A self-recommending podcast. For example, around minute 7, Yuval Levin points out that what is unusual currently is that elites in various realms have similar backgrounds. It used to be that the business elite was not culturally similar to the journalistic elite or the political elite. Having elites that have much in common culturally with one another and yet differ sharply culturally from people who are not in elites is a problem.
Here is more of my coverage, along with coverage of other FITs.
Have you come across this website attempting some kind of quantification related to your FITs? I’m not sure I understand what they are doing, but it seemed intriguing.
https://www.metarational.net/lens/arnold_kling_fits
Hi Infovores, that’s a little side project of mine. It’s a bit incomprehensible at the moment, but the goal is to create information filters from a seed set of sources, with the goals being (a) create good filters, using objective criteria such as FITs; (b) simply see the world through various perspectives/lenses. In this case, I used FITs scores to initialize a Personalized PageRank vector over a graph of Twitter endorsements (likes, retweets) to create a ranked list of Twitter accounts. With the resulting scored list of Twitter accounts, you can create various applications, like a news aggregator. I have a prototype of a news aggregator available at https://news.johndbeatty.com/arnold_kling_fits (also see news/opinion through lenses at https://news.johndbeatty.com).
I think it verges on a great early step – but only in a way similar to Google’s pagerank.
What FITs does is add point score suggestions, from promoters (/owners), moderated by Arnold as referee.
(Much?) better than Twitter follower/ like counting BUT not yet able to be automated.
another important & I think overlooked point about today’s elites came up in a recent Robert Wright podcast. Bob was talking to law professor Mehrsa Baradaran, who is also Dean of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion at UC Irvine Law School. She matter of factly states that CRT has “become the language of the elites,” and if you want your child to ascend to elite status, they need to learn it. She also kind of implies that it is not “real,” in that CRT language is more of a tribute that the elite class pays to the activist class to avoid any structural changes that would threaten their status. I think this puts JCS Chief General Milley’s recent testimony to Congress on Wokism in context; if military men like Milley want to retain their status – which usually includes lucrative positions on corporate boards post-retirement – then they have to learn & speak this language as well.
Podcast link; CRT as language of the elites at 42:49
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djvEPscKfuc
I don’t buy this ‘just learning language’ framing.
Kids aren’t being taught from some objective and disinterested or even critical viewpoint about the terminology and intellectual framework adherents of a particular ideology use to communicate and interact with each other other, and alongside exposure to many other alternative modes of speaking and believing. They’re being taught that the ideology *is true*, and that all the alternatives *are false* and not even worth learning about, which is something only bad people would do.
I could teach a perfectly accurate course on using woke progressive language, but woke progressives wouldn’t like it, because it wouldn’t propagate their faith, but merely describe the faith, occasionally in unflattering ways.
Wright and Baradaran were obviously having trouble remembering details about what was a fairly prominent fracas. This is something I observe all over the place and in my personal life even among smart professionals, and I think a lot of this is a kind of intellectual atrophy as many people have gotten used to outsourcing memory and recall of specifics to internet searching.
They were trying to recall Andrew Gutmann’s letter about why he was pulling his daughter out of Brearley, not Dalton, which of course has its own similar troubles with insane wokeness. And boy, Baradaran was just completely wrong in how she characterized that situation, as if Guttmann just didn’t understand the words or language, “not meant for every audience,” or was over-reacting to merely teaching that kind of vocabulary or giving the kids “cultural competence.”
One can only say, “Oh, come on!” to that kind of excuse-making. No way is that what happened; go read Guttman’s letter and see for yourself if Baradaran’s ditzy characterization makes sense.
Guttman gets it, Baradaran doesn’t.
There is a big difference between taking, say, a comparative religion class and learning about the tenets of Calvinism or Buddhism on the one hand, or attending a madrassa where Sunni Islam is taught as Truth, memorizing every verse in the Koran, and participating in pep rallies featuring the stoning of apostates.
Now, maybe one could make a more sophisticated argument that one can’t *really* master competency in the culture and ‘language’ of the elite without going all-in on woke progressive religion, both in orthodoxy and orthopraxy, because otherwise one would repeatedly slip up in the etiquette of interactive protocols and give off subtle cues of being inauthentic and not belonging or being ‘one of us’. I think there’s something to that, and it might salvage the argument somewhat, but Baradaran wasn’t going there.
And even if she was, then the message is, “You have to pay $50K a year to have your elementary school kid indoctrinated in crazy and obnoxious woke progressivism if you want them to have any chance of getting past the gatekeepers of prestigious institutions which control the capacity to enjoy the status and social networking of elites.” Not necessarily untrue, but man, pretty alarming and probably why Gurri was not at all allergic to “burn it all down” for higher education.
Heck, even Baradaran was quitting the Diversity Dean gig because she just couldn’t handle dealing with the new generation of hyper-woke students produced by the above process and with all their constant, petty, and viciously vindictive complaining, which turns out, much to her unwelcome surprise, to be most of what the job entailed.
There is no doubt that it was one of Wright’s weakest efforts. He didn’t press Baradaran enough on the details of CRT, didn’t get into the rejection of rationalism, etc. And she definitely tried to whitewash it. And I agree that people like her are whistling past the graveyard, that the younger cohorts indoctrinated into the ideology are eager to build their auto-da-fés. Baradaran and those like her will be lucky not to end up like Robespierre.
But all that being said, I think she is correct in identifying this as the language of the elites. CRT inspired pedagogy could not have achieved the reach it has without elite backing. However misguided it ends up being, the elite class definitely supports and pushes wokism, at every level.