War: What is it Good For?

Thursday, May 8th, 2014

At the heart of Ian Morris’s War: What is it Good For? lies a startling statistic and the counterintuitive thesis that flows from it:

We are used to looking back on the 20th century as comfortably the most violent in all human history — the silver medal usually goes to the 14th — but if Ian Morris (a fellow at Stanford University) is to be believed, the century that could wipe out perhaps 50 million to 100 million in two world wars and throw in the gulags, the Cultural Revolution, civil wars, government-orchestrated famine, trench-stewed pandemics and any number of genocides for good measure was, in fact, the safest there has ever been.

[...]

It would seem from the growing evidence of graves that Stone Age man had something like a 10–20 per cent chance of meeting a violent death, and if you factor in the anthropological evidence of surviving 20th-century Stone Age societies, then, as Morris puts it, Stone Age life was ‘10–20 times as violent as the tumultuous world of medieval Europe and 300–600 times as bad as mid-20th-century Europe.’

(I suspect that summary oversimplifies.)

You’d think there’d be a better way to tame Man’s violent tendencies, but so far Leviathan — birthed by War — is the best we’ve found:

If the Roman empire could have been created without killing millions of Gauls, if the United States could have been built without killing millions of Native Americans … if conflicts could have been resolved by discussion instead of force, humanity would have had the benefit of larger societies. But that did not happen … People hardly ever give up their freedom, including their rights to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war, or fear that such a defeat is imminent.

Posted in Policy, War | 6 Comments »

Apology Tweets

Thursday, May 8th, 2014

Patton Oswalt is trolling Twitter by apologizing for offensive “deleted” tweets that he never sent in the first place:

  • Oops. Just deleted my last Tweet. & would like to apologize to seniors & sufferers of Lyme disease. I was out of bounds.
  • Yikes. Had to delete another Tweet. I crossed a line on that one. Also, I thought 12 YEARS A SLAVE and THE BUTLER were brilliant.
  • PLEASE disregard last Tweet. Already deleted. Transphobia is hurtful, and I’m a big fan of HEDWIG & THE ANGRY INCH.
  • Forgive me. Previous Tweet deleted. Sorry. Yes, we all know what “grape”, “ape”, “tape” & “cape” rhyme with. I’m an asshole.
  • Previous Tweet very hurtful. Already deleted. @KimKardashian & @JoeBiden are national treasures. As are our Native American friends.
  • Another Tweet deleted. I apologize. That one was just mean. Go ahead & block me, @AnthonyCumia & @thelindywest. #tolerance
  • The FUCK is wrong with me? Last Tweet deleted. The victims of the Holocaust deserve our highest respect, not penis limericks.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Profiting from the News

Wednesday, May 7th, 2014

Scott Adams (Dilbert) has been profiting from the news:

The investment idea is that the news always exaggerates risks. This is an extension of the Adams Law of Slow Moving Disasters that says humans generally figure out how to avoid big disasters when they see them coming.

So, for example, when BP stock was in the toilet, and the news media kept telling us the Gulf would be ruined for decades, I loaded up on BP stock because I predicted the opposite: a better-than-expected clean-up. That prediction turned out right. So far, that investment has paid about a 5% dividend in recent years and the stock itself is up 19%. (You should interpret that as just “up” because I haven’t compared the performance to the market in general that is also up.)

When the news was reporting that Iranian leaders were on a suicide mission to develop a nuclear bomb to destroy Israel and their own country, I assumed it would all work out peacefully and I invested heavily in a beaten-down EFT of Israeli stocks. It’s the biggest single investment I’ve ever made. That’s up 26%.

When the news indicated that the government of Turkey was circling the drain and disaster was near, Turkish stocks crashed. I predicted that Turkey would work things out and get back to business in due time. So I loaded up on the biggest cell phone company in Turkey. As bad luck would have it, that company also has a big position in Ukraine, so it took a hit after I bought it, but now it’s up 10%.

Posted in Business, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Race Is Real. What Does that Mean for Society?

Wednesday, May 7th, 2014

Race is real, Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance argues, but what does that mean for society?, Robert VerBruggen wonders:

Certainly, it is illogical to draw conclusions about an individual from the racial group he belongs to, even if every last one of Wade’s theories is true. Remember, evolution worked on human populations mainly by subtly shifting gene frequencies — every race has individuals with all sorts of attributes, even if the averages turn out to be a little different. But not everyone has a solid grasp on these kinds of statistical concepts. For many, there is no difference between “genes that increase X are slightly more common in this racial group” and “members of this racial group are inherently high in X.” When X is, for example, intelligence or propensity to violence, this perception can lead to serious societal problems.

Perhaps the solution is to do a better job of teaching this distinction to the public, but thus far the media and academy have been no help whatsoever. As Wade points out, instead of explaining that race is real but racism is wrong, they are presenting the assertion that race is imaginary as a reason that racism is wrong, and branding as a racist anyone who suggests that evolution might happen to humans too. Since human evolution has indeed been “recent, copious and regional,” we are seeing that what we’ve been taught is “racist” is actually just true.

Posted in Policy, Science | 2 Comments »

Happy Birthday to the Reactivity Place

Wednesday, May 7th, 2014

Nick B. Steves’ blog is celebrating one year of reactivity. I thought you should know.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Death Stars Bad, Droids Good

Wednesday, May 7th, 2014

When Dan Ward introduced his daughter to the Star Wars movies, she came to this conclusion: “Daddy, they shouldn’t build those Death Stars any more. They keep getting blown up.”

Dan Ward is a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force, an acquisition officer, and he agrees that Death Stars are overrated military investments:

In addition to the observation that Death Stars “keep getting blown up,” which prevents them from being very effective, I also noticed they are inevitably over budget and behind schedule. Then I read an interview in which George Lucas himself anointed the humble astromech droid R2-D2 as “the hero of the whole thing.” The conclusion for how the military spends its money was clear: Death Stars bad, droids good.

This counterintuitive finding was not entirely unexpected. Since the early 2000s, I’d been developing and experimenting with an approach to innovation based on restraint — tight budgets, short schedules, small teams, and highly focused objectives. This was a relatively unusual approach for an Air Force officer to take, given my service’s longstanding preference for spending decades and billions developing enormous, multi-role systems. Indeed, these mega-projects are the most prestigious and the surest path to promotion in the military, which helps explain why we build so many of them.

And yet, while they may be impressive to work on, Death Stars contribute very little to the fight, partly because they’re always behind schedule and partly because they explode on a regular basis. This pattern is not limited to the movies.

The Army’s Comanche helicopter (22 years + $7 billion = zero helicopters) and the Joint Tactical Radio System (15 years and $6 billion before it was cancelled) are just two recent examples. But as the Government Accountability Office helpfully notes, these huge projects overall tend to “cost more, take longer to field, and often encounter performance problems” — not unlike the Empire’s moon-sized battle station. This means there are economic as well as operational reasons not to build them, which perhaps explains why I get a very bad feeling whenever I’m around one.

Real-life performance data shows that the most important and high-impact technologies are not the gold-plated, over-engineered wonder weapons that turn majors into colonels, colonels into generals, and young Jedi apprentices into Sith Lords. Instead, data suggest the real winners are humble, simple, low-cost products made by small, rapid innovation teams — the type of projects that don’t attract much attention from the press or from the brass because all they do is get the mission done without any fuss.

Defense analyst Pierre Sprey has written extensively about these “cheap winners” and “expensive losers,” a pattern which also showed up in my career.

He goes on to mention some real-world projects. Oddly, he never once mentions Lockheed’s famous Skunk Works.

Posted in Business, Media, Policy, War | 7 Comments »

The Perfect Crime

Tuesday, May 6th, 2014

If you want to kill someone and get away with it, hit them with your car — at least in New York City:

Dubner: Okay, let me be clear. I don’t actually want to kill anyone. And I don’t endorse the idea of wanting to kill anyone. But if I did, and I were looking for a way to do it and get away with it, how would I do it? I’d wait ‘til they were outside, walking down the street, maybe crossing at the light … and then I’d run them over in my car. Now, I’d have to make sure that no one knew I was trying to run them over. But they’d be dead and I, especially in New York City, would in all likelihood go scot-free.

Smith: There’s the case that happened with the little boy on the Upper West Side, Cooper Stock. He and his dad were crossing the street. And a driver was making a turn, and he just ran over the little boy, didn’t see him.

Dubner: Lisa Smith is a former prosecutor in the Brooklyn D.A.’s office; now she’s an assistant professor of clinical law at Brooklyn Law School.

Smith: So right now all that is is a summons to the driver for failing to yield. But it does not rise to the level of any kind of manslaughter or homicide charge. There was a study that showed that between 2008 and 2012 there were something like almost 1,300 fatal crashes in New York, and there were like 66 drivers arrested.

Dubner: Now, you might think that a place like New York, with so many pedestrians, would have particularly tough laws against running them over. But you’d be wrong. As Lisa Smith told us, only about 5 percent of the drivers who kill a pedestrian in New York are arrested.

Smith: Our neighbors have different vehicular laws than we do. Both Massachusetts and Connecticut have vehicular manslaughter statutes that punish traffic fatalities or serious injury that occurs because of simple negligence. New Jersey doesn’t have the same statute as Massachusetts or Connecticut, but even they have vehicular manslaughter statutes that encompass more behavior than what New York has, which is absolutely nothing other than drunk driving. So around the country in Iowa, Louisiana, Georgia, Nevada, Kansas, California, all over the country there are states with vehicular statutes that punish a failure to yield as a traffic fatality, that punish the driver.

Dubner: Smith says that New York has some of the narrowest standards for conviction in the country. It’s called the “rule of two” — you need two significant violations of traffic laws in order to bring a charge, including some incredibly reckless or criminally negligent act. Otherwise, it’s just … an accident.

Some interesting facts:

According to NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, only about 25 percent of the time is a driver’s “failure to yield” the official cause of a pedestrian fatality. In another 27 percent, the cause is unknown or unreported. Okay, so what about the pedestrians? Seventeen percent of the fatalities are the result of a pedestrian being “in [the] roadway improperly (standing, lying, working, playing).” Another 16 percent occur when the pedestrian is “not visible.” Nearly 15 percent come from the pedestrian “darting or running into [the] road,” and another 13 percent come from “improper crossing of roadway or intersection.” Now, again, keep in mind that this is according to data that usually comes from police reports – which, as Charlie Zegeer warned us, is bound to overweight the perspective of the driver who lived as opposed to the pedestrian who died. That said, here’s one other number that might get your attention: of the pedestrians killed in fatal crashes in the United States, 37 percent had been drinking, with a blood-alcohol concentration of .08 or higher. If you look at pedestrian fatalities among 25- to 34-year-olds, the drunk-walking number rises to 50 percent.

Pedestrian traffic fatalities have dropped from 16,000 per year, in the 1930s, to 4,000 per year. At Bellevue Hospital, in New York City, 25 percent of all trauma patients are pedestrians struck by motor vehicles, and another 10 percent are bicyclists struck by motor vehicles.

The interviewed doctor concludes, “From our data, I think all pedestrians should be wearing helmets. But who would really want to wear a bike helmet when they’re walking, when they’re going out for a date?”

Posted in Crime, Policy, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

Liberals Eat Here. Conservatives Eat There.

Tuesday, May 6th, 2014

Liberals and conservatives eat at different restaurants — although most of the effect seems geographical:

Restaurant Conservative Index Liberal Index
CALIFORNIA PIZZA KITCHEN 75 146
ROMANO’S MACARONI GRILL 96 141
RUTH’S CHRIS STEAK HOUSE 93 137
ON THE BORDER 94 136
P.F. CHANG’S CHINA BISTRO 80 133
BERTUCCI’S 87 132
THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY 87 132
FRIENDLY’S 69 132
MARIE CALLENDER’S 104 123
CHEVY’S 93 123
HOOTERS 105 121
BUFFALO WILD WINGS BAR & GRILL 86 118
PONDEROSA STEAKHOUSE 97 112
OLD COUNTRY BUFFET 81 111
CARRABBA’S ITALIAN GRILL 110 110
FUDDRUCKER’S 84 110
JOE’S CRAB SHACK 84 110
RUBY TUESDAY 93 109
O’CHARLEY’S 121 108
PERKINS 95 108
RED ROBIN 105 106
IHOP (INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF PANCAKES) 94 106
MIMI’S CAFE 103 105
SHONEY’S 110 104
TGI FRIDAY’S 92 104
LONE STAR STEAKHOUSE & SALOON 104 102
OLIVE GARDEN 101 102
CHUCK E. CHEESE’S 89 101
PAPA MURPHY’S 116 98
RED LOBSTER 101 97
APPLEBEE’S 100 97
OUTBACK STEAKHOUSE 100 97
DENNY’S 99 96
BIG BOY 98 96
CHILI’S GRILL & BAR 99 94
BLACK ANGUS STEAKHOUSE 101 93
HOMETOWN BUFFET 116 88
GOLDEN CORRAL 101 86
SIZZLER 103 85
LONGHORN STEAKHOUSE 115 82
CRACKER BARREL 118 75
BOB EVANS 110 71

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

People Befitting Their Environment

Monday, May 5th, 2014

“Knowledge is usually considered a better basis for policy than ignorance,” Nicholas Wade concludes, in A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, but I doubt many liberal creationists — as Steve Sailer calls them — will agree, when the knowledge looks like this:

European cultures tried to keep population below the famine level by inculcating the sexual restraint and romantic choosiness conducive to relatively late marriages, while East Asian cultures cultivated grinding work ethics. In most of tropical Africa, however, the infectious disease burden was so lethal that dense populations could not be achieved due to epidemics. So the population could not form cities, nor even fully farm the countryside. The big danger in Africa was not Malthusian overpopulation, but underpopulation, which may account for how sexualized their cultures are.

Not surprisingly, each continent’s culture seems to have bred people befitting its environment, and their traits live on in their descendants in modern America.

Posted in Policy, Science | 4 Comments »

You Must First Invent the Universe

Monday, May 5th, 2014

Sid Meier describes the allure of Civilization, his groundbreaking 1991 game:

We really didn’t design it in, but as I look back, I realize there is a really interesting growth path in the game. In the beginning, you have one or two military units, just a couple of technologies, and just a couple choices to make. The game opens up and unfolds gradually at your own pace. And before you know it, you’re dealing with lots of interesting decisions.

There is also that one-more-turn quality. There are enough different things going on that there is never really a good time to stop. In one city, you’re building something, and when that is done, you’re exploring this other continent. And then you meet the leader of another civilization, and you’re wondering how that is going to turn out. There are enough different threads in your imagination at any one time. One of the reasons that Civ has become this well-known phenomenon is that people remember the night when they stayed up to 3 a.m. playing it. It’s these experiences that stick with you.

So true.

The game was originally going to be about the rise and fall of civilizations:

There would be occasional setbacks, such as the Dark Ages, that you would have to overcome, and the glory of overcoming them would be satisfying. But what we found was that when bad things happen, people would just reload the game. They were not interested in the fall of civilizations. Just the rise of them.

So we ended up with a game of constant progress. We actually started to understand the psychology of gamers. When something bad happens, often they blame it on the computer, or the designer, or some other outside force. They would think it wasn’t fair, and they would reload the game.

We also found the same phenomenon when nuclear weapons came into play in the game. Players did not have much hesitation in using nuclear weapons against the AI-controlled civilizations. But if somehow the AI used a nuclear weapon against them, it would be: “wait a minute, that’s not fair.” The message of Civ is that [nuclear weapons are] a lose-lose for everybody. But we found that we couldn’t allow the AI to use them, because it was destroying the player’s experience. If the player is destroying the AI’s experience, then it’s only the computer that suffers.

Stupid computer…

Posted in Economics, Games, Policy, War | 4 Comments »

The Progressive Orthodoxy’s Nicene Creed

Sunday, May 4th, 2014

The orthodoxy’s equivalent of the Nicene Creed has two scientific tenets, Charles Murray explains:

The first, promulgated by geneticist Richard Lewontin in “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” (1972), is that the races are so close to genetically identical that “racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” The second, popularized by the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, is that human evolution in everything but cosmetic differences stopped before humans left Africa, meaning that “human equality is a contingent fact of history,” as he put it in an essay of that title in 1984.

Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, what is known by geneticists has increasingly diverged from this orthodoxy, even as social scientists and the mainstream press have steadfastly ignored the new research.

That’s the introduction to his review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance, which he declares a delight to read.

Both tenets of the orthodoxy are wrong, by the way:

Mr. Lewontin turns out to have been mistaken on several counts, but the most obvious is this: If he had been right, then genetic variations among humans would not naturally sort people into races and ethnicities. But, as Mr. Wade reports, that’s exactly what happens. A computer given a random sampling of bits of DNA that are known to vary among humans — from among the millions of them — will cluster them into groups that correspond to the self-identified race or ethnicity of the subjects. This is not because the software assigns the computer that objective but because those are the clusters that provide the best statistical fit. If the subjects’ ancestors came from all over the inhabited world, the clusters that first emerge will identify the five major races: Asians, Caucasians, sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans and the original inhabitants of Australia and Papua New Guinea. If the subjects all come from European ancestry, the clusters will instead correspond to Italians, Germans, French and the rest of Europe’s many ethnicities. Mr. Lewontin was not only wrong but spectacularly wrong. It appears that the most natural of all ways to classify humans genetically is by the racial and ethnic groups that humans have identified from time out of mind.

Stephen Jay Gould’s assurance that significant evolution had stopped before humans left Africa has also proved to be wrong — not surprisingly, since it was so counterintuitive to begin with. Humans who left Africa moved into environments that introduced radically new selection pressures, such as lethally cold temperatures. Surely, one would think, important evolutionary adaptations followed. Modern genetic methods for tracking adaptations have established that they did. A 2009 appraisal of the available genome-wide scans estimated that 14% of the genome has been under the pressure of natural selection during the past 30,000 years, long after humans left Africa. The genes under selection include a wide variety of biological traits affecting everything from bone structure and diet to aspects of the brain and nervous system involving cognition and sensory perception.

Given Murray’s own experiences, I got a chuckle out of this line:

His trust in his audience is touching.

Posted in Policy, Science | No Comments »

Positional Correctness

Saturday, May 3rd, 2014

Political correctness is not about protecting anyone, but rather about expressing one’s own moral superiority — making it what economists call a positional good:

A positional good is a good that people acquire to signalise where they stand in a social hierarchy; it is acquired in order to set oneself apart from others. Positional goods therefore have a peculiar property: the utility their consumers derive from them is inversely related to the number of people who can access them.

Positionality is not a property of the good itself, it is a matter of the consumer’s motivations. I may buy an exquisite variety of wine because I genuinely enjoy the taste, or acquire a degree from a reputable university because I genuinely appreciate what that university has to offer. But my motivation could also be to set myself apart from others, to present myself as more sophisticated or smarter. From merely observing that I consume the product, you could not tell my motivation. But you could tell it by observing how I respond once other people start drinking the same wine, or attending the same university.

If I value those goods for their intrinsic qualities, their increasing popularity will not trouble me at all. After all, the enjoyment derived from wine or learning is not fixed, so your enjoyment does not subtract from my enjoyment. I may even invite others to join me — we can all have more of it.

But if you see me moaning that the winemakers/the university have ‘sold out’, if you see me whinging about those ignoramuses who do not deserve the product because they (unlike me, of course) do not really appreciate it, you can safely conclude that for me, this good is a positional good. (Or was, before everybody else discovered it.) We can all become more sophisticated wine consumers, and we can all become better educated. But we can never all be above the national average, or in the top group, in terms of wine-connoisseurship, education, income, or anything else. We can all improve in absolute terms, but we cannot all simultaneously improve in relative terms. And that is what positional goods are all about — signalising a high position in a ranking, that is, a relation to others.  This leads to a problem. Positional goods are used to signalise something that is by definition scarce, and yet the product which does the signalling is not scarce, or at least not inherently. You can increase the number of goods which signal a position in the Top 20 (of whatever), but the number of places in that Top 20 will only ever be, er, twenty. Increasing the number of signalling products will simply destroy their signalling function. Which is why the early owners of such a signalling product can get really mad at you if you acquire one too.

We have all seen this phenomenon. Those of my age (1980 vintage) have probably witnessed it for the first time in their early teens, when an increasing number of their schoolmates tried to look like Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, and being a fan of that band lost its ‘edginess’. ‘Being alternative’ is a positional good. We cannot all be alternative [1]. Literally not.

Now remember how the ‘early adopters’ responded when Nirvana fandom went mainstream, and their social status was threatened, because there are clear parallels with PC: some of them went on to more extreme styles; others tried to repair the broken signal by giving endless sermons about the differences between ‘those who are in the know’ and ‘the poseurs’.

PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their social status. The PC brigade has been highly successful in creating new social taboos, but their success is their very problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.

You can do that by insisting that the no real progress has been made, that your issue is as real as ever, and just manifests itself in more subtle ways. Many people may imitate your rhetoric, but they do not really mean it, they are faking it, they are poseurs (here’s a nice example). You can also hugely inflate the definition of an existing offense (plenty of nice examples here.) Or you can move on to discover new things to label ‘offensive’, new victim groups, new patterns of dominance and oppression.

If I am right, then Political Correctness is really just a special form of conspicuous consumption, leading to a zero-sum status race. The fact that PC fans are still constantly outraged, despite the fact that PC has never been so pervasive, would then just be a special form of the Easterlin Paradox.

Steve Sailer has made the same point before, without so much econ jargon.

(Hat tip to Peter Dimov.)

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Joyce Carol Oates on Donald Sterling

Thursday, May 1st, 2014

Joyce Carol Oates has much to say about the current two-minutes hate directed at Oceania’s enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein — pardon, Donald Sterling:

Nostalgia for time when one could say anything in private no matter how stupid, cruel, self-serving or plain wrong & not be criminalized.

“Self-righteousness is the collateral damage virtue must risk in stamping out vice.” Le Roquefortchaud

Slurs “Commie” & “pinko” in 1950s — slurs of “racist” in our era — casually uttered, to denigrate another who differs from you even mildly.

Is there a federal law providing “expectation of privacy” in personal situations, or is it a state law? Or is it even a law? Am I dreaming?

As lawyers advise, “Never put anything in writing,” soon the admonition will be: “Never put anything in words that might be recorded.”

Only stand-up comedians & clearly designated satirists are allowed an almost total freedom of speech today in US. (Note “almost.”)

Many who frequently speak in public have begun to speak much more circumspectly than we once did, for fear of being quoted out of context.

Would, or could, ACLU today defend Nazi’s right (or “right”) to march through Skokie, Illinois? Real test of principle vs. extreme backlash.

Tragic pessimist George Orwell could not have foreseen that individuals would give up their freedom to be punitive Big Brother themselves.

In 2039 murmuring something “critical” about the President may result in a fleet of drones sent in your direction. “Wait–just kidding!”

If one individual is so vilified for making private statements, one day you may not dare say anything “critical” about the President.

Why do so many people confuse an individual case (agreed, despicable) with a principle? “Free speech” — “free press” — US Constitution.

In US law, no one is “indefensible.” If prosecution does not need to prove a case, we are all susceptible to false accusations, arrest.

Many, perhaps most, US citizens now seem to believe that to defend just the principle of “free speech” is to defend a particular individual.

Many, perhaps most, US citizens now seem to believe that you can/ should be punished for what you say even in private. Repercussions?

This era of ever-vigilant social media & NSA surveillance may one day be seen as the end of “free speech” in America. Happened so quickly.

Am I the only person in US surprised that a private conversation (no matter how ugly) can be the basis for such public recrimination?

Nostalgia for time when one could say anything in private no matter how stupid, cruel, self-serving or plain wrong & not be criminalized.

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

Right Is The New Left

Wednesday, April 30th, 2014

Right is the new Left, Scott Alexander has found:

A friend recently pointed out that conservatives aren’t, on average, very smart. He illustrated this with a graph of IQ vs. political belief which confirms that the left has a significant advantage.

But I look at my Facebook feed, and here is what I observe.

I see my high school classmates — a mostly unselected group of the general suburban California population — posting angry left stuff like “Ohmigod I just heard about that mayor in South Carolina WHAT A FUCKING BIGGOT!!!”

I see the people I think of as my intellectual equals posting things that are conspicuously nuanced — “Oh, I heard about that guy in South Carolina. Instead of knee-jerk condemnation, let’s try to form some general principles out of it and see what it teaches us about civil society.”

And I see the people I think of as the level above me posting extremely bizarre libertarian-conservative screeds making use of advanced mathematics that I can barely understand: “The left keeps saying that marriage as an institution isn’t important. But actually, if we look at this from a game theoretic perspective, marriage and social trust and forager values are all in this complicated six-dimensional antifragile network, and it emergently coheres into a beneficial equilibrium if and only if the government doesn’t try to shift the position of any of the nodes. Just as three eighteenth-century Frenchmen and a renegade Brazilian Marxist philosopher predicted. SO HOW COME THE IDIOTS ON THE LEFT KEEPS TRYING TO MAKE GOVERNMENT SHIFT THE POSITION OF THE NODES ALL THE TIME???!”

(I will proceed to describe this level extensionally: Jonathan Haidt, Bowling Alone, time discounting, public choice theory, the Hajnal line, contract law, Ross Douthat, incentives, polycentric anything, unschooling, exit rights)

And, I mean, I know the reason I get so many people trying to come up with bizarre mathematizations of politics is because those are the sorts of people I select as my friends. The part I don’t get is why so many of them end up weird libertarian-conservative. Certainly not because I selected them for that. I don’t even think they were weird libertarian-conservatives a few years ago when I met a lot of them. It just seems to have caught on.

And my theory is that in a world where the upper class wears black and the lower class wears white, they’re the people who have noticed that the middle class is wearing black as well, and have decided to wear white to differentiate themselves.

It’s the reverse of the 1950s. Assume you’re a hip young intellectual in the 1950s. You see all these stodgy conservatives around you — I don’t even know what “stodgy” means, I just know I’m legally obligated to use it to describe 1950s conservatives. You see Mrs. Grundy, chattering to her grundy friends about how scandalous it is that some people read books about sex, lecturing to the school board on how they had better enforce her values on the children or she will have some very harsh words to say to them.

And you think “Whatever else I am, I’m not going to be a mediocrity like Mrs. Grundy. I’m not going to conform.” Which, in the 1950s, meant you became a leftist, and talked about how stodgy society was fundamentally oppressive, and how you were going to value different things, and screw what Mrs. Grundy thought.

And gradually this became sufficiently hip that even the slightly less hip intellectuals caught on and started making fun of Mrs. Grundy, and then people even less hip than that, until it became a big pileup on poor Mrs. Grundy and anyone who wanted even the slightest claim to intellectual independence or personal integrity has to prove themselves by giving long dissertations on how terrible Mrs. Grundy is.

But when Mrs. Grundy herself joins the party, what then?

I mean, take that article on Dartmouth. A group of angry people, stopping just short of violence, invade a school building and make threats against the president unless he meets their demands. Every student must be forced to attend moral instruction classes inculcating their (the protesters’) values. Offensive terms must be removed from the library. And the school must take care to admit people of the right race. When was the last time you could hear a story like that and have it be even slightly probably that the mob was rightist?

It’s hard to argue that Mrs. Grundy is not a proud leftist by now, still chattering about how scandalous it is that people read books with the wrong values, still giving her terminally uncool speeches to the school board about how they had better enforce her values on the children (and if she can get the debate society on board as well, so much the better).

There must be overwhelming temptation among hip intellectuals to differentiate themselves from Mrs. Grundy by shifting rightward.

And perhaps so far this has been kept in check by the second rule of our cellular automaton — you can’t take a position that would get you plausibly confused for a person of lower class than you.

I was tickled by a conversation between two doctors I recently heard in a hospital hallway:

Doctor 1: My daughter just got a full scholarship into a really good university in Georgia.

Doctor 2: Congratulations!

Doctor 1: Thanks! But I’m hoping she’ll choose somewhere closer to home.

Doctor 2: Why? Because you want to be able to visit her more?

Doctor 1: There’s that. But the other problem is that the South is full of those people.

Doctor 2: So? Colleges are like their own world. Your daughter probably won’t even encounter many of them.

Doctor 1: I know. But I keep worrying that just by being there, she’ll make friends with them, and then end up bringing one home as a boyfriend.

“Those people” is my replacement, not the original term used by the doctor involved. The doctor involved said a much less polite word.

She said “fundies”.

Fundies — in all of their Bible-beating gun-owning cousin-marrying stereotypicalness — have so far served as the Lower Class With Which One Must Not Allow One’s Self To Be Confused. But I think that’s changing. Sorting mechanisms are starting to work so well that, at the top, the fundies just aren’t plausible. In our model, people from class N can be confused with class N-1, but never with class N-2. But as the barber-pole movement of fashion creeps downward, fundies are starting to become two classes below certain people at the top, and those people no longer risk misidentification.

I notice that, no matter how many long rants against feminism I write, everyone continues to assume I am a feminist. It’s like, “He doesn’t make too many spelling errors, his writing isn’t peppered with racial slurs — he’s got to be a feminist. He probably just forgot the word ‘not’ in each of his last 228 sentences.”

And I wonder if maybe the reason why I am outraged by the debate team but not by the South Carolina mayor isn’t that I feel a greater threat from the debate team, but because I feel like there is a greater threat of me being mistaken for the debate team. If impotent expressions of outrage divorced from any effort to change things are ways of saying “I’m not like this! I promise!” And I get less outraged than some other people about South Carolina because I feel confident enough in my intelligence that I don’t worry anyone will mistake me for a fundie. But I feel less confident no one could mistake me for the sort of person who judged those debate championships, so I need to shout at them to show I’m Not Like That. This would actually explain a lot.

If some intellectuals no longer need to worry about being mistaken for fundies, that frees them to finally breath a sigh of relief and start making fun of Mrs. Grundy again. And that means they’ve got to become conservatives, or libertarians, or anything, anything at all, except for leftists.

So far it is just a few early adopters — the intellectual equivalent of the very trendy people who start wearing some outrageous fashion and no one knows if it is going to catch on or whether they will be soundly mocked for it.

And they are having a really difficult time, because a lot of conservative ideas aren’t that great. Like, reality leaves you a lot of degrees of freedom when you’re deciding your political self-presentation, but it doesn’t leave you an infinite number of degrees of freedom, and the project of creating something that is both anti-leftist enough to serve as a fashion statement but reality-based enough not to be dumb is still going on. The reactionaries are doing an excellent job maximizing the “anti-leftist” criterion. The “reality-based” criterion is a harder egg to crack, but it makes me think of Drew Summitt, Athrelon, and some of SarahC’s more political moments.

As the Commissioner puts it, “Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.”

When I put it like this, I realize I’m not becoming more conservative at all. I’m becoming anti-leftist. Actually, put that way a lot of people seem to be anti-leftist. I can’t think of a single specific policy proposal supported by Glenn Beck. Can you?

And I think the best explanation is that all my hip friends who I want to be like are starting to be conservative or weird-libertarian or some variety of non-leftist, and Mrs. Grundy is starting to become very obviously leftist and getting grundier by the day, and so the fashion-conscious part of my brain, the much-abused and rarely-heeded part that tells me “No, you can’t go to work in sweatpants, even though it would be much more comfortable”, is telling me “QUICK, DISENGAGE FROM UNCOOL PEOPLE AND START ACTING LIKE COOL PEOPLE RIGHT NOW.”

And I said this is my favorite of all the explanations. Why?

Because if it’s true, and it spreads beyond a couple of little subcultures, it means my worst fears are misplaced. The future isn’t a foot stamping on the face of a a college debate team forever. It’s people — or at least some people — rolling their eyes at those people and making fake vomiting noises. And then going too far, until other people have to roll their eyes at those people. And so on. Instead of a death spiral we get a pendulum, swinging back and forth.

But I would hope for something even better than that. Like, at each swing of the pendulum, people learn a little. I was really impressed with how many smart and decent people thought that the Eich thing was wrong (…and wore kilts, and played bagpipes…shut up). Fashion does not accrete, but maybe reality does. And I would like to think that the rationalist movement is a part of that. And if that’s true, that’s a way in which reality will eventually come to overpower fashion and the arc of the universe might tend toward justice after all.

Posted in Policy | 7 Comments »

Just a Job

Wednesday, April 30th, 2014

What jobs require minimum skills?

All the jobs reformers and progressives both describe in disparaging terms: Walmart clerk, hotel maid, custodian, garbage collector, handyman, fast food worker. The average elite makes these jobs sound unfit, an insult to even consider.

I had a kid who I will call Sam in my Math Support Class for Kids Who Didn’t Pass the Graduation Test. He wasn’t particularly memorable, charming or appealing, a slacker constantly trying to get out of any effort. If I didn’t take away his cell phone, he’d never work and even without his cell phone he’d be more likely to draw than practice the basic skills I tried to help him improve on. His skills are incredibly weak; like many low IQ kids he’s got good solid math facts but no ability to synthesize or generalize.

A couple months ago, long after he’d finished my class, Sam came bounding into my room beaming. BEAMING. He’d gotten a job at Subway. He was going to make a presentation in English class on how to make a sandwich, and he was wondering if I could help him edit his essay on the same topic. His essay was weak, but it demonstrated significant effort on his part, and he took my edit suggestions to heart and returned with a still-weak-but-much-improved version. I’ve seen him several times since, getting an update on his increasing hours, a raise, getting his GED because he can’t pass the graduation test. He’s got a purpose and he’s excited. He could give a damn if elites think his job’s a dead end.

From there, Education Realist goes off in a direction I was not expecting.

Posted in Business, Education, Policy | No Comments »

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