FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
I'd argue that you are cherrypicking here (perhaps unintentionally) to make your point. The 1619 project as I understand it was largely driven by media, not historians, in particular Nikole Hannah-Jones (a journalist).
It is true that the project was initiated by journalists and the media apparatus, rather than by historians directly. It's worth mentioning in passing that Journalism is also an academic field, and one that Hannah-Jones is reasonably likely to be inducted into in the future, given the evident status resulting from her project.
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Here is the 1619 project's bibliography. Pretty clearly, Jones drew heavily from "legitimate" academic and pseudo-academic sources (Kendi, Coates and similar, people it's not a good idea for an academic to disagree with) from a variety of fields, including history, in the production of her project. I am confident she was assisted in her project by many professional academics, including professional historians. She presented her project as history, and she was able to do so because actual historians provided her legitimized raw material and legitimized her output in turn.
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Within the field of history specifically, people spoke out. James H Sweet, President of the American Historical Association, penned an article titled Is History History?. An answer to the title's question might be inferred by the abject apology that now precedes the article, in which he defends precisely zero of his previous points.
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At least five other prominent historians were willing to speak out against it under their actual names, with the result that general descriptions note that it's controversial due to disputed accuracy of some elements of its narrative, making it indistinguishable from every other historical account ever written. In no way does this extremely limited pushback from within the discipline appear to have counteracted the 1619 project's effect on broader culture. The author has attacked those objecting to her project's lies as motivated by racism, and claimed that objectivity in History is impossible in any case and so her story is as good as any. Historians as a academic class appear to be smiling and nodding, or, at most, argue that this is a valuable contribution to the national conversation and the real problem is pushback from legislators.
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Her project appears to have been accepted as history by large portions (supermajorities?) of the broader Academy itself, together with most of the rest of the knowledge-production apparatus outside academia proper, and through these channels has also been accepted by large portions of the public. It was subsequently converted into educational materials specifically for teaching history at all levels of education from grade school to University, and for this purpose was in fact adopted as formal curricula many teachers across many schools, and has doubtless heavily influenced the curricula and teaching of many, many more. It continues, to this day, to be generally considered a valid resource for teaching history, even at the university level.
...Given the above, how is the 1619 product not an output of History as an academic discipline, by which that discipline should be judged?
More generally, what is the purpose of History as a formal, credentialed, taxpayer-funded, status-laden academic discipline and sociocultural organ, in your view? What is the point of it, why is it valuable? There are always going to be autists digging for information about the past, synthesizing it down into coherence, and then encapsulating it for transmission in a narrative. I'm one of them, in my own modest way. Why is it necessary that this system in particular continue on?
My understanding once was that Historians generated a consensus understanding of the world we live in and how that world came to be, while simultaneously keeping that consensus as honest as possible by puncturing its self-delusions. I am quite convinced that the current system is incapable of performing such a function, as I believe examples like the 1619 project demonstrate.
Another argument might be that the system generates significant amounts of true knowledge, and that even if that true knowledge is shouted down and buried in the present, it is still possible to dig it up later and use it for the betterment of all. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the harm the system enables in the present and has enabled in the observable past, significantly outweighs any plausible potential benefit in the future. True knowledge can and will be generated outside the present system, and the scale of the harms appear to me to demand immediate redress.
Or perhaps the present system is about the process, not the observed ends. The important thing is to generate and maintain this lively, interesting, collegial intellectual ferment, where smart people get together and bounce zany ideas off each other, and we fund this in the hope that they'll hit on some bizarre, out-of-the-box idea that's super useful, something we'd never find by looking for it in a rational, systematic, spreadsheets-and-time-cards approach. And if this is the argument... You concede bias, but I do not think the term "bias" adequately encapsulates the scope of the problem.
Since the late 1980s, book after book has assailed the lack of viewpoint diversity and power of political correctness on campus. But in the ensuing decades, these problems have only worsened. Universities are now in a feedback loop in which a political monoculture creates a hostile climate for conservatives, driving self-censorship and empowering cancel culture, which keeps conservatives out.
And so on, and on. It is routine for Academics of all disciplines to call for ideological purging of people like me from the academy. It is routine for academics to express support for discrimination and exclusion of people like me from the academy, whether in polls or in their own public advocacy. I do not believe it is possible for my views or my values to receive a fair hearing in any part of the existing academic system. I do not believe it is practical for members of my tribe to attempt to join that system in hopes of reforming it from within. I do not believe that the system can be meaningfully reformed in any eventuality; Academics, collectively, have built the environment they wish to have and fully intend to maintain it, at any cost, while burning vast resources and generating considerable harms. The solution is not to ask them kindly to please not, nor to generate ineffectual mandates in the face of limitless resistance and bottomless malicious compliance.
The job we gave Academia was one of great import. They willingly accepted a sacred duty, and in my view they have willingly betrayed that duty about as thoroughly as it could possibly be betrayed. One of the patterns I've noticed in Moderate thinking is the ability to recognize that if bad choices are made, negative consequences are likely to result, but then when the bad choice is in fact made, to argue that the negative consequences they themselves predicted should nonetheless be restrained. My unwillingness to engage in such behavior is, I think, one of the things that marks me as an extremist. There have been no shortage of warnings to the Academy that if they continued to convert their system into a partisan war-engine for their tribe, the system itself would be in peril. They continued. I think it is time to actualize the peril. If you disagree, I'd be particularly interested in whether you disagree over where to draw the line beyond which the system must be dismantled, or if you disagree that there is such a line at all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2d ago
The key insight here is that sufficiently inconsistent "rule of law" is no longer rule of law. "I would prefer rule of law. Let me know when it's available again."
See the expansion above.
...I think I should probably generate fewer open-ended grievance rants. I guess there's the question of my personal experience and interaction, and then there's the question of general observable data. Put another way, are they good at teaching, and are they good for society?
Personal experience is a big part of it: I've been taught, and I've observed those close to me being taught, and I've worked at low levels in the system helping teach, and I've taught on my own outside the system. I've worked as a professional artist for near two decades now and was a struggling artist trying to break in for a half-decade before that, and that whole time I've been trying to learn as much as possible. To reiterate the edit above, I would never suggest that anyone I care about pay money to a university to teach them to be an artist, any more than I would recommend that someone I care about join a multi-level marketing scheme or invest in NFTs. The mismatch between value burned to value received is just too wide, even without accounting for the ideological contamination. This is the part of academia I know the most about, and I think maximalist-negative assessments of this area are entirely warranted.
Second-hand experience is also a part of it: I have professional academics in my immediate family who I'm close to, who are wholly committed to the current system, from which I can gain insight into a contrary perspective. I know they are good people who have dedicated their lives to excellence in their profession, who care deeply about doing a good job, who believe deeply that they are fighting the good fight, who have likewise spent decades straining to learn and improve, to do a good job. The stories they tell me and the answers they give to the questions I ask about how that fight is going are not encouraging.
Observation is a very big part of it.
Student loan debt is somewhere around two trillion dollars, and student loan forgiveness is a live political issue. The strongest argument for the existing system, by a very wide margin, was that it generated prosperity by equipping its students for success in the modern economy. That justification is incompatible with the apparent necessity of writing off all the student loans we shoveled into the pockets of those institutions. We can observe that their costs have spiraled without apparent end. We can observe that their capacity to achieve the goals that justified those costs appear to be chronically declining. They are very bad and very arguably getting worse at the jobs we pay them to do. But on the other hand, they are fantastically good at generating vast pools of toxic ideology which they then pump directly into our society's memeplex, with disastrous consequences for everyone.
You mention history: the most significant output of historical academia in the last decade or so that I'm aware of is the 1619 project. I think this is a very bad output that has made the world a significantly worse place in ways that can be directly measured by counting specific dead humans. A runner-up would be the supposed child graves "discovered" in Kamloops. My assessment of other outputs from the field leads me to conclude that this is probably a reasonably representative example of what we should expect from the field, and indeed from most fields generally. It seems to me that a large portion of every dollar Academia receives is going to go to generating more of this, and things like this, and things even worse than this. There are a lot of other examples, spread very widely over academia as a whole. I never got around to writing a post about the academic lady, prestigiously positioned at a prestigious university in charge of a grant worth the better part of a million dollars, discussing in a publicly-posted interview how important it was to not report abuse of black children by their families to the authorities.
There's more. There's so, so much more.
Poetry and history can certainly have real value and legitimate research. I am not confident that academia is outputting any appreciable quantity of real value and legitimate research on these subjects, relative to the value it consumes to "study" them. Then again, Poetry and History are not my direct area of expertise.
I am an artist. I am very interested in encouraging my kids and their numerous cousins and young people I encounter generally to pursue art as a skill and even potentially a career, because I find it very rewarding and think they might as well. I would never, ever encourage them to engage with the academic art world in any way, and will actively discourage them from "studying" art at conventional educational institutions, and certainly not to pay those institutions to teach them how to be an artist. My personal experience with those institutions was woeful, and I've seen no evidence since that my experience does not generalize.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
You have to be very cautious about this, it's mostly an exaggerated self-deprecating meme - large subfields of psychiatry and psychology work great.
Define "work great"? Leaving aside the drugs end of things, does psychotherapy/counseling reliably deliver good results compared to much cheaper alternatives like, say, talking to a priest or a volunteer who's completed a two-hour course on active listening?
Much of mental illness is as much a political and ethical problem as it is a treatment problem.
But the treatments, and the academy that developed them, have very obviously oversold their "solutions" to the point of actively and chronically aggravating the political and ethical problems. They have made a habit of claiming that that old, well-tested, workable solutions should be replaced by new and improved solutions that will fix everything, and then when these new solutions don't actually work they and their allies pointedly ignore all the consequences.
Would you disagree that if we want to answer the question of why this murder happened, the answer is that Psychology as an industry didn't do its job? If you disagree, could you explain why?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
...I'm questioning my own memory, but my recollection is that Scott wrote extensively on the cultural implications of the Robber's cave experiment and what it tells us about tribalism in his classic posting era, and then a couple years later someone pointed out that Robber's Cave was likewise faked.
At some point, there actually has to be a feedback mechanism between pernicious behavior and resource and status distribution.
Do you think such damage could plausibly be within three orders of magnitude of the damage the current system has recently produced?
If "lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research" is a problem worth considering, maybe it behooves the system to fix the problem in a more discerning and deft manner, rather than simply allowing it to fester to the point that outside intervention becomes inevitable? And if the system is constitutionally incapable of fixing the problem... what is there to do but simply accept the costs?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
The creator of Cops is on record that they intentionally selected footage with an eye to avoid aggravating racial prejudice against blacks.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
The whole point of an ivory tower is to be sealed off from the world.
The sealing is insufficient, as it is leaking tax dollars, electricity, telecommunications access, food, water and air, among other notable deficiencies which crave rectification.
Nationalize the endowments and the pensions. Nuke and pave.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
tanto points are significantly stronger than a lot of other point styles. In addition, tanto-style blades are frequently chisel-ground, which is worse for cutting but better for this sort of thing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
a 3-to-4-inch blade with some form of locking mechanism.
I actually don't routinely carry a knife any more, mostly because I work from home and am not usually anywhere but at my home, which has knives like these scattered across most interior surfaces. But anywhere I go, my prior would be that 50%+ of the men I see, and no few of the women, are carrying one of these.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I cannot fathom why anyone would carry a knife with them to a social occasion.
...Like, a pocket knife, not a fixed blade?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
And yet, we have gained serious erosion of the NFA, and concealed carry has steadily advanced.
Why don't you move, out of curiosity?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Don't lay this at the feet of liberalism.
Was the ACLU not liberal? Was the Atheist movement not liberal? Was not Academia liberal? Was Blue Tribe culture, in the broadest sense across the whole western world not Liberal?
The problem is several universalist beliefs systems have formed due to liberalism's permissiveness. These universalist beliefs are zero-sum and require their adherents to both proselytize and interfere with other groups values systems.
Functional society requires proselytization and interference in other groups' values systems. These are not options, they are going to happen a lot if you want human cooperation at any appreciable scale.
Liberalism is a stable solution within a particular value substrate that acts as an additive transformation to myriad existing beliefs, requiring them to adopt a particular value base in regards to divergent belief systems around acceptance and non-universality.
Liberalism is not a stable solution, because it requires values coherence to exist at all, while actively generating values-divergence. It eats itself. The history of the last few decades has been a very obvious, very public example of exactly how it eats itself. Conformity is necessary when you pack people in together like sardines, and that conformity has to be imposed even if people don't want it. And so either it is enforced, or society fissions along innumerable fault-lines into subgroups capable of doing so.
Merely add that substrate to your beliefs, keep to your own community, and voila problem solved, no violence.
A common understanding over what it means to "keep to your own community", or what "violence" is, requires exactly the sort of enforcement of conformity you are claiming is unnecessary. It is certainly true that if men were angels, government would be unnecessary, but men are, observably, not angels, and government is very obviously necessary. People will not keep to themselves. People will not leave the other alone. We cannot now maintain consensus on whether we should tolerate drawings of the Prophet Mohammed or saying the N-word; we cannot even agree on what murder is or how to deal with it, much less shrug at endemic slave trading and mass human sacrifice and the systematic rape or mutilation of children, to name a few cultural peculiarities that tend to corrode "keep to your own community" ideals.
Why do human's keep returning to universalist beliefs?
Because humans need order. Not want it, not prefer it, need it, and on an extremely fundamental level. And they don't just need a little bubble of it surrounding their immediate person, they need it out to the horizon with a uniformity that allows them to imagine it stretching to infinity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Does it seem that way? I don't think I gave any indication that I believe only liberals can be civil. Illiberals of a tribe can often be civil to illiberal members of the same tribe.
We agree that we can't tell whether a group of people being civil with one another are liberal or illiberal. The question is if we can tell whether a group of people being uncivil are liberal or illiberal. You seemed to be claiming that uncivil = illiberal. If my argument is that both civility and liberalism break down under sufficient values-incoherence, and you reply that people being uncivil are displaying illiberality, the problem is whether evidence can distinguish between our hypotheses. I agree that illiberals are uncivil to those they oppose, but the question is why. I am also pointing out that liberals observably turn into illiberals and embrace incivility, which your argument doesn't seem to account for, and which it really ought to, given the numerous horrifying examples of the problem.
As for the rest of your questions, they come across as an antagonist gishgallop. Instead of subjecting me to a barrage of questions that clearly veil some point you are trying to make, you would do well to simply state your point clearly.
I think my questions were quite reasonable, but I can reframe in the form of a statement, if you like.
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Liberal ideology led directly to present strains of illiberalism, by obvious and publicly observable attempts to implement Liberal principles. This happened quite uniformly all across America and the Western world in general, all at the same time, very decisively, and with surprisingly little conflict from within Liberal culture. Illiberalism did not defeat Liberalism, it very clearly emerged from it by obvious extrapolation from Liberal principles.
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Often, this Liberal > Illiberal transformation happened very publicly and obviously in numerous prominent organizations, and even in specific notable individuals, and both those transforming and those watching them transform recognized that the transformation was being driven by pursuit of specific, clearly-articulatable Liberal principles. They were not rejecting Liberalism, but rather their Liberalism was self-destructing.
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These Liberal > Illiberal transformations are fundamental changes, such that where the transformed have ended up is, from the outside, very obviously incompatible with what were presumed to be bedrock principles of Liberalism, and yet many of the transformed do not themselves recognize that they are no longer Liberal in any meaningful sense. The best example here is probably Free Speech: both America and Europe claim strong adherence to freedom of speech, but the principle is rapidly dying out in America and is more or less entirely dead in Europe, and neither society seems to have common knowledge of this fact.
If your idea of "too different in values" applies to two groups of Arab muslims who have the same genetics, same language, same religion, same basic economic modes, who disagree over point of theological authority, then your conception of distance in value space is hardly meaningful and not useful as a predictor of conflict. It's probably borderline tautology, for obviously any conflict arises over some difference or another.
This seems like a reasonable point, given how fraught prediction is in general... And yet it seems to me that attempting to assess core values and the conflicts between them still gives better predictive value than trying to label people as "liberal" or "illiberal" based on ideology or apparent temperament. Some examples:
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No one on the Blue side saw Freeze Peach coming, near as I can tell. No one on the Blue side saw Trans Rights coming; it was still being treated as a punchline in Blue entertainment as little as a year before it became a bedrock issue for the Blue Tribe vanguard. No one saw the collapse of the atheist movement coming. No one of consequence saw the ACLU flip coming.
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My recollection is that Conservative Christians did see the general flip toward illiberalism on the part of Blue Tribe coming as far back as the 90s, and arguably much further back than that, based on an assessment of values rather than surface ideology.
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Currently, it seems to me that a lot of people have predicted a hundred of the last zero collapses of Woke, and have consistently underestimated political radicalization in general. On the other hand, quite a few people have been wrong in symmetrical but opposite ways, so maybe it's a wash.
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Despite this, it seems to me that the arguments for Liberalism that I'm aware of are, at this point, entirely bankrupt, and rely on ignoring the evidence of cultural evolution over the last few decades. Zunger's thesis, near as I can tell, remains unassailable: Tolerance is not a moral precept, and Liberalism's collapse seems to be an obvious consequence of Liberal axioms to the contrary. If you think otherwise, I'd be quite interested in your arguments.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Looks like a UI screwup. I approved the post, and given that I still see option to remove it in the UI, and having just toggled it back and forth to test it, I'm not sure what's going on there.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Just a bit too pat and simplistic. Looking around, it seems to be precisely the illiberals of all stripes who cannot engage civilly.
It seems to me that you are begging the question; do you recognize a population of illiberals of any stripe who nonetheless engage civilly, or is the identifying mark of the illiberal an inability to so engage?
How many of the illiberals you actually observe emerged from uniformly liberal environments? How many of them used to be liberals themselves? How many of them arrived at illiberalism through liberal arguments pursuing liberal ends by liberal means? How many of them even recognize that they are now illiberal?
What percentage of Europeans would agree that Europe no longer has any meaningful claim to free speech principles? Would you agree that Europe no longer has any meaningful claim to free speech principles?
Do you believe that "free speech" is a coherent, actionable concept that has been in meaningful effect? If so, where and when? Do you expect its return?
if liberalism generates values diversity, then illiberalism has a symmetric failure mode whereby, due the illiberals' need to enforce cultural uniformity, tribal boundaries are formed along literally any cleavage site in value-space (no matter how close the groups' values may be in absolute terms), and are amplified until civil behavior becomes impossible.
I am skeptical that people who lose the capacity for mutual toleration are actually close in values-space in any meaningful way. Could you give some concrete historical examples of people losing the capacity for mutual civil behavior despite coherent values?
On the other hand, I observe large human cultures operating in highly cohesive, cooperative ways for centuries. Few of these long-term-successful cultures appear to me to have been equally or more liberal than our present society in the modern era, and most and perhaps all of them were much, much less liberal.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Conversation, cooperation, civility, all the foundations of complex, positive-sum human interaction rely on shared values to operate. Liberalism generates values-diversity. When values become sufficiently diverse to be mutually incoherent, conversation, cooperation and civility can't function any more. That's what you're seeing around you: values-incoherent people losing the ability to interact in a positive-sum manner because they lack the necessary common ground.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
My argument is that it's not just about the scale, but what you are doing at that scale. It's the difference between a canal and a bulldozer; both are examples of earth-moving technology, but they are not equivalent technologies.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14d ago
Transistors are nanotechnology, curently making people's lives better.
No they are not. "nanotechnology" in the Drexler sense involved the ability to perform large-scale manipulation of individual atoms, allowing the manufacture or alteration of arbitrary physical matter. transistors do not provide this capability.
Pretty sure they're referring to the TV show.
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