[Epistemic Status: I no longer believe this is true. From subsequent reporting, it looks like the rioters on January 6th came in with much more violent intentions than initial reporting suggested.]
Wednesday, everyone in America was very surprised.
A number of heavily armed men in furry costume overwhelmed the Capitol Police and ensconced themselves in the halls of the federal government of the United States of America. But what exactly was that?
Congress was beseiged. Congresspeople were holed up in their offices, or in communal space. The capital was stormed. The lines fell. Actions were taken which are exactly the actions you would undertake if you were attempting a coup to overthrow the government. But it wasn’t a coup. As many political scientists and even more numerous amateur pedants have noted, a coup is performed within the administrative apparatus of the government. A mob effort of outsiders, uncoordinated with government figures, is not a coup.
So, was it a putsch? Outsiders can do a putsch. So far, Wednesday sounds like a putsch. Well, no. It was neither a coup nor a putsch. If Wednesday’s events constituted a putsch, then someone would have attempted to turn the siege of congress into a new government. Instead, our would-be-conquerers, after taking over the center of government for more than 300 million people, wandered around in the halls of state unopposed, like little cats in a bodega.
Congress was not really in very much danger. Everyone in congress reasonably thought that they were under attack from a heavily armed mob that had breached security. But then the heavily armed mob, instead of consummating their incursion with murder or abduction, took a few selfies, stole a lectern, and went home.
A reasonable observer can conclude, first, that they didn’t think they were going to get that far, and second, that they had no idea what to do if they did.
What happened Wednesday wasn’t a coup. And it wasn’t a putsch. It was a protest that turned into a riot, and it can be best understood in terms of protests that turn into riots.
And so it is useful to contextualize it in terms of last July.
There’s been a lot of chatter over whether that comparison is legitimate. But the disagreement largely results from a failure to distinguish two possible points of comparison:
Did the precedent set by the Black Lives Matter protests in July set the stage causally for the events of Wednesday and the expectations of Wednesday’s larkers?
Was Wednesday’s lark a legitimate application of the precedent established in response to the protests of July?
The reason to denounce the events of Wednesday as categorically different from the events of July is because the protests and riots in July were, fundamentally, more legitimate. Police killing innocent people is bad. Democratic elections are good.
The reason to compare yesterday’s events to the protest/riots of July is because the people protest/rioting Wednesday did not view their protest/riot as illegitimate.
Let us remember what happened this summer. Lots of people did things that were legal. Then, other people did things that were plainly illegal. However, under the consideration that these actions constituted legitimate protest, few attempts were made to punish the clearly illegal activity.
In particular, consider CHAZ: the capital hill autonomous zone. Obviously, it is illegal to set up a country right in the middle of the streets Seattle. At minimum, it is an extended form of jaywalking. Yet for a time official Seattle policy dictated that… they would let it slide. Of course, this was reversed once the bodies started piling up , but all in all few were arrested, and the municipal government even partially complied with the protestors’ demands.
Not only were the normal legal ramifications for such activity waived, the reputational consequences were waived for activity which would be considered reprehensible if not under the aegis of legitimate protest. Consider the following sentence from the wikipedia page on CHAZ:
“A peaceful march during the early afternoon of July 25 by the Youth Liberation Front was designated a riot by the SPD after several businesses were destroyed, fires were started in five construction trailers near a future juvenile detention center, and the vehicles of several center employees were vandalized.”
Normally, peaceful is not a qualifier we would apply to events which include destructions, fires, and vandalizations. Peaceful is a qualifier we would apply to countrysides. Wikipedia here appears to have offered at least a partial amnesty for any excesses performed on CHAZ’ behalf [Reading the edit history here can be fruitful].
Further, consider the, “protest exemption” applied to exhortations to stay at home and avoid crowds.
So, let us answer what precedent was set in July:
Activity which is normally illegal will be legally permitted if it is part of legitimate protest.
Activity which is normally viewed as immoral is alright if it is part of legitimate protest.
Now suppose you have been encouraged by purportedly respectable figures to believe that the election of the United States has been stolen from you. Suppose you believe you have the support of the police, and the majority of the country (or at least a majority of the electoral college). You might be inclined to consider a storming of the capitol quite legitimate. During the theft of the election it might even be obligatory.
Of course, it’s unclear how many of yesterday’s rioters truly believed that the election was being stolen. After all, they didn’t work very hard to stop it. They mostly stood around complaining about police intransigence. If DLive and eye witness accounts are to be believed, they expected they would get better treatment than Black Live Matter, and were surprised at the resistance that received them. It appears their motivation was that they had a political team, their political team had lost, and they felt they should do something about it.
So, it is wise to strongly prosecute yesterday’s malefactors. But if so, it is not because they attempted to overthrow Democracy. It is because they pretended to, committed many heinous crimes toward that pretense, and they genuinely expected everyone would give them a pass.
Below is a ranked list of all books I have read since graduating from college into the COVID pandemic. The list includes children’s books, 19th century novels, high-modern fiction, sci-fi, and a number of academic texts. Thus, all comparisons are natural and objective. I have ranked them by how good they are.
If you disagree, it is because you lack my discernment, and if you are lucky, you will one day see how wrong you were. The list proceeds from worst to best. With that, Allons y!
Thirty
Wuthering Heights – God. What a slog. Everyone is annoying; everything is awful, and the prose isn’t exciting enough to justify it. I only finished this because the volume I had of this was so pretty. Come on Brontes, do better.
Twenty-Nine
Under Western Eyes – Joseph Conrad is the single worst prose stylist in English, and unless he has a fantastic novel to express with his turgid words, the substance is not going to make up for the style. Terrible book. Apparently it was the product of some butthurt he felt about Dostoevsky.
Twenty-Eight
The Invisible Man – Eh. It’s okay. But the premise (a cool premise!) isn’t explored any better than Plato did, and this doesn’t have the cachet of The Republic.
Twenty-Seven
How to do Things with Words – I feel bad putting this so low on the list, because it is very good. J.L. Austin isn’t really a normal philosopher. A normal philosopher provides insights and makes you see familiar things in new ways. Austin, instead, is more of a safety net against your own stupidity and laziness. Austin at his best is articulating a distinction you know exists but can’t quite make explicit, and might be inclined to elide in your slothful moments. If you find yourself confusing language and assertion, this book will fix that, and fast. I just didn’t happen to be inclined to confuse those two things.
Twenty-Six
The Subtle Knife – I started reading The Golden Compass books because my girlfriend loved them and we were watching the show together. They’re very good, but this one (the second in the trilogy) doesn’t quite meet the rest. It’s weirder than the first, but not grander, and the sparse development of the world of Cittagazze compares poorly to the richness of Lyra’s world. Every town in Lyra’s world is in a region, in a country, in a worldwide society. Every person has an ethnicity and a religion and idioms in their language. In Cittagazze there is a town.
Twenty-Five
Philosophy of Logic – This is a good book for explaining the consensus positions of the philosophy of logic in the mid-century, as well as Quine’s particular doctrines. But there are two ways it could be very interesting: these directions are the technical and the philosophical. The most curious part, technically, is the exploration of branching logics. Branching logics are cool; you should check them out. However, it’s not obvious they… mean anything. Imagine a condition F which has four arguments a, b, c, and d. For example F might be, “are the Beatles”. We might want to say, “For every a there is a b, and for every c there is a d, such that F is true of a, b, c, and d”. There’s no way to formalize that without branching logic. But, read it closely and you’ll realize it’s kind of a meaningless statement.
How about the philosophy, the answers to the questions, “What makes logical truths true?” and, “Why are we able to manipulate true sentences to make other true sentences”?. The answers to both are, more or less, that logical truths are just products of the uses of logical words (Quine refuses to say, “definitions”. True, but not that satisfying.
Twenty-Four
Those who Leave and Those who Stay – I love the My Brilliant Friend series, but this is definitely the weakest link. It’s just Elena kind of being a bitch and having a bad time. No complications feel hugely different from the previous complications.
Twenty-Three
Everyday Life in Traditional Japan – Great book! Now I know more about traditional Japan! The best tidbit is that the government worked to keep farmers away from theatre and towns because if the farmers found out how fun life could be if they weren’t farmers then they would stop farming.
Twenty-Two
Knowledge and its Limits – Good book, but got too into its thesis. The idea is this: going back to Plato, philosophers have said that knowledge is, “justified true belief” but in the 1970s a guy named Gettier said something about clocks and now no one believes that any more. People have tried in different ways to re-define what knowledge is. Here, Williamson takes a different tack: fuck it, he says, knowledge is fucking knowledge, everything else has to be defined in terms of it [Note: Not exactly. But, more or less].
There are two interesting things to get from this book, neither of which the author focuses on. The first is a technical result: Suppose you know what you know aka, in any case where you know the statement S, then you know that you know S. Doesn’t it seem plausible? I know I’ve assumed it before. Well, if you take it as true, you get a bunch of paradoxes.
The other is that whenever someone says something, you can ask them, “how do you know that?”. This is a bit radical. It means that knowledge is what you are socially responsible for having when you assert. The author chooses not to focus on this because of some unconvincing intuitions regarding lotteries, and comes to a less satisfying analysis of knowledge for it.
Twenty-One
Ivanhoe – This is a lot of fun! The trouble is that none of the characters are that compelling until close to the end, when Rebecca and Ivanhoe become fascinating figures. Ivanhoe, the character, is a romantic hero, despite being unapologetically antisemetic. However, his antisemitism is not the flaw, the antisemitism shows the limits of his moral system. A weirdly deep, Faulkner-esque exploration of honor culture for an adventure romp with King Richard and Robin Hood. Another major highlight is the Fall of the House of Torquilstone, which has some of the loveliest prose in early 19th century fiction (Scott was a poet, after all).
Twenty
The Sword in the Stone – Wonderful! Excellent! I will be so excited to read this to my kids. I just wish Merlin did some magic other than turning Arthur into animals. If you plan to read this, try to get the 1938 version because it is better than the later one.
Nineteen
The Amber Spyglass – The conclusion of The Golden Compass is much richer than its mushy center. Pullman sets up dramatic questions, and effectively answers them. The imagination of the new Eden is top-notch science fiction, and the tension between scientific, fantastical, and divine elements is navigated more or less effectively.
Eighteen
Philosophical Investigations – Wittgenstein’s big(ger) work. Good, but you might have heard a lot of it before. Passages of the book are devoted to explaining how language works, as a public good, and how this precludes the use of language about consciousness in practical projects (the famous beetle in a box argument). It is hilarious, therefore, that painkillers exist. I think the existence of painkillers, and the importance of consciousness-talk in their development may be one of the only times that an analytic philosopher’s claims have been disproven by empirical facts.
[Note for philosophical readers: Yes, Witgenstein’s skeptical argument about rules is convincing (you know, the one Kripke made such a stink about). However, since the structure of behavior, physical events, and experience happens to be pretty isomorphic across people, conscious experience is weirdly public and language about it is weirdly usable for practical projects, most notably art and psychiatric drugs. Painkillers don’t just change my behavior in a predictable way. They change my private experience in a predictable way.]
Seventeen
Fathers and Sons – Great! But it makes me sad because the nihilist generations that succeeded the liberals in Russia sucked and ruined the place forever.
Sixteen
The Story of a New Name – The second book of the Neapolitan novels. Some great episodes.
The key to the series is its scope. This has three aspects. First, Ferrante has deep, rich inner lives for almost every named character. In so many novels all characters but two or three can only be seen from the outside (cough cough John Updike cough cough), but in Ferrante’s work, everyone in view you see up close. Second, elements that you didn’t realize meant anything can come back in a big way 500 pages later. Third, Ferrante sustains radically different tones based on the positions and emotions of the characters. The storyboarding, the focus, the patience, incredible! I think this is what sustains the sociological analysis that economist-types like about this series.
Fifteen
The Story of the Lost Child – The conclusion to My Brilliant Friend! Elena finally gets out of her own hell! At so many points in this series I thought Elena needed C.S. Lewis: her problem is a cruelty which is a smallness. Finally, she develops! So satisfying!
Fourteen
Sense and Sensibilia – J.L. Austin again. Austin at his best: explaining how to use terms that you already know well, but better than you could have explained them. However, when he gets to explaining what-it’s-like to experience things, he gets obviously confused and muddled. Unfortunately, that’s sort of the point of the book. My personal theory is that the man literally had no conscious experience, and was what philosophers call a “P-zombie.”
Thirteen
The Old Man and the Sea – Every time I think of this book I smell salt. No authors match Hemingway in invoking sensation, whether the pine-air of the mountains or the feel of rope running down your palm [edit: PERHAPS Collette*]. However, I happen to live within an hour’s drive of the ocean, so, wasted on me.
*I have never read Collette.
Twelve
As I Lay Dying – Excellent! I had gone my entire life thinking this was one of the awful Faulkners like The Sound and The Fury or Absalom, Absalom! I had no idea it was so light and readable! The microscope-focus rendering of character is unparalleled. However, as my father said, “It’s about a bunch of crackers hauling around a body. Who wants to read that?”
Eleven
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money – Liquidity is actually very weird, and you will not realize just how weird until you read this book. Well, an introspective banker may realize it on his own.
It’s remarkable how much of any intermediate macroeconomics course is in this book, and the whole thing sprung from Keynes’ head like Athena.
Ten
My Brilliant Friend – The start of it all! Also recommended by my girlfriend (who’s surprised?). This is one of the most alluring books I’ve read in a long time. Around every corner is something new, exciting, and dangerous. Every character is real and true and yet harlequin in color. I highly, highly recommend.
Nine
1066 and All That – This may be the funniest book in English. If you like Wodehouse and the History of the British Isles and you haven’t read this book, you’re playing yourself.
Eight
Lord Jim – If Joseph Conrad were not the worst prose stylist in the pantheon of English Letters, this would be my favorite of all novels. Conrad at his lushest and most romantic; the book drips feeling.
Seven
The Bounds of Sense – What a weird one. When I was in senior year, my advisor said that there was a branch of, “Analytic Kant Criticism” that was very insightful but had nothing to do with Kant, and it all started with this book.
To those unfamiliar with dear Immanuel, his whole thing is arguing what must be the structure of the world we live in for us to have the experiences we have. The arguments hinge on some claims about geometry which turned out to be more or less false.
Strawson’s project is different. Strawson is not looking for the necessary structures of experience. Instead, he notes that there’s structure to normal language and logic. Are there facts about our experiences that make that structure… useful? Appropriate? Odd to wrap the answer in Kant exegesis, but excellent question!
Six
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – I loved this book so much I looked into careers at the CIA. It turns out they suck and don’t pay. Alas.
Five
The Guns of August – This may not be how the World War really unfolded, but how it felt at the time; la belle epoque shattering like an artillery shell; the old world and her virtues crushed underfoot by her own industry.
Sir John French, Von Kluck, Lanzerac, King Albert! Who can forget them?
History is rarely so completely transformed into a novel. If we were native Latin speakers, this is how Tacitus would read to us.
Four
A Moveable Feast – Hemingway’s memoir of Paris in the 20s. In this book, there is a passage, describing an actual event, where F. Scott Fitzgerald hypothesized to Ernest Hemingway that he had induced schizophrenia in his wife Zelda through the unfortunate shape of his penis. Zelda had… encouraged him to form this hypothesis. Hemingway then had Fitzgerald whip it out in the middle of a cafe, told him it was fine, and took him to the Louvre to make some comparisons.
This book reads like literary history fan-fiction. It is ridiculous that such giants were all hanging out and getting hammered together. Top-shelf.
Three
On the Plurality of Worlds – This is one of those philosophy books that argues something obviously false and insane about something you know well, but argues so well that all of your assumptions on the topic are toppled. A tour de force of obvious error, a la Descartes’ Meditations or The Critique of Pure Reason. A joy to read.
The conceit is that to make sense of language about possibility, we must accept that for any possible true statement, there are actual universes full of actual people where that sentence is true – the only difference between their universe and ours is that we happen to be in this one, the way I happen to be in New Jersey. Ridiculous. You can tell this is ridiculous because we use statements about necessity and possibility all the time (“It’s true that Trump lost in 2020, but it easily could have gone otherwise”) but we would have no idea which of such statements are true if possibility and necessity were fundamentally matters of cosmic geography.
At the same time, Lewis convincingly shows that all other appealing views on possibility (eg a possibility is anything you can coherently describe; a possibility is a consistent picture of things) are bogus, so either you have to accept Lewis’ crazy position or stew in the knowledge that language about possibility, necessity, and even causation is, at heart, a little dumb.
Two
Northanger Abbey – Every time I read Jane Austen I remember how much I can enjoy a novel. Every character’s likeable qualities are, at the same time, contemptible. Every character understands some things about every other character that the other character does not understand about themself. I have heard that for some people the language and cultural distance make Austen inaccessible. Dear reader, I can only hope this does not happen to you.
One
A House for Mr. Biswas – If I ever visit Trinidad it will be Naipaul’s Trinidad. Some books tell a story, and some books give the whole arc of a life. This is the latter kind. For such a novel to work, every life-event has to relate to the same themes, flaws, obstacles, and arcs. It’s not easy to pull off. At the same time, the setting is so richly realized: socially, economically, even physically, that the far-off island becomes near and familiar. It is hilarious that people read this as anti-colonialist literature.
Nassim Taleb, a lesser deity among Econ and stats bros, has recently started writing greatly about behavioral genetics. Most of his arguments are dumb, and this is why.
First, let’s lay out his arguments.
Research on behavioral genetics, especially pertaining to IQ, proceeds primarily by finding correlations between certain genetic factors and IQ tests, then certain IQ tests and performance in fields that actually matter (income, percentage of marriages that don’t end in divorce, not going to prison, succeeding in, “smart” enterprises like computer science and management, etc.). They therefore conclude there to be correlations between genetic factors and performance by these metrics. However, they do this by just multiplying the correlations. For example, if genes explain 50% of variation in IQ, and IQ tests explain 25% of variation in income, the behavioral geneticists conclude that IQ-genes explain approx 12.5% of variation in income. However, this is illegitimate, because correlation is not transitive. As a toy example, perhaps the other 50% of variation in IQ is explained by the quality of the Angel and Demon on your shoulder, who give better or worse advice, and, independently, this Angel and Demon determine 25% of income, again by giving better or worse advice. Therefore, the conclusions of the behavioral geneticists that performance on real life important metrics are determined by differences in genetic profiles are spurious.
Correlation between different IQ tests taken on different days is only about .8. Then, correlations between IQ and various life outcomes are whatever they are (.5, .3, yada yada). Behavioral geneticists conclude from the correlation between IQ TESTS and real life performance (on those same metrics from before) that there are correlations between some metaphysical, “IQ” and performance. However, again, because of the intransitivity of correlation, this syllogism is unjustified.
First, let’s quickly explain point 1). Taleb has basically just not read the literature. The conclusion that genetic profiles influence these outcomes we care about was never derived from correlations between genetic profiles and IQ tests. It was derived from correlations between genetic profiles and actual performance on these metrics, as observed primarily through studies on adoption and twins. IQ is posited as a plausible mediator between genetic profiles and performance in real life. Let us be clear on what we know. We know the difference between how closely correlated fraternal twins and identical twins are in the contemporary United States on various metrics. It is assumed that genetically determined differences in behavior explain the difference in correlations between identical and fraternal twins. The other plausible explanation is that identical twins correlate so much more closely because they are treated more similarly because of their appearance. However, it has been consistently difficult to find strong correlations between long term important outcomes and appearance, and, honestly, thinking about your life, how plausible is that? We also have similar studies finding similar conclusions when two identical twins are adopted by different families. The remarkable fact is that if you multiply the correlation between IQ and success on these metrics by the correlation between identical twins on IQ, you end up with roughly the correlation between identical twins on some metrics, regardless of whether the twins were adopted or not. Notably, college attendance is not one such metric, probably because it’s expensive and unfair.
To address the second argument, Taleb has perfectly legitimate reasoning, if we think that there are important factors which determine scores on IQ tests other than IQ. But IQ is simply, “the tendency to do well on IQ tests”. Taleb is treating IQ scores, this metaphysical, “IQ”, and performance on, say, college exams as three variables that all have correlations. His argument is that behavioral geneticists act as if there is a 1 correlation between, “IQ” and IQ scores, even though we know there is not. Therefore, the actual predictive power of IQ on life outcomes is weaker than they measure it to be. He is CORRECT, as far as this goes.
But let’s think for a second. What is the difference between IQ and IQ scores? Random noise. Of course, Random Noise is not part of the fundamental furniture of the universe; one man’s noise is another man’s signal. However, in this case we have a well enough defined formal system that we can say what’s what, and pretty confidently conclude that it is the signal, not the noise, which explains long term outcomes.
Remember that IQ is simply, “the tendency to do well on IQ tests” as strength is simply, “the tendency to succeed in performing feats of strength”. If something other than IQ is causing the correlation between IQ tests and real life performance, then it is only something which determines the variation between IQ performance on different days. But, let us be clear. This is absurd. Many factors contribute to how you do in am IQ test today RELATIVE to other days: hydration, the amount of sleep you got last night, etc. Please explain how the amount of sleep you got last night predicts lifelong earnings? The syllogism Behavioral Geneticists make that allows them to reason from IQ score/performance correlations to IQ/performance correlations was not implied by statistical laws, but by a basic understanding of the way the world works. There is nothing mathematically impossible about the idea that your grades throughout college were determined by how well you felt the day of 4/3/2011, the day your psych professor had you take an IQ test for his research. It’s just stupid.
Remember, being someone who generally gets enough water or sleep could easily be what causes life, “success” and explains the correlations between IQ tests and life outcomes. But being someone who generally gets enough water, thus doing well on IQ tests, is a part of IQ, by definition. The same is the case for the difference between people who put all their effort into arbitrary tests and those who don’t bother.
Let us note, in fact, that since we have defined IQ as, “the tendency to do well on IQ tests” then, generally speaking, correlations we find between IQ scores and life performance will be weaker than the actual correlations between IQ and life performance, because, as Taleb himself has noted, the average person coded as 1 standard deviation above mean IQ in any regression is actually only . 8 standard deviations above mean IQ. Essentially, a randomly noisy measure of a feature will find weaker correlations between that feature and other variables than actually exists.
Indefensible Expectations 