The desire to outcompete the USSR in social outcomes was driven by nation-level existential concerns about what would happen if communism had better social outcomes. (see also Marshall Plan)
Anti-expert sentiment is hardly new in the USA. (cf The Paranoid Style in American Politics). Facebook makes it far easier for anti-expert people to coordinate.
Increased anti-expert coordination places evolutionesque pressure on bad arguments, leading to better versions of those arguments.
Bothsidesism in various sectors weakens immuno-epistemic protections against stupid ideas
Increased sorting and extremism between Rs and Ds makes people less willing to coordinate on public goods. (“Republicans are more likely to [do something akin to Prisoner’s Dilemma defecting], so why bother trying to deal?”)
Google, Amazon, and grocery stores are (in this sense) a different category of thing from public goods. There is a profit motive pushing them forward in a laissez-faire capitalist system.
The memetic success of capitalism makes it more socially acceptable to critique the USPS by saying that it doesn’t turn a profit. (The military doesn’t turn a profit. Or does it? Has anyone studied counterfactual models of gas prices where we didn’t go into Iraq? Was $2.4MMM a good deal?)
Two-forward one-back advances in the rights of historically marginalized groups (women, Black people, Latinx, Asianx) has made historically relatively better-off groups feel like progress is a zero-sum game, making them less willing to coordinate
The bigger society gets, the more our savannah monkey brains are Just Not Cut Out for A World This Complicated
Universities create a motive for scientific progress, but only insofar as the prestige leads to more students being willing to attend. State-level spending on higher ed in my alma mater’s state goes down every year.
Incentive: do research that is “cool” (more students) or likely to lead to financial support from private sector (new Koch Hall for applied economics or whatever).
Some people are going to do what they want because they’re wired that way, and some of them will end up making a lot of money (Elon Musk). This will carry pet projects forward.
Museums, orchestras, operas, some theaters owe their start to the Kochs and Musks and Gateses of 100+ years ago, who took all their surplus money and put it into stuff they cared about (High art and not Low art).
Presumably, being on a nonprofit entity’s board has always been a giant cluster headache due to the same infighting/social signaling/etc that people complain about now; maybe previous Americans were more willing to play that game in exchange for status because status was more important to them
NYT examples are interesting. I think they dovetail with the “objective journalism” trend which is a flash in the pan relative to the history of printed news. (compare London’s various dailies (at least as of 20 years ago) with people identifying themselves politically in part by stating which paper they read)
Strongly suspect that objective journalism was an outgrowth of the Cold War, somehow. Maybe people looked at Pravda and Nazi newspapers and realized that part of winning was not having [handwaves] whatever Pravda is.
Yes, US bridges are crumbling, etc. However, when a decent-sized bridge falls down, it gets rebuilt (right?). So the problem is less coordination and more people being stupid about economics and risk. Or maybe that stupid leads to failure to coordinate in terms of taxes.
I was reading an LW post recently about how hard it is to scale up corporate culture from, say, a startup—the NYT US news desk is probably not THAT large.
Not counting “fake news,” i.e. not considering people with judgments proudly based on irrationality and ignorance, is the NYT actually perceived less well than in years past? The only big hit I remember them taking in my adult life is cheerleading the Iraq war.
Obviously, carving out those people is missing a major part of the story. Does the conservative media environment (Fox News, Breitbart, Rush) create the “common knowledge” that allows coordination among people who want to see the country coordinate less? Cf Ben Pace’s “The Costly Coordination Mechanism of Common Knowledge”
I want political scientists to break their backs publishing articles and studies about what happened in the 2020 election, and why everyone voted for who they voted for.
Covid is another thing. Suppose Trump had said, “Do what Fauci says, the guy knows what’s up,” what percent of anti-maskers would have been pro-mask? In other words, how much no-coordinating is driven by politics?
What is it about masks in particular that triggered the “I refuse to coordinate unless and until it kills my family” meme? At first, it was supposedly about the government mandate (rather than the requested act), but that has shifted to a focus on the act itself.
Why didn’t we do contact tracing more, and why didn’t my mayor bang on and on about how important it was and why? I had to look really hard to find any info at all about contact tracing nationwide or in my state. It didn’t need to be voted on, just have money thrown at it.
Why didn’t people answer the phone when the contact tracers called? Coordination problem? Do local, state, and national health entities’ failures count as institutional failures if they are caused by people’s reaction to them, independent of what the entities actually did?
Why were people okay with “herd immunity” as a strategy when sensible estimates indicated that would kill over a million people? Is there an empathy gap or large number problem with coordinating on this issue?
If Those People think the CDC is so crap, why don’t they want to reform it? (Does anti-government sentiment just reflect the view that some coordination/defection problems are absolutely intractable? Is this defensible?)
Harvard. My sense is not that it has lost face in general, just that people are arguing that its admissions criteria have been Goodharted. (not so much the argument that the criteria were wrong when they were generated…)
Where is Moloch in all this? Moloch, who generated examples of unions becoming corrupt, which were then used to justify suppressing unions rather than fixing them?
My middle of the country view on California in particular is that the claims of widespread governmental failures there are driven by people who think the government is too liberal.
That said, the gun laws seem to have been written by people who don’t know very much about guns.
Surely the massive flows of dark money generated by Citizens United have made it harder for small groups to coordinate and for new institutions to develop—the signal:noise ratio surely has gotten smaller. (Data on this?)
The 0-3 model seems right. You just need gatekeepers and line-holders to make sure the average norm-adherence stays high enough.
Note: NYT has always been held to some extent by the Ochs/Sulzberger family. (Parallel: Fox News and Murdoch empire.) Hypothesis: strong institutions under capitalism require patrons.
Elon Musk is a patron, too. Was there really market pressure to come up with rockets that could land on a platform floating in the ocean?
This is connected to the LW (and elsewhere) concept of slack. Someone with resources can help NYT preserve its culture by partially shielding NYT from the market demands that there be no slack in its business model.
I wonder: Are people more interested in money and less interested in status now? Or maybe status is something you can get more easily now in places other than your job? Or maybe job status means less when you feel like your job is the public-capitalist arena and you suspect the system is rotten or at least a problem?
Loss of regard for the political parties, if it exists, must be a function of increased sorting and polarization. (ie more people hate the parties because they oppose them strongly, versus people who lean in the party’s direction but are frustrated by the apparatus)
It must be very hard to count the number of subculture-communities out there. How do you even find them to begin a study?
Why are the scholars of community so obsessed with bowling leagues? (Why did so many people participate in them? Or is this a bad just-so story based on the title of Bowling Alone?)
A political party/presidential government takes a sledgehammer to some government agency, which leads the brightest people there to say “fuck this” and go to the private sector, which leads to the agency becoming less functional, which leads to…
More people know about Dunning Kruger, coordination problems, etc now than before (I think…) Is knowledge of all humanity’s cognitive biases an infohazard relative to one’s ability to get motivated to work for the common good, to coordinate, to support a sometimes-frustrating but mostly valuable institution of which one is a member?
I feel in my bones that anti-expertise is the X Factor here, but I can’t justify that empirically, and obviously anti-expertise has many other causes, so proving it was the X Factor would only get us closer to an answer.
Maybe I only feel that way because I am an expert at some things.
Functional institutions are a levee built against the eldritch horrors.
Do functional institutions start out with an eldritch horror as a target, or do they struggle forward blindly and only sometimes find a target?
[Just hit a wall. Hit a wall at #47 last time, too!] Ultra babble mode engaged: What role does mental health play in all this? If everyone has crippling anxiety because they’re afraid of being evicted, is there a ceiling on how complex of an institution they can create?
What drives people to become patrons? Guilt at earning so much money? Maybe: Jeff Bezos’ charitable giving isn’t aimed at e-commerce as far as I know.
A large, long-standing functional institution that needs to be insulated from the profit motive: can it even exist without some kind of patron? Or will it inevitably be outcompeted otherwise?
Obviously some people like to tear down functional institutions. What is wrong with them?:
I NEED MY SECOND INTERNET STAR.
The desire to outcompete the USSR in social outcomes was driven by nation-level existential concerns about what would happen if communism had better social outcomes. (see also Marshall Plan)
Anti-expert sentiment is hardly new in the USA. (cf The Paranoid Style in American Politics). Facebook makes it far easier for anti-expert people to coordinate.
Increased anti-expert coordination places evolutionesque pressure on bad arguments, leading to better versions of those arguments.
Bothsidesism in various sectors weakens immuno-epistemic protections against stupid ideas
Increased sorting and extremism between Rs and Ds makes people less willing to coordinate on public goods. (“Republicans are more likely to [do something akin to Prisoner’s Dilemma defecting], so why bother trying to deal?”)
Google, Amazon, and grocery stores are (in this sense) a different category of thing from public goods. There is a profit motive pushing them forward in a laissez-faire capitalist system.
The memetic success of capitalism makes it more socially acceptable to critique the USPS by saying that it doesn’t turn a profit. (The military doesn’t turn a profit. Or does it? Has anyone studied counterfactual models of gas prices where we didn’t go into Iraq? Was $2.4MMM a good deal?)
Two-forward one-back advances in the rights of historically marginalized groups (women, Black people, Latinx, Asianx) has made historically relatively better-off groups feel like progress is a zero-sum game, making them less willing to coordinate
The bigger society gets, the more our savannah monkey brains are Just Not Cut Out for A World This Complicated
Universities create a motive for scientific progress, but only insofar as the prestige leads to more students being willing to attend. State-level spending on higher ed in my alma mater’s state goes down every year.
Incentive: do research that is “cool” (more students) or likely to lead to financial support from private sector (new Koch Hall for applied economics or whatever).
Some people are going to do what they want because they’re wired that way, and some of them will end up making a lot of money (Elon Musk). This will carry pet projects forward.
Museums, orchestras, operas, some theaters owe their start to the Kochs and Musks and Gateses of 100+ years ago, who took all their surplus money and put it into stuff they cared about (High art and not Low art).
Presumably, being on a nonprofit entity’s board has always been a giant cluster headache due to the same infighting/social signaling/etc that people complain about now; maybe previous Americans were more willing to play that game in exchange for status because status was more important to them
NYT examples are interesting. I think they dovetail with the “objective journalism” trend which is a flash in the pan relative to the history of printed news. (compare London’s various dailies (at least as of 20 years ago) with people identifying themselves politically in part by stating which paper they read)
Strongly suspect that objective journalism was an outgrowth of the Cold War, somehow. Maybe people looked at Pravda and Nazi newspapers and realized that part of winning was not having [handwaves] whatever Pravda is.
Yes, US bridges are crumbling, etc. However, when a decent-sized bridge falls down, it gets rebuilt (right?). So the problem is less coordination and more people being stupid about economics and risk. Or maybe that stupid leads to failure to coordinate in terms of taxes.
I was reading an LW post recently about how hard it is to scale up corporate culture from, say, a startup—the NYT US news desk is probably not THAT large.
Not counting “fake news,” i.e. not considering people with judgments proudly based on irrationality and ignorance, is the NYT actually perceived less well than in years past? The only big hit I remember them taking in my adult life is cheerleading the Iraq war.
Obviously, carving out those people is missing a major part of the story. Does the conservative media environment (Fox News, Breitbart, Rush) create the “common knowledge” that allows coordination among people who want to see the country coordinate less? Cf Ben Pace’s “The Costly Coordination Mechanism of Common Knowledge”
I want political scientists to break their backs publishing articles and studies about what happened in the 2020 election, and why everyone voted for who they voted for.
Covid is another thing. Suppose Trump had said, “Do what Fauci says, the guy knows what’s up,” what percent of anti-maskers would have been pro-mask? In other words, how much no-coordinating is driven by politics?
What is it about masks in particular that triggered the “I refuse to coordinate unless and until it kills my family” meme? At first, it was supposedly about the government mandate (rather than the requested act), but that has shifted to a focus on the act itself.
Why didn’t we do contact tracing more, and why didn’t my mayor bang on and on about how important it was and why? I had to look really hard to find any info at all about contact tracing nationwide or in my state. It didn’t need to be voted on, just have money thrown at it.
Why didn’t people answer the phone when the contact tracers called? Coordination problem? Do local, state, and national health entities’ failures count as institutional failures if they are caused by people’s reaction to them, independent of what the entities actually did?
Why were people okay with “herd immunity” as a strategy when sensible estimates indicated that would kill over a million people? Is there an empathy gap or large number problem with coordinating on this issue?
If Those People think the CDC is so crap, why don’t they want to reform it? (Does anti-government sentiment just reflect the view that some coordination/defection problems are absolutely intractable? Is this defensible?)
Harvard. My sense is not that it has lost face in general, just that people are arguing that its admissions criteria have been Goodharted. (not so much the argument that the criteria were wrong when they were generated…)
Where is Moloch in all this? Moloch, who generated examples of unions becoming corrupt, which were then used to justify suppressing unions rather than fixing them?
My middle of the country view on California in particular is that the claims of widespread governmental failures there are driven by people who think the government is too liberal.
That said, the gun laws seem to have been written by people who don’t know very much about guns.
Surely the massive flows of dark money generated by Citizens United have made it harder for small groups to coordinate and for new institutions to develop—the signal:noise ratio surely has gotten smaller. (Data on this?)
The 0-3 model seems right. You just need gatekeepers and line-holders to make sure the average norm-adherence stays high enough.
Note: NYT has always been held to some extent by the Ochs/Sulzberger family. (Parallel: Fox News and Murdoch empire.) Hypothesis: strong institutions under capitalism require patrons.
Elon Musk is a patron, too. Was there really market pressure to come up with rockets that could land on a platform floating in the ocean?
This is connected to the LW (and elsewhere) concept of slack. Someone with resources can help NYT preserve its culture by partially shielding NYT from the market demands that there be no slack in its business model.
I wonder: Are people more interested in money and less interested in status now? Or maybe status is something you can get more easily now in places other than your job? Or maybe job status means less when you feel like your job is the public-capitalist arena and you suspect the system is rotten or at least a problem?
Loss of regard for the political parties, if it exists, must be a function of increased sorting and polarization. (ie more people hate the parties because they oppose them strongly, versus people who lean in the party’s direction but are frustrated by the apparatus)
It must be very hard to count the number of subculture-communities out there. How do you even find them to begin a study?
Why are the scholars of community so obsessed with bowling leagues? (Why did so many people participate in them? Or is this a bad just-so story based on the title of Bowling Alone?)
A political party/presidential government takes a sledgehammer to some government agency, which leads the brightest people there to say “fuck this” and go to the private sector, which leads to the agency becoming less functional, which leads to…
More people know about Dunning Kruger, coordination problems, etc now than before (I think…) Is knowledge of all humanity’s cognitive biases an infohazard relative to one’s ability to get motivated to work for the common good, to coordinate, to support a sometimes-frustrating but mostly valuable institution of which one is a member?
I feel in my bones that anti-expertise is the X Factor here, but I can’t justify that empirically, and obviously anti-expertise has many other causes, so proving it was the X Factor would only get us closer to an answer.
Maybe I only feel that way because I am an expert at some things.
Functional institutions are a levee built against the eldritch horrors.
Do functional institutions start out with an eldritch horror as a target, or do they struggle forward blindly and only sometimes find a target?
[Just hit a wall. Hit a wall at #47 last time, too!] Ultra babble mode engaged: What role does mental health play in all this? If everyone has crippling anxiety because they’re afraid of being evicted, is there a ceiling on how complex of an institution they can create?
What drives people to become patrons? Guilt at earning so much money? Maybe: Jeff Bezos’ charitable giving isn’t aimed at e-commerce as far as I know.
A large, long-standing functional institution that needs to be insulated from the profit motive: can it even exist without some kind of patron? Or will it inevitably be outcompeted otherwise?
Obviously some people like to tear down functional institutions. What is wrong with them?:
Yay for ultra-babble mode! Break through that wall!
Fixed your spoiler syntax for you. You were using the markdown syntax in our WYSIWYG editor.
Thank you.