Ours is an era of rising ideological fervor, moving toward something like the Chinese cultural revolution, with elements of both religious revival and witch hunt repression. While good things may come of this, we risk exaggeration races, wherein people try to outdo themselves to show loyalty via ever more extreme and implausible claims, policies, and witch indicators.
I think one thing that is really needed is smart generalists who are willing to communicate at the lowest intellectual level *without* engaging in exaggeration races. Don't use specialized language, use language that everyone can understand. Don't try to impress other intellectuals, or the public. Just try to communicate information in language that normal people can grasp. Communicating complex concepts in simple language is difficult, but extremely valuable to society.
"moving toward something like the Chinese cultural revolution"
I do think we are in the midst of a moral panic, wokeism especially has denounciation spirals but I sense it is receding, as evidenced by John McWhorter anti wokism selling well, the uncancelling of Luis c.k, Dave Chappelle not being canceled at all.
We are quite far from all the negative aspects of the Chinese revolution.
Exaggeration races occur because thought-leaders are afraid of losing their position in the Insider Circle due to excessive competition. This is mostly because the internet made discourse much more competitive & open (not an unalloyed good).
Anything that increases friction in communication / competition, or reduces transparency / virality, or reduces the ultimate rewards to the Big Winner, will reduce current exaggeration races. Otherwise, we'll keep cranking up the exaggeration race until intellectuals reform a new Insider Circle using obscure politeness "codes" / jargon / credentials / backgrounds that's sufficiently resilient to entry from the internet riff-raff.
This formation of Insider Codes happens all the time, as you like to note. It's particularly awful now because the competition is so excessive that the strongest candidates have resorted to Insider Codes based on being Anti-Utility (e.g. Emperor wearing no clothes). From a signaling perspective, the most robust Insider Codes are the ones the make least sense or most self harming, because the Fitness Cost is the highest to adopting it; so only the most elite can afford them.
If the level of competition is reduced, then we'll go back to the old dynamic where the Insider Code is a bit arbitrary but not entirely Anti-Utility. Where Ivory Tower just means slightly out of touch / eccentric. Where the weirdest / most facially illogical conspiracy theory doesn't always win on the internet.
Trying to dampen this through Public Intellectuals or Polymaths as buffers won't work because those who want to Stand-Out will just harder at being extreme & weird as long as the excessive competition landscape exists.
The fact that it isn't nearly that bad, yet, doesn't justify lack of concern about the similarities (in kind if not intensity) between the current era and the Cultural Revolution.
Or mean we shouldn't fear continued movement in that direction.
I'm not sure generalists make the problem better. They may well make the problem worse.
Specialists tend to operate in relatively rarefied atmosphere and their reasons for accepting or rejecting particular views tend to respond to narrow issues in the specialty which may be less correlated with broader ideological viewpoints. OTOH, generalists are more likely to see the issue in a particular field through a more general ideological lens and risk increasing the correlation between people's views on various subjects.
For instance, whenever generalists wade into debates about the effect of gender on mathematical achievement, the role of blacks in colonial america or even AI one unsurprisingly finds their ideological views often drive their focus and concerns. True, the specialists are also influenced but the nice thing about specialists is their sense of what views are associated with a particular ideological view is often dependent on details of the subject's development (e.g. famously views X, Y and Z were used in bad way W) that differ from the ideological affiliations a generalist would apply.
To be clear a sufficiently clear eyed and brave generalist is surely a benefit but, speaking generally, I'm unsure which increases the kinds of risks you mention more.
It seems to me philosophers can be more independently minded in part because their heritage. Few other disciplines provide models of critical, heroic truth-seeking for students to imitate. However, most (all?) successful religions provide models and gurus for students to imitate. You yourself probably have more value as a model gadfly for others to imitate than anything else.
But I take your point. We could keep this and drop the bad stuff.
“Ours is an era...moving toward something like the Chinese cultural revolution...we risk exaggeration races..."Was this deliberate comedy? I hope so, but Chinese history is horribly abused all the time, so I can't take it for granted.Contemporary America is not very much like CR China. Here is what the CR was like:All the universities closed.Rival political gangs conducted pitched battles.Young people were transported en masse to remote locations and dumped there for years.Senior politicians had their rivals tortured and executed.The media was completely politically controlled.The country was only a few years away from literal starvation.If Hanson is genuinely confused enough to think that the USA is like this, then... time to move on. Perhaps it was just a carelessly-worded exaggeration, though. Or maybe a real joke! If so, well done, that was quite funny.
I read the blog post with utmost interest. It is very you to be reading an obscure blog like this. In character for you. ...... The post had me at its opening paragraph. I really like the reference to the Chinese cultural revolution. It is bold to suggest what is happening in the US right now is that. Trump is still claiming the election was stolen from him, and a ton of people buy into that claim. ........... Was there any particular reason you shared this blog post with me?
Facebook scrolling is not a tidy affair. I think all that you share on Facebook might be better also served in a blog. So people who come across one comment might have the option to dive in if they feel like it. But perhaps also a TikTok or YouTube. To penetrate the audience in Nepal.
I do often embed your Facebook posts into my blog posts.
I don’t think ‘worshipful’ is a fair characterization of most philosophers who work on particular historical philosophers like Aristotle or Kant or Wittgenstein or some other old guy. Sure, they are unusually familiar with the old guy’s works and context, and can come up with charitable readings of large parts of their work, but just as often they are more knowledgeable of criticisms of the old guy and usually clearly think that the old guy was just wrong on some counts. More often than not, they use the old guy’s ideas as a jumping off point to explore some system of ideas.
Eg, you spoke with Agnes Callard, and she’s an ancient philosopher, and she doesn’t strike me as worshipful in following Plato or Aristotle. And her academic style isn’t really unusual (her public style is unusual, but that’s not the question here).
In the case of the philosophers, I wonder if the focus on history helps keep them somewhat ideologically independent from contemporary trends. Philosophers tend to be unusually aware of the fact that almost all arguments trotted out in current discourse are variations of much older arguments, and hence able to draw from a larger source of objections, counter-examples, and dialectical moves. And indeed some criticize the current fashion of analytic philosophy (which emphasizes formal work, and models itself somewhat on mathematics) as being too ahistorical and hence falling into traps that could’ve been avoided if we were more sensitive to intellectual history.
There is a field other than philosophy that lends itself to being generalist: Library Science. It doesn't tend to have the prestige or status of philosophy, but by its nature it touches on all other fields of knowledge.
I think one thing that is really needed is smart generalists who are willing to communicate at the lowest intellectual level *without* engaging in exaggeration races. Don't use specialized language, use language that everyone can understand. Don't try to impress other intellectuals, or the public. Just try to communicate information in language that normal people can grasp. Communicating complex concepts in simple language is difficult, but extremely valuable to society.
"moving toward something like the Chinese cultural revolution"
I do think we are in the midst of a moral panic, wokeism especially has denounciation spirals but I sense it is receding, as evidenced by John McWhorter anti wokism selling well, the uncancelling of Luis c.k, Dave Chappelle not being canceled at all.
We are quite far from all the negative aspects of the Chinese revolution.
What topic did Tyler Cowen initially request?
Exaggeration races occur because thought-leaders are afraid of losing their position in the Insider Circle due to excessive competition. This is mostly because the internet made discourse much more competitive & open (not an unalloyed good).
Anything that increases friction in communication / competition, or reduces transparency / virality, or reduces the ultimate rewards to the Big Winner, will reduce current exaggeration races. Otherwise, we'll keep cranking up the exaggeration race until intellectuals reform a new Insider Circle using obscure politeness "codes" / jargon / credentials / backgrounds that's sufficiently resilient to entry from the internet riff-raff.
This formation of Insider Codes happens all the time, as you like to note. It's particularly awful now because the competition is so excessive that the strongest candidates have resorted to Insider Codes based on being Anti-Utility (e.g. Emperor wearing no clothes). From a signaling perspective, the most robust Insider Codes are the ones the make least sense or most self harming, because the Fitness Cost is the highest to adopting it; so only the most elite can afford them.
If the level of competition is reduced, then we'll go back to the old dynamic where the Insider Code is a bit arbitrary but not entirely Anti-Utility. Where Ivory Tower just means slightly out of touch / eccentric. Where the weirdest / most facially illogical conspiracy theory doesn't always win on the internet.
Trying to dampen this through Public Intellectuals or Polymaths as buffers won't work because those who want to Stand-Out will just harder at being extreme & weird as long as the excessive competition landscape exists.
He did say "moving toward something like".
The fact that it isn't nearly that bad, yet, doesn't justify lack of concern about the similarities (in kind if not intensity) between the current era and the Cultural Revolution.
Or mean we shouldn't fear continued movement in that direction.
I don't find anything funny about it at all.
I'm not sure generalists make the problem better. They may well make the problem worse.
Specialists tend to operate in relatively rarefied atmosphere and their reasons for accepting or rejecting particular views tend to respond to narrow issues in the specialty which may be less correlated with broader ideological viewpoints. OTOH, generalists are more likely to see the issue in a particular field through a more general ideological lens and risk increasing the correlation between people's views on various subjects.
For instance, whenever generalists wade into debates about the effect of gender on mathematical achievement, the role of blacks in colonial america or even AI one unsurprisingly finds their ideological views often drive their focus and concerns. True, the specialists are also influenced but the nice thing about specialists is their sense of what views are associated with a particular ideological view is often dependent on details of the subject's development (e.g. famously views X, Y and Z were used in bad way W) that differ from the ideological affiliations a generalist would apply.
To be clear a sufficiently clear eyed and brave generalist is surely a benefit but, speaking generally, I'm unsure which increases the kinds of risks you mention more.
It seems to me philosophers can be more independently minded in part because their heritage. Few other disciplines provide models of critical, heroic truth-seeking for students to imitate. However, most (all?) successful religions provide models and gurus for students to imitate. You yourself probably have more value as a model gadfly for others to imitate than anything else.
But I take your point. We could keep this and drop the bad stuff.
“Ours is an era...moving toward something like the Chinese cultural revolution...we risk exaggeration races..."Was this deliberate comedy? I hope so, but Chinese history is horribly abused all the time, so I can't take it for granted.Contemporary America is not very much like CR China. Here is what the CR was like:All the universities closed.Rival political gangs conducted pitched battles.Young people were transported en masse to remote locations and dumped there for years.Senior politicians had their rivals tortured and executed.The media was completely politically controlled.The country was only a few years away from literal starvation.If Hanson is genuinely confused enough to think that the USA is like this, then... time to move on. Perhaps it was just a carelessly-worded exaggeration, though. Or maybe a real joke! If so, well done, that was quite funny.
Sent to the person who sent me this blog post:
I read the blog post with utmost interest. It is very you to be reading an obscure blog like this. In character for you. ...... The post had me at its opening paragraph. I really like the reference to the Chinese cultural revolution. It is bold to suggest what is happening in the US right now is that. Trump is still claiming the election was stolen from him, and a ton of people buy into that claim. ........... Was there any particular reason you shared this blog post with me?
Facebook scrolling is not a tidy affair. I think all that you share on Facebook might be better also served in a blog. So people who come across one comment might have the option to dive in if they feel like it. But perhaps also a TikTok or YouTube. To penetrate the audience in Nepal.
I do often embed your Facebook posts into my blog posts.
I meant more just out of curiosity. And some examples of each category of real people would be nice for clarity.
I don’t think ‘worshipful’ is a fair characterization of most philosophers who work on particular historical philosophers like Aristotle or Kant or Wittgenstein or some other old guy. Sure, they are unusually familiar with the old guy’s works and context, and can come up with charitable readings of large parts of their work, but just as often they are more knowledgeable of criticisms of the old guy and usually clearly think that the old guy was just wrong on some counts. More often than not, they use the old guy’s ideas as a jumping off point to explore some system of ideas.
Eg, you spoke with Agnes Callard, and she’s an ancient philosopher, and she doesn’t strike me as worshipful in following Plato or Aristotle. And her academic style isn’t really unusual (her public style is unusual, but that’s not the question here).
Sure, stay aware of history. That's different from worshiping particular ancient philosophers.
The obvious question for me is "what is the topic Tyler requested"?
In the case of the philosophers, I wonder if the focus on history helps keep them somewhat ideologically independent from contemporary trends. Philosophers tend to be unusually aware of the fact that almost all arguments trotted out in current discourse are variations of much older arguments, and hence able to draw from a larger source of objections, counter-examples, and dialectical moves. And indeed some criticize the current fashion of analytic philosophy (which emphasizes formal work, and models itself somewhat on mathematics) as being too ahistorical and hence falling into traps that could’ve been avoided if we were more sensitive to intellectual history.
There is a field other than philosophy that lends itself to being generalist: Library Science. It doesn't tend to have the prestige or status of philosophy, but by its nature it touches on all other fields of knowledge.
Robin seems like all three to me, mostly polymath, then public intellectual, and philosopher last.