I. Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have "thought globally" (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people. National thinkers tend to be dangerous also; we now have national thinkers in the northeastern United States who look upon Kentucky as a garbage dump.
II. Global thinking can only be statistical. Its shallowness is exposed by the least intention to do something. Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place. Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it: reduce it, make a bauble of it. Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. If you want to see where you are, you will have to get out of your space vehicle, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot you will find that the earth is still satisfyingly large, and full of beguiling nooks and crannies.
Many conservatives tend to assume that economic outcomes in capitalist economies are “natural.” Yet there is nothing less natural than severing the connection between economic growth and family formation. For millennia, human beings have viewed children as an asset, not a cost, for the simple reason that children provided additional labor and looked after their parents in old age. It is only in the last century that this link has been severed.
We now have a system that forces would-be parents to think of their children as a cost and not an asset. Yet these children are quite literally the most valuable asset that any country could possibly possess. Without children, a society withers and dies while its economy is converted into something resembling a chaotic nursing home, where a shrinking workforce slaves away to service a growing pool of retirees (as the specter of forced euthanasia lurks in the background).
UATX
We expect to face significant resistance to this project. There are networks of donors, foundations, and activists that uphold and promote the status quo. There are parents who expect the status quo. There are students who demand it, along with even greater restrictions on academic freedom. And there are administrators and professors who will feel threatened by any disruption to the system.
We welcome their opprobrium and will regard it as vindication.
To the rest — to those of you who share our sense that something fundamental is broken — we ask that you join us in our effort to renew higher education. We welcome all who share our mission to pursue a truly liberating education — and hope that other founders follow our example.
It is time to restore the meaning to those old school mottos. Light. Truth. The wind of freedom. You will find all three at our new university in Austin.
I don’t know whether this is going to work, but I think it’s a wonderfully exciting endeavor. In the American university today, the systemic and/or emergent silencing of those who dissent from or even merely question the Successor Ideology is made possible by the belief, by all parties involved, that the dissidents have nowhere else to go. But what if they do have somewhere else to go? And what if philanthropists who wish to support higher education have a choice between institutions with long-recognized prestige — always an irresistible draw in the past — and institutions that fit the philanthropists’ ideals?
(One thing I don't understand: the presence of Sohrab Amari on the university’s Board of Advisors. Isn’t its classical liberalism antithetical to his frequently-articulated vision of the social world as an arena for defeating your enemies in ideological combat and enjoying the spoils of your victory?)
This will be very, very interesting. A tiny bit of me wants to check Twitter to enjoy the inevitable DEFCON 1 meltdown — but all the rest of me immediately slapped down that tiny bit and I don’t think we’ll be hearing from it again.
This was a blog post, wasn’t it? Dammit.
To earn membership in a group you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups. Hence, optimal weighting of beliefs and communications in the individual mind will make it feel good to think and express content conforming to and flattering to one’s group’s shared beliefs and to attack and misrepresent rival groups. The more biased away from neutral truth, the better the communication functions to affirm coalitional identity, generating polarization in excess of actual policy disagreements. […]
This raises a problem for scientists: Coalition-mindedness makes everyone, including scientists, far stupider in coalitional collectivities than as individuals. Paradoxically, a political party united by supernatural beliefs can revise its beliefs about economics or climate without revisers being bad coalition members. But people whose coalitional membership is constituted by their shared adherence to “rational,” scientific propositions have a problem when — as is generally the case — new information arises which requires belief revision. To question or disagree with coalitional precepts, even for rational reasons, makes one a bad and immoral coalition member — at risk of losing job offers, one's friends, and one's cherished group identity. This freezes belief revision.
Forming coalitions around scientific or factual questions is disastrous, because it pits our urge for scientific truth-seeking against the nearly insuperable human appetite to be a good coalition member. Once scientific propositions are moralized, the scientific process is wounded, often fatally. No one is behaving either ethically or scientifically who does not make the best case possible for rival theories with which one disagrees.
This by Kevin Kelly is useful: “Class 1 problems are caused by technology that is not perfect, and are solved by the marketplace. Class 2 problems are caused by technology that is perfect, and must be solved by extra-market forces such as cultural norms, regulation, and social imagination.”
The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call “information” – which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.
— Wendell Berry (2005)
No one is sure what Blake meant by mentioning ‘dark, Satanic mills’ as part of what Jesus would have seen and moved among, but the candidates include early industrial sites, Druidic temples and (I’m afraid) Anglican parish churches. The point, though, is that we are being asked to imagine that the incarnate God moved and worked even in the middle of the cruelty, hypocrisy and exploitation that are an inseparable part of every human community’s history. ‘Jerusalem’ is being built, even while all the signs in society around us seem to negate the vision.
What we need is the rekindling of desire – the sheer passionate longing to see a social order at which the Holy Lamb of God might look without heartbreak. Arrows of desire; the courage and endurance of mental fight; the struggle to keep this imagination alive and burning – this is what we pray for. The poem looks back to an imaginary past and forward to an imagined future, but at its heart is the question: ‘do you truly want to live in Jerusalem? Because if you do, you need to remember that it is always already here and now; because even where justice and love seem to be defeated, the Holy Lamb of God is present.’
— Rowan Williams, from Candles in the Dark
Between 1980 and 2016, the wealthiest 1 percent of university endowments had already grown tenfold — from an average of $2 billion to $20 billion, after adjusting for inflation. Harvard University, Yale and Princeton University did this by averaging annual return rates nearly double those of endowments valued below $100 million, as are those of most investment funds for public, private and community colleges. Similarly, this year’s median endowment among all schools gained 27 percent, roughly half the rate for the top Ivies.
In my forthcoming book “Bankers in the Ivory Tower,” I show that elite schools grew their endowments by investing large amounts early in private equity and hedge funds led by their own alumni — which helped both the schools and their graduates.
As has often been noted, institutions like Harvard, Yale, and MIT are hedge funds that happen to have universities attached to them. “Charitable” giving to them is little different than “charitable” giving to Elon Musk.
The contemporary American university is an enormous Kafkaesque bureaucracy teetering on top of a small Dickensian sweatshop. If we don’t count the sports teams and the research institutes, the university consists of preindustrial artisans, the instructors, divided between a small and shrinking group of elite tenured artisans and a huge and growing number of impoverished apprentices with no hope of decent jobs — with all of the artisans, affluent and poor, crushed beneath the weight of thickening layers of middle managers.
Apart from useful research, most of which could be done just as well in independent institutes, the product of all but the most prestigious American universities consists of diplomas which are rendered progressively more worthless each year thanks to credential inflation. According to the Federal Reserve of New York, the underemployment rate for recent college grads — that is, the percentage working in jobs that do not require a college diploma — was 40% at the end of March 2021. True, workers with college diplomas tend to make more than those without them — but at least some of the premium comes from Starbucks baristas with B.A.s pushing high school graduates into even worse jobs.
In a productive economic sector, labor-saving technology and/or the factory-style division of labor result in what might be called the virtuous circle of industrialism: Prices for consumers fall, wages for workers rise, and the ratio of managers to productive workers stays the same or shrinks. In the American university, however, technological stagnation, artisanal production, and administrative bloat result in rising prices for consumers, falling wages for the majority of productive workers (nontenured instructors) and more and more bureaucrats per worker over time.
two quotations on the metaverse
Facebook, it’s now widely accepted, has been a calamity for the world. The obvious solution, most people would agree, is to get rid of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has a different idea: Get rid of the world. […]
His goal with the metaverse is not just to create a virtual world that is more encompassing, more totalizing, than what we experience today with social media and videogames. It’s to turn reality itself into a product. In the metaverse, nothing happens that is not computable. That also means that, assuming the computers doing the computing are in private hands, nothing happens that is not a market transaction, a moment of monetization, either directly through an exchange of money or indirectly through the capture of data. With the metaverse, capital subsumes reality. It’s money all the way down.
The truth is, a thriving metaverse already exists. It’s incredibly high-functioning, with millions of people immersed in it for hours a day. In this metaverse, people have built uncountable custom worlds, and generated god knows how many profitable businesses and six-figure careers. Yet this terrain looks absolutely nothing the like one Zuckerberg showed off.
It’s Minecraft, of course.
(I am not returning to blogging as such, not until 2022 at the earliest, but it occurred to me this morning that I still need a place to put quotes I want to remember and use later, so I’ll keep using the blog for that.)
Almost-November rose.
hiatus
This will be my last post on this blog in 2021: I’m shutting down for the rest of the year. I’ll revisit things in January to see if I want to resume.
In the meantime, I’ll still be doing my weekly newsletter and my utterly-boring-to-everyone-except-me photo blog.
topics
This is related, in a way, to my previous post: After reading yet another invitation-disinvitation story, I think every university should – in the interests of full disclosure, honesty, and charity – prepare a list of Topics On Which Dissent Is Not Permitted and send that list to everyone who is invited to speak. That way prospective lecturers will know in advance whether they hold views that are not tolerated at those universities and can decline the invitation immediately rather than having to be canceled later on.
motives
For more than 20 years now, I’ve been writing occasionally on the theme of motives, always making the same points:
- Because, as Rebecca West famously said, “There’s no such thing as an unmixed motive,” it’s very hard to tell what anyone’s truly dominant motives are;
- What people actually do is more important than what you think their motives are;
- There’s no reason to think you can understand the motives of others if you don’t have a firm grasp on your own.
I was thinking about that third point especially last night while listening to the most recent episode of FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. The hosts prided themselves on looking into the motives of the people who make polls, but it never occurred to them that their own project might be motivated also.
Some writers in the so-called “rationalist community” will preface their posts or essays with some statement of “confidence interval” or “epistemic status” – Scott Alexander does this, for example. I think everyone who writes about the motives of others should append to their discourse a “personal motive estimation” – an account of what they believe their own motives to be. In the spirit of full disclosure.
engagement
All the main social media companies say they don't promote hate on their platforms and take action to stop it. They each have algorithms that offer us content based on things we've posted, liked or watched in the past. But it's difficult to know what they push to each user.
"One of the only ways to do this is to manually create a profile and seeing the kind of rabbit hole that it might be led down by the platform itself, once you start to follow certain groups or pages," explains social media expert Chloe Colliver, who advised me on the experiment.
So Spring set up a fake account: a man called Barry.
Like my trolls, Barry was mainly interested in anti-vax content and conspiracy theories, and followed a small amount of anti-women content. He also posted some abuse on his profile — so that the algorithms could detect from the start he had an account that used abusive language about women. But unlike my trolls, he didn't message any women directly.
Over two weeks, I logged in every couple of days and followed recommendations, posted to Barry's profiles, liked posts and watched videos.
After just a week, the top recommended pages to follow on both Facebook and Instagram were almost all misogynistic. By the end of the experiment, Barry was pushed more and more anti-women content by these sites — a dramatic increase from when the account had been created. Some of this content involved sexual violence, sharing disturbing memes about sex acts, and content condoning rape, harassment and gendered violence.
As I keep saying: for the social media companies, hatred isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It promotes engagement.
mediocrity and acceptance
This reflection by Tim Stillman articulates a lot of what I, as an often unwilling but helpless Arsenal supporter, have been feeling lately. The petro-plutocrat takeover of Newcastle United adds to the list of clubs that Arsenal will simply not have the financial resources to compete with, and in a weird sort of way that’s a relief. It has been some time since Arsenal could plausibly contend for the Premier League title, but we fans have hoped for a return to the Champions League. Now, as Stillman notes, “What is the ceiling of this project? ‘If things go really well this season, we could finish 5th!’ It’s difficult to get excited about that but, unless there is a change in owners or a change in owner MO at Arsenal, qualifying for the Europa League is what success looks like for Arsenal.” Yep. For the foreseeable future Arsenal will simply be a mid-table side – and it’s strangely nice not to have to think about any higher aspirations.
Those circumstances can improve in one way only: If Stan Kroenke sells the club to some massively rich owner or consortium. (Stillman writes of a change in the Kroenke MO but I don’t consider that even a possibility.) And as frustrated as I have been by the Arsenal ownership, new ownership is probably the one thing that would end my Arsenal fandom – because in the current environment it’s hard to imagine any sufficiently wealthy ownership that doesn’t have the problem that Newcastle’s new owners have: deep entanglement with massive corruption. I prefer mediocrity to that.