Arnold links J. Haidt:
Instead of Tyler implying I should stop bashing Twitter because look at this great translation of a Joseph Brodsky poem, he and other high-status intellectuals should just disdain to go near it. Do your public writing on a blog or substack instead.
Arnold has a link, with a snippet of thought from that thinker, and adds a bit more of his comments. Kind of like Twitter, but more thoughtful, but far far more work.
While Arnold focusses on Twitter, I’m far more concerned with the discrimination against Republicans as college professors.
»Haidt is so confirmation biased and closed about Bloom's 1987 "The Closing of the American Mind" - US colleges secretly (openly?) discriminate against Republicans and have been doing so for many decades. He, like J. Rauch, says good things, but fails to actually follow that advice honesty:
"you have to have viewpoint diversity, you have to have people pushing against each other. And by design, we always used to have that in universities, journalism—the adversarial legal system is set up that way—and when that fails, when you systematically intimidate dissenters, the institution gets structurally stupid. It cannot do smart things. And that's what happened beginning in 2014. " When he wrote "The Coddling of the American Mind" - clearly aware of and thus pointedly ignoring Bloom & college discrimination.
Yes to viewpoint diversity - but colleges have been long against this tho they've become far more strongly against this since 2014. Claiming it started then fits his story better and the many decades of mild but increasing discrimination don't.
He's correct about the increased mob intimidation effectiveness, and especially Yale's willingness to accept mob rule in 2015. And he does want better intellectuals, as do I, without being willing to call out how often the Democrat supporting intellectuals are dishonest. Lots of Republicans are called out as dishonest for lesser lies.
Let's also remember America elected it's First Black President in 2008 - but every single person who opposed any of his policies was called a "racist" by some number of paid intellectuals (academics, journalists).
Mounk mentions that "American elites don't seem to hold beliefs" , which I don't think is true. Instead, they strongly hold false beliefs and obfuscate the truth. Somewhat like Arnold Kling does when he implies that human life does NOT start at conception. Life is not the same as human rights.
A better point for the start of polarization is ... Roe v Wade in 1972. With the dishonesty about Federal Power (unwritten penumbra of privacy vs explicit 10th Amendment) as well as claiming the question is "when does human life begin" rather than "when does the gov't begin protecting human rights that all humans have"?
Many biological processes undergo an S curve of slow expansion, than rapid explosive expansion up to some plateau or peak. The intellectual domination of pro-choice (pro-abortion) on colleges seems to have followed this S curve, along with the questioning of free speech based on being against hate speech. Perhaps pro-abortion domination on colleges had already been achieved by 1987. So in 1994 with Murray's "The Bell Curve" that highlighted racial differences in IQ, the "politically correct" response was to lie and claim Murray was lying. His data was lightly questioned, but he was pilloried for his conclusions about IQ differences in racial averages.
Larry Summers was fired from Harvard in 2006, partly because he truthfully noted that few women were top physicists. The dishonest PC folk claim women and men are "equal" in intelligence, altho SAT & IQ tests don't show this. See MIT's recent winners of the Putnam Exam:
https://news.mit.edu/2022/mit-students-take-first-place-82nd-putnam-mathematical-competition-0311
5 guys in the first 5 spots, the top woman "in the top 15" (clearly not in top 10) - all Asian. No Hispanics, no Blacks, no Whites. Groups and averages in groups are not equal. We as a society need to deal with those truths - but PC lies make it more difficult to be honest about it, and Twitter makes it easier to stop the truth. (Optimal policy seems to be treating each as an individual...)
Haidt's a smart guy and does seem to want better discourse. A key idea in his Twitter / social media critique is to get human ID verification. He emphasizes this even more in his longer Atlantic article - yet in that article he utterly fails to note that many voters want Voter ID. If Haidt supports voter ID, why doesn't he claim so? If he opposes it, why not be honest? (because opposition is clearly hypocritical, but support outrages the Democrat intimidation crowd and he's unwilling to accept flak on this issue at this time?)
Arnold should be thinking about a FIT system which operates more on likes or ratings, with self-refereeing rather than needing a person or an AI (benign philosopher dictator).
So many great links to make me think so many different things.
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Ed West links and thinks about lots of stuff of the world, focused a bit on his UK home base. One of his comment replies:
The class differences in marriage are very noticeable here, if you look at a class of kids almost all the middle class ones will have married parents and the workknh class ones won’t.
Christopher Caldwell reflected on how French politics is class war.
The class war is getting worse in the world. [check out the quoting quote]
But record numbers of men also do absolutely nothing, and this is hugely concentrated in the lower social classes. As Rob Henderson writes on his Substack:
Today, one in six American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether: about 10 million men. This number has more than doubled since the 1970s.
Over the past half-century, the number of men per capita behind bars has more than quadrupled.
Among white American males in the bottom 30 percent of socioeconomic status, the number of prison inmates per capita has quintupled since 1975. For those in the top 20 percent of socioeconomic status, the rate has remained virtually unchanged.
Henderson, who came from a working-class background before attending Yale, blames the lack of social norms being enforced from above. He writes that
If you come from poverty and chaos, you are up against 3 enemies:
1. Dysfunction and deprivation
2. Yourself, as a result of what that environment does to you
3. The upper class, who wants to keep you mired in it
Jacob Siegel also paints a brilliant picture of Curtis Yarvin in a profile for The Tablet.
It’s a great source of interest to me that so many intellectuals — people who read a great deal and think deeply — are so often terrible human beings. So the Jacob Taubes story sounds fascinating.
Richard Hanania writes some very interesting pieces on Substack, and this month he interviewed Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego, on one of his favourite themes: progressive dogma being built into US law.
Gail often comments on my daily Instapundit.
All of these links could also be tweet links, with (too-) quick, (too-) brief comments.
Having more good content on Substack might help, but the reality is there’s too much good stuff, not enough trusty editor - choosers, and the AI algos push easy extremism rather than thoughtful contrary possibilities.
I’m recording my thoughts, more than choosing what to recommend that others read.