Isegoria

Charles Krauthammer has a conversation with Bill Kristol that more or less starts with the Reagan Doctrine he named while still a conservative Democrat:

Harold Lee explains the Confucian heuristic:

Like a lot of people, Confucius was bothered by “bad inequality” — the kind of hierarchy where the elites actively oppress the poor and the lower class at best toils away, and at worse foment short-sighted peasant rebellions. The usual Western response to bad inequality is leveling — knock down all hierarchies as “elitism” and “privilege,” and even everything out until there’s no concentration of power such that anyone can oppress his fellow man. Sometimes that can be a helpful approach, but there are several side effects.

One is that while some kinds of inequality can be gotten rid of — wealth, family inheritance, ethnic inequalities, and so on — there are many more you can’t touch. Some people are more diligent than others, you can’t change that. Some are more politically savvy, some are taller, better looking. If you suppress all sources of inequality that you can, often you end up just increasing the importance of things you can’t touch. Knock down aristocracy, and you simply get meritocracy that privileges diligent, politically savvy nerds instead. And while we’ve developed some social technology to at least channel selfish impulses in prosocial ways, we haven’t yet invented the analogue of capitalism that channels height inequality into prosocial behavior.

A related problem is that in telling a story about eliminating inequality, this leveling frees up the new elites — the winners in the new “emergent inequality,” to deny that they’re in fact elites. They’re just average Joes like anyone else, and feel therefore feel no sense of obligation towards the losers of society. And when they’re in competition with the weak, they see it as a contest between equals and have no compunction about using their strengths to exploit them, all cloaked in egalitarianism. (This is in fact a criticism that has been leveled against meritocracy — the winners feel like they have earned their advantages, and therefore feel no noblesse oblige.)

Confucius took a different tack — he said hey, there’s always going to be inequality, let’s not kid ourselves. Instead, let’s formalize it into really visible hierarchy, and, crucially, tie great power to great responsibility. Rather than wrangle with abstract notions of status, he prefers to emphasize the personal interactions between superiors and inferiors. So he spends a lot of time talking about rights and responsibilities in different kinds of relationships, and promoting rites — think “etiquette” — to make it clear that the weak respect the strong, and that the strong have obligations to the weak. If you’re going to be king, you’d better protect your people. If you’re going to be a mom, the kids have to obey you and take care of you in your old age, but you’d better raise them well. No weaseling out.

A superforecaster reviews Superforecasting:

While superforecasters had ordinary-seeming day jobs, they were an unusually smart and knowledgeable group. When tested, they scored at least a standard deviation higher than the general population on tests of fluid intelligence and at least a standard deviation higher than the general population on tests of political knowledge. Many were retired or — like me — were employed less than full time, so they could spend hours every week researching the questions and breaking them down into manageable parts. If the question was whether Ebola would spread to Europe, they pored over epidemiological models, studied airline screening procedures, and read papers on the possible sexual transmission of the disease. They updated their forecasts often.

Superforecasters also scored highly on measures of “actively open-minded thinking”. That is, they are not committed in advance to any one idea of how the world works. They treat their ideas as hypotheses to be tested, rather than premises to be built on. They look for facts and arguments that might call their views into question. They generally see events as determined in part by chance rather than attributing them to divine will or fate. They approach problems from a variety of different angles. They are unusually willing to consider that they might be wrong.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously divided thinkers into “foxes”, who look at problems from a different perspectives, and “hedgehogs”, who “relate everything to a single central vision”. The dichotomy comes from the Greek poet Archilochus’ line that “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. Tetlock found that people who were confident there are simple, readily-available explanations for events — whether they were realists or liberal idealists, Marxists or supply-side economists — were practically worthless forecasters. People who saw themselves as foxes, who thought politics was complex and unpredictable, and who were willing to consider different points of view were consistently more accurate. Foxes were better forecasters.

The superforecaster writing that is Robert de Neufville, an associate of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute:

He has degrees in political science and political theory from Harvard and Berkeley. As one of the top 2% of forecasters in IARPA ‘s experimental Good Judgment Project forecasting tournament, he qualifies as a “superforecaster”. He was one on the forecasters interviewed for Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. He has contributed to The Economist and The Washington Monthly, and for several years wrote the Politeia column for Big Think. Follow him on Twitter here.

David Hume addresses the “trolls” of his time in the first section of his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals:

Disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons, entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy, from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity, superior to the rest of mankind. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in inforcing sophistry and falsehood. And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.