Indefensible Expectations

Bates and Tilley give these complicated stories about why the Dutch and Swiss didn’t develop big, powerful military states in the 17th & 18th centuries, while France and Britain did. But… like… the population of the Dutch Republic in 1795 was 1.9 Million. The swiss were about the same time. In contrast, the Isle of Britain had, at that time, a population of 10.7 Million. Ireland had another 4 million inhabitants. France had a population of 28.1 million.

… Why do you need a more complicated story than that?

How were the Dutch and Swiss possibly going to compete as world powers? Why bother to build a big centralized state that can wage world war? The Dutch gave it a good shot through ~1680, but obviously that was going to end.

There is incredibly strong data that immigration in Europe is economically beneficial and evidence from other developed countries suggests it can be politically sustainable.

But not all immigration. Not the type of immigration that is politically controversial.

The immigration that helps a host-country is selective migration and migration from rich countries. The politically controversial kind is humanitarian entry (asylum, refugees, and economic migrants from Africa and the Middle East).

Asylum (and other unskilled immigration) has high costs for the government, and these costs continue on to the later generations: the children of unskilled immigrants are generally low-skilled themselves; they draw disproportionately from the fisc and contribute disproportionately little.

In contrast, immigrants selected for labor and education (and immigrants from developed countries) contribute disproportionately much and draw disproportionately little. So do their children!

There is a reason that there are no political crises in Europe over immigration from different parts of the EU.

I am amazed at the sheer number of New York Times articles that fail to track this distinction.

I am refraining from Twitter, so I will be posting here again.

“Let me tell you about a New York Times opinion peice that angered me.” A call that has often portended good things.

The particular article is by Lydia Polgren. It is basically normie lib stuff. I am not a right-winger, but I really do find this line of reasoning repulsive.

The short version is this:

What leaders and policymakers in the rich world don’t seem to grasp is that the roster of countries that will need more people is growing fast, as birthrates plummet much faster than anyone expected in countries that have long been a source of migrants. Our politics revolve around the idea that scarce resources mean keeping people out. We are utterly unprepared for a world in which perhaps the scarcest resource will be people.

“In this hyperpolarized environment and debate, many people have missed the big picture,” said Marco Tabellini, an economist who studies migration and political change at Harvard University. “Countries in the global north will have to really compete for migrants.”

If you think that sounds preposterous, it is worth considering that this competition is already happening and has been for some time. After the toppling of the cruel Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, governments across Europe wasted no time announcing that they would pause asylum applications from Syrians, clearly eager to see the back of the Syrians who fled the country’s gruesome civil war. But in Germany, health officials fretted that amid a broad shortage of medical workers, losing thousands of Syrian doctors would be a heavy blow to the country’s already overmatched health system.

Now, this argument is specious for a couple of reasons.

Migrants are not Undifferentiated

The first is that such Responsible Liberal Chiding of the atavistic conservatives is utterly unsupported by the reality on fiscal impacts of immigration.

Asylum-claimants are uniformly a fiscal-negative for any country anywhere that accepts them, as are their descendants.

Now, that may surprise you, because many papers find that migrants have a positive effect on the fisc. But you have to differentiate by migrant type. The migrants who contribute are typically other Europeans moving from one European city/country to another (or immigrants from outside Europe selected for their professional skills).

The Asylum claimants whom Polgren chastises Conservatives for excluding are not a solution at all. Each asylum claimant costs a European government roughly 400,000 euros over their lifetime. Polgren tut-tutting Conservatives reveals that she has no idea what she is talking about.

You see a similar pattern in other migration-destinations. In the United States, educated immigrants are a benefit to the fisc, while uneducated immigrants (which includes the vast majority of asylum claimants) are a drain.

So, Polgren is tut-tutting conservatives because they won’t adopt her preferred policy, which is one that would make the problem worse.

But immigration is actually even less of a solution than the data would suggest.

The net-positive effect of migration is largely an accounting trick. The EU (and the rest of the EEA) is a community with a common labor market. When people move, they mostly move as adults. Generally, people have a positive fiscal impact as adults, because children can’t work. So, migration internal to the EU has a positive fiscal impact on the migrants’ host countries simply because migrants aren’t children. But this isn’t positively impacting Europe. It just shifts the positive-impact of adult Europeans from one country to another.¹ It’s doing nothing to answer the fertility crisis, which is a Pan-European phenomenon.

Unselected Non-Western migrants have such poor labor-market performance that they are a net drain even when they come as adults. Their children do little better. Pakistani and Bangladeshi Britons remain the poorest and most state-supported group in Britain, roughly 70 years after most of their ancestors migrated to the United Kingdom to work in textile mills. At the same time, British Indians are the most economically successful group in the UK. Now, I doubt that British people had strong underlying biases that caused Pakistanis to need state-support while Indians excelled. The difference is that British-Indian immigrants mostly arrived under Britain’s post-Blair migration system, which heavily selects on education. Selection matters, and the benefits of selection last several generations.

So, without heavy selection, migration is no answer to the fertility problem at all. And, the answer that migration appears to provide is just that Germany and the Netherlands are winning adult-taxpayers at Hungary and Slovakia’s loss.

So you really do need children. Now, native children also have a small net-negative impact, but they also raise GDP in the long-run. Do some quick math and you find out that native children help achieve sustainable debt-to-GDP ratio at current levels of taxes and spending.² They are the thing that you need (alongside skilled migrants).

In sum, Polgren is utterly wrong to think there is a competition for people. There isn’t. There’s a competition for high-value people. Getting low value people does nothing to help that. It makes the problem worse. There is a radical difference between the fiscal value of European children and non-European children³ (except when non-Europeans are selected for labor-productivity), and this difference survives several generations. So, the competition for people is a competition only for certain people. But that competition is mostly just a competition between different developed countries, because that is where most high-value people come from (especially since fertility rates are collapsing in the developing world.) So migration is a minimal solution at best.

Family Policy

This gets us to the other problem with the article, a pretense that family policy has been tried and failed.

No country has made any serious effort to raise its fertility, including Hungary. Hungary is under political constraints that make it impossible for them to make any meaningful policy moves.

I want to note that what is called “family policy” is really the removal of a long-standing inequality in Western-governance over how to support dependents. Overall, there are three large groups of people who are unable to support themselves: the elderly, the disabled, and children. Federal expenditures to support children are roughly 2% of US GDP. Expenditures on the elderly⁴ are 10% of GDP. On a Per capita basis, the US federal government spends seven times as much on each elderly person as it spends on each child. Essentially, the United States, alongside most countries, foists the cost of raising children on their parents, although the state cares for all other large groups of people who are unable to work.

Now, there are non-federala government expenses on children: schools! But these aren’t payments to support children. These are investments in children’s human capital made so those children will be more productive later.

So, if you’re serious about family policy, the sort of scale you should be talking about is massive. You should think about spending 10% of GDP. Orban’s family policies, the most aggressive in Europe, are less than half of that.

You might also want to try more creative solutions than tax-and-spend. I think you could really raise fertility by having many professions be unavailable for anyone who is unmarried and 30+ (or, have professionals pay punitive taxes until they get married). Alternatively, you could have a lot of housing-stock in expensive cities that’s reserved for families with children. One benefit of either policy is that educated, successful, ambitious people would all get married, which would change our general cultural views around childrearing. Culture is highly determinative of fertility rates. You could get even more creative with these ideas. The key thing is that you have to think big. Getting more children will be very expensive, because raising children is very expensive!

Orban can’t do any of this.

Hungary is within the EU. So, they can leave. He needs young Hungarians to stay in the country because they pay all the taxes. So, he has to attract young Hungarians. Thus, he can’t impose the costs of childrearing on unmarried Hungarians. Young Hungarians will leave if he imposes big taxes on them or limits their professional opportunities.

So, if he really wants successful family policies, he needs the costs to fall on old people (whom you don’t really need in the country).

But old people vote. And they have no reason to vote for family-policy. Old people will not see the benefits from raising fertility. By the time the policies bear fruit, those old people will be dead. Failing to invest in children is, in part, the classic problem in democracies that the electorate cares insufficiently about the future.

But, even if old Hungarians were more responsible about the future, the European common-market creates a collective-action problem. Europeans want someone to pay the costs of raising European children. But whoever makes the investment in children will not necessarily get the benefit. So, even if a country taxes its old people to responsibly invest in children, it might never get anything out of it. Young Hungarians are moving to the west. So, if they responsibly invest in children, Germany eats up the benefit.

So, Orban is caught in a double-bind. He can’t impose the costs of family-policy on young people, because he needs them to stay in the country. He can’t impose the costs on old people, because they are his electorate.

Thus, if Europe is serious about surviving the next century without becoming an overtaxed retirement home, there has to be a Europe-wide solution to their Europe-wide problem. Personally, I doubt that will happen. These governments are utterly dysfunctional and sclerotic. Maybe they’ll get more serious. I don’t know.

1. Granted, there are some marginal fiscal gains to allowing migration within Europe because people can specialize, etc. ↩︎
2. Dutch GDP/lifetime is about $5 million, while average natives cost $40k on net, over their lives. A consistent deficit of 1% of GDP is fine, given inflation & reasonable growth in real GDP. ↩︎
3. Obviously, when I say “European” I don’t mean “European.” I mean: European, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Singaporean, American, Canadian, Australian, etc.: anywhere that has high labor-productivity. ↩︎
4. These are largely Social Security and Medicare. ↩︎

• “Oversocialized” or “Oversocialization” is a concept that regularly comes up in right-leaning internet spaces, to refer to people who are so emotionally invested in being liked and prestigious that they cannot live a satisfying life. Today I discovered that it was invented by Ted Kaczynski.
• A bit ago on Twitter, I made a joke that supporting a Jewish State in Israel is obviously not the true right-wing position, which is that Deus Vult. That turned out to be surprisingly prescient.

I recently found out that California now has mandated ethnic studies for any student to graduate from high school.

I find this a striking fact amid concerns that Trump will politicize the education system.

Having taken a look at the model curriculum, it’s not as bad/dishonest as you might think.

Now, there is a bizarre inclusion of Egyptian philosophy and Religion under some “African civilization,” attributing Egyptians like Imhotep to this “African” civilization and Egyptian concepts like Maat and Kemet to this “African” tradition. This is then framed as part of the ethnic background of African Americans.

Obviously, that’s idiotic. There is no cultural connection whatsoever between Egyptian civilization and the West African peoples from whom African Americans are descended. Ideally, California would instead have a curriculum that drew on genetic and material evidence to talk about the Bantu expansion and perhaps discussed the other peoples of Southern Africa (Pygmies, the Khoe-khoe and the San, Chadics, Nilotics, Kushitics, and others). It would be cool if they discussed interesting, unique peoples like the Dogon and the Lemba. But that’s probably too much to ask for.

Still, the curriculum could be worse. Sure, there is little desire to engage with reality, and the general ethno-nationalist attitude of of the whole thing is objectionable. But the discussion of racial inequality is mostly grounded in fact and accurate ancient history isn’t the most important thing in the world. The curriculum seems to mostly be pretty positive, highlighting the accomplishments of individual groups, rather than encouraging race-hatred against Whites.

One curious feature of the curriculum is that students are encouraged to engage in economically leftist chants, rather than just ethno-nationalism. In particular, students are encouraged to chant their faith in the seven principles of Kwanzaa, which include Ujima:

“COLLECTIVE WORK AND RESPONSIBILITY To build and maintain our community, together your worries mine. My worries yours, whatever!,”

And Ujamaa:

“COOPERATIVE ECONOMICS, “THAT MONEY MAN!” To build and maintain our own stores, our own shops, our own businesses, getting props. Sharing profits, feeling fine, I’ll buy your goods, you buy mine (Believing people come before profits do. Power to the people, to the me … To the you.”

I am amazed that California liberals feel that it is appropriate to be indoctrinating children with the idea of “collective responsibility” for each others’ economic fortunes, and an idea that we should have a nationalist-socialist attitude toward the economy, wherein we should share profits wtihin the community (which appears to be an ethnic one) and should restrict our economic activity to within the community.

I am not sure that California’s education professionals even realize that this is a contestible proposition, let alone a controversial one.

I think that would be clearer to them if they were asked to imagine Whites, Christians, or Baptists as the community chanting.

Another remarkable feature of the curriculum is that, despite extensive discussion of immigration push- and pull-factors, as a framing of Latino and Chicano culture, there is no mention of Cuba or Venezuela at any point.

There is also extensive discussion of the model-minority “myth,” which makes the standard objections to the trope (that Pacific Islanders and the Hmong are looped in with more successful groups like Chinese-, Japanese-, Vietnamese-, Indian- and Korean-Americans; that Asian-Americans were oppressed and discriminated against, etc.). There is, of course, no engagement with the question of why some groups appear to be a model-minority (except for a bizarre argument that their success results from “teacher support“): why the discrimination against Northeast Asian-Americans failed to deter their economic and education success (as it failed to harm other hated minorities like Jews or Mormons). To consider such questions would, of course, reveal that the ethnic-studies curriculum cannot actually provide much insight on the real dynamics that drive ethnic-stratification.

But I digress.

In my mind, the worst part of this curriculum is just that it is a waste of time. It really could be worse than it is.

But it is incredible that Liberals think Conservatives are the party trying to politicize the K-12 curriculum.

Interesting that even though AI has faded slightly from the national conversation over the last year, investors have decided that very important things are happening.

[Edit: HAHAHAHAHAHA Ezra’s Post-Mortem is basically this same take]

I am going to tell you a parable.

Consider this my election post-mortem. I hope it shapes your political decisions.

Now, I will not try to give a broad range of advice. Josh Barro and Matt Yglesias basically have all the right takes about why the positions of the Democratic party were unwise, and Ruy Texeira could have told you all the proximate causes of these poor choices.

So, in the grand tradition of schizo-anon poasters the world ocer, I will offer something more esoteric and abstract.

The Parable of the Wealthy Sheikh

Imagine that you are a wealthy sheikh looking to invest his treasures, and you have two eunuch advisors.

The first eunuch was, at one time, a genius. He is worldly enough to be right about every question you could ever ask. And, he’s scrupulously honest. But unfortunately he’s also brain damaged. He has a copper rod lodged in his brain, so he’s wrong exactly 40% of the time, completely at random. Whether he tells the truth turns entirely on where the copper rod happens to have rolled inside his skull, sort of like a coin-flip.

The second is also a genius, but a wily one. You know he’s capable of being right every time. And, you have a deal that you can execute him if he lies more than 20% of the time. But, within that 20% limit, he has his own desires and his own interests. He can see how you act in response to what he tells you, and he might lie selectively. You might only find out years later whether he was initially telling the truth.

You yourself have a sizeable fortune. Just enough that you can use 10% of the investment advice that you get from your advisor.

So, which one should you trust?

If you’re a cautious man, then you should trust the brain-damaged Eunuch. You should trust him even though he is generally less reliable.

With his advice, you can’t know whether any given bet is a good idea, but you do know what will happen in the aggregate: 60% of your bets will pan-out. So long as you don’t put too much into any one bet, you can be absolutely confident in a reasonable return.*

Don’t trust the wily eunuch: it’s too risky. His advice brings Knightian uncertainty: an unquantifiable** risk that every single one of your bets will fail. The fact is, you have no idea whether there’s a pattern to where the wily Eunuch lies. Maybe he tells the truth exactly when you’re not making bets, and he lies exactly when you are. Since you only make decisions on some of his advice, he can mislead you systematically. May he’s winning from every bet you make while you’re losing from it. Maybe he’s just capricious, and happens to lie about onion futures, which you happen to enjoy betting on.

The fact that he’s right 80% of the time is nearly irrelevant – if he’s discerned what kind of advice will induce you to bet, he can lie only when it counts. So long as he can predict what you’ll do, the 80% number doesn’t matter: he has more than enough room to lie when he needs to. Functaionally, the only thing driving him is what he wants – and you have no idea what that is; you can’t model him.

Let me generalize: whenever you have an advisor you can’t model, there is an unquantifiable risk that all of your bets will go wrong. It barely matters how reliable the advisor is. For investing, the key thing is modelability.

Let me give another example. Suppose your brain-damaged Eunuch had a slightly different injury. Suppose, instead of his injury making him randomly wrong 40% of the time, it instead leaves him in one of three states:

• Seven percent of the time, the copper rod rolls one way, and he tells the truth.
  
• Three percent of the time, it rolls another way, and he tells a falsehood.
  
• Ninety percent of the time, the rod rolls, and he speaks completely at random: half true, half false. However, in this 90% of cases, he also talks in a fucked-up strokey voice like a deaf person. He doesn’t notice this, and you try not to mention it because he would feel bad.

In aggregate, he’s even less reliable than the other two eunuchs. He’s only right 52% of the time! But he’s a great financial advisor. You know to ignore him when he talks in his fucked-up strokey voice, and make all of your bets based on the 10% of advice he gives in normal-talk. Then, your investments pan-out 70% of the time.

My point is that to trust someone, you have to understand them. You don’t want an advisor who’s capable of misleading you. You don’t want to take the global risk that the wily advisor isn’t your friend. You want to take small, quantifiable risks that balance each other out. So, when you’re making investments, you go with the massively brain-damaged advisor, even though he’s the least reliable overall.

Now, if you wanted to optimize for believing true statements, you would act differently, and follow the wily advisor. But that is not what you are doing. You have personal goals. You go with the advisor who will help you advance them. And that’s the advisor who’s severely brain-damaged.

Let us call the wily advisor “The New York Times.” Let us call the brain-damaged advisor “Joe Rogan.”

The Danger of Unquantifiable Risk

There is a type of person who is perfectly rational to trust Joe Rogan over the New York Times, even though they know that the New York Times is very reliable and Joe Rogan is an idiot. In fact, they should trust Joe Rogan specifically because he is an idiot.

Media are essentially the same as a financial advisor. People use media to make all manner of important decisions, including what jobs to take, whom to marry, whether to have children, when to have children, whether to move, where to move, whether to commit crimes, and, perhaps most importantly, whom to vote for. Truth is instrumental to personal goals.

And so, when people they have to choose whom to trust, they should choose the unreliable source that’s easy to understand or aligned with their goals. They should ignore the reliable source that might be aligned against them.

That is, they should trust weird cranks like Joe Rogan.

I suspect that the pressure to trust cranks has a nontrivial influence on American politics. There is a society-wide crisis of trust affecting every major American Institution, particularly concentrated among youth and conservatives, pushing the young and conservative to get their news from social media, even though everyone knows it’s less likely to be correct.

If the argument above holds, then they have good reasons to do that. While they are getting less accurate information, they are getting more actionable information. Crackpots are easy enough to understand. Complex institutions with secretive values are not. So, complex institutions can mislead you, and crackpots will just be wrong at random.

I don’t know exactly how much that rational argument matters. People are often just silly. But we certainly shouldn’t just ignore that turning away from respectable institutions and toward crackpots would be a perfectly rational thing for many people to do. Many people are doing it.

In a real sense, you are being more cautious by trusting cranks and crackpots. Their errors are basically random, so they won’t cause all of your bets to go wrong. A few, here and there, will go awry. If you trust someone who could be manipulating you, you could make a system-wide error.

And the thing is that the New York Times and its sister-institutions are trying to manipulate you constantly. Mostly, this is benign. Consider that respectable media doesn’t want to give you the impression that minorities commit a lot of crime. So, they hide information from you when minorities are culpable. When a murderer is White, they tend to mention that, and put it at the top of the article. When a murderer is Black, they’re less likely to mention it, and it typically comes at the end. This is particularly striking because we usually think race is a more salient part of the identity of Black Americans than of White Americans. Black Americans are a distinctive minority with a unique history of oppression. So could it possibly be happenstance that the media leaves out when criminals happen to be Black?

Imagine if it were common to report on suicides of non-veterans by mentioning that they never served in the military, but the military history of veterans typically went unmentioned. That would be odd.

Putting aside the stats, there are piles of classic exemplars of manipulative writing. Here is a favorite of mine. Several respectable newspapers have even stopped providing information (such as mugshots) specifically because that information “may have reinforced negative stereotypes“). Relatedly, the Swedish government entirely stopped publishing certain statistics because they would have uncomfortable implications on race or ethnicity.

The inescapable conclusion is that respectable media will hide the facts when adverse to preferred narratives (Universities are basically the same. Josh Barro’s piece on this is so good, and so funny, that I have nothing to add. You should read it!).

Now, in the cases above, the media’s manipulation of news is basically fine. They want you not to think Black people are all criminals. Cool, nice, good.

But not all manipulation is so innocent. In particular, it was really quite objectionable when respectable media falsely tried to convince you that Donald Trump said that white nationalists were very fine people.***

Separarely, the New York Times, for several years, had a top-down policy of always covering tech with a negative lense. Whom was that serving?

60 minutes simply substituted Kamala’s answer to an interview question with her answer to another, hiding the fact that she was a garbled and incoherent interviewee.

Granted, you might think it’s inappropriate to call this behavior “manipulation.” Perhaps Times writers aren’t trying to shape your behavior, they just feel personally uncomfortable reporting on a murderer who’s Black. Perhaps they thought an anti-tech narrative is what subscribers wanted, and they were catering to the market. Perhaps they were so anxious about Trump that they literally could not understand the words that he had said. Perhaps they just wanted to help Kamala get her point across. These psychological explanations are sometimes true. In particular, it looks like the culprit behind misleading speech on youth gender-medicine really is journalist-psychology, not any active desire to mislead.

But is individual-psychology always the explanation? Is it unreasonable to see the Times as an institution which exists to build credibility and get smart, skeptical people to vote Blue? What staff at the Times wouldn’t want that? If they did, who would stop them?

Furthermore, from the point of view of the audience, the existence of literal manipulation doesn’t matter. Recall the wily advisor. The Knightian uncertainty isn’t caused by manipulation. It’s caused by unmodelability.

Let me tell you a story.

I know someone who went to hang out with the Azov Battalion in about 2017, during the Donbass war. Back then he was kind of a white supremacist. Not anymore. He’s a pretty good guy now.

You may recall that the Azov Battalion have a reputation as neo-nazis. However, when he went to visit them, he was surprised to find that they were actually pagans, and Hitler was just one of their many gods. In media appearances, they played-up the Naziism. This caused serious problems for them, because they relied on material support from the West, and the Naziism made that politically difficult.

So, the guy went to their publicity office (yes, the Azov Battalion had a publicity office), and asked what was up with that.

The publicist was surprised. She was a good publicist, so she regularly read CNN, the Times, ABC, etc. Accordingly, she expected an imminent fascist overthrow of the government of the United States. She was forefronting the Neo-Naziism in order to secure American support.

What happened here is that she took literally the liberal histrionics about Democracy Dying in Darkness. She simply could not model the many layers of hysteria that permeated the left during Trump’s first term.

And so she was systematically misled.

Now, was the New York Times actively trying to mislead the Azov Battalion into presenting as Neo-Nazis? Of course not. But she nevertheless found herself a victim of Knightian uncertainty and systemwide error. The liberal media were opaque. Modelling coastal-liberal neuroses is hard. If you can’t pull it off, you can fall victim to global error.

So what should she have done? Simple: the way to avoid Knightian uncertainty is to ignore the Times. Instead, trust Joe Rogan.

Why Some People Trust Joe Rogan

Think, for a moment, from the point of view of an idiot.

An idiot can’t possibly understand the psychological and bureaucratic engines that power the journalists of the New York Times. He can identify a few patterns. He can tell that they’re liberal, and want to make him a liberal. He can tell they want him to have respectable egalitarian beliefs about racial minorities, gender minorities, immigrants, and the poor. He can tell they have a weird obsession with SNL. But he can’t understand the details. He can’t tell when they’re being open or misleading. He can’t tell exactly what subterfuge would be in-bounds vs. excessive, and he can’t understand their goals well enough to know what directions they would want to manipulate him.

And so, even though the Times is almost always right, he can’t rely on it. If he did trust them, he would believe mostly true things, but his projects would be threatened by Knightian, system-wide risk. He would be swayed into doing what someone with their values would want, not what a well-informed person with his own values would want.

The Times cannot provide him any politically-actionable information. Like with the wily advisor, their general reliability does nothing to lower Knightian risks, and so he shouldn’t listen to them at all. He’s an idiot, so he can’t understand the Times’ subtle patterns. He can’t tell when they’re leading him astray. You can not trust anything you can’t understand.

So what can he understand?

He can understand Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan, whatever his vices, is not going to deceive you. Joe Rogan won’t hide adverse facts to help his preferred narratives. Joe Rogan won’t adopt top-down policies to try to shape your views. He’s not manipulating you. He enacts all the values he espouses on the show. He even takes his own fake medications.

How would he manipulate you? He’s basically an ape.

Of course, Joe Rogan has his own biases. But they don’t pose the same danger as the Times,’ because they aren’t strategic. Instead of deciding behind closed doors which facts to disclose, he lets everything air, and rationalizes as needed to support his favorite positions. He does it right in front of you, on air. He does this because he’s insane. If he can’t retrofit your facts to his beliefs, he just calls you fat.

To be manipulated by Joe Rogan, you would have to be profoundly dumb.

And, furthermore, he doesn’t have opaque neuroses that secretly color journalistic coverage. His lunacies are totally transparent. He shouts them at you. If you can’t figure out his biases and blind-spots, you have the mind of a small child.

And so, you should use Joe Rogan as your source of political news. Sure, he’s only right 52% of the time. But at least you understand him. At least you can’t be misled.

Why I Trust the Media Anyway

And yet I, personally, can trust the respectable media entirely. Certainly more than Rogan. And that’s for two reasons.

First, I don’t think they can manipulate me.

I am ensconced in an upper middle class bubble, and I am extremely informed. I read a lot of news, and so I learn who’s reliable. I know which commentators are serious and earnest, and I learn which sources (and types of claims) are trusted by the earnest and serious people (Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Josh Barro, Joseph Heath, Larry Summers, Zeynep Tufekci, Nate Silver, Matt Zeitlin, Derek Thompson, Tyler Cowen, Kelsey Piper, etc.). I know which commentators are a bit funky, but honest, with interesting and informed ideas (Ross Douthat, Freddie Deboer, Charles Fehn Lehman, Gwern, Scott Alexander, and one-whom-I-will-not-name-but-who-is-associated-with-a-certain-batsignal). Through the prism of these trusted commentators, whom I understand due to our cultural similarity, I can largely rely on the New York Times and the entire liberal-media nexus.

In short: I am capable of relying on urban liberals because I am an urban liberal.

So, when I see evidence of systematic media-manipulation, I never worry that I’m being manipulated. I’m confident in my model of the media. So, I can be confident on which directions their biases push in. Thus, from my point of view, any errors are basically random, like the errors of the braindead advisor. I don’t face Knightian uncertainty. Due to my intelligence, cultural position, large amount of free time, and heavy news consumption, I can rely on the New York Times without worrying about manipulation. Anyone smart enough can rely on the media even though it wants to trick them.

Second, I’m aligned with the media.

If they want to manipulate me, I’m pretty nonplussed.

The New York Times wants heavy US support for Ukraine and Taiwan. They want a foreign policy that’s supportive of Israel, but restrains them when they’re callous with the lives of Palestinians (and the Lebanese). They want higher marginal tax rates on rich people. They want to counter climate change with a mix of policy and technology. They want free trade with a sprinkling of policies to “friend-shore” against China. They’re even getting skeptical of the diversity bureaucracy and WPATH, which is about as right-leaning as I get, and pushing against NIMBYism, which is a personal hobbyhorse of mine. Great! I can basically trust them! Even if they are manipulating me, they’re mostly manipulating me in favor of things I already want to do. I have a few areas of disagreement (largely on low-skill immigration), but they’re pretty small stars in a wide firmanent.

So, I have good reason not to worry about them manipulating me: we agree on basic values, so I can trust them on individual facts. I don’t need to worry that their coverage is structured to manipulate me, because they would be manipulating me into doing things that I want to do in the first place.

What to Learn from This

Almost everyone who is flummoxed by the broad decline in trust is someone like me. We’re urbane, educated, secular liberals who are basically sympathetic with the center-left and sufficiently tuned to the discourse to tease apart liberal-hysterias from credible fears. We know the norms of speech, so we can distinguish polite euphemisms from literal truths. We know about Gell-Mann amnesia and Bettteridge’s Law, so we can get information from the news quickly and efficiently, without extrapolating incorrectly from any details or rhetorical flourishes.

But there aren’t that many of us.

And for anyone else to trust the media would be irrational.

I hope you can see the implications.

Are you a person of influence who would like to be trusted? Would you like right-wing crazies not to dominate the information environment? Would you like cross-pressured voters like Joe Rogan not to endorse Republican candidates?

Then you need to become much more forthright, even when forthrightness would disfavor narratives you believe in, make you personally uncomfortable, or damage your social standing. You need to become way easier for idiots to comprehend.

Granted – there are limits to the above argument. Wily advisors can give actionable information, even if it’s slightly skewed; that’s how lobbying works. But the advantage in reliability has to be massive.

At the end of the day, people are choosing the brain-damaged advisor. That means they don’t have enough reasons not to.

To end, I must admit that I myself have an axe to grind. I am temperamentally inclined to transparency and candidness. And, I have unrelated reasons to think that forthrightness would be good for the Dems (letting a little loose would make the dems more likeable, especially with the bro-vote).

So, be aware that I am using this model as a way to manipulate you.

I hope you trust me more now that I have made that transparent.

_________________________________

* Assume that, for whatever reason, you are incapable of pre-committing to randomizing your behavior in order to prevent the wily advisor from selectively lying to you.

** Technically you could quantify the risk, but the quantified risk is solely based on your priors. The advisor’s record of accuracy tells you (almost) nothing.

*** Now, I do not think it was appropriate for Donald Trump to describe far-right militias like the Three-Percenters and Proud Boys as “very fine people.” But they are not White Nationalists. That is a different type of organization. Respectable people were wrong, and then got called-out, and it became clear they were wrong, and then many of them didn’t back down. And, furthermore, regardless of whether Trump was correct about some people there not being white-nationalists, he wasn’t defending white nationalists. He was saying that there was another group of people there who were not white nationalists and were very fine people. Whether or not he was right, that’s simply a different thing!

The Friendship Market

In a well-functioning friendship market, an interruption is a credible signal that you have something valuable to say.

At a general level, interrupting is positive-value if the interrupting comment adequately responds to the interrupted comment. That is, interrupting maximizes utility if and only if the person, upon hearing what you say, would not find it worthwhile to say what they are saying when they were interrupted, or would change what they say due to the information conveyed through the interrupting comment (and the value of that change is worth having to make the change).

Interrupting is negative value otherwise.

Granted, there are other reasons interrupting might be negative value. Some people just really hate being interrupted. BThe important thing is this: the value of the interruption greatly depends on the quality of the interrupting statement. Interrupting is “gambling” on the quality of your statement. In a functional market, you’re gambling with your own money.

In a competitive market for friends and conversation, a person who repeatedly makes negative-value interruptions will internalize the costs of their miscreance. Their value as a conversational partner will fall (people will not want to hang out with them) and thus, in the long run, they will shoulder the burden of their interruptions, even though the short-run costs fall on their conversational partners. In the long run, they will end up in conversations with other low-value parties who wouldn’t otherwise have anyone with whom to converse.

In an uncompetitive market for friends and conversation, the cost of negative-value interruptions is not internalized. Imagine you’re locked in a room with 2 people forever. In Hell. If they’re pointlessly interrupting you, there’s noting you can do about it. Sure, it makes you miserable, since you can’t escape them. But it doesn’t cost them anything.

Granted, you could have systems to internalize costs even in a non-competitive market for conversation. Both players in the conversation might adopt a “tit for tat” strategy of shrieking whenever the other party interrupts them in a negative-value way.

Competition is just one way to have a well functioning market. The important distinction is between well-functioning markets (markets where costs are internalized) and dysfunctional markets (markets where they are not).

Interruptions as a Signal of Conversational Value

In a well-functioning market for conversation and society, interrupting someone is a very credible signal of the quality of what you’re saying. If someone says something low-value after their partner stopped speaking, that isn’t that bothersome. The alternative would have just been silence. So, speaking in-turn is never that costly, even if the speech is low value. Contrast that with interruptions. If someone interrupts you to say something low value, that imposes a great cost – not only did they add no value to the conversation, they prevented you from adding value. Thus, the stakes of interruptions are higher than for other speech. Every time you interrupt, you gamble your reputation on the value of what you’re saying. In a well-functioning market, the value of your reputation is high.

Now, interrupting is not the only conversational behavior that is “high stakes.” Here are some others:

1. Speaking at length
2. Initiating a conversation
3. Breaking a conversational norm
4. Speaking in a particularly attention-grabbing manner
5. Making a statement with embedded inferences or obliquey (this forces the conversational partner to trace the line of reasoning themselves, which will turn out to have been a waste of their time if the reasoning was poor).
6. Speaking unmelliflously; using strange and offputting language.
7. Speaking unapologetically.
8. Making objections (making an objection is a waste of everyone’s time if everyone could already see how the original speaker would answer. Alternatively, it’s extremely useful if it corrects an error by the other speaker)
9. Making jokes (jokes either land or they don’t. If they don’t land, saying them was pointless).

When you speak in suchbways, and it wasn’t worthwhile, there was a great cost. You demanded attention, and you didn’t justify making that demand.

There are other ways to speak that are especially low risk:

1. Asking clarificatory questions
2. Thanking the speaker; apologizing – (almost) everyone likes to be flattered; talented flattery and untalented flattery are of similar value. Though there is more value in talented flattery, that’s not because we enjoy high-quality flattery the same way we enjoy high-quality insight. Talented flattery is more valuable because it is more convincing. Thus, sincere flattery is almost always a safe conversational choice.
3. Being kind, likeable, and polite. – Even stupid comments are endearing if spoken by a kind, likeable person.
4. Asking questions, generally. This is low value because, if the question is dumb, the other person can just answer quickly.

So, we can see that in conversation, there are more or less two possible strategies:

1. High Risk: regularly interrupting, making lots of jokes, especially off-color humor, speaking at length, using complex reasoning.
2. Low Risk: waiting for your turn, speaking briefly, speaking softly, apologizing, asking clarifactory questions.

You may notice that the people in your life tend to follow one of those two strategies.

Furthermore, communities differ. Hisk risk strategies are traditioinally associated with men, Jews, Italians, Lawyers, the Northeast, Economists, Physicists, South Asians, Australians, the Dutch, Twitter, comedians, urbanites, Wall Street, and any group referred to with the epithet “____ Bros.”

In particular, analytic philsophy seminars and Economics seminars used to have a reputation for use of extremely high risk strategies. Interruption was ubiquitous, objections were loud and explicit, speakers would often be required to literally run their calculations on the board.

Many people found such a community discomfiting, and prefer lower risk strategies.

Low risk strategies are associated with women, Methodists, Sociologists & Anthropologists, librarians, therapists, American Indians, the rural, Midwesterners, and the Japanese.

A community of high risktaking excels at quickly identifying who has worthwhile things to say – everyone is staking their reputation all the time.

A community of low risktaking excels at preventing annoying bullshit.

Thus, there are (roughly) three types of communities, and you can tell which one you’re in based on who interrupts:

A Well-Functioning Market: (High variance in interruption; interruptions are generally high value).

If you live in a functioning market, costs are internalized and high-value speech is rewarded, so the people who speak in the High Risk fashion will tend to be people who actually have interesting things to say.

Now, that doesn’t mean that many people use the high risk strategy. You can have a well-functioning market where there are few interruptions. That will be one where people just really, really hate being interrupted. The sign of a functioning market is high variance in strategies, where strategy is correlated with ability. Talented talkers will tend to adopt high-risk strategies, since high risk strategies are rewarded if they lead to good outcomes. Poor talkers will tend to take low-risk strategies, in order to minimize losses.

A Poorly-Functioning Market: (High variance in interruption; interruptions are often low value).

If you live in a poorly functioning market, there will be lots of people who have full social lives and adopt a high-risk strategy, but nevertheless bloviate. Strategies are adopted based on personal preference, not skill. Many talented talkers take low-risk strategies because they aren’t rewarded for high value speech, and many poor talkers take high-risk strategies because they aren’t subject to market discipline.

A Middly Functioning Market: (low variance in interruption).

In a middly functioning market, everyone adopts a similarly risky strategy, because social forces compel every person to act the same, regardless of differences in talent.

Such social forces impose a cost (risky but high-value speech is prevented). However, they also have a benefit (blowhards are prevened from menacing the innocent). This isn’t a first best solution. Ideally, talented talkers (and only talented talkers) would adopt high risk strategies, providing value to everyone. But it might be hard to police blowhards without also suppressing talent. In that case, it might be best to have a hard rule against high-risk behavior.

The mark of such a society will be that everyone adopts basically the same strategy everyone else uses.

Now, technically you could have a society where social forces compelled a high risk strategy. But it’s hard to imagine that actually happening. That is, it’s hard to imagine a society where we punish blowhards for not talking enough. So, few societies will compel everyone to take high-risk strategies.

Beyond Function & Dysfunction

Beyond the question of function & dysfunction, some societies will tend to have riskier strategies while others will tend to have more cautious ones.

A society would tend to encourage risky strategies when the following conditions hold:

1. People don’t happen to be bothered by interruptions very much (high tolerance for bloviating)
2. The value of speech is agreed (that is, everyone mostly agrees on what speech is high value vs. low value)
3. The value of speech is predictable (such that a person can know the value of their speech before deciding to say it)
4. The value of speech is high (in general, people do not value their tranquility very highly).

What communities are like this? Well, it will be communities where speech is more of a game, there are many common projects, and it is easy to determine what other people want to know.

Ideally, an academic field should involve a lot of high risk strategies. Academics should be hungry for information, and have well-defined standards for what is a valuable argument and what is not. Everyone should be engaged in a common project of inquiry where reasoning is explicit. So, it should be easy to tell where the holes are that ought to be filled. That is, speech-value should be high, predictable and agreed).

A dysfunctional academic field would not reward high-risk strategies. In a dysfunctional field, lots of communication is implicit; so it’s hard to tell what arguments people are looking for. There is a split between the official standards for high-value speech and what people actually want to hear. Eeveryone has different ideas of what’s high value speech and what isn’t.

Now, not everything in the world should be an academic department. Outside academia, values are plural; trying to predict ahead of time the value of your speech to another is hubris, so you probably should take low-risk strategies.

But the decline of high risk strategies in academia in the last few decades is almost certainly a sign of research paradigms breaking down without replacement. Or just a general psychological divestment from inquiry, as a project.