Here—there’s an excerpt here. You can include them if you’d like.
Kerry
Karma: 111
Matt Taibbi has written an article that makes me more confident it was a false flag...at least 55%. He doesn’t argue this, but he also noted that the accusations were weirdly chosen and presented. It’s paywalled, but a few quotes:
“When I reached out to the group’s listed email, they declined comment” (citing fear of threats, in a short and vague response.)
“The campaign seems to have failed, as it doesn’t appear the LSA is planning on taking action.” (Why did it die out without any further info?)
“Pinker didn’t see this exact campaign coming, as ‘I don’t consider myself a political provocateur, and I’m a mainstream liberal Democrat.’ However, he says, ‘over the years I’ve realized I have some vulnerabilities.’ … By way of explaining, he referenced [the SSC controversy]...”
He speaks more calmly and intelligently about this issue than almost any public figure I’ve seen. I’m going to read more of his work.
By “operationalize our disagreement,” do you mean agreeing on what wou. I’m now more confident in my position. He’s evidently volunteered to be a champion of the cause and take the heat, and the interview suggests he’s thought a lot about the issue and how it works. So he would know how to “game” it. But it’s evident he’s not taking responsibility for the letter and probalby never will—it’s not like
Literally as I’m writing this, I just saw that Pinker did an interview. I’m now more confident in my position. He’s evidently volunteered to be a champion of the cause and take the heat, and the interview suggests he’s thought a lot about the issue and how it works. So he would know how to observe it and “game” it, and he’s not afraid. But it’s evident he’s not taking responsibility for the letter and probably never will if he was behind it—it’s not clever enough to brag about. But it would have given him reason to step in to the fray and highlight certain things, which he obviously wants to do. He says that “It’s important that there be a public voice, a focal point to break what is sometimes called a spiral of silence.”
ETA: I should clarify that this is technically a different position—I was lumping them together under “he is in on it,” but I no longer think it is mostly about inoculation. More about the other possibility I suggested: “Or perhaps it was a plan by him and others to send the debate in a specific direction that they could more easily address.”
I assume you are asking me to give a probability....maybe 40%. The last few months have been so weird that it’s harder for me to assess this than it normally would be—I have a feeling I’m not tracking the full range of plausible motives now in operation. I also don’t follow Pinker very closely so I don’t have a great sense of his behavior, tactics, and values. But the information given in this post seems to me strong evidence that this isn’t what it appears to be, and Pinker seems by far the person with the most to gain from it (and the most to lose from not trying to preempt it.) It would almost certainly involve cooperation by others who want to see if the technique works and think Pinker is a good trial balloon (his steady, optimistic personality is ideal for this, and he has prominent detractors rising to his defense, which gives momentum), but it wouldn’t work without his active participation.
This definitely explains a lot of it, but I feel like there’s something missing from the analysis.
These are very sharp observations, and I think you’re on to something. Don’t know what the real story is, but your suggestions are plausible. The one that seems most likely to me is Pinker preemptively canceling himself to inoculate against future attempts. I don’t think it’s outlandish. And I think it is quite possible that Pinker has some Machiavelli in him.
Or perhaps it was a plan by him and others to send the debate in a specific direction that they could more easily address. It’s possible that he just caught the eye of some LSA member who wanted to take a stand and didn’t do much research, but your point about the footnote is telling. I didn’t follow the Pinker controversy closely, but I did notice it seemed oddly tame. People are way too wedded to taking things at face value—yes, most of the time, there’s no grand conspiracy, but strategy is a thing and you have to watch for moves or glaring omissions.
In addition to the general craziness, there’s definitely something going on right now that just seems off—incidents that are too neatly executed yet simultaneously too incompetent or bizarre to be natural. I think people are hijacking the current controversies—the issues are mostly real, but there are contrived ones mixed in, I suspect, that go beyond simply riding the wave and seem designed for maximum division and ridiculousness. And it’s happening in mainstream media outlets in a coordinated manner. At first I thought some people or groups were sowing confusion and the media was falling for it, whether by domestic trolls or foreign information warriors, but now it seems more like malicious testing, to see what works and how far they they can go without getting pushback. It could be a show of power demonstrating that absurdity can be enforced, but that kind of behavior is a weird thing to do at such a large scale for such a diverse audience. Powerful status quo figures use spin and selective smear campaigns, but rarely benefit from constant and off-putting provocation. It seems more designed to disorient everyone and make exploiting it in any real direction impossible. I don’t think this would be related to conservatives, but to a person or group who doesn’t have any interest in the country’s welfare or traditional political power. I know this sounds conspiratorial, but something odd is going on, and I can’t quite figure out who benefits, unless it’s pure distraction by panicked and deranged elites who can’t deal with their disrupted future, as Matt Taibbi has argued. I’ve never seen anything like it.
My guess is that most people aren’t infecting many others because of a number of factors, mainly awareness of the issue and social distancing measures. Most people are being extra careful compared to usual, especially about things that would have a high probability of transmission. I’m not sure how good the testing is...even if it is much better than it was, are they really anywhere close to catching all new cases, especially very mild ones? They are probably undercounting. But it doesn’t surprise me that right now it’s not taking off like crazy, especially if so many people are working from home and kids aren’t at school/don’t even really spread it. Initial spread would have been more extensive because of lack of awareness. People weren’t taking precautions because they didn’t know to do so, or didn’t understand the most effective ways to reduce risk, which was really unfortunate for groups of vulnerable people, such as nursing homes and multi-generational homes. If everything was open and no one was aware again, you’d probably start seeing huge super spreader events that could go exponential.
Add: vaccine won’t do much, for reasons I’ve posted elsewhere.
The people it would make the biggest difference for would probably be too high risk to take a vaccine that wasn’t heavily tested overtime, and may not be able to risk such a vaccine at all. They would have to rely on herd immunity. The feeling of psychological security it would offer lower-risk people may have some impact.
Update:
1) Going much slower than expected, but still expect a sudden shift at some point. It’s starting to look like the health risks are less severe than many feared in April and May, but of course it’s not no big deal either.
2) This is going as I expected, more or less, but I’m surprised by how much working from home continues. I also think concerts could come back early than expected, but they’ve all been postponed by a year now anyway, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to go forward then, by any means. They are tied with stadium sports for the worst possible superspreadever events, I think. Sports are generally so much more important to most people that they will almost certainly get started first, but it is a bit tough because many venues host both so how do you do one without the other? Mandating masks and banning cheering may be attempted, but the problem with both events is that people can’t wear masks and drink, and it’s real hard to keep quiet even if you’re trying. Sports crowds are generally much older, so the reverse could happen—young people adjusting to remote sports, and the older ceasing to attend. I don’t know.
3) This is going on as I expected—not a whole lot of discussion of it, though. Starting to change a bit.
4) Going as expected, to the extent much can be expected here.
Getting a lot of resistance on these, so adding more:
1) Higher ed is done. Less from logistics than puncturing the illusion surrounding the ponzi scheme nature of it, as well as the current American dream narrative. Makes people reconsider assumptions, but mostly the money won’t be there or won’t be easily spent. Elite colleges for certain things will return—tech and humanities—most people will stop getting a traditional college degree and turn to other types of programs or focus on ones that don’t require it. Credentialism will lessen in many areas.
2) Not as sure here, but pretty significant economic disruption as people can’t pay bills and default on mortgages and try to save money. It seems like the real estate bubble should crash, but everyone pushes back on this. Obviously, will depend on the location, but office real estate most definitely. I don’t see how this can’t cause a problem with residential either. It makes people think of the future differently. This may be mitigated by government intervention, probably a much bigger and more controlling government, or it could lead to decentralization.
3) As a result of 2), I tend to think permanent (for my lifetime, at least) reduction in American standard of living and also probably life expectancy. We were at the peak of living standards and it was unsustainable, borrowed from the future and past in a way that cannot be repaid or regained, because much of it is actually related to ones perceptions psychologically/narrative, as well as other interlocking manipulations, and the whole thing will unravel now—the whole infinite growth and progress thing is not persuasive enough anymore. Nor is the post-truth/post-politics world. Return to object level. This will mean that people are much less obsessed with lengthening their life without any cost-benefit calculation—Boomers will probably be peak healthcare consumption for some time. Everyone else will see a future where people languish in nursing homes, and have a less rosy expectation, and be more aware of the fact of death. This awareness of the tradeoffs, combined with the impact of COVID-19 (assuming it doesn’t peter out, but I imagine it will have some effect), will shave a few years off the average life span.
4) Massive inter- and intra- generational conflict. Appears to already be starting. Major problems between many Boomers and their kids. Their kids mainly dysfunctional and unable to break free of the assumptions they were raised with fully. Overly obedient for good reason. But ultimately will probably still wrench the wheel away from the leadership class eventually, as they aren’t tolerable at this point. There will definitely be some capable factions out there regardless of the overall issues.
Here’s an example of one thing that made me wary of the paper: https://medium.com/@lessig/lessig-v-nyt-very-good-news-d8b3c57150c4
I disagree with the idea that we’re obviously more moral in a superior sense to people who lived earlier in American history. Perhaps in a “quantitative” sense. We started out in an environment more favorable to certain moral ideas, but we may have gone no further or not even as far as our predecessors in personal moral achievement/advancement. The improved environment was a result of the most recent predecessors’ moral advancement. What we do with it represents how much moral gain we can take credit for.
While there are obvious exceptions, in general, it seems to me like the equivalent of saying “I had an iPhone and they had no electricity—I’m so much more advanced!” The retort is that the end result is definitive—“we don’t own slaves, whether or not we did anything to help get to this point, we’re still more moral because of this.” That’s what I mean by quantitative: we do have better technology. And this does matter—while one of my objections is that we actually wildly misrepresent the degree of acceptance of many of these things historically, often claiming that no one even thought to question the wrongness of things that were always at some level publicly contentious (such as slavery), it certainly does affect your moral sensibility. The average person now is less likely to have developed a tolerance for brutality and oppression than the average person in a slave-holding society. That said, Thomas Jefferson himself wrote about this exact issue—how it morally perverted southern children. So some had sensitivity and awareness, but that didn’t get them very far at all in the morality of their actions. And that brings me to my main point: many of the people who can claim to be more moral, with some justification, would not be if the circumstances had been less favorable. This is true of most people, who tend to go along with things.
But we’re not just “men of our time,” either. Some people truly are more moral than their contemporaries and transcend circumstances—these are usually the same type of person in any era. The abolitionist in the 1800s would be consumed with fighting injustice today, although what types are debatable. Abolitionists overlapped a lot with women’s rights advocates, etc. They don’t need to be taught what’s wrong—they see it. When the average person claims this moral vision, I’m wary. I just don’t believe most men today are superior in judgement, moral or otherwise, to Benjamin Franklin. I most definitely don’t believe so with regard to Lincoln. They had more favorable circumstances that kept them from certain things, but I don’t believe their impulses are fundamentally different.
I just find the whole idea of clear and definite moral progress problematic and ahistorical. I don’t think we want to play this game, and I don’t think morality reverses as wildly as we think. Practices change more than fundamental beliefs. And the average public opinion does not differ as much on many things over time as is often represented. For example, what Mary Wollstonecraft said. I haven’t gotten a chance to look at the context of her statement, but it was a common argument at the time, including by her, that women were deprived of the ability to develop themselves, morally, intellectually, and otherwise, because they weren’t allowed to take on certain responsibilities, make decisions, or have the same learning experiences. And in a society with norms like that one, and particularly in a world in which most women dealt with constant pregnancy or nursing, this would indeed appear fated. An argument like that is not at all objectionable to me, nor would a weaker version that was also common, such that women were generally more emotional and personal by nature, and this tended to interfere with acquiring certain broad virtues to the highest extent. It may be incorrect and reflect a lack of awareness of social norms that shape the situation, but I don’t see it as a sign of particular immorality. I think many people would make an equivalent comment today. It’s not considered very respectable, but it’s not terribly rare to think women might be more emotional or more frequently fail to develop sufficient confidence and independence due to fate seeming against their success. And I don’t think either of these comments are immoral, even if incorrect. Many people would say that is what they had personally observed. People are regularly mistaken in what they think they have observed. The consequences of this are unfortunate, but it doesn’t strike me as inherently indicative of bad character.
Also, I disagree with that characterization of Lincoln’s views. I’ve studied him pretty carefully. In many things, he was a live and let live guy, though alert to concerns of justice. He didn’t have a busybody streak when it came to those things. I don’t think he had strong feelings that other races should be prevented from doing anything. I think it is entirely possible he was in favor of or at least wasn’t bothered by black suffrage personally at any time, and probably not very bothered by interracial marriage (he probably wasn’t in favor of it, because he saw that the family would be ostracized, but I don’t think he was upset by it). But he also knew most white people in the area did care, and so it wasn’t something he spent much time on, because it wasn’t going to happen, and he was generally focused on advocating for things that could be practically achieved. He evaluated most things politically, which at times I think was far from immoral—the situation had to reach a certain point to make certain developments wise to pursue. The key thing was that he moved in the direction of justice whenever it became clear it could be done without drastic backlash or noncompliance.
The quotes that are paraphrased in your post are often taken out of context—he was basically telling voters he wasn’t advocating for black suffrage or interracial marriage, which were unpopular, not that he had some strong personal feeling against it and would never in a million years let it happen. His words are very carefully qualified. I believe he even joked about how he wasn’t advocating for it, but he didn’t see why it was such a big deal if a black woman wanted to marry a white man, saying something like “if she can stand it!” He also joked that he’d personally follow Stephen Douglas around to make sure he didn’t marry a black a woman, since Douglas seemed so worried about what would happen if the laws changed. He seemed to find the whole debate rather annoyingly obsessive—if you are against interracial marriage, it’s not like anyone is going to make you do it! I think he also joked about this when speaking to Kentuckians, saying he had several sister-in-laws in that state, and he had no fear that they were going to run away with black men, that it was an issue just used to inflame people. (And, of course, many people today still might have a hard time adjusting to a child’s decision to marry someone of a different race, and don’t go out of their way to fight for unpopular causes.)
He by no means went out of his way to help black people (few did), but I truly don’t think he had any strong impulse to block their progress. As president, he came around to it as quickly as it was feasible—once black soldiers enlisted in the military, that was proof to him that they were capable of voting. I think he was fundamentally much more decent than most people then or now. He wasn’t a reformer on the leading edge of justice, but few are, and usually reformers only achieve their aims with the help of practical but principled politicians. Both are needed, and one is not necessarily more moral than the other.
I suspect the strategy more to make it obvious the paper is aware of what it is doing, not allowing them to spin it as a misunderstanding after the fact. I think this changes their calculation more than people realize, but it’s impossible to say what the final decision will be.
My prior for malice was also pretty high, and had updated in that direction significantly in the last year or so from monitoring the coverage, and also with recent details. It may not be an “evil villain” highly coordinated malice, but the incentives and dynamics led in the direction of enough general “bad faith” insinuation to be net negative. It didn’t have to be intended as an attack on Scott or the blog, but rather as a morally obligatory denunciation of perceived ideas or associations—the increase of obligatory denunciation in its pieces makes it structurally very difficult for them to cover many topics in a net positive way. Ten, even five, years ago, I would have had totally different priors and been much less suspicious. I feel like people are treating the legacy media like a programmed computer and not like a group of humans in a specific set of circumstances. Of course, we can’t know anything for sure, and people too easily assume malice. And I’m not claiming most people at the NYT are malicious. But I’m surprised at how much people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the NYT at this point, especially in terms of principled consistency. If this were a policy matter, it should have been settled long ago—what could be so complicated?
It’s true that we learned more about the type of lung damage as things went on, but I still feel like that ventilator conversation was really implausible in hindsight. I’m not an expert, but experts seemed suspiciously quiet, and it should have been obvious to many of them that there were major practical concerns. Accounts from other countries seemed to suggest that ventilators were a poor choice for a significant number of COVID-19 patients, but all our resources seemed to go in that direction, rather than the seemingly obvious fact that you have to keep it out of the nursing homes rather than send people to nursing homes to clear beds for ventilator patients.
The average nursing home resident will not survive ventilation. I remember reading an interview with an Italian doctor saying he’d never put his elderly father on one. We knew COVID-19 damaged lungs, and that lung damage complicates ventilation. I caught on relatively early that they were being overhyped only because I stumbled across two online accounts by technicians trained to operate ventilators, which is apparently a pretty delicate task that most healthcare workers aren’t great at, especially in these severe and unpredictable cases. There clearly weren’t enough of them to put vast numbers of people on ventilators, and ventilators are serious equipment, with serious effects and high fatality rates, to be used as a last resort, not the panacea they were portrayed as. It seemed like a distraction from more practical attempts we could have taken to improve the overall situation. The average person can be forgiven for not seeing this, but even just reading about SARs should have been enough to raise more questions in my mind.
Agree that we aren’t wired for scale. Disagree that we haven’t lost the ability to do things. However, eradicate COVID-19 was not something we ever had the ability to do—certainly not in the U.S.--I suspect that places like New Zealand will eventually be forced to open up out of desperation, as no miracle cure with be forthcoming, though I hope I’m wrong on that. But it was certainly a huge gamble for the countries that have sealed their borders and gone for eradication, and I totally disagree with the judgment that it was obviously the right move, though it might turn out to be.
I’m looking forward to the simulacra post, because I do agree that we’ve gotten to the point of denying the existence of the object level and that it is incredibly disturbing and unsustainable. Were this not the case, we would have handled COVID-19 much more sensibly, but we would not have contained it. I’m very confident of this. Humans have never tolerated or been able to plan for the kind of restrictions it would require, and it is likely literally impossible anyway—the economic and social dysfunction will probably render it unsupportable before we got a miracle cure, if that ever happens. (I use the term miracle cure instead of vaccine because I’m thinking of a vaccine that we get within a few years, that we are confident doesn’t have major side effects and is widely effective, that we are able to mass produce and distribute at sufficient numbers to basically eradicate the illness worldwide, that would provide fairly long-lasting immunity, etc.---a truly effective vaccine that we actually are able to somehow give to huge numbers of people, including those hard to find and resistant to being vaccinated. This is a much taller order than “a vaccine.”)
Very delayed response, sorry. I suspect that by the time we have a vaccine ready to go on a mass scale, it won’t make a huge difference. People will return to life before then, for the most part. Not sure if the most vulnerable are able to get vaccines or if that is dangerous—if they can, it will make a difference for them. I don’t think it will eradicate the disease because not everyone will choose to get it (especially as it seems dangerous side effects could be a thing with this vaccine, due to the autoimmune response, and being comfortable about this will take years, and it isn’t clear how dangerous it is for most people), it would be a huge and imperfect effort even if we mandated it, and presumably the disease will change over time, requiring new vaccinations. So I don’t think a vaccine is going to be what changes things here. Obviously, it is still playing out, and the data about risks that comes out regarding both the disease and the vaccine, along with other practical issues, will affect the final outcome.
That sounds like a great post!
Excellent work! Look forward to your next post. COVID-19 was such a good illustration of much of this.
It seems unlikely that it is literally impossible (are any respiratory viruses not able to be transmitted via surfaces?), but everything I’ve seen suggests that we should be *way* more concerned about aerosol/air transmission. Maybe this is the wrong way to look at it, but I guess I figure if someone has left small amounts of the virus on a surface, they’ve also been breathing in that area, and probably left a lot more of it in the air. So if I’m near that surface, I should be more worried about the air by far. Especially since most masks aren’t going to block it completely, and getting it on my hands doesn’t necessarily mean I get it into my body, whereas breathing it in does. I suppose it lingers longer on surfaces, but it seems to be pretty weak pretty fast. And a person spreading the virus doesn’t necessarily get it all over his or her hands or surfaces, since people don’t seem to have a ton of sneezing/runny nose/heavy coughing going on compared to other diseases. So the only time I’d be thinking about surfaces is dealing with a package delivery or touching something outside.
And I’ve long stopped thinking about that. I find it impossible to completely disinfect everything that touches the outside—I lose track of everything that might have touched everything else—so I’ve stopped caring about surface transmission, beyond some basic handwashing. Plus it’s hard to even replace my cleaning supplies in the stores. So far, I’m pretty sure I haven’t had it, but I could have been asymptomatic. And I’ve been regularly going to a popular Dunkin Donuts with a mask but not being very fastidious about washing my cup and donut bag and straw and phone and keys and headphones and jacket every trip. Very early on, it was said surfaces probably weren’t the main vector, so I was always annoyed with the push for gloves over masks.
I realize that this decision has no bearing on whether I could contract it from surface transmission, but it seems impossibly difficult to worry much about it, especially given how many resources seem devoted to cleaning things, especially outside, when we know so much of the problem is airborne. I wonder a lot about A/C use in the coming months and why we don’t have that discussion. And if viral load matters, that would be good to know. I fully expect to get the virus, as I have from the beginning, at some point in my life.
What stands out to me is that this looks low-effort, but stuff like the footnote thing, and some of the rather subtle though simple argumentation, seem fundamentally incompatible with being low-effort. This is what I see as most significant that something is off. And if you try and take the letter at face value or as an effort to be taken at face value, you would expect to see evidence of motivation/effort, since someone has to care enough to bother. That’s also why I doubt the humiliation aspect—if you want to show someone you can enforce absurdity, it’s usually a lot showier with more effort involved, and it would be more clearly absurd. This is more dumb than audacious. It could be incompetence, but the footnote also seems fundamentally incompatible with that. It’s just not a natural kind of shoddy work—more of a generic placeholder.
It’s not particularly brilliant, so I don’t think the letter itself is more than a pretext or experiment, if it’s a false flag thing. It’s not done in the way someone like Pinker would do it if he was trying to sell books or make himself a martyr or be well-guarded against future accusations. I wasn’t sure how sharp Pinker was at first (in a strategically alert sense, not an academic one), or how conflict-averse. After researching this, I’ve concluded he is quite sharp and not afraid of conflict—so it’s too slapped together for it to have been a big move on his part. It would have to be a small component of a larger move.
I think it is a mistake to assume there is much risk if the plan fails, or that it would have to be particularly complicated. A lot of this stuff is normal PR behavior, as ChristianKI says below. There’s a lot of mischief and “inexplicable” stuff that goes on daily on the Internet, and people barely notice many of the crazier things, let alone something like this, which is pretty boring.