I don’t know Wei Dai’s specific reasons for having such a high level of concern, but I suspect that they are similar to the arguments given by the historian Niall Ferguson in this debate with Yascha Mounk on how dangerous ‘cancel culture’ is. Ferguson likes to try and forecast social and cultural trends years in advance and thinks that he sees a cultural-revolution like trend growing unchecked.
Ferguson doesn’t give an upper bound on how bad he thinks things could get, but he thinks ‘worse than McCarthyism’ is reasonable to expect over the next few years, because he thinks that ‘cancel culture’ has more broad cultural support and might also gain hard power in institutions.
Now—I am more willing to credit such worries than I was a year ago, but there’s a vast gulf between a trend being concerning and expecting another Cultural Revolution. It feels too much like a direct linear extrapolation fallacy - ‘things have become worse over the last year, imagine if that keeps on happening for the next six years!’ I wasn’t expecting a lot of what happened over the last eight months in the US on the ‘cancel culture’ side, but I think that a huge amount of this is due to a temporary, Trump- and Covid- and Recession-related heating up of the political discourse, not a durable shift in soft power or people’s opinions. I think the opinion polls back this up. If I’m right that this will all cool down, we’ll know in another year or so.
I also think that Yascha’s arguments in that debate about the need for hard institutional power that’s relatively unchecked, to get a Cultural-Revolution like outcome, are really worth considering. I don’t see any realistic path to that level of hard, governmental power at enough levels being held by any group in the US.
I don’t know Wei Dai’s specific reasons for having such a high level of concern, but I suspect that they are similar to the arguments given by the historian Niall Ferguson in this debate with Yascha Mounk on how dangerous ‘cancel culture’ is. Ferguson likes to try and forecast social and cultural trends years in advance and thinks that he sees a cultural-revolution like trend growing unchecked.
Ferguson doesn’t give an upper bound on how bad he thinks things could get, but he thinks ‘worse than McCarthyism’ is reasonable to expect over the next few years, because he thinks that ‘cancel culture’ has more broad cultural support and might also gain hard power in institutions.
Now—I am more willing to credit such worries than I was a year ago, but there’s a vast gulf between a trend being concerning and expecting another Cultural Revolution. It feels too much like a direct linear extrapolation fallacy - ‘things have become worse over the last year, imagine if that keeps on happening for the next six years!’ I wasn’t expecting a lot of what happened over the last eight months in the US on the ‘cancel culture’ side, but I think that a huge amount of this is due to a temporary, Trump- and Covid- and Recession-related heating up of the political discourse, not a durable shift in soft power or people’s opinions. I think the opinion polls back this up. If I’m right that this will all cool down, we’ll know in another year or so.
I also think that Yascha’s arguments in that debate about the need for hard institutional power that’s relatively unchecked, to get a Cultural-Revolution like outcome, are really worth considering. I don’t see any realistic path to that level of hard, governmental power at enough levels being held by any group in the US.