I appreciate his insider perspective into elections, politics and law. It is much in the same way that I appreciate when Arnold discusses his time in government and how the system really works, not simply the headlines that you read in press accounts.
Anyone nominated Michael Huemer yet? See: Fakenous.net
Example wisdom from latest blog:
“ All of this is terrible for America. It’s also especially bad for minorities. Success in any society does not flow from rejecting the norms or hating the majority. Those things are pretty sure paths to remaining marginalized and impoverished. That’s why Woke ideology is one of the worst things you could teach to minorities.”
This FIT is a fine idea, with so many great folk up above. Tho it’s missing one of my two favorite bloggers:
https://www.thenewneo.com/ (the other has self-disqualified).
However, I don’t think intellectual status is the key issue for solving current problems. There are two key issues:
TRUTH and POWER.
Most of the above noted seem to be looking for Truth – as am I. However, as has been noted here with ASK, many folk are able to believe in untruths. Often it seems the more intelligent folk are more able to believe is some untruths – “rationalization” describes the process such smart folk use when they’re actually being “useful idiots”.
Insofar as truth is useful for gaining and holding power, it has status with those wanting power. If lies or exaggerations are more useful, they will be used and their use will be rationalized. And those more successful will gain more status.
Neo is looking for truth, and trying to write in a way that might change somebody’s mind. She has a great blog series on how A Mind is a Difficult Thing to Change.
As well as more current stuff.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2005/02/21/mind-is-difficult-thing-to-change-part-2/
Communicating in a way that changes minds is of huge importance.
Blogging was better than twitter for truth, but twitter is better for power.
> However, I don’t think intellectual status is the key issue for solving current problems. There are two key issues: TRUTH and POWER.
I agree – “High Status” intellectuals will be persuasive to some, but at the end of the day, they are just additional players (or a new organization) in the ongoing meme/epistemological war.
> Most of the above noted seem to be looking for Truth – as am I. However, as has been noted here with ASK, many folk are able to believe in untruths. Often it seems the more intelligent folk are more able to believe in some untruths – “rationalization” describes the process such smart folk use when they’re actually being “useful idiots”.
This is one way, but there are several others. One of the most common I see is that normies (even smart ones) don’t (can’t?) reason from first principles, and seem to not bother to apply even the most basic of critical reasoning to the official “facts” they pick up from the media. As Ayn Rand always said: check your premises (and your axioms).
Due to covid I’ve gotten into going to meetups in all sorts of different communities, and the variety of flawed epistemic and logical styles out there is scary, even from those whom you’d think would know better (like Rationalists) – if you want to see tempers flare (followed shortly thereafter by interest in the topic of discussion suddenly going from 100 to 0), apply a little recursive socratic questioning to smart people’s “truths” & rationalizations and you’ll quickly find out how “rational” they really are.
> Insofar as truth is useful for gaining and holding power, it has status with those wanting power. If lies or exaggerations are more useful, they will be used and their use will be rationalized.
This is a huge problem – considering how much of his life Noam Chomsky has devoted to this topic, it’s amazing how little intellectuals seem to have learned (based on diverse conversations I’ve had). I think the reason is that “knowledge” is a lot more complicated than it seems. One common thing I’ve seen is that even though someone may possess deep abstract knowledge of things like bias and logical fallacies, they are often unable to practice it in realtime culture-war conversations (race, gender, politics, etc). I believe this is due to “System 1 and 2” thinking as described by Daniel Khaneman in ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ – when smart people are involved in realtime, object-level, culture-war discussions, they seem to mostly only use (or have access to) System 1 (subconscious/heuristic, fast but unreliable) cognition, whereas if they are contemplating or discussing abstract ideas (like bias or logical fallacies), the mind tends to run in System 2 (conscious/logical, slow but more reliable). If they haven’t managed to commit this knowledge to System 1, it seems to be largely unavailable when discussing sensitive topics (perhaps emotions invoke “fight or flight”, which relies on System 1?).
I have spent years experimenting with people in different settings (different communities, topics, intelligence levels, etc) and there is amazingly little variance – I am quite certain that this general theory has significant validity to it.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory, and maybe even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory.
If there are bugs in a computer program, we wouldn’t be surprised if we get poor results. Yet, most people I’ve talked to seem unable to consider (or even generate any curiosity in) the possibility that if you try to run an entire planet of diverse cultures on similarly bug-ridden programs (human minds, the platform upon which the majority of reality itself runs), you may get similarly poor results – especially when you’ve networked all these minds together in a span of under 15 years, and they exist within an epistemological swamp.
If anyone has any ideas of how one might explain this idea in an understandable way, please let me know, because I am having no luck.
I think we need a new platform, something that commands respect, rather than demands it. I think Truth can be crowd-sourced, and many of these bugs cleaned up in the process, if you know how to go about it.
Part of Thinking Fast, well in real life, is having ready answers to all of Steelman, Strawman, Leadman (flexible), and Teddy Bear arguments (feel good dominant criteria). Not so easy.
” I think Truth can be crowd-sourced, ”
This seems to be part of the FIT effort.
I’m hoping it will help. Expecting not so much –
but far more, and better, than “the worst”.
Ya, but it seems like when there is a disagreement, people are not able to slow down. And once a personal “commitment” in a discussion based on a System 1 estimate has been made, ~most people seem unable to reconsider it, or even defend it.
> ” I think Truth can be crowd-sourced, ”
This seems to be part of the FIT effort.
18 people is a pretty small crowd, especially when the members all have a ~similar background (academic). If one wants to find flaws in an idea, or solutions to a problem, letting thousands to millions of minds work on it *in addition to the original 18* seems like a better approach than just 18.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law
> Linus’s law – In software development, Linus’s law is the assertion that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.
> The law was formulated by Eric S. Raymond in his essay and book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999), and was named in honor of Linus Torvalds.
> A more formal statement is: “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.” Presenting the code to multiple developers with the purpose of reaching consensus about its acceptance is a simple form of software reviewing. Researchers and practitioners have repeatedly shown[citation needed] the effectiveness of reviewing processes in finding bugs and security issues.