In the field of American studies (and the subset African American studies), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. sits both inside the priesthood (in his Harvard professor role) and outside (with his TV work, notably Finding Your Roots). Like GMU economists, he does more than anyone to bring the public into academic conversations (in this case about history and genealogy) that the priesthood largely controls. I once heard a professor lament "I'd write a whole book slamming him [Gates] but my grandmother would kill me."
There are always popular preists who engage with the public in approved ways. You have to walk a fine line of appealing to the masses but not being heretical, so you need to be both in good standing in two communities. The pope is a person. He is the pope of AAS. There are also sometimes lesser popes. Academics who write popular books, but aren't heretics. Still it's risky, I think of Jared Dimond as a popular priest who the lost a battle and is now mostly considered a heretic.
Diamond's sin is writing outside of his field. He's a biochemist writing history. From historians' perspective, he's not a heretic; he's a rando who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Plus, he didn't really know what he was talking about. Or if he did, he purposely presented the supporting data and ignored examples that contradicted his thesis. I go back and on whether he did this on purpose or not.
I wouldn't say that, i think he's a great and very important public intellectual. Like a lot of big thinkers, he gets some big things wrong (some of them were obvious to me immediately on reading, like the idea that Australia has no easily domesticable wild plants), but I think he gets more right in the end.
It's odd, I've often come across references to Diamond being debunked or discredited, but every time I try to dig into the details it's either minor quibbles that don't really contest his core point, or obvious absurdities like trying to claim Europeans never actually conquered most of the world. Is there a source anywhere that actually tackles the question of "Why Europe?" and comes to a substantially different conclusion than Diamond's?
I've also searched for criticisms of him on r/askhistorians, and I just saw people getting upset that he took on a bigger project than "here's what we learned from digging into this one tomb."
I took a history class freshman year on this exact issue, and my professor's argument was that one of the biggest reasons why the New World was less advanced in terms of military technology was that iron and coal deposits were so far away from each other that it would have been almost impossible to coincidentally make steel, which was almost inevitable in the Old World where such deposits overlapped.
As far as major inaccuracies, iirc one of the biggest was that Diamond had this whole argument about sedentary food production being easier in the Old World leading to more stratified and complex societies leading to military superiority, but the Inca Empire was in fact massive, sedentary/farming-based, and highly stratified. The lack of horses was a major factor in their defeat, but they weren't helpless in the way Diamond describes; they actually persisted fighting the settlers in some capacity for decades, including one point at which they did massive damage to the settler groups by organizing massive groups of people to drop boulders on them.
This is disorganized and I could look for/think of more if you'd like but these were some of the big complaints he had.
This is my experience as well. Anything i read debunking him smells desperation and cope. They are quibbles about the story at the introduction, which is a dumb story and it's wrong, but wasn't the point of the book. The basic point that Eurasia is big east to west, so things moved quickly between different parts, and that mostly explains it, and no one refutes that. They just don't like big thinking and have a priestly visceral reaction to his work. It's kind of shameful. Like I keep waiting for the debunkers to you know get to a point and debunk, but they got nothing.
My main problem with Diamond is he puts theory first and then selectively collects facts to support his theory rather than working from facts to develop a theory. Worse yet, many of his facts are just plain wrong, and he ignores the facts that don't support his theory. The so-called "big thinkers" like Diamond, who like to make grand simplifications while not bothering to dig into the actual data, are really small thinkers who distort our understanding of the world.
Most diseases do not transfer to humans from domesticates, is the most obvious one. Smallpox, ebola, covid, etc, do not come from domesticates. This is a core part of his explanation of the disease gradient between the Americas and the Old World - and the disease gradient is the single biggest factor in the ultimate crushing victory of the Old World - and is actively wrong.
Additionally, the disease gradient worked the opposite way, in Africa's favor, despite the fact that many of the most important domesticates (horses, cows) basically die on contact with Sub-Sahelian African environs due to sleeping sickness.
I haven't read that book, but as far as I can tell, it argues for the geographic superiority of Eurasia, even including North Africa, over the rest of the world.
Anyone who sums it up as "this is why Europe triumphed" is cheating.
Why Western Europe and not India, the Middle East, or China?
You're not wrong, but answering the sub-question of "why not America, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Oceania" is at least a lot closer to addressing the "Why Europe" question than anything I've seen from his critics.
And don't forget that most of the game-changing inventions that changed the historical dynamics in Europe came from China. Paper and printing, iron and steel production, gunpowder, the compass, mechanical clocks, wheelbarrows, etc. One theory is that the reason China didn't exploit these inventions to dominate the world, is they had a relatively centralized empire most of the time. While Europeans were divided into feuding states that needed to exploit things like gunpowder to gain an advantage of their competitors. Note: I don't buy into this theory.
The short answer is that it wasn't just geographical, although geography played a role- especially in relation to coal sources transportable by waterways.
There was an epistemic layer. The monarch/sovereign state needed to lose it's absolute monopoly on property- in English Common Law the sovereign is also subject to the law. More importantly, religion/the state need to lose its absolute monopoly on truth.
There are other reasons. Guilt/forgiveness cultures are rare- honor/shame far more common. Both the scientific and entrepreneurial industrial revolution required a culture in which the consequences for mistakes and failures could be overcome. Japan has a suicide forest. A campaigner tried to have this changed. The authorities response was 'why would we want to that?'
As a central cultural archetypal figure. Jesus was absolutely essential for the global revolution which raised roughly 85% - 90% of the world's population up out of the types of poverty which most modern Westerners cannot even imagine.
> Is there a source anywhere that actually tackles the question of "Why Europe?" and comes to a substantially different conclusion than Diamond's?
I feel that you're asking a question as if you had looked long and hard, but... if you had looked long and hard surely you would have come across some other explanations.
I suggest two books to get you started:
Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
By: Walter Scheidel
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
By: Joseph Henrich
Both are excellent, in fact far better than GG&S.
As far as "debunking" Diamond, well it depends on the specific argument. The idea that domesticable plants were more available in the fertile crescent has been attacked. I don't know enough to talk about it. Domesticable animals too, for example Zebra can be domesticated. The idea that Europeans were resistant to germs because the lived with domesticated animals seems false too as most germs didn't come through that route. The idea that length of shoreline lead to fragmentation is very tenuous in itself (lots of places with this feature), there are much better explanations.
And so on, and so on.
I like the idea that seasons and agriculture lead to selection for consciousness and intelligence (seemed like a direct consequence of the ideas in GG&S), but Diamond precisely told us that actually Europeans were dumber than Papuans for genetic reasons and because they watch too much TV.
It's less "as if I've looked long and hard" and more that it seems odd to me that people criticizing GG&S never seem to bring up alternate approaches to the question it's addressing. If people think Diamond addressed the question poorly, I would think the natural reaction would be to point to someone they think did it better, but in my experience it seems more common to act offended that he raised the question at all.
And I appreciate the book recommendations, although TBH I'm pretty unlikely to devote the time to read a full book on the subject any time soon.
Diamond,Jared, _Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies_, in the prologue:
"[...] natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies."
Funny how Diamond earlier had mentioned how despicable genetic explanations are, to suddenly come up with a genetic explanation of why Papuans can keep track of plants and animals better than Europeans.
Also, it never occurs to him that once agriculture started it may have created the conditions for the genetic selection of smarter more conscientious people. And yet, he believes that selection did happen, but only for resistance to some diseases.
In short, Diamond suffered very strongly of confirmation bias.
I think Diamond was quite open in the intro to his book that he did it on purpose.
There is a tendency among Jews to want to downplay racial differences because the Jewish religion treats ethnic competition as a matter of kill-or-be-killed (at least at pertains to Jews vs. non-Jews), and this naturally leads them to be fearful of the consequences if people were to believe race is real.
Or maybe they have a millenia-long history of people wanting to eradicate them down to the last child, with one of the latest and closest-to-successful incarnations very much on racial grounds?
What you are describing is Jewish religious teaching, which is not at all the same as history.
Anyone who behaved as the Jews behave, would have caused people to want to kill them. But the Jews behave this way largely because of their belief that others just innately want to kill them.
I’m not sure that “American Studies” counts as a priesthood. I think a priesthood has to have a few things
1. A specialized body of interconnected knowledge. I can’t form a priesthood around knowing ten random facts which any normie could learn if they so wished, the knowledge has to be such that it must be learned sequentially— that is, require a series of inferential steps to acquire. Otherwise, a lay person could learn the subject piecewise, studying whatever parts were relavant to the particular issue without being meaningfully impaired by not knowing the rest of the subject matter.
2. It must be professional: its members must rely on it for a significant portion of their livelyhood. Otherwise the incentives against coruption which Scott discusses don’t work nearly as well. Also, this is the requirement which keeps fandoms from being classified as a priesthood.
3. It has to have public relavance. We care what doctors and lawyers and scientists think becuase we have questions about health or the law of the natural world whose answers the priesthood is better positioned to discover. And we actually care about the answers to these questions, which is from whence the priesthood ultimately derives its power over us.
I maintain that American Studies, as an academic discipline, is not a priesthood, because it fails point 1. If you nuked the discipline from orbit, there is no relavant question which the public would be thereby unable to answer. Certainly, there are interesting questions which a priest could answer better than a random person, but these could be answered by an economist, a historian, or a sociologist just as easily, without the economist, historian, or sociologist knowing the whole basics of American studies, or indeed anything outside their field.
By Scott's definition of a priesthood, I would argue that it is not -- the definition of a priesthood implies that in normal times, they have an epistemic advantage over the public society.
Academic grievance studies are more like a cult masquerading as a priesthood.
Lawyers have been a functioning profession for a very long time. Not ephemeral at all on the scale of human societies. Unless you mean a geologic time scale, in which case who cares.
"Law" has. A given type of lawyer has not. Same with "religion" and "medicine." That's not what we're talking about here. Those aren't priesthoods. The group of individuals who have passed the American bar exam and currently practice law is a priesthood.
> 1. A specialized body of interconnected knowledge. I can’t form a priesthood around knowing ten random facts which any normie could learn if they so wished, the knowledge has to be such that it must be learned sequentially— that is, require a series of inferential steps to acquire. Otherwise, a lay person could learn the subject piecewise, studying whatever parts were relavant to the particular issue without being meaningfully impaired by not knowing the rest of the subject matter.
I would dispute that. Medical textbooks are available in any decent library. Any amateur can read up the literature on any medical specialty, it takes some time and smarts, but is quite possible. Case in point: our host has offered literally hundreds of articles on all kinds of topics a mile removed from his medical specialty (e.g. on economics, or literature, or philosophy) and seems rarely be hampered by not knowing the secrets of any particular priesthood.
Your medicine skill level is not what makes you a part of the physicians priesthood any more than a PhD in theology makes you a Catholic priest. It does not matter how much you know about medicine, if you operate on people without being ordained as a priest, you will go to jail, just like any bishop would excommunicate any layperson who decided that they know enough theology to celebrate the Eucharist.
These priesthoods which enjoy a state-sponsored monopoly (Lawyers are another one) are generally the the tightest knit communities: if you are kicked out of your profession, you are just an unemployed person with a maxed skill which is about as professionally useful to you as if you had spend a decade leveling up your Star Trek lore.
My own field is STEM academics, which is a little more porous. Sure, nobody will publish you without a STEM-adjacent degree (and preferably a PhD degree and an important professor co-author), but at least you can move between subfields. The phrase "Go back to your outer electron orbitals and do not sully this room with your presence, chemist!" is rarely if ever spoken.
"and seems rarely be hampered by not knowing the secrets of any particular priesthood"
I'd say he is often hampered by lack of field-specific expertise but does an admirable job of compensating for it through general smarts, extensive research, and interaction with his readership that includes experts in many of those topics. Still, he says lots of things that end up needing correction or clarification, and would be absolutely silly to try to publish in a journal of that field.
Likewise in medicine, you can read up on a specific problem and often learn details that most doctors wouldn't know off hand, but if you tried to put that knowledge into practice without consulting a doctor first you'd be likely to screw up in important ways.
> Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there.
Accepting the premise that this "infection" was worse than previous infections -- it could be that this "virus" (wokeness) was more virulent than other viruses OR that the immune system of the priesthood was weaker than for previous infections.
You seem to favor the former explanation, but I think the latter is far more likely. We are literally in the middle of the largest revolution in communication technology in human history; the barrier between inside and outside the priesthood is radically different than it was before.
Now, I think that academics have done a *particularly poor job* of adapting to the reality of communication today. I study social media and politics, and I think that the way academic twitter evolved was a disaster: mixing our professional communication with our political beliefs in an open, activist-heavy platform was an immunological nightmare. I think you and I agree about this. But I think it means that the success of "wokeness" is epiphenomenal to the specific tenets of it.
I wrote about this recently -- "Musk Bad" is a strategically useful frame to get academics to stop using Twitter, but really the problem is "Twitter Bad for Priesthood"
I disagree with your implied claim that current inequalities ALWAYS reflect group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts in the distant past. There's the obvious rebuttal (which inequalities? does the fact that men are stronger than women indicate that men as a sex committed wrongful acts in the past to bring about this state of affairs? or that Norwegians are taller than Japanese?), but even if you're limiting yourself to economic inequality, there are innumerable counter-examples.
Well, as in many things, the concept itself is an important tool to admit within your model of the world. Much better to be able to grasp that than to live in some delusional Just World in which you're convinced that everyone only gets precisely what they deserve by rights of their own skill and effort. But as in many things, it being an important tool does not mean it can then be applied indiscriminately to ANY problem and produce equally useful results. Don't use a hammer to drive in screws.
I don't think this is the fundamental idea that wokeness is based on; I don't think it's original to wokeness; I don't think woke people are the only ones who believe it (many or most conservatives acknowledge the reality of intergenerational wealth and privilege); and many ideas or beliefs that people consider "woke" are obviously wholly disconnected from this idea (e.g. most apologists for wokeness in this thread are invoking the idea that respecting people's preferred pronouns is just "being a decent person", and gender ideology obviously does not derive from the idea that "current inequalities... reflect group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts").
It's not the only idea that's foundational to wokeness but most of the others are equally reasonable at their core. For instance gender ideology grows from the basic liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone.
That's such a bizarre gloss of the connection between the two beliefs that I'm rather flabbergasted. In no particular order:
1) The NORMATIVE belief that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone does not in anyway imply the FACTUAL claim that everyone has an intrinsic, ineffable "gender identity" knowable only to themselves.
2) Many liberals (e.g. JK Rowling) are more than willing to meet trans people halfway and say that how they choose to live their lives is their business. Proponents of gender ideology do not accept this and demand nothing less than absolute fealty to their worldview, and openly call for violence against people who do not recognise that trans women are literally women.
3) Most active proponents of gender ideology either do not recognise the "active harms" caused by their worldview (e.g. women convicts being raped in prison by "trans women" with fully intact male genitalia; children who have been permanently sterilised because they erroneously believed that medical transition is the only route to happiness and flourishing
4) If gender ideology flows logically from the liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone else, you would expect trans activists to be rather live and let live politically. I think it's fair to say that this is not remotely the case.
5) If gender ideology flows logically from the liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone else, why are trans activists not ardent supporters of transracial people? If all trans people are demanding is the right to live their lives in peace in a way that makes them happy, why don't they extend the same courtesy to transracial people?
Randomness obviously exists - either in the form of literal quantum randomness, or pseudo-randomness arisen from complex causal chains too long and entangled for us to interpret them as more than background noise. That is also obviously a factor. But if you see some kind of difference between two groups that has statistical significance then obviously that can not easily be written off as mere coincidence, and that's where having more articulate explanations than just "everyone gets what they deserves" comes in play.
Again, I don't think this should be applied bluntly to answer EVERY question. I agree some people go to ridiculous extremes to deny any contribution of individual merit or luck just like some people go to ridiculous extremes to deny any systemic biases. All of these are real effects that play off each other. Which produces which result is an empirical question that should be studied as such, not by starting with an answer and then working out the rationalisations for it.
I think you are straw-manning what they said. I think it's true that current inequalities are always _partially_ downstream of past acts, but in the sort of trivial sense that in a complicated world, _everything_ is partially downstream of things in the distant pass (and yes, I think limiting this discussion to social/cultural/economic inequalities is what was meant/intended in the first comment).
But what they actually said was that the idea that acts in the distant past impact current inequalities is true and important. I do think that that basic idea is sort of undeniable and obviously true. It is almost never the _only_ factor and it is very often not even the most _important_ factor (and not that rarely it is a _trivial_ factor), but it is ~always _a_ factor.
Excluding literal biological facts, I would actually be curious to hear an inequality that was in no way influenced by some at historical misdeed (even if it's only a misdeed by today's standards). Everything is downstream of somebody conquering, raping, pillaging someone else (something that is pretty universally frowned upon these, days, even if was the norm 1000 years ago).
>Excluding literal biological facts, I would actually be curious to hear an inequality that was in no way influenced by some at historical misdeed
I think that's goalpost-moving. Every inequality was "influenced" by historical misdeed in the sense that history is holistic and cause always precedes effect. Lomwad seemed to be making a stronger claim, that present economic inequalities are always directly caused (in whole or in part) by wrongful acts in the past.
But in an effort to answer your question, one trivial example is that, when you look at median American household salary by ethnicity, it does not remotely tally with recent historical examples of who was conquering, raping and pillaging who. Japanese Americans who had all of their possessions stolen from them and were forced into internment camps bounced back within a generation, without any raping or pillaging required (however you interpret that metaphorically). It's no exaggeration to say that the descendants of Japanese Americans who were interned during the war are wealthier than the descendants of the white Americans who interned them. American Jews famously make more money and wield more power and influence than the American average (particularly in specific industries like the film industry), but many of them can only trace their history in the US as far back as the 1930s, arriving there with little more than the shirts on their backs. To a first approximation, they didn't achieve their enviable position in American society by conquering, raping and pillaging - on the contrary, the only reason they came to the US was to ESCAPE from being conquered, raped and pillaged.
Nearly eleven years ago (!), Scott pointed out that, contra the standard progressive narrative, the American states which practiced slavery until the Civil War are generally poorer than the American mean (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-the-least-powerful-force-in-the-universe/). If you can conquer, rape and pillage for hundreds of years until you are forced to stop doing so by the people who voluntarily stopped doing so several decades prior, and end up not just on parity with them but actually worse off, that ought to prompt some reflection as to how much explanatory power the "economic inequality is always the result of historical misdeeds" theory really holds.
Slave states were poorer than their northern, industrialised cousins already at the time of the Civil War, *that's why they lost the war*. I agree that the general idea that all evil results in wealth is wrong (and in fact is itself pretty dangerous: it suggests zero sum thinking, and once you adopt that mindset, you're left with either "I should sacrifice myself for the sake of others" or "I should hurt others for the sake of myself". The people who push that idea would like you to pick the former... but we know that in practice lots of people, if they internalise that mindset, choose the latter). But obviously there are forms of wealth that could not have been possible without committing certain evil acts.
For example the US' vast territory and natural resources were undeniably conquered at the expenses of other people who previously occupied them. War and genocide were involved. I don't think anyone can be blamed much for bringing smallpox to the Americas - not enough medical knowledge for anyone to do anything about it, even the most peaceful expedition imaginable would have caused the same tragedy - but the various acts of enslavement and genocide are entirely on those who perpetrated them.
That said, I agree we should actually stress that sometimes - more often than one would think, in fact - being an antisocial asshole is not just evil, it's ALSO stupid and simply hurts everyone around. Being a slaver wasn't just evil, it was also counterproductive, it created a class of lazy backwards aristocrats too busy keeping their own slaves from murdering them to do anything else productive with their time, and curtailed the slaves' own potential to contribute to society. Lose-lose. I do think that one big problem with the current leftist thought is this focus on zero sum mindset, which as I said is bad when people buy it. It's like this cultural substrate actually *primes* people to become fascists (which is what you get when a zero sum minded person takes the selfish path to the logical end: I can only survive by murdering and pillaging others, and everything else is just a pretty lie made up to stifle me).
If two people buy the same number of lottery tickets, and only one of them wins the jackpot, the resulting wealth inequality is completely independent of historical misdeeds.
(One could try to argue that the existence of inequality-producing lotteries could itself be a result of historical misdeeds, but as long as the lottery itself is fair, historical misdeeds have absolutely nothing to do with which player wins.)
True, but then who's more likely to better retain and invest the money they won - the person from a relatively affluent family who received a good education and is experienced in the ways of money, or the beggar from a long legacy of beggars who's easily scammed and has no ideas for what to do with money beyond spending it on necessities and luxuries?
Individuals can buck trends, but on large samples, these sort of effects will probably produce a systematic self-reinforcing feedback loop in which money draws in more money.
If you can't figure out the answer to that "obvious rebuttal" faster than you typed it out you haven't really thought about this much. If the rebuttal is obvious the person you're talking to is as capable of coming up with a good answer as you are, so when you haven't bothered it seems both disrespectful and like the prelude to a death-by-a-thousand-questions situation. It feels in bad faith.
If you answer the first 3 to 5 objections you have to an idea for yourself, from the honest, good faith position of people who believe that idea, you'll have more productive, deeper discussions (and understanding), and people like me will feel less like giving you (I admit) lightly condescending advice.
It's an obvious rebuttal to ME. There are plenty of people in the world (including many who comment on Scott's articles) who actively deny that there are any natural inequalities in male and female strength and athletic performance whatsoever, and insist that any allegedly innate disparities are purely the result of socialisation.
To me, the idea that some inequalities are just natural and biological (such as the difference in male and female strength and speed) and hence not the result of some historical misdeed seems so obvious as to hardly require any justification, but apparently there are people who disagree with me. Maybe it's dismissive of me to say that I think it's bonkers to believe otherwise, but there does come a point where you have to be like "if you don't believe this, this is a you problem". Am I obliged to engage with flat earthers in "good faith"? The idea that women would be just as strong as men if not for socialisation seems at least as insane and obviously wrong as the belief that the earth is flat.
You've been incredibly prolific in this comment section, and occasionally I've caught a well-expressed glimpse of my own beliefs in some of what you say, esp. regarding the denialism of biology latent in vocal and extreme trans-related activism.
This being said, I have some lightly patronising advice of my own concerning your contributions:
(i) You do not seem to have sufficient knowledge in biology to be an adequate foil to the biology-deniers who trigger you so.
(ii) You do not seem to engage with non-biology-related challenges to your worldview in good faith. As commenters gave gone to great length to convey to you, it's possible for many of the trans-rights-conveyed points to be correct or have value even as their extreme versions go off the rails and deny reality. Acknowledging these points when you can will go some way towards bolstering your own argumentation.
(iii) Your tone and choice of words consistently suggest that this is a highly personally and/or politically charged topic for you. To put it bluntly, you come across as a hater, or at the very least someone who thinks trans people are in some way ill-intentioned as a group, or collectively harmful.
These collectively mean that, at least to my eyes, you are hurting your own cause, at least in this context.
Y'all are obsessed with the smallest, most inconsequential things. Literally nobody's average bench press means anything. If you're frustrated it's because you can't get past the most superficial, surface parts of the issue. As I said, the rebuttal is so obvious you haven't bothered to actually think about it or why other people don't find it compelling. You've decided you win and nobody else is operating in reality when all you've done is read the jacket copy.
> current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit but also group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts or at least first-mover advantage in the distant past and maintained through collective action today
The OPs claim was that inequalities do not *solely* arise from a single clause, so why are you claiming an implicit "ALWAYS"?
>current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit but also group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts
That seems definitive, without any obvious hedging. If they'd said "current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit, but CAN also..." or "MAY also", it'd be more equivocal and I wouldn't find it as objectionable.
I disagree to the extent that I think the OP's statement includes the possiblity of a contribution approaching zero and we can never be definitive enough about these things to gain certainty, but I see where you're coming from.
I assume that most "viruses" are based on some amount of truth. A truth that doesn't overreach (and so is therefore a net positive) is a reform, while a truth that overreaches (and so is therefore a net negative) is a virus.
I think you're overstating the case. The only undeniable part is the mundane observation that history can sometimes have lingering influences on the present. The rest is debatable. The presumption that we should separate the population into semi-arbitrary groups, and then consider average differences between them on any desirable trait or outcome to be a grave injustice is not obvious.
Yeah, wokeness, much like Marxism, gets at a fundamental truth of the world. They see the problems quite well in many cases, but some of their solutions are bad or impractical. Trying to declare them nothing but left-wing wonk untethered to reality is a denial of reality as sweeping as anything else. It's just a denial that rests on consensus.
The problem is that both tend to think they have identified *the* fundamental truth rather than just *a* fundamental truth, and thus pound every "nail" they see with their hammer (and sickle).
As an apologist for wokeness I disagree with this characterization. Certainly this is how *some* woke people think but for me the reason to look beyond "individual merit" is the factors in society that prevent individual merit from being measured effectively. Such as racism and misogyny that are still with us. While you can look for the roots of these issues in the past, the way they arose has no effect on how I think they should be addressed now.
“Solely” is doing a lot of work here. It’s frankly incredibly disingenuous to pretend that’s what the dispute over wokeness was about, whether inequality was “solely” due to merit. And wokeness also came with a whole host of prescriptions that absolutely do not undeniably follow from this premise.
The "immune system" in academic fields that are estranged from industries has been incredibly weak since the recession. Because of poor funding and rising wages outside of the academy, a comparatively large proportion of people who remain in these fields are making a financial sacrifice for ideological reasons. However, donors are also disproportionately likely to be ideologues: a recent study found that donors were systematically more extreme than party voters. This mirrors the Marxist takeover in the 20th century, where USSR funded academic institutions to ideologically capture them. That would mean not only is the immune system weak and the virus potent, but the patient is living in close quarters with an infected community, to stretch the metaphor.
I would add that I think there is a major reason for weak immune system, linked to how scientific priesthood differ from classic priesthood: It builds theories both predictive and falsifiable about some aspect of the world which can be independently tested, giving an alternative (but royal) entry into priesthood stardom: come with something more predictive than the current best, or falsify the current best, and you will get a fast ticket to cardinal or pope level, regardless of how remote to priesthood you were. It used to work in fields with strong experimental wings, difficult theories but easy falsification and big bonus for being right in the form of new technology. Hard science, especially since industrial revolution. However, since WWii which marked it's peak in term of technological trickling down, there is a clear crisis there, essentially closing the fast path (aka reality check) and I feel that not only hard science is much less immune to crazy ideological derive than it was, but it de-anchored the soft sciences and let them devolve back into classic religion-like priesthood
It seems intuitive to me that the thing that is causing all this chaos is social media. It is the thing that happened right when everything started becoming crazy. Hank Green has a really good video on how humanity is going through a moment because of it. (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8PndpFPL8g) (Are we allowed to link stuff? If not I'm sorry) . It seems like it's causing a lowestcommondenominatorification of everything. Outside priesthoods this looks like advice about eating capybara testicles to cure your cancer. In priesthoods the lowest common denominator ended up being all the woke stuff.
Sorry but why is wokeness bad? Is this term used differently in the US? I can't really think of a reason why it's a problem to address someone the way they want to be addressed?
This seems like a "assumed clear" premise to the whole text but I don't get why that should be clear. Wokeness is as far as I know not defined very well and some parts of it may be bad while some parts are probably good and most are just noise.
Nevermind I asked this question some time ago already and apparently it really IS a different beast in the US and also what Scott seems to fear is for me more in the word "censorship" and not in the word wokeness. Im still assuming getting "canceled" is not as bad as it is told but I'm not from the US and also not someone with opinions that he usually canceled so I'm probably biased.
> what Scott seems to fear is for me more in the word "censorship" and not in the word wokeness.
idk about scott, but I doubt american freedom of speech is going anywhere(an american hillbilly has more freedom to say slurs then the British royal family)
Communism, the death of merit, child genital mutilation are worse.
I think our incoming administration is even more interested in restricting speech than our outgoing administration was, and hope our institutions are robust enough to resist.
.... While Im anti trusting trump and the elon h1b drama was last week; there were just purges of wrong thinkers during 2020 in a historical moment of mass-fear.
Im aware of a few cases of claims of elon removing blue checks, it aint 2020. If trump has *any* power over blueskys banning people Id be positively shocked.
Well, the question of whether trump has the power is really just another version of whether our institutions are robust enough to resist what he wants.
in 2020 there are just emails from the government telling the social medias to censor people and *they did*; its established fact this happened, your being absurd to claim your more worried about it happening now, when it already happened then; even if you believe trump will do it with 99% odds, 99% < 1
Trump could be pure evil, he wont have the same crisis as "biden" did to censor; and I was still speaking the entire time(tho I am unemployable apparently)
I was unaware of this news story but still not 2020; lets not forget how hysterical everyone got and how that horrible line of families breaking down was crossed, jobs were lost.
A politically active person getting politically induced legal threats have always been a flaw with american freedom of speech(hence the slapp laws existing in the first place) this is a return to the norm, maybe a return to a slow tend line of decline if you wish.
Trump sucks in many ways, including wasting time on the lawsuit, but I do not think there's any way he will be worse on free speech than the Biden or theoretical Harris admins.
- Refusing to publish studies that contradict woke premises (eg that immigration might have negative effects, or that anti-police campaigns backfired, or that some problem might not be caused by racism)
- Saying false things because they think it is helpful for activism (eg that anti-lockdown protests would spread COVID, but anti-police-brutality ones wouldn't)
- Doing extreme and controversial things because it supposedly corrects a disparity (eg prioritizing COVID vaccines based on race rather than age, even knowing this would result in thousands of extra deaths)
- Prioritizing identity/activism rather than merit in hiring and promotion decisions, for example basing hiring on "diversity statements".
- Extreme versions of language policing like calling criminals "justice-involved individuals"
- Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who objects to the above, and of people who object to that, and so on recursively
- Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who points these things out or gives the public information about them
I'm saying this because Leo had a real question and I want to answer it, but let's try to avoid turning this comments section into one big "wokeness: good or bad" fight.
Ok thanks. As I said afaik this stuff just doesn't exist in Germany and all of this is for me more in the term "censorship" and not wokeness.
In Germany afaik all of this is just fantasy "I'm the real victim here" published by the far-right and nazi people to propagate THEIR censorship as justified.
This make it very confusing when suddenly there are posts like this where I'm not assuming far right ideology and agenda that use these dangers as a real problem to solve when it's not actually a real problem in my region.
There absolutely is stuff like diversity hiring in Germany. I distinctly recall one instance where a postdoc position was advertised for women only, despite this being literally illegal. I didn't go out of my way to seek this out, a friend of mine organically stumbled across it as he was looking for positions (spoiler: he didn't get an interview).
As you said it is illegal. Your friend could have used this to make some money. (It is also illegal to exclude trans people and apparently there is someone who uses this to claim money multiple times because someone forgot to include a "d" in his ad but that's also just a fringe case. Like assholes exist. That doesn't make it a social problem. But maybe I'm biased idk. In my bubble people tend to be sexist and racist and "phobic" against everything not cis-heterosexual and not even called out for it. They DO complain a lot about being called out for it and not "being able to say anything at all anymore" while saying the things they say the can't say anymore without anything happening.)
Wokeness is a frustratingly broad term, and seems to be used about anything to the left of Mussolini that the speaker doesn't like.
I don't doubt that the examples Scott cite are real, and I agree that they are very bad, but 99% of the time I come across someone complaining about wokeness it is someone trying to sell me on the idea that the west has fallen because the latest dumb blockbuster had a black woman in a leading role, or something of similar substance.
This makes it very hard for me to know the extent to which this is a real problem or not outside the US. I'm not American, but I'm willing to take the word of Scott and a few other writers who have presented concrete evidence of 'wokeness' in the sense Scott uses the term being a problem there. Of course there is no shortage of people claiming it's a problem in Europe as well, but it all seems to be the same sort of complaints Leo mentions above (which again, is also on par with 99% of the American complaints), in so far as there is any signal beyond that, it gets lost in the noise.
Disputes over terminology are generally worse than useless, but in this case I think it would be in the best interest of people who want to talk about the real problem Scott is describing here, to come up with another term to help normies distinguish their concerns from the "I'm just mad I can't say the n-word at work anymore" crowd.
> distinguish their concerns from the "I'm just mad I can't say the n-word at work anymore" crowd
...when the concern is woke censorship, aka "X doubled down on saying the n-word at work and ended up leaving their job because they picked this particular hill to die on", how are they to distinguish that from the crowd?
>As I said afaik this stuff just doesn't exist in Germany
>In Germany afaik all of this is just fantasy "I'm the real victim here" published by the far-right and nazi people to propagate THEIR censorship as justified.
I think a lot of people both inside and outside Germany would vehemently disagree with both your description of reality and your particular framing on this. I would encourage you to at least entertain the possibility that you might be misfiring here if your stance is that "too much wokeness" as described by Scott is something unique to the Anglosphere.
Sure, probably- I'm going to back out of this conversation as I'm not German and I don't want to overclaim my own knowledge of the situation. All I was trying to say was that the OC felt very confident and my baseline (which I've also adjusted a little) was way off that of Leo.
Hm okay. I really doubt that. Do you have any concrete evidence when people were actually canceled or censored or self-censored for stuff like Scott mentioned in Germany or Europe? I know only of people who complain very loud to an audience of right leaning people that they are being cancelled while making a lot of money with racist and sexist stuff they say and are preaching to that same audience.
Or maybe you have an idea where I can get this problem that is not infested with Nazis? I just can't relate at all to the stuff that Scott is describing. That to me sounds like something to be feared if the far right will get the majority, which is not unlikely to happen soon. Not something I have to be afraid of from the left.
Edit: sorry I misformulated: evidence that this is done systematic and frequent. Not some uniq cases where it happened somewhere once.
Ctrl-F "TM", first result. Unfortunately the news site linked is in Swedish, but if you search for "Kristina Sundquist", you'll find a bunch of RW news sites repeating it.
The first result I saw was the phrase "COVID treatment". If I require a matching case, there's a comment by Bella Marte which contains zero links. What is the Swedish citation?
Lol. I'm French, so I kinda institutionally hate Germany, but if we park the word "woke" for a minute, is it not the case that German elites are so utterly captured by group think that they
1. thought Nordstream was a good idea?
2. Did not blink at welcoming an unprecedented number of mainly unskilled non- German speaking immigrants?
3. Phased out nuclear power when anyone with 2 non-group-think captured neurons to rub together could see that it would make absolutely everything (prices, carbon, energy supply, dependency on Russia) worse?
4. Don't seem to have blinked at the fact that senior politicians actually falsified documents to that end?
5. Don't blink that people can punished _more_ for complaining about rapists than for the actual (as per a valid trial) raping ?
I think that last category is your "victim card" extreme right - if so, don't they have a point??
The last one is certainly woke, and probably the second one (at least if you had the same "this will be GREAT and everyone who disagrees is a Nazi" that we had) but 1, 3, 4 are just the combination of leftism and being unable to see that actions have consequences other than the ones you wish they had (a prerequisite for many forms of leftism)?
Dude, you literally live in a country were a rape victim got a harsher sentence than her rapist for saying mean things about him on social media just because the rapist was from a minority group. Are you arguing in bad faith and playing dumb or are just dumb?
No I'm not. It wasn't "mean things" it was threats. It wasn't because he was from a minority group but because he was a minor. Are YOU arguing in food faith or why are you ignoring this?
Edit: oops wrong post. If you mean me and the case about that one guy that was a minor and the woman who threatened him in his messages it still applies. If not I have to first look up what case you are talking about.
I despise Nazism, but I think Holocaust denial is free speech (as the latter is, in it's pure form, descriptive while the former is normative). And yet the latter is illegal along with the former. That is not related to American "wokeness" but it is a similar problem IMO.
FWIW this same claim was made in the U.S. for a long time before the Overton window shifted. Antone who said this sort of thing was a problem was dismissed as far right.
It could well be the case that you are surrounded by legit racist and people whining and exaggerating as well. Those can both be true at once. These are scary times for everyone and I think that tends to amplify our instinctive tribal responses.
Along these lines, it should be obviously true that in any given bubble the Overton window may be at any given location. Even if the average Overton window lands too high up, for an individual it may be too low. Since many media outlets broadcast to very large areas, their own Overton window may seem bizarrely biased in one direction to one region, while in another its biased in the opposite direction. Then, since an individual just doesn't inhabit the other bubbles, it looks like the media outlet is just a malicious actor.
Here is a concrete case in Germany. The wikipedia article even explicitly talks about the controversy over the media bias. Now you could argue there are good reasons the media was biased, but you can make those arguments with many groups that media outlets selectively decide not to apply this to. I think this is a prime example of what this sub would consider as woke overreach.
Though I do think Germany is less woke than the US right now, because in the US, selective reporting and even highlighting of race doesn't get up roars. It's basically the bog standard.
In fact I was in Germany a year after this incident. I talked with a group of women raising awareness for sexual assault and they mentioned this very incident. They proclaimed to not be aware this was a mostly migrant caused event. Bias is like make up when it's working. You won't notice it, but you will be influenced by it.
Addendum: it can be hard to say whether there is bias for or against something in a society. If you boil it down it can be hard to find where bias is even bad because most biased people claim to have a good reason for it! Almost by definition some must. In the US, there has been a shift where powerful actors (CEOs, politicians, any public figure, and especially universities) absolutely can say and do mean things to right wing groups, but will get absolutely demolished for doing that to left wing groups in any way. And it's not reflective of the public average. This is a problem because these powerful institutions of course have control over others. There are right wing powerful actors, but for the most part they aren't institutions most people have to go through, unlike jobs and universities.
That's... Not a good example. One sentence is due to insult which can be argued that it's to harsh in this case. The other sentence was "nothing" because of age rules that have nothing to do with wokeness. Both a combined to an argument even though they have not much to do with each other. The people you need to address for lowering the general age rules for sentencing are different people than the ones you need to address so people get no sentences for insults. Also she could have insulted him just fine with no consequences if she used slightly different words.
>One sentence is due to insult which can be argued that it's to harsh in this case.
Well yeah, that's exactly what I'm arguing. And I'm arguing that it's "too harsh" because wokeness has arrived in Germany.
I don't know how anyone can sincerely entertain the idea that wokeness hasn't arrived in Germany, while also being cognizant of the fact that one can be literally imprisoned (albeit briefly) for describing a convicted rapist as a "disgusting freak" in a private communication. If that's not what liberal and conservative people are complaining about when they complain about wokeness, what else could it be?
I looked it up. She was sentenced not only for insult but also for threatening. It was direct communication alright, but directly to the one. Also she was one of 140 cases after his contact info had been leaked.
I thought the one about young people is in the constitution but that wasn't right. So the people who could change that are actually the same people. What I meant is that these are very different political goals and campaigns if you want to achieve them and the one about young people being sentenced has not to do much with wokeness in my opinion.
If I may refer to my upthread comment (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods/comment/85238653) the misunderstanding here is that race questions and trans questions come as a package (="woke") in the US and that package as a whole has no equivalent in Germany.
Scott's definition of woke at the beginning of this subthread put an emphasis on race. A comment about that definition cannot be invalidated by making a point about trans.
I don't understand your comment. Are you suggesting that unless a country has succumbed to the full complement of identitarian grievances, it cannot be said to have "gone woke"?
That seems kind of silly to me. It's not a binary yes/no. Even someone who thinks the term "woke" is a conservative dog-whistle would surely concede that Germany is wokER than, say, Saudi Arabia.
The conversation unfolded something like this (simplifying):
A: What is wokeness?
B: [Something about race]
A: OK we don't have that in Germany
C (you): I am baffled that you would say that, these links clearly state that you have trans-rights.
I would invite you to not be baffled by that fact that somebody who earnestly inquires what wokeness is and gets told it is a race thing would not take trans rights into account when judging whether wokeness exists in their country. The "we don't have that" comment was a direct response to a very specific subset of what wokeness might be.
Also, your claim that there is no racial wokeness in Germany just seems plain wrong. Thousands of people participated in George Floyd protests, some of which escalated into violence (no one killed, thankfully): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Germany
My claim in the post I linked (not sure if you followed the link) was not that there is no US style wokeness in Germany but that people who are trying to import US style wokeness to Germany wholesale are extremely confused about how the world works.
The George Floyd situation itself, whatever you want to make of it, does not have an equivalent in Germany. Not in a naive "it could never happen here" sense but in the practical sense that the dynamics that lead up to George Floyd are just not present.
Hopefully the issue that Scott has with "wokeness" is not that people hold opinions and sometimes protest to voice these opinions in the abstract, but how it influences policy. I am truely at a loss what kind of policy change Germany could implement in reaction to George Floyd and, I claim, so are the protesters.
Note that according to your own wikipedia source, the only thing that happened in reaction to those protests was that then head of government Merkel condemned racism as a "very very terrible thing".
You might want to call that condemnation as such "woke" but that would be ahistorical: German anti-racist sentiment follows from the experience of Nazi-Germany not from the US civil-rights movement.
I think the reaction after Fukushima that pushed Germany to stop nuclear power plant and instead burn lignite is another example of very damaging purity spiral (Claude estimates 200k/300k DALYs since 2011).
The claim wasn't that this is a new phenomenon, just that it increased in the last years.
This idea that nuclear energy is something to be avoided reaching as far back probably served as an "obvious truth" on which post-fukushima-fear could crystalize into a reinvigorated political movement. In that sense, using this well known and seemingly obvious "truth" that nuclear power is essentialy bad, replaced the need for an actual argument derived from data in (re-)starting that movement. I think this replacement of factual arguments with "obvious truths" is the basis of Scotts gripe with Wokeness
I knew/know nothing about German politics, but I still remember visiting Germany's pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai. It was a giant friendly pavilion completely devoted to energy, proudly presenting how Germany was moving away from "dirty" polluting sources to renewable ones. And listed in the "dirty" sources was nuclear power, with no justification and barely a mention anywhere else in the three-story building. (It was probably easiest to just lie by omission and trust that the general public already "knew" how horrible nuclear was.) I was shocked and very disappointed.
I was even more disturbed at the end when they made you take a "survey" by exiting the presentation through one of two doors: the door that said you agree with everything they said, want clean energy, are a good person, and wish to make the world a better place ... and (cough, sneer) the OTHER door. They actually had cameras set up to count which door people used. It felt almost dystopian. I imagine propaganda works even better when you make people commit to it with a physical action.
So, even five years ago, the German priesthoods were already in a post-truth virtue spiral, doing their best to deceive/herd the public - but only for the goodest of good reasons, naturally!
Every time there is any discussion about wokeness, the automatic response to that is 'none of this is real, stop claiming to be the victim when you are the oppressor'. I couldn't tell you whether it existed in Germany but I can tell you that I've seen a hundred people post the exact thing you posted about America, even though every point Scott mentioned is something specific that specifically happened.
Independently, every argument that occurs in America is automatically imported to every other country, whether it applies there or not.
Independently, wokeness is not uniquely American in its virulence. There's no reason to assume Germany's own priesthoods wouldn't be susceptible to it.
So, if 'what's bad about wokeness' was an honest question i.e. you're positively disposed to it to start with, I recommend *not* assuming it doesn't actually exist in Germany. Positive disposition about wokeness produces this assumption it doesn't exist, whether it exists or not. Unless you know for sure that you would not have made this mistake about America if you were American, this assumption seems verifiably uncorrelated with reality.
Ok I'll look out for it more. It's really hard to actually filter it from all the far-right noise. I realised I'm not really surrounded by intellectual people in my everyday life so maybe that's why this alley seems abstract to me.
On Scott's first point, I did an internship with a European think-tank focusing on migration (based in Paris, but with a couple of German researchers), and one of the big discussions, held relatively openly, was: "can we publish this research if it makes migrants look bad, and therefore provides ammunition to the far-right?" I got the impression that this attitude was ubiquitous across the European think-tank space, and I'd assume it's prevalant in Universities as well.
Also... Scott mentioned extreme language policing. As I'm sure you know, there's lots of language in Germany that's literally illegal. Björn Höcke was fined around $30,000 for saying: "Alles für Deutschland". There's also some deplatforming of speakers at Universities because of their views, but I don't know how that compares to UK/US levels.
Not quite what Scott meant, but my (very left-wing) brother lives in Dresden and told me the other day that "woke" (he didn't use the word...) things like pushing the use of awkward gender neutral language, and seeing healthy normal male behaviours (taking your t-shirt off at the bouldering wall was his example) as somehow "toxic" - are some of the main factors, besides immigration, behind the increasing popularity of the far-right in East Germany.
Yes, far-right people around the world are very hypocritical and try to exaggerate this problem and use it cynically for political ends. But it's very easy to see similar problems that the U.S. has in Germany.
Germany, for obvious historical reasons, has erradicated the term "race" successfully from public discourse. Even in far right rhetoric, insofar as it reaches the public, you would find racist sentiments phrased in terms of a mythical German birthright [the "mythical" being my addition, this is left implicit].
On a more practical level Germany's closest equivalent to racial tension is probably still a lot closer to US relationship to "Mexicans" (as used in Trump speeches, not the neutral sense of the word) than it is to US actual racial tension a la BLM.
This state of affairs is very confusing to less smart people on both ends of the spectrum who import their political wholesale from US media (aka "the internet") in the same way we import the MCU and Taylor Swift (aka the US is obviously our cultural hegemon, this should not even be a debate).
So you will for example find confused leftists desparately trying to adapt a concept like PoC to a society where this is not really relevant and confused rightists worrying about affirmative action style positive discrimination in a society where even asking someone to identify as a member of a race would be a serious faux-pas.
Potentially as a consequence of this, the role that "woke" has in US discourse (as far as I am a aware of it) - as a generic slur used by the right wing for politics they don't like - is filled by "green" in Germany. So when, as it happened recently, CSU tells their voters that they would not want to work with "the greens" they are not referring to the green party specifically, they refer to "green" as the great other. If you are in search of a conceptual rather than literal translation of "woke" that is the concept space I would suggest to start looking at.
And in Russia, all the things from Scott's comment and many of the other worst things are done in the name of state ideology, which can be defined with minimal simplification as anti-woke...
How would you distinguish the attempts to destroy careers as a feature of wokeness and not simply the excommunicatory maintenance of the priesthood you described in your original post? I assume there is some degree to which you might say that the practice of excommunication within wokeness is more severe than the standard practice outside of it, but I am curious what specific discrepancies you see between the two.
I thought the main difference was the 'reasons for excommunication'.
We believe their pre-wokeness excommunication reasons as positively correlated with producing good doctors, and post-wokeness reasons to be negatively correlated? I may be simply failing reading comprehension.
The last two features that Scott listed in his definition of wokeness included:
- Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who objects to the above, and of people who object to that, and so on recursively
-Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who points these things out or gives the public information about them
Which seem to me to be behaviors inherent to priesthood at all points in history (as well detailed in the original post) and not unique to wokeness. My original question was what features of the excommunication that happened during wokeness not present previously? I would not find an answer like, "there was more excommunication going on" to be satisfactory, but something like "excommunication during wokeness was more highly contagious between friends/colleagues," to be insightful. I think Scott touches on this with the first quoted point (saying it happens "recursively"), but I am also curious what other discrepancies he (or anyone else who was a member of a priesthood in which wokeness circulated/circulates) has noticed.
Also, forgive me if I'm misinterpreting, but I think what you're saying can be boiled down to:
Good excommunication = not woke
Bad excommunication = woke
(Good/bad derived directly from positively/negatively correlated with producing good doctors)
This seems extremely reductive to me, surely woke isn't just "bad." Even if you think it is bad and irredeemable it surely is more nuanced than just anything that is "negatively correlated with producing good ______ (doctors, scientists, artists, politicians, etc.)." I take issue with a number of things commonly referred to under the category "woke" and am also a defender of some. To make a horrible mistake, I'll get personal and acknowledge that I'm trans.
When Scott notes as a facet of wokeness
- Refusing to publish studies that contradict woke premises
I find I agree somewhat. I think there is a lot of valuable research that could be done on transhood that is not being undertaken because it is a politically charged arena. While I think *currently* that most of the political charge is being delivered by the right, I think the impetus of this political charge was delivered by liberal activism, which is imo the precursor that mutated into wokeness.
But when Scott writes,
---
Wokeness is a beautiful resolution between contempt for the public and wanting to stay in touch with the public. The public (as represented by the average straight male white guy) is, themselves, out of touch. Not just out of touch, but the enemy of in-touch-ness, the ones who must be conquered and transcended in order to be truly in touch. By learning what pronouns to use for trans people (etc, etc), you’re learning secret knowledge, feared and loathed by the masses, that makes you cool and in touch with the youth (considered as an abstract mass). You will gender your trans patients exactly correctly, and their eyes will go wide and they’ll think “Wow, doctors are so cool and in touch, not like all the other people I meet.”
---
I think there's a lot missing here. I don't think being sensitive to pronoun-usage around trans patients is simply a way to elevate the medical priesthood into being "in touch," I think it's an actually valuable addition to the responsibilities of medical professionals. I can say firsthand that in any medical experience I have ever had post-transition it has been glaringly obvious as to whether or not the medical professional has earnestly thought about displaying sensitivity towards their trans patients before. I once had a breast sonogram done and was referred to as "he" while the doctor had the ultrasound wand pressed into my breast. It was a little bit surreal.
Both of these statements are trans-focused, as that is the facet of wokeness that I am most apt to speak about its impact on, but I'd like to be clear that I find the overall shift away from wokeness a net good. I was a pretty vocal supporter of wokeness a few years ago when in high school/as a freshman in college, but ironically transition gave me the space to start to notice my discontent with and question it.
I do think that wokeness was more effective as a political tool than as a means of enacting social good/justice, but I also think that for many who were shelved by the ideology of wokeness, and who are now feeling more comfortable and less pressured, there can be a tendency to mislabel other phenomena as within the category of wokeness and to over-vilify it.
Scott described it as a "memetic plague," which I think is pretty fair. The particular manifestation it took in the U.S. was certainly viral, and fits my own key requirement which is "temporary." I think wokeness was a temporary viral outbreak and should be contained and examined for better understanding and the production of a vaccine. I think also that it was able to spread throughout our societal body very rapidly because our body is itself in disrepair and failing. There are very real, immense tensions present in the foundations of our socioeconomic and political systems (I have a U.S. perspective here, but socioeconomically speaking neoliberalism and globalism are highly international affairs), and I am operating with a sense of a high likelihood of a major schism happening within the next 20 years (medium-high for the next 10 years). I think there is a danger to ascribing malfunctions in these foundational systems to wokeness and believing them to be temporary. It'd be like looking at a dead patient who had COVID and saying "COVID killed this person" without examining their lungs first to notice they had asthma. COVID can kill people, but that person's lungs were already structurally unsound. It's also important not to over-vilify wokeness by saddling it with certain behaviors that are natural facets of human social dynamics and politics, especially ones that are heightened by tension caused by structural failures in our foundational systems (tensions of race and class seem to me to be the most pertinent examples here). It'd be like looking at a dead patient who had COVID and saying "COVID killed this person" without noting that they were 105 years old. People can die from COVID, but also removing COVID won't remove death.
This was meant to be a reply and it's gotten out of hand in length, so I'll include my own summary/description of wokeness here so that I'm not speaking too abstractly without putting some skin in the game for others to critique.
I'd define wokeness primarily as the "application of techniques of resistance to an apparatus of oppression to the actually existing apparatus of suppression." I think wokeness was really just young people learning about the horrors of historical oppression and pre-supposing the moral right and responsibility to fight viciously without critically analyzing the current state of affairs (the contemporary suppression of certain social groups was treated as though it were oppression). That was the ignition, but the wick and fuel were the various priesthoods (most notably the social sciences and art/media institutions), the hyper-connectivity and algorithmically rewarded outrage-loops of social media (traditional media exhibited some of this too), and the capitalization by mega-corporate structures who saw this as an opportunity to earn brownie points among a coalition (young people and Democrats) they sensed the greatest democratic threat from (interest in taxation).
There's a world of difference between "doctor gets excommunicated for promoting quack medicine" and "doctor gets excommunicated for refusing to take a knee".
Diversity statements don’t end up with prioritizing activism more than research - nothing is going to change the fact that at top universities, people hire on the basis of research prestige, with teaching, diversity, and service being just tiny rounding errors you can see at the edges. But the diversity statements and teaching statements mean that sometimes you make some tie-breaking differences on these grounds.
This is not accurate. A diversity statement is a forced political statement and researchers who fail to adequately endorse the necessary DEI doctrines are filtered out of the applicant pool. By filtering out qualified candidates on ideological grounds you are necessarily putting activism ahead of research. The mere existence of diversity statements signals a stifling culture which will encourage many capable people to avoid academia altogether.
This is not accurate. A diversity statement (or “statement on inclusive excellence”, as the University of California called them when they were part of the process) is a fourth document, parallel to the research statement, teaching statement, and service statement, in which a candidate says what they have been doing to promote inclusive excellence, just as their other statements say what they’ve been doing in research, teaching, and service. Most of the time, no one pays much attention to anything other than the research statement, but if you’ve got some nice-sounding thing you can spin well in one of the others, it can be a little advantage. Occasionally, a particularly woke or anti-woke statement on inclusive excellence will trigger someone on the committee, and they’ll act on it by objecting to something about your research. But it certainly doesn’t function as a litmus test in practice, even if it’s a fun dark fantasy to imagine.
You mean, said specifically that they think it would be bad to help students from different backgrounds succeed? No.
I also haven’t seen anyone who was hired who said in their teaching statement that it’s a bad thing to teach students.
Can you give me an example of some of the tenets of DEI that you think someone might legitimately disagree with, that would be relevant to mention? I don’t agree with most of the tenets of education policy, but it’s still not too hard to write a statement about teaching that emphasizes the positive. It should be easy enough to do the same for a statement about “inclusive excellence”, which is a very broad phrase, that I assume most people can agree they are working towards, even if their vision of it is different from someone else’s vision.
I'm politically leftist, but it annoys me greatly that universities considered diversity statements an appropriate thing to require from their staff. I think you're interpreting the parent comment about "filtering out right-leaning people" very narrowly here. I don't think most of the filtering is happening to conservatives who decide to risk their career by making a particularly anti-woke diversity statement. It happens before that. Anti-woke individuals are discouraged from even applying to institutions that require diversity statements.
Imagine if instead universities were requiring staff to write statements on how they are upholding the morals and values of Jesus Christ. Sure, maybe in practice most academics don't pay much attention to these Christian values statements, and professors rarely get fired or lose funding over them. It's still a strong signal that those of us who don't believe in Christian values aren't welcome. And it's still disturbing that non-Christians would have to hide their beliefs and pay lip-service to Christian values or risk blowback that we'd much rather not deal with.
I was short listed for a job at Notre Dame and had to give a statement about how my research supports their Christian mission. It’s not too hard to write something about how the study of the epistemology of uncertainty is important for all belief systems, including religious ones, and it has the benefit of being true.
The inclusive excellence statements are similarly annoying, but also not too hard, even if you’re opposed to a lot of wokeness, as long as you don’t actually believe that it’s a good thing to discourage students who don’t fit in.
Prioritizing COVID vaccines based on race rather than age was also expected to kill more black people (specifically, elderly ones missing out on vaccines going to younger people)! Its only virtue was that it would kill even more elderly white people.
All of these things do seem bad. I think this post would be vastly, enormously stronger if at least some of these were actually in the relevant section of the body (hopefully with some actual examples and citations). Instead, there's a brief bit about using the right pronouns for people and a link to a years-old blog post about one particular conference.
This really highlights my frustration with the entire term "woke" and why I wish we could excise it as a unitary concept. It's exactly the same thing as "eargrayish." It's blending perfectly benign and innocuous things incredibly extreme and outlandish things for (as far as I can tell) the sole purpose of pretending they're the same. It is significantly harmful to any attempts at clarity and precision around social trends.
"It's blending perfectly benign and innocuous things incredibly extreme and outlandish things for (as far as I can tell) the sole purpose of pretending they're the same."
Although the term in vogue at the time was "social justice' rather than "woke", Scott has been observing this phenomenon for at least a decade: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/ (of course, it is the wokists themselves, in those examples, who are trying to conflate outlandish claims with unobjectionable ones for self-serving ends)
The past usage of the term "social justice" was noticeably narrower than the present usage of the term "woke." I'd guess this is partly a function of the length: it's so easy to slip "woke" into a sentence or phrase, that people seem to do it constantly. Regardless, calling a person an "SJW," or an article or program "social justice focused" seemed to have a relatively clear and consistent meaning in a way that is not at all true of "woke."
Again, Scott's foremost example of doctors being "woke" IN THE POST is simply calling people by their preferred pronouns. Millions of people do this *every single day* with no fanfare. How many people do ANY of the things Scott mentions in his comment above on a daily, monthly or yearly basis? Probably many orders of magnitude less. For that matter, hearkening back to the social justice post you linked, how many *individual people* use words or terms in the motte-and-bailey fashion regularly? Probably not all that many.
(While I think the motte-and-bailey is a useful schema to be aware of, it's biggest weakness--one that Scott exemplifies in his own writing--it's that very often the people using a term in incompatible senses are in fact DIFFERENT PEOPLE. It may make communication frustrating if one person understands a term to mean X and another understands it to mean Y, but it's not a sign of anyone trying to trick you.)
All these things are obviously bad to me, but I would still be tempted to self identify as woke, because I take seriously the idea that more than nothing should be done to reduce the effect of historic inequalities on modern opportunities, and that as long as they're not harming anyone, I don't see why I should mind if someone wants to present socially as a woman even if born genetically male (although my detailed beliefs on this topic are probably annoying to both sides), and that in many cases increasing diversity has some value in and of itself, and that most refugees are good, moral people in difficult circumstances that are a net benefit to the country they move to and would be even more so if given more support and less hatred.
Those beliefs, even though mildly held would be enough to get me labelled as woke by what feels like most users of the term.
Like Leo Yankovic, in the bubbles in which I move I'm much more likely to come across what seems like bad faith uses of 'woke' to harrass people and invert victimhood than the actual negative things listed. Of course, I fully accept that outrageously bad things have been done in support of those ideas and those bad things should be fought by everyone - I can't think of any signficant ideas that isn't true of, and in my embubbled state, it can be difficult to accurately evaluate where the balance is.
I realised my bubble isn't very intellectual in my everyday life. That might be why I only see the other problem of people being sexist and homophobic and racist and not being called out for it. I assume that if I had a more academic everyday life where people in my level of intelligence are not also mostly my friends and peers I would have experienced "cancel culture" more.
Not necessarily. I live in a pretty intellectual bubble and have never seen much of cancel culture. Mind you, I’ve never seen much sexism or homophobia – but pretty much everyone I’m around reports experiencing much more sexism and homophobia than cancel culture.
It seems to be a “Different Worlds” thing. That makes it hard to determine the significance of what’s actually happening.
I have a few doubts regarding the Wokeness and career path. Usually the people making this claims come from an academic background and often miss on the wider scale of the population. Most of the people don't work in these environments. Eg, a person whose views align with Labour Unions or with Communism fear that being vocal about their opinions will result in job insecurity and as a result stay silent, this is a kind of situation that often gets ignored (since these people don't have platforms to scale up their views) but nevertheless still counts as censorship. My field of work is very corporate (as is most of the population) and you are free to share your opinion only if it aligns with a perpetuation of the regent structure. So in some way you only benefit in these environments if you align with their values and it might not be so different from other career paths that you mention.
I get that. But I don't think there are very many cases where genuine trans people use this and don't plan on ever transitioning. I don't even think there are that many trans people but that's a different problem.
I assumed you are opposed to people who want to be addressed as female and haven't transitioned (trough operation, hormones etc) and don't plan to ever do this and also raped someone pre-transitoning. If someone goes through surgery and hormone treatment and have raped someone I assumed you would be fine with calling them she.
> What we've all been told is that nobody gets to decide who's genuine and who isn't
Always remember, the ones telling us that there can be no valid empirical criteria by which someone can say "this person is not trans" — making the claim literally unfalsifiable by design — always try to invoke the name of "science" to give themselves validity.
Most trans people don’t get all the surgical interventions. Transitioning is usually more about the social presentation than about medical alterations.
I mean, Anglophones are living in the dreamtime. They can just tweak a few pronouns and off they go. Other languages have gender built right into every part of a sentence; when it's impossible to say, e.g., "I'm not surprised" without specifying a (traditional, binary) gender for the "I" with every word, the whole movement dies before it's even born. People do create and learn entire constructed languages, but those communities are very very small.
While I wholeheartedly agree that this is an abomination, I feel compelled to point out that the aim is “woke-inspired but not by the usual themes derided as woke in the US”. It’s not about gender fluidity or race, it’s about the belief that the French rule of “masculine as default grammatical gender” turns women away from certain male-dominated study fields.
This particular strain of it is but if you zoom out enough you can see similar thought patterns in post-revolutionary French denouncements, Chinese struggle sessions etc. without even getting into the 20th century German or Eastern bloc experiences - in character if not in severity.
And maybe this all starts to become irrelevant now we're living in the online era of "we're all Anglo now". This thread discussion is only taking place in one language of course.
It's often said on the right that Woke is a Marxist doctrine; I'm not conversant enough to understand to weigh in on that but it does occur to me that especially the racial identity factors of Woke in America are probably substitutionary for what in Europe would be expressed in class-based conflict (Europe until recently not having enough racial minorities to really matter), so communism, socialism. Note that this doesn't explain the gender aspects of Woke, however.
Exactly. It's the same old Marxist ideas of oppressor vs. oppressed conflict and the need for revolutionary changes to resolve the oppression, just with a different axis defining oppressor vs. oppressed.
America is the only real country where politics happens, and the rest of the West are just colonies who pretend to have their own politics while actually receiving ours.
For my part, my impression is that Europe is in general both less woke than the US (more restrictions on trans kids' ability to transition, for example. as another, more obviously anti-muslim policy) while still managing to have a bigger problem with censorship.
Mostly I would credit the 1st amendment for this - I believe Germany also guarantees free speech rights, but the guarantee doesn't have the teeth behind it that 1st amendment jurisprudence does. For example, you often see people online say that "hate speech isn't free speech". But this is contrary to US law - arbitrarily hateful speech still gets the protection of the 1st amendment as long as it doesn't also include incitement to imminent lawless action, the standards for which are quite high.
One example for Germany in particular is the way laws against anti-semitism have been used against pro-palestine speakers. This kind of thing would never get someone imprisoned in the US under current law. Other commentators point out woke ways in which this kind of censorship happens as well.
IMO the US has taken the superior position on both of these axes, but I do understand how someone less woke than me would disagree.
I'm not entirely sure this is on-topic, since I'm talking about laws, rather than "priesthoods", but I hope it's a useful perspective to add to those you've already seen.
In Germany, you can get arrested for writing bad things about dead people. It's a shock to me to hear that Germany has any kind of free speech guarantee.
It's interesting how these things are all over the place - Europe has *terrible* freedom of speech compared to the U.S., but better freedom of the press (barring the absolutely terrible U.K., which seems intent on always combining the worst parts of Europe and America).
Very late response, but question relevant to my recent life. I moved approximately from the Bay Area to NRW about 2 years ago, and the whole cultural landscape people assume for politics is very very different. Which gets trippy when people use overlapping words or are arguing for "more" or "less" with different assumptions of the current level.
Germany's got its own political woke-like elements, of course, but the wokeness Scott is talking about is way more present/instrusive/relevant/powerful/hated in the US. You're not insane, people are talking about this from wildly different contexts.
Don't you think you're giving priesthoods too much credit, even outside politics-adjacent areas? What about replication crises? What about Science Fictions and p-hacking etc etc?
All of these were discovered and brought to light by priesthood members. You know about them because they won their relevant intra-priesthood disputes.
But not always through priesthood channels. Data colada is a blog. Science Fictions is a pop book. The practices exposed by publications like these persist, don't they? And until they spilled out of the priesthood, the priesthood protected its own, didn't it?
My impression is that these were first discussed through priesthood channels, and after the discussion was interesting, people wrote popular books describing what had happened.
I agree that Data Colada is somewhat a counterexample insofar as it sometimes directly releases new results through the blog.
Unless the post is supposed to apply only to priesthoods after a certain time T, where T can vary but it's definitely always in the past (trust me), then I don't see how that's supposed to help. How do I know which current-time priesthoods are totally making things up, but will become trustworthy after they get their internal disputes sorted?
It seems to me that the fact that priesthoods that totally do make things up have existed for extended period of time, like most of them pre-replication-crisis, or the 1950s psychology that you mentioned, totally invalidates the whole argument. The final part about priests being subtle about their lies seems in clear contradiction with this. In what way were 1950s psychologists subtle?
If you're implying that the replication crisis is a one-off event, and now that we've gone through it, we can be confident that we won't have these kind of extreme cases in the future, I could get behind that, but that should have been the meat of the article, instead of anecdotal evidence of how a few specific priesthoods work.
I'm impressed, you succinctly diagnosed this blog post as freeform off the top of the head musings that don't really work together or add up to much. I guess not every post can be a winner.
These are just the ones we know about. And even if an argument has been won, that doesn't mean there has been any meaningful action taken; its just another ritual for priesthood members to step through before creating more crap.
People never believe me, but I saw a lot of outright fraud back in the day. People looked the other way, or weaker professionals took the downfall (postdocs). There were whispers and no consequences.
Right. Scott's answer is a bit too dismissive to the point of question-begging.
"What about the massive scandal where we found out a large percent of the Hard Science Data was functionally equivalent to the meme's 'I made it up' meme?"
"It was scientists who discovered the error, which proves that Science works!"
No. It proves that people cheat the system, sometimes systemically. We put up safeguards to catch careless cheaters, but every system is vulnerable to cheaters commensurate with the incentives that attract successful cheaters.
The question is how well does the profession police itself? If one decade it discovers a massive cheating scandal and the next decade the whole place is overtaken by BS woke ideology, this suggests massive vulnerabilities that have yet to be seriously shored up.
Does religion get credit for biology because mandrel was a priest and darwin believed? Of course criticism comes from people connected to the system, the system is where the people are.
There was more than one system, in multiple different parts of the world. And yet, it's telling that virtually the entirety of the foundations of modern science were laid within one specific system, and not elsewhere.
America is a super power, maybe europe could've be seperate but theres allot of cultural overlap
Every ~~successful~~ rich enough region is a semi-real nation state(with russia and china being the semi-nation states), if universitys "infect" nation states, theres a different theory for why all the world uses university's
Its kinda unclear to me what you mean by system here, there were joint american-soviet science projects when it was debatable they were "the 2" systems. Am I to love all aspects of modern science because islum sucks at knowledge-work, what if I just wanted a red state college to be anti-woke would physics stop working?
I took his statement of a system to reference what we call The Enlightenment and and associated scientific process and reasoning which came out of Europe some centuries ago.
If so thats been like.. 5? political systems taking over since
French monarchy, British monarchy, gutted British monarchy, reconstruction america, fdr's america; the lines are blurry and you can debate who took over the enlightenment when; but if all of them were capable of maintaining the engine of science, why not a 6th?
Great post, I wonder if this is not too dismissive of a real problem:
"But I still have basic trust that something in the New York Times’ non-opinion pages is 99% likely to be factually true - probably spun a bit, probably selected from the space of possible news articles because it supports the Times’ agenda, but factually true - in a way I don’t believe for random YouTubers. And I expect the spin to have some level of elegance."
Lying by engineering a sample bias is probably one of the most insidious and dangerous form of lying because it directly targets a very vulnerable point of cognition.
It directly targets vulnerability in information theory and probability theory, the reason for p-hacking and the replication crisis. It is mathematically impossible to detect without knowing about the data gathering and filtering procedure, about knowing about confounders, statistical paradoxes like Simpson's etc. It can be used to obscure distinction between accidental correlations and real causation.
There should be a burden of proof on the purveyor of information that this is not happening. Suspicions of inculcating a sample bias should be investigated and loudly called out every time, not dismissed as fair game.
It's a worse form of lying because it's much harder to verify, than outright black and white factual lies. It can mislead much more.
“Don’t intentionally omit evidence that clearly contradicts your point” is also a clear and very useful rule, and I don’t think we should be letting journalists get away with violating it.
If the journalist reports “Chinese troops bombs hospital, 300 children burned to death”, but omits (or even just de-emphasizes by waiting until the seventh paragraph of the article to mention it) that the Chinese were fighting the Zizian Echatomological Collective who were building a launch complex for biological agents on the roof of the hospital, and that the children burned to death not in the hospital, but in a nearby orphanage mined by the ZEC as hostages, then I think that journalist’s bias is a problem.
The NYT is not quite at that level, but it’s way too close to it to just say “meh, some bias is unavoidable”.
The places where the NYT straight up lies are also incredibly dangerous, because they're both non random (carefully selected for maximum impact) and believed (since they're just rare enough that people turn off their bounded distrust).
>It's a worse form of lying because it's much harder to verify, than outright black and white factual lies. It can mislead much more.
It can more easily mislead people with high epistemic standards and background knowledge (mostly people in or affiliated with the priesthood.) I think we're observing in our modern informational climate though that you don't need lies nearly this sophisticated to mislead people en-masse. The average person isn't playing the informational game at a level such that this sort of deception is called for.
While "Nothing Ever Happens" was going around tech-right twitter circles, someone remarked that it's the most reliable prediction in history, but it's only interesting when it's wrong.
Scott's position on old versus new media is sort of a mirror to that; yes, they're *mostly* reliable, but all the more insidious for it! The NYT is much more skilled at lying than Joe Tuber dreams of being, and not everyone is going to have the capability of recognizing that. They get what they want in the moment and make an ineffectual correction 10 or 100 years later.
If you're only concerned with some specific factual claim rather than broader statistical trends, though, that sort of liar is quite useful to have around. Better yet, have at least two or three fully independent ones with well-known, mutually hostile agendas, and then whatever details they all manage to agree on are very unlikely to be wrong in any provable way - with, crucially, minimal effort on the reader's part.
Naturally that system breaks down when the supposedly-rival news sources start to coordinate behind the scenes, in pursuit an agenda the reader doesn't understand.
This would be a much stronger argument if Joe Tuber didn't still somehow manage to gather thousands of followers by saying that the Moon is made of cheese. Insidious lies aren't any more dangerous if the public is dumb enough to buy the blatant stupid lies too anyway. At least the insidious ones can't deviate that much from the truth to stay insidious!
I suppose it depends how we draw the lines of insidiousness.
Speaking of the NYT, historically they got a Pulitzer for being wildly wrong about the Holodomor and that lasted long enough and pervasively enough that almost certainly had impact on the public's reaction (and the government reaction?). What about more recent untruths (since untruth can include not-technically-lies like omissions that potentially change the interpretation, selective reporting, etc)?
If Joe Tuber convinces 1% of people the moon is cheese, and this has no effect on the world other than people being wrong, that's sad.
If the NYT convinces 1% of people that they should stop calling the cops and just be victimized, that's tragic. But at least they know the moon is mostly rock, right?
Unfortunately Joe Tuber can also convince people of things that have real world impact, but (so far) it's the NYTs of the world that wield influence more effectively.
Also ignores that a) a not insignificant number of JoeTuber's viewers may in fact not actually be people and b) there is (probably) a massive power differential between JoeTuber's readership and the NYT's.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's that clear. But generally speaking the solution obviously isn't "burn the existing media to the ground and let a million Joe Tubers organically grow and reinvent the wheel from scratch" because that will be definitely even worse.
Obviously a lie with more reach will have more effect, even if it is in itself subtler. And obviously a lie about something that touches your life directly has more effect than one about some random scientific fact you will never really care about (such as the chemical makeup of the Moon). Though that said, the Joe Tubers of this world aren't shy with lies that touch your life directly either. The classic examples being alternative medical therapies, with which they probably actively kill lots of people (by the opportunity cost of them not using the actual therapies, when not because the alternative therapy is literally harmful) all the time.
In many ways sample bias is an inherent problem with journalism as a whole. Simply reporting every prominent murder in a country of hundreds of millions creates a sample bias. Normal people with brains evolved for a village of 100 people tops hear all of that and feel "whew that's a whole lot of murders, the world is really going to the dogs". You should like report a random murder every 15 years if you wanted to convey the correct feeling of danger rather than the correct information (which is virtually useless to most people who aren't homicide detectives anyway).
You also get to decide what's a "prominent murder". And surely it would be better to precommit to "report every thousdandth murder" than "one every [time period]" if you want to be giving an accurate impression.
Yeah, I didn't mean this as a prescription of what to actually do. It would be very complex to design. I'm just outlining the issue.
I'd say any murder of e.g. a big political figure is prominent in that it affects lots of people with its consequences. In fact there's multiple examples of those that have literally changed history (Archduke Franz Ferdinand being the most blatant one). Same can apply for murders of other people with some influence like industrialists or journalists. But when it comes to "husband kills wife over infidelity" or "robber kills victim" then sure, they reflect some kind of crime trend which may be indicator of a social problem, but that's much better understood by aggregated statistics than individual sensationalised news.
Not to mention those high profile murders that are selected purely because of their "true crime" spectacular value which springs exactly from the fact that they are unique and unusual. For example I remember in Italy when Amanda Knox was put under trial and convicted (now generally acknowledged wrongly) for the Meredith Kercher murder. The entire thing was turned into a circus and treated as a whodunnit played out at the national news scale. Quite a shameful display.
What Scott is saying is that you have two options: (1) the information source that has subtle and insidious lies (2) the information source that has blatant lies. I agree that the first option is pretty terrible. But it's not the *worst* possible option!
Like any major news source, the NYT has a reputation they'd like to uphold, and so they try to avoid printing obvious, blatant lies. But also like any major news source, they need engaging, gripping articles to make money, so they fudge the truth. What's the alternative? Web sites with no reputation to upload just go for blatant clickbait lies because that is successful, so that's worse. Whereas a major news organization that never fudges the truth to make the article more exciting loses readership and money to those that do.
I agree that's what Scott is saying. I wonder though if we could get to a journalism culture where engineering a biased sampling is as much, if not more of a reputation hit (since it's a more powerful weapon for disinformation that targets a fundamental knowledge transmission weak point).
It's more difficult to prove but when there is good evidence for an infraction, it should discredit journalists at least as much as other forms of lying.
But wait, why is the one that has blatant lies worse? If they’re blatant, it means you can easily notice them and adapt your interpretation to compensate.
The problem with subtle and insidious lies is that they’re hard to notice and compensate for (even when you notice them), and therefore much more likely to succeed in manipulating you. That’s why we have scary words like “insidious”.
Nobody lies in a way that's blatant to the person they're lying to, that would be obviously dumb. What I'm talking about is lies that are blatant if you spend a bit of time researching. As opposed to lies that are not easy to verify, even with a bit of work.
Think about all the obvious misinformation that spreads on Twitter or Facebook. 20% of people know it's obviously false, but 80% don't take the time to even think if it's true, let alone google it, and so they believe it and spread it.
Even in the scientific community, there are differences about whether each individual paper/journal/subfield should display a "balanced" perspective of all the data or whether the field as a whole should give a balanced picture, with unbalanced subunits being freely published. For example, I've seen claims that Italian physicists were more prone to publishing anomalous experimental results on the principle that suppressing them, even if one's prior were that they were erroneous, would distort rather than improve the quality of the literature overall. Other national traditions saw publishing iffy results as polluting the literature.
The NYT is no different. It can be a useful part of a balanced information diet and is unlikely to unsubtly just make things up, as Scott said. But if you rely too heavily on it you will get a lot of stuff wrong.
> This was supposed to go well, because the priests are smarter than everyone else. But a natural result of these qualities is that all the priests get one-shotted by some bias which is especially appealing to smart people (and especially repugnant to the public who they’re actively trying to differentiate themselves from), lock it in as consensus, then stand firm as a rock in response to the rest of the world telling them they’re wrong.
This is the problem with listening to smart people. Far too many people value intelligence far too highly, without bothering to control for more important factors like character, experience, and morality.
We used to understand this; the "evil genius" was a staple of our entertainment a few generations ago, a warning that a person could be both very intelligent and very wrong. But somewhere along the way, we've lost sight of that. Today we've largely replaced thinking of people as good or evil with thinking of them as smart or stupid. When someone espouses ideas that look terrible to us, we tend to think they must be some kind of idiot, rather than that their values are out of alignment.
Let's look at the most stereotypical extreme example of all. There are plenty of good reasons why people admired Adolf Hitler, and why some continue to do so to this day. This was a man who took a war-torn country ravaged by hyperinflation and built it up into a Great Power nation in the course of less than a decade. This is not something a moron, or even someone of average intelligence, is capable of. And if you only look at that, and conveniently ignore or deny the horrendous evils he did, he looks like a really amazing guy. But he's not an amazing guy; he's evil. An evil genius.
This poses an interesting question, then: How to develop a "priesthood" structure where people are selected for, and gain status within the priesthood by, being *good* rather than simply being smart?
> He took power in the middle of the Great Depression so there was nowhere to go but up; all countries recovered from it.
Fair point. Counterpoint: "all countries" did not suffer from hyperinflation as a part of the Great Depression. There's a reason that the name of Weimar Germany is proverbial for hyperinflationary horror: what they experienced was a (largely) unique phenomenon.
> It was obviously stupid to try to fight the British Empire, Soviet Union, and United States at the same time; a smarter leader would’ve stopped at Czechoslovakia or even the Fall of France and kept Germany’s status as a leading power.
He didn't try to fight the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States at the same time. The USA was brought into the war as a response to some pretty intense provocation from Japan, not from Germany.
And he wasn't even obligated by his treaty with Japan to do so. In the case of the UK, he actually had intended to avoid war with him, but by refusing to accept any compromise he agreed to made Chamberlain convinced there was no upside to giving in any more to someone determined to relitigate the Great War.
Yeah, they cut off America's oil supply, a move which, if not violently responded to immediately, would have weakened the United States enough to enable it to be conquered easily.
US oil imports for the full year of 1937 represented about 8 days of domestic production (27,484,000 barrels of imports, vs. 3,500,000 barrels per day of production), according to figures from the US Energy Information Administration.
"The USA was brought into the war as a response to some pretty intense provocation from Japan, not from Germany."
Nope, the Germans declared war on the US themselves.
And this catastrophic decision was partly motivated by Hitler's persuasion that a rich, spoilt nation full of Jewish and black cultural influence will be no match for the tough Aryans on the battlefield.
I didn't say he ended it; I said that it was a (largely) unique problem Germany faced that made them worse off than most other countries, even after it was over.
I wrote that suffering from hyperinflation was not a typical experience that other countries had as a part of the Great Depression; that German hyperinflation was not related to the Great Depression.
The hyperinflation was over before the Great Depression started. It was *deflation* (which other countries *did* face during the Depression) that garnered the Nazis enough support to take power.
I think what you're criticizing Hitler for here is not lack of intelligence, but lack of wisdom. As any D&D player could point out, they're different things.
>Intelligence is in general correlated with morality because intelligent people are less likely to believe in zero-sum thinking, which is the root of most immoral behaviors that seek to harm others rather than expand the pie.
It’s good to know smart people managed to finally pin down morality but disappointing to hear I’m too dumb to practice it. I can take some comfort in knowing I’m a scoundrel by birth and not by choice.
I guess intelligence’s stranglehold on morality means machine learning is on the verge of turning all mankind into degenerates.
Hitler might have had more charisma than intelligence, but the people actually running the show (Heydrich, Speer, Eichman) was almost certainly extremely intelligent. They probably also didn't believe in the party's own propaganda ( Eichman famously told the mossad agents who captured him that he was never like those lowbrow Der Sturmer readers).
Intelligence are negatively correlated with crime, probably because crime is a very bad strategy in a civilized state. Committing genocide can be a great way to make a career in a totalitarian regime, and so intelligent people have no problems doing it.
If you are poor, you're in a zero sum reality -- resources spent on one thing mean a probation somewhere else. Conversely, it's easy for the wealthy to be consequential "good".... and intelligence is correlated with wealth.
> This poses an interesting question, then: How to develop a "priesthood" structure where people are selected for, and gain status within the priesthood by, being *good* rather than simply being smart?
I think much, much more of the problem being highlighted here is that if you have domain expertise and intelligence in, say, medicine, 99% of the reason you know how to treat cancer is domain expertise and 1% is intelligence. So if you, a trained doctor, are called upon to opine on (say) inner city crime, you must either have domain expertise (i.e. do serious reading and research on the subject, comparing different sources, etc), or you are just going to be talking bullshit. You might be marginally better at talking bullshit than a random person, since as a doctor you interact with the sorts of people involved in inner city crime and are intelligent, but only in the same way that a chaplain with a Master's who does hospice care will know a bit more about medicine than the average person because the people he's talking to are involved in medicine (since they are dying).
The woke are loud and salient. But within most "priesthoods" there are a majority of people just doing the work who don't really care about that side of things. I don't think it is an accurate portrayal to say that, for example, all of psychology has been taken by woke.
"I think the priesthoods are still good at their core functions. Doctors are good at figuring out which medicines work. Journalists are good at learning which Middle Eastern countries are having wars today and interviewing the participants about what fighting wars in the Middle East is like. Architects are good at designing buildings that don’t collapse. But now this truth must coexist with an opposite truth: the priesthoods are no longer trustworthy on anything adjacent to politics. "
Fair, but you are cherrypicking a bit. Priesthoods in most fields in the Humanities are not at all good at figuring out anything beyond rhetorical grievance posturing.
> I don't think it is an accurate portrayal to say that, for example, all of psychology has been taken by woke.
Depends on how pedantic you want to be regarding the meaning of the word "all."
I have a friend who completed a degree in psychology last year. We talked a lot about the studies and the courses, and there were required classes about how it was every therapist's affirmative duty to prioritize principles of DEI and Social Justice in their practice. And this was at a school that an outsider who knew them only by reputation would assume to be a rather conservative university.
To my thinking, that's close enough to "all of psychology has been taken by woke" as to make no difference.
I have my masters in a psychology field and have never taken a DEI class. I've never even read a DEI paper. And I went to UPenn which many consider to be very woke
When? As I said, this happened last year. And this wasn't simply my friend's biased retelling of events filtered through personal perception; I saw the actual course material they were being taught.
You seem to like doing apologetics for these horrible, toxic ideas that you also seem to disagree with. If they're bad ideas, why not just say they're bad ideas instead of saying, "oh it's actually fine to be around ideas we already know are bad, get over it"
There is a priestly halfway house which earns the enmity of both the yawping barbarians and the priests: the expert witness, disparaged by the masses as a hired gun and by the academic community as a money-grubbing apostate. (Can you tell I spent 35 years as one?)
Something I always find fascinating is that medicine was a prestigious and high status profession for 2400 years before there was any useful medicine to provide.
How are you defining the point where there began to be "useful medicine to provide"? Wherever it is, I can assure you that there are thousands of years worth of satisfied patients before that point who would disagree with you.
Some of those treatments likely actually did something effective, even though the people who did them never did randomized controlled trials. Just like traditional practices of nixtamalizing corn and boiling cassava had important nutritional features that weren’t understood by the cultures that adopted corn and cassava outside the Americas until scientific study later identified what was going on.
I assume we've looked at historically accepted interventions, identified a few like the ones you mentioned as actually useful even if their claimed mechanisms were incorrect, but on balance is there not a consensus that the net effect of 'medicine' was neutral to negative, after controlling for placebo effect?
I think the 19th century veil makes this hard to judge if the "consensus" is based on any evidence or if things got worse as the medical profession was starting and they extrapolated backwards.
“is there not a consensus that the net effect of 'medicine' was neutral to negative, after controlling for placebo effect?” Not who you were talking to but I definitely don’t think there’s a solid consensus on that...
Food practices are engaged in by more people for more of the time. There is more cultural selection for them. Medicine can remain harmful for a longer amount of time because people only use it when likely to die anyway.
Autopoiesis would naturally tend to promote specific common interventions as more successful than others because people intuitively will attempt to mimic interventions that work. Even snake oil salesmen understood that you should keep fevers low and isolate sick people from other members of the family.
We tend to miss this because we seriously underestimate the number of specific unique practices doctors employ. Simply going to a doctor to seek treatment is already using a number of incredible technologies:
- Identifying a class of person who can perform medicine
- Training that person to specifically practice medicine based on documented cases
- Having a group of people approve the kinds of material doctors can be trained with
- Requiring doctors to have completed supervised practical medical activities before being allowed to practice medicine
- Identifying a location where medicine is practiced, separate from normal life, and equipped with the tools necessary to complete planned tasks
These things are all incredible and, in fact, NOT obvious to laymen starting from first principles. Many of them are thousands of years old. Medicine is many, many thousands of best practices BEYOND just “controlling for placebo” in studies.
One of the things I always find amusing is that patient satisfaction scores are not associated with improved health (and likely are weakly inversely associated with health!). For thousands of years, medicine consisted of "amusing the patient while Nature cured the disease."
> How are you defining the point where there began to be "useful medicine to provide"?
The point at which Christian Scientists stop outliving the general population. I think it was some point around the middle of the 20th century, though I'm unable to find a good source for that.
To be fair, ancient medicine was pretty good at patching up wounds and even fixing broken bones, and healing other injuries, where this would not have naturally happened satisfactorily or at all.
For example, in one battle Henry V copped an arrow in his face that penetrated right to the back of his skull. He would never have survived if his doctor hadn't invented and quickly constructed a new instrument to clasp the arrow head and slowly withdraw it, then sterilize the wound with honey and wine.
Also, decent (by contemporary standards) doctors and healers knew literally thousands of herbal remedies, and their uses, and these often did work.
Another anecdote. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV sustained a major jousting injury in 1350. His neck vertebrae were damaged, he was paralyzed for some time, and never completely recovered.
But the emergency action of a very experienced doctor probably saved his life, and he was able to manage the realm competently for 28 more years, before dying of old age at 62 years of age.
A 11-page modern medical article (in Czech, but easily translatable by Google into English), based on examinations of his skeleton, is here:
Surely they had useful knowledge about antiseptics, sedatives, operations like caesareans, amputations, bonesetting etc. Also medical professionals tended to know more about lifestyle risks, hygiene, diet and exercise etc.
I'd estimate that the majority of medical professionals have had a net positive health impact on the societies in which they've operated for as long as they've existed.
But there might be a pattern (like the GMU example) where less prestigious medical people (e.g. midwives, traditional bonesetters) had more of a positive impact than the "priesthood" of more prestigious medical experts who espoused weird theories about foul humours, blood-letting and wu-xing/ yin-yang.
Surgeons and people treating wounds in general tended to know their stuff (within the limits of knowledge).
Internal medicine was _terrible_ and very likely harmful on average. This might explain homeopathy - at the time, water was preferable to what passed as drugs. For the longest time they were stuck in the Galenic mode of thought, with emetics and bloodletting.
I recall Rasputin might have actually succeeded in making the hemophiliac tsarevich feel better because at least he stopped court doctors from giving aspirin, an anticoagulant, to the aforementioned hemophiliac.
Probably tens of thousands of years before that as well; primitive tribes usually have some kind of witch doctor and that witch doctor is usually pretty high status.
But as others have said it's likely that some of them did something not completely ineffective some of the time, even if it's just advising the patient to rest and giving them the old oo-ee-oo-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla-bing-bang.
IIRC, according to Herodotus, a court doctor in Persia successfully saved an empress mother from breast cancer with a mastectomy. Pretty impressive, with iron age tools and hygiene! Even if most medicine was ineffective, I assume the most skilled physicians with access to the best tools could still accomplish things.
I think your theory works a lot better if you drop the assumption at the purpose of a priesthood is to produce the truth, and instead assume that purpose is to produce status for its own members first, with truth coming only sometimes as a byproduct.
Social groups of all kinds orient themselves around some conception of “good”, which is might include some mix of truth about some part of the world, but at its core is a function of values. All social groups need “we are better than others because”, and preistly classes say “ we know what’s true”. That conception of good becomes the inflexible root prior that drives actions and perceptions, as well as determining status within the group.
You gain status not by being more accurate but by increasing the groups conception of the gulf between it and the unwashed masses. Not all truths are equal - those truths which increase the prestige of the priests are far more valuable that truths which would argue the priests are less special than they think. Falsehoods which aren’t obviously false but boost the status of the group will be contested internally; the more subtle the falsehood, if it boosts group status the more likely you should expect the priests to adopt it.
We should then expect that a priesthood will converge on the truth only if they face significant selective pressure from the world outside of it. In the case of medicine, it’s patient patients dying or not dying. But that’s weak, and you should expect it to reward things like, doctor seeking status at the cost of their patient’s long-term well-being as long as it doesn’t produce gruesome deaths that are obviously attributable to bad medical advice. If a theory produces advice that drives most people crazy over long periods of time so they kill themselves with bad diet and bad lifestyle, this set of beliefs could get high status within the priestly class because it increases that conception of why they are good. This is probably true even if it produces bad health outcomes among the priests! All that matters is the status of the group. Converging on truth is only useful if it boosts that status. If it threatens that status, it’s harmful to the group and punished aggressively.
In order for a preistly class to change consensus, it needs to have feedback from reality that’s intensely painful; anything “embarrassing” can be dismissed as the mawping barbarians not getting it. This is especially true in an era when people can associate with like minded persons and ignore everyone on the outside. There’s a reason the democrats are now talking about changing some of the woke stuff; it’s only because they lost.
In the case of architecture, the feedback from the outside world is basically nonexistent, aside from who gets funded. The same is true of much of academia. When the funding agencies are the government or other groups with approximately infinite money, I think we should expect them to converge on nonsense.
This means, we should expect wokeness and other memes to infect areas in inverse proportion to how often and how painfully they get feedback from reality. As the world gets wealthier, we should expect increasingly insane preistly classes because the only thing tying them to reality is funding. When you define what’s high status for outsiders (ie architecture, art), you’ve got that on lock. Hence decades of string theory producing literally nothing useful, and yet still it gets all the funding in physics.
Show me a priestly class with guaranteed funding and I’ll show you a group unmoored from reality, high on their own supply and convinced only the barbarians think otherwise.
Scientist, circa 1900: “We’ve got this model that tells you what kind of light a heated body emits.”
Layman: “Sure, please go on. “
Scientist: “So it’s not perfect, but it works pretty well, and if you look at stars, it tells us how hot they ought to be based on their overall color.”
Layman: “Cool. Does it tell you something about radiators?”
Scientist: “No, we tried, but there are too many assumptions in this model and it completely breaks down for radiators.”
Layman: “And you want to make it better.”
Scientist: “No, it’s basically irrelevant to radiators. But when you look closely at the model, it tells you something weird. It tells you that stars should radiate an infinite quantity of energy.”
Layman: “And you want to harness it! Good man.”
Scientist: “No, there’s no such thing as an infinite quantity of energy.”
Layman: “That’s a garbage model, then.”
Scientist: “No, it’s worked really well whenever we tested it. It’s just that it doesn’t add up in extreme regions.”
Layman: “And why should we care? No real person is ever going to see any hint of these ‘extreme regions’. Get back to earth, man.”
Scientist: “But I have this idea for an explanation. It sounds really cool and promising! But I need time and peace to think through its implications and how to test it properly.”
Layman: “No. Just do useful stuff. Like radiators. It’s freezing here.”
And this is how Max Planck became a radiator repairman, Albert Einstein stayed a paper-pusher, and quantum physics never got invented.
For the members, the purpose is to generate status. But for the community as a whole, encouraging members to explore weird parts of idea space is how you get the community to end up finding truths that no one would think of otherwise.
Funny. On the one hand, priesthoods have issues, problems and in hindsight, can turn out to be completely wrong, on the science, on standards, on ethics. On the other, this is completely normal because humans duh!™, we can't have positive feedback loops and incentives and transparency and rules, because boring™, and really, I like my cool aid, what does it matter if the ingredients are toxic, it feels like velvet as it rolls off my tongue, that sugar rush is just so fantastic! And moreover, my favorite publisher is not ranked #74 because they're pushing pulp rubbish, no sir, it's because they don't have street cred. That's just a branding problem. Why would anyone believe such a thing as the truth exists?
In medical school and trying to grapple with this. We had a “scandal” recently where, during a student group election, someone released the public voting records of each candidate to “make sure you see how everyone voted before committing to their leadership.”
Sharing any opinion that asks for nuance or fact-checking has legitimately made people the subject of public scorn—I once mentioned the ICD codes for maternal mortality become more granular as it relates to the reported significantly increased rates after our professor cited them without context, and was accused of being a conservative shill (obviously in misalignment with everything I have ever expressed otherwise). Multiple peers are now effectively persona non grata.
In a profession that requires we work in teams constantly and rely on the expertise of others, I worry about how these dynamics affect that. To be fair, medicine has always been a “my buddy gets the referral” career, so maybe I’m idealizing a past that doesn’t exist/being cynical about a present that’s just a repeat of that.
I think the only way out of this moment is to keep your head down and work on what you care about, especially with slowly changing tides that are realizing the damage these paradigms can do.
typo? "on ideas opposite the values of the public"
I find the doctors example weird because the priesthood is enforced at gunpoint and it would probably look different otherwise. Journalism is interesting in that it isn't at least as straight forwardly
Some big things like software don't have much of a priesthood.
> Some big things like software don't have much of a priesthood.
Maybe no successfully exclusionary ones, but rust, the concern trolls with community guidelines are making an attempt; oo and uncle bob did the rounds.
the gatekeeping mantra of traditional priesthood is "where's your degree, bozo?"
software has 2 such mantras.
the first is "RTFM, moron"
the second, which is far more powerful, is "lets take this to a side channel to discuss"
(clarification 1: the way software is gatekept is by a combination of shibboleths and invite-only discussion groups where the actual important decisions happen)
(clarification 2: I think gatekeeping is good and we should have more of it in the world)
Diderot's maxim might be applicable. This "Tanya Swinney" is wrong in the first half of her tweet (DDT is great!), but her second half has the right spirit.
How do you update when you agree violently with a priesthood after minimal training about a specific claim, but are not a priest?
Personal examples for me are the Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, and buddhist meditation. Experiencing both after 1-5% of the training an actual musicologist and monk go through.
I updated hard to 'buddhism is close to 100% true' and 'I have zero interest in exploring more stuff like this, but I will listen to it once a year and enjoy it immensely' in a way that I think is pretty random. I don't know why I have spent no time thinking about whether other non-popular music items would be worth exploring also.
I think the parable is widely misunderstood, but what I was going for kind of dovetails with what you're saying here: people back then were just utterly shocked that *judges* could decide presidential qualifications (as if they hadn't done so in the past). So I wrote a little story about how judges aren't necessarily more objectively qualified than anyone else to make these decisions, but we have them there because SOMEONE has to.
There's some pretty profound implications there (and in other areas) for jobs irreplaceable by AI. These priests...they often don't have some objective benchmark of performance we can compare "alternatives" to...there's no "universal objective legal standard" that we can compare judging to and determine who is doing "good judging" and who is doing "bad judging"...we just need some human to make the call.
You're entire framing is too cynical. A priesthood is a religious caste, and one of the defining features of religion is that it believes in revealed truths, i.e. things that you have to believe are true because they were told to you by a higher and unquestionable power.
What you seem to be talking about are academics in (mostly soft, or at least messy) sciences, and one of the defining features of science is that it rejects the concept of revealed truth in favor of empiricism and experimentation. Some sciences (the hard ones) are more firmly grounded in this than others, and we absolutely need to be on guard against what Hayek called scientism (using a scientific facade to lend credibility to non-scientific ideas), but I still think it's too cynical to use the term priesthood.
It matters because how you frame this influences the answers to your questions, at least in part. If you really think academia is a religious caste then your model for how to fix it should be the Reformation, i.e. you need to convince the relevant people that the capital-T Truth has *actually* been revealed to you, and that they've been following corrupt heretics. But if you think academia is actually just a bunch of scientists, or people who at least want to be scientists, that became too politically homogeneous (in this case left wing, but the same problems would apply if the homogeneity had been in the other direction) and too obsessed with political power, then your solution should be to appeal to their scientific ethos and force them into confrontation with reality.
Also, it would probably be good to: 1) diversify academic funding sources so that academics aren't so dependent on government funding, and as a result be so susceptible to political edicts; 2) limit the scope of government power so that fewer academic disciplines overlap with government policy, thus limiting the corrupting influence of political power. But I'm libertarian-ish, so of course I'd say that.
The people who swore to the motto "Nullius in verba," on no one's word, rejected revealed truth in favor of empiricism. Those who preach the doctrine of "Trust the experts" instead are indeed best characterized as a priesthood.
No, they aren't. The experts are still trying to use the scientific method, or at least that's their ideal, even if they sometimes fall short.
The people saying "Trust the experts" are trying to protect their prestige and political power. That's a common human reaction and it does not, on its own, make someone a "priest" or a believer in revealed truth.
This is a good point, particularly as to the implications that the analogy holds. Another example: there's been a recent trend where the university president or department chair writes letters to the faculty expressing concern/shock/denunciation regarding some current event (an officer-involved shooting or a supreme court decision, for instance). Academics and non-academics alike tend to chafe at these letters. If the institution is a priesthood, then the solution is to write better letters on more salient current events. If the institution is a scientific community, then the solution is to stop writing letters on topics that do not directly leverage the scientific expertise of the letter writer, or to stop writing such letters entirely. IMO the latter is preferred but it requires a different analogy.
Defining the essence of religion as "revealed truth" feels a bit too narrow to me, and is possibly an artifact of abrahamic bias or something. E.g. my impression of Hinduism is it's centered less on beliefs, and more about ritual purity.
I think we're trying to establish distributed trust/consensus, and the two standard methods for that are proof of stake and proof of work. Membership of the priesthood is proof-of-stake, since you risk getting defrocked if you're lying, while most kinds of ritual purity are proof-of-work--ideally, it's easier to tweet out 100 dubious claims than write 100 dubious papers. For a while, people used "empiricism" and "quackery" interchangeably when talking about medicine, because saying "I tried it and it works" is easier than coming up with relevant citations from Galen and Aristotle.
Proof of stake has taken a big hit with the loss of public trust, but it looks like our ability to do proof of work is about to be completely annihilated by generative AI so I agree we need to find a way back to proof of stake.
"This might be a natural consequence of the priesthoods’ drive to separate themselves from the public."
John Carey, who was a professor of English at Oxford, had a theory that modernism in literature was a conspiracy by the elite to develop a form of literature that the newly-literate general public still couldn't understand. He wrote an entire book about this, titled "The Intellectuals and the Masses."
Firstly, I think that you underestimate the degree to which wokeness got accepted by the priesthood because it was closer to the moral truth than what came before.
Using people's preferred pronouns is the courteous, nice, respectful thing to do. And one is often entitled to decide what pronouns others should use with respect to you for the self-ownership or some similar reasons.
Similarly, there are good reasons to believe that reparations for slavery are in principle justified even if implementation is a lot more complicated, and that ongoing police brutality in the US is a problem.
Meaning, if you look at the parts of wokeness that got the widest acceptance among academia, it is those parts which are closest to truth and just have to do with being nice, respecting people and just not being revoltingly evil.
There is a motte and bailey being played by both sides here. From the left, the motte is parts of wokeness which are most likely to be true and good. The bailey is the claim that all sorts of illiberal nonsense is required once you accept the more plausible aspects.
From the right, the motte is the observation that there is a lot of illiberal nonsense being peddled. The bailey is the claim that all wokeness, including the things that all decent people should accept are wrong.
So we need to be specific about what the wokeness virus is, which parts are true (or at least closer to the truth) and which parts are not.
Secondly, a lot of these things are self correcting in the long run. I write papers, other people write different papers, people look carefully at the arguments and eventually errors will get corrected. A lot of illiberal nonsense is fashionable in certain quarters for now. As long as we continue chipping away at problems and there is sufficient communication and collaboration between different priesthoods, these errors will be detected and removed.
> Using people's preferred pronouns is the courteous, nice, respectful thing to do.
This is true, to some extent. But that only correlates with "close to the moral truth" if you subscribe to a warped values system that values "nice" above "truth" or "reality" or "honesty."
> And one is often entitled to decide what pronouns others should use with respect to you for the self-ownership or some similar reasons.
And now you're getting into coercion and attempting to impose dishonest "niceness" upon people who do not subscribe to that value system.
> Similarly, there are good reasons to believe that reparations for slavery are in principle justified even if implementation is a lot more complicated, and that ongoing police brutality in the US is a problem.
No, there really aren't. There was a valid case for reparations about a century and a half ago, when there were still victims to be made whole and perpetrators to be corrected. Today, everyone who was involved in slavery is dead, and so are all their grandchildren. So people who speak of "reparations for slavery" are talking about punishing some people for crimes they did not commit, to enrich other people who were not a victim of those crimes. The very idea makes a mockery of justice.
As for "ongoing police brutality," the data does not support the claims made. The incorrect claims are so atrociously bad that not only do the woke consistently overestimate actual levels of police violence by multiple orders of magnitude, but so do non-woke people aware of the problem and trying to give better estimates correcting for woke nonsense.
>This is true, to some extent. But that only correlates with "close to the moral truth" if you subscribe to a warped values system that values "nice" above "truth" or "reality" or "honesty."
You know, I recall there being a classic SSC post about exactly this problem.
>> Using people's preferred pronouns is the courteous, nice, respectful thing to do.
>This is true, to some extent. But that only correlates with "close to the moral truth" if you subscribe to a warped values system that values "nice" above "truth" or "reality" or "honesty."
What makes you think this is a 'warped' values system? Don't we ourselves use just such a value system when we ask ourselves "Is it (a) necessary, (b) kind, and/or (c) true," which is such a prominent feature of discourse on this board when constructing our posts? Are we all 'warped' here?
Maybe some people do. Me, I believe in _ex falso quodlibet:_ if you begin by accepting false premises, you can end up "proving" any incorrect conclusion.
I know I’m going to regret asking, but have you read Scott’s decade-old “the categories were made for man, not man for the categories”? The claim that a trans person (say, male to female) is making is not that they have a vagina and a uterus (apart from intersex people, but whatever).
Not acknowledging their preferred pronouns is basically saying “the categories for man/woman are fine in their genitalia-based meanings, I’m not making an exception for you, and if that causes you pain, then sucks to be you”.
In a way, it’s good! Categories are not concrete (except sometimes in mathematics) so it falls to us to enforce them so that they don’t dissolve in meaninglessness.
But then you can’t define these people away as being illogical or breaking the basic tenets of reason.
Also, less than 20 years ago, trans people had to be very private to this information lest they reap scorn and mockery from everyone else. Don’t they deserve to exist in peace in this brave new 21s century of ours? Acknowledging their existence doesn’t harm anyone, and, sure, there are trickier questions about athletic teams, age-appropriate limitations, how much input doctors should have, the potential for abuse and so on.
> The claim that a trans person (say, male to female) is making is not that they have a vagina and a uterus
No, it's worse than that. It's that having a vagina and a uterus does not make you a woman. The claim is the destruction of "male and female." The claim is, as you put it, an attempt to "dissolve in meaninglessness" what it is to be a man or a woman.
> Not acknowledging their preferred pronouns is basically saying
"I will not be coerced into affirming delusions. If you thought you were Napoleon, I would not treat you as if you were, and I won't on this either." It's amazing how quickly one of the most basic principles of psychiatry — do not affirm delusions — goes out the window and gets twisted into some sort of bizarre moral obligation to affirm the delusion instead, when people start to make a political issue out of it.
> Don’t they deserve to exist in peace in this brave new 21s century of ours?
Not if they refuse to leave others in peace. When they go making an issue out of it and trying to coerce others into affirming things that are not true, they forfeit "deserve to live in peace" status, the same as anyone else.
> Acknowledging their existence doesn’t harm anyone
Two incorrect statements for the price of one. Calling it an issue of "existence" is a massive motte-and-bailey argument. Literally no one is saying "these people do not exist." Of course they exist. They're being very loud and making a nuisance of themselves; they couldn't do that if they weren't there. But that does not make their delusional claims legitimate, any more than a person existing who believes himself to be Napoleon makes his delusional claim legitimate.
Second, it creates *massive* harm in the real, personal, non-abstract sense. Immediately after you say "this doesn't harm anyone" you list several areas where it does indeed cause harm to people. So we can start there.
Now add to that the intense harms caused by surgical transitioning. It wrecks a person's body, causing a laundry list of horrible, often lifelong conditions that sounds like an over-the-top parody of the "side effects may include" section of a pharmaceutical ad. Read up on detransitioners and some of the horrific things they've had to deal with.
Now add to that the intense harms caused by *social* transitioning, and social contagion. Read up on people like Sage, a girl who decided to play the "I'm really a boy" game because "all the girls in school" were "identifying as" something other than normal heterosexual girls. School officials were all too happy to play along, which ended up sending the poor girl down a year-long hell of exploitation, sex trafficking, drugs, abuse, and being kidnapped by the legal system to be used as a political pawn. When she was finally returned to her family, the tearful girl uttered the absolutely heartbreaking words, "I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to have friends."
The fact is, legitimate gender dysphoria is like acne: it attacks young people, it's usually embarrassing and uncomfortable for a few years, *and then it goes away.* In the vast majority of cases, people grow out of it as they grow into their adult bodies. This is one theory to explain why long-term suicide rates have been observed to go *up,* not down, in affirmed transgender individuals: because when they finally come to themselves and realize that they were a man/woman all along, and not the woman/man they've been pretending to be, and see the irreversible harm they've done to their bodies along the way, they just can't cope with it.
Activists tend to dismiss detransitioners, saying they make up "only" about 1-2% of people who transition. This is insanely short-sighted, as it's a well-known truism in business that for every 1 person who complains about your product/service, there are 10-100 having the same problem and saying nothing. And that's for neutral products where there is no social or political pressure not to complain. The implications here are staggering!
I'll try to ask this in a snappy way before I answer in a more collected way to some of your points: "are you sure you don't have Trans Derangement Syndrome?"
> No, it's worse than that. It's that having a vagina and a uterus does not make you a woman. The claim is the destruction of "male and female." The claim is, as you put it, an attempt to "dissolve in meaninglessness" what it is to be a man or a woman.
As a matter of formal logic, the categories were already broken. Proof: intersex people exist. Among eight billion people, biology has a lot of ways to be weird.
(By the way, what is your definition of "be a woman"? Have a vagina? A uterus? No X chromosome? Be *born* with a vagina? Any of these would have seemed legitimate 50 years ago, wouldn't they -- but what about edge cases, or today's chirurgy?)
However, this didn't make the categories useless, because the exceptions are so few. There are men, women, and a tiny body of exceptions. If you add trans people, we're talking about the categories being porous for 0.5-1% of people. As long that this is stable, this does not seem like dissolving the category in meaninglessness.
> Not if they refuse to leave others in peace. When they go making an issue out of it and trying to coerce others into affirming things that are not true, they forfeit "deserve to live in peace" status, the same as anyone else.
Do you believe that every school employee, every politician, every judge should lose the right to live in peace should it turn out that the Christian God does not, in fact, exist?
And should the Bible turn out to be literally true, should we instead hound and harass biology and geology teachers?
If so, I admire your consistency, but question your wisdom. If not, why? Aren't they forcing children to saying that which is untrue every single day of their lives, and maligning them if they do not?
> Calling it an issue of "existence" is a massive motte-and-bailey argument. Literally no one is saying "these people do not exist." Of course they exist. They're being very loud and making a nuisance of themselves; they couldn't do that if they weren't there. But that does not make their delusional claims legitimate
I agree that "acknowledging their existence" sounds better as a slogan than anything else. What I mean is the following: treat them as actual human beings deeply suffering for something which is out of their control, without being mocked, insulted, or harassed as a group, let alone for politically motivated reasons.
Especially if you believe that they have a delusion, are sick and need treatment, using them as punching-ball is even less psychiatric practice.
(Sure, the activist is extraordinarily annoying and it is human, if petty, to indulge in a bit of retaliation. But the vast majority of trans people are not their online ambassadors.)
> Second, it creates *massive* harm in the real, personal, non-abstract sense. Immediately after you say "this doesn't harm anyone" you list several areas where it does indeed cause harm to people. So we can start there.
I'm missing the part where "changing pronouns when you talk of some specific person" (a purely verbal, individual-to-individual issue) implies the most insane takes on everything I'm mentioning afterwards.
> Now add to that the intense harms caused by surgical transitioning. It wrecks a person's body, causing a laundry list of horrible, often lifelong conditions that sounds like an over-the-top parody of the "side effects may include" section of a pharmaceutical ad.
So, you have this awful procedure which does all this, and you think that most adults will undergo it without understanding what they're heading into? This doesn't sound quite right.
I'm assuming that on the contrary, the people undergoing it have done their research, been informed by their doctors, and decided they wanted it anyway. On this blog, we believe that people are free to make their own mistakes and wreck their own lives, do we not?
(So yes, limiting them to adults seems more than perfectly reasonable.)
Relatedly, to what extent is something a delusion if you can in fact bring it, or a close approximation of it, about? To get back to your Napoleon example, the guy will never be Napoleon. He may grow out of it -- or we could just make a simulation for him to be Napoleon in. Again, not hurting anyone?
> Now add to that the intense harms caused by *social* transitioning, and social contagion.
Yeah, that one's an issue and I'm not sure what to do with it. Involving the legal system at all is bonkers except perhaps in the most extreme cases. Parents have a tricky role here: teenagers basically get high by defying their parents and calling them old farts who never understood anything to life.
BTW, would you have a link to your claims about Sage's story? The NY Post's account (they're not woke, right?), which is the first one I found, did not seem to involve any element of social contagion, but instead a lot of bullying including threats to "rape Sage until she liked boys".
Can we at least agree that this is wrong and should not happen, regardless of Sage's "gender identity" (or delusion, if this is what you think it is), even if she asked the boys in question to call her by male pronouns every single day?
> The fact is, legitimate gender dysphoria is like acne: it attacks young people, it's usually embarrassing and uncomfortable for a few years, *and then it goes away.* In the vast majority of cases, people grow out of it as they grow into their adult bodies.
In cases of social contagion, it seems clearly true. But as far as I can tell, a non-insignificant number of older people have decided to transition as well, and there's no clear reason why the gender dysphoria go away with age. For some, it will be sufficiently acute that the sex-change operation may well be the best way to diminish their suffering.
I'm not sure I believe your theory, but I suppose I'll gladly read (if perhaps not answer) if you elaborate on where the statistic comes from and what it exactly is.
> Activists tend to dismiss detransitioners, saying they make up "only" about 1-2% of people who transition. This is insanely short-sighted, as it's a well-known truism in business that for every 1 person who complains about your product/service, there are 10-100 having the same problem and saying nothing. And that's for neutral products where there is no social or political pressure not to complain. The implications here are staggering!
So, by this truism, about 200-2000% of Americans detest Trump but say nothing?
More seriously, this sounds a bit too general a counter-argument. Activists gotta activize, but I'm skeptical they wouldn't account for that (and is the 1-2% stat, that I also remember seeing, from activists?).
Even if this is the case (which I guess would make me update, but not to the point of calling "being trans" a delusion), all the more reason to accept reassigning pronouns, no? Isn't it the easiest intervention to reverse on an individual basis, and at least one good way to test if you do have some form of dysphoria that is actually there to stay?
It seems like you’re coming at this from a place of treating “truth” or “honesty,” as you define it, as the highest value. But most people do not place one value above all others like this, and in all honesty, when someone claims that they do it’s hard to believe them.
Consider just a few examples:
Truth vs Kindness: You are a soldier returning from war. You served with a friend, who did not make it home. He died calling for a high-school girlfriend. His widowed spouse asks you what his last words were.
Truth vs Respect: You are a guest at a friends house, and they have spent all day preparing a meal for you and many others. You do not particularly care for the food. Over dinner, in front of everyone, someone asks you, “how are you liking the chicken?”
Truth vs Justice: You are a detective executing a search at the property of a mob boss who has thus far been untouchable. You discover smoking-gun evidence, but it is in a freestanding garage, and your warrant only covers the house. But the garage has a window, and if you claim you saw the evidence through the window, it will be admissible and the mob boss goes away. Do you claim it?
Truth vs Family: Your brother has been selling pot to his high school friends, and just turned 18. You’ve been trying to explain to him that this is a bad idea, but hey, teenagers. Bad news gets worse and the cops show up at your door asking about weed at the school and whether your brother is involved. Are you honest?
If capital-t “Truth” really is the highest value for you, then it should win in all these situations, as well as more extreme ones (e.g. “do you ‘prioritize honesty’ even when Nazis are asking you ‘which way did the Jew go?’). But for 99.9% of humanity, capital-T Truth is *an* important value, but not the *absolute* value. It’s important, it’s not a trump card to always put above other values – rather it’s valuable but constantly traded off against other values. They'll prioritize truth in some of these scenarios but not others. I myself would be honest about the mob boss scenario but probably lie in the other 3.
And that .01% for which it really is an absolute value generally aren’t good examples of what we’d think of as functional humans – they’re subject to all the extreme examples and problems hard utilitarians are (“Would you really drown 100 babies to if it yielded more QALY’s than it cost?”).
So I guess the question is which bucket you see yourself in:
(1) Truth really is the absolute value, and you really do think that the ‘moral’ thing to do when asked is be honest and tell the Turks where the Armenians are hiding.
(2) Truth is not really an absolute value for you, you just think that it’s more important to “speak truth” about what you believe someone’s gender to be rather than prioritizing kindness and calling them ‘he’ or ‘they’ or whatever if that’s their preference.
If #1, be prepared for pretty much nobody to agree, and IMO for very good reason.
If #2, be prepared for others to ask you what the harm of prioritizing kindness is in a situation so perfunctory, and for them to respond with doubt if you claim that using someone’s preferred pronouns somehow destroys the foundations of western thought in a way that telling grandma that no, you really do like the sweater doesn’t.
"It was a real ugly time. I'd rather not dredge up those memories, and in all honesty, you probably wouldn't want to know." There's a massive difference between being honest with people and being Jim Carrey from Liar, Liar.
> Truth vs Respect
"It was OK. A bit dry though." This *is* showing respect: if no one ever tells them that their cooking is bad, they'll never know they're doing anything wrong, and they'll just continue to cook badly forever.
> Truth vs Justice
If the case was that important I'd make sure to get the warrant right before conducting the search.
> Truth vs Family
If you knew me and my actual non-hypothetical RL brother, you wouldn't even bother asking this question. Let's just say, you're hitting a little too close to home here, and certain bad things have happened that would not have happened had my parents valued truth a little more highly.
U.S. police is bad (likely mostly due to super-short training times and a messed-up esprit de corps), but this is not particularly racially correlated when you look at the actual data (police are less likely to kill black people per event, and more likely to harass them).
'This is true, to some extent. But that only correlates with "close to the moral truth" if you subscribe to a warped values system that values "nice" above "truth" or "reality" or "honesty."'
Which it often is in personal interactions. Quoting Mencken: "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
So I do it out of politeness in direct interactions, the same way I wouldn't say that sweater is ugly even though it is.
>Meaning, if you look at the parts of wokeness that got the widest acceptance among academia, it is those parts which are closest to truth and just have to do with being nice, respecting people and just not being revoltingly evil.
>Using people's preferred pronouns is the courteous, nice, respectful thing to do.
Is it "courteous, nice and respectful" for a woman to use the "preferred pronouns" of the male person who raped her with his fully intact penis, because said rapist claims to believe that he is really a woman?
Precisely. As Adam Smith famously put it, "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." Simply valuing being generically "nice" as the highest virtue is a perversion of morality.
I think this is the exact motte and bailey Murali is referencing: in the vast majority of cases where someone defers to another's pronouns there is no "guilty" or "innocent"; and no one is saying it's the highest virtue... Just that it is _a_ virtue and in most normal interactions there's no very strong overriding considerations to the contrary.
This is like someone saying, "saying please and thank you is nice and courteous" and getting the response, "what about a rapist who forces their victim to thank them afterwards at gunpoint? Is that courteous?"
Like, yes, sometimes the basics of courtesy are not actually courteous; also there are times where they remain courteous but we acknowledge there are reasons to be rude (you'd be ok with a rape victim not saying thank you to her rapist even in a situation that otherwise would demand it, eg he passes her something out of reach) but we are pretty deep into the bailey here.
Honestly very rarely overrides courtesy in ordinary interactions: you almost never tell people your honest opinion of their looks, or their religious beliefs, or whatever in ordinary professional and semi-professional settings
What has it got to do with it? Any group has bad actors, agreed; a denomination based on one’s sole declaration has an inherent potential for abuse, sure.
But are you claiming that because there has been bad actors calling themselves trans, this disqualifies everyone calling themselves trans?
What other group would you be willing to apply this reasoning too?
Truthfully, I cannot think of any other group in which membership in that group is conferred solely on the basis of performative declaration, and in which members of that group demand special privileges as a result of their group membership. I can't prove that a self-identified Christian really does believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, but because they aren't generally demanding special privileges, it's irrelevant.
I think it's rather telling that whenever a new group has sprung up with this pair of characteristics, the collective reaction (including from trans people themselves) has been one of contempt and dismissal. No one is more fervently opposed to "transracial" people attempting to game affirmative action policies for their own ends than trans activists.
This is a fair point. But it’s also important to look at differences. Here are some that come to mind.
1) gender is a universal (at least Western in a very broad sense) experience in a way that race isn’t (it seems like an American hysteria foremost).
2) The prominent “ambassadors” of transracialism are asking for money and a job (in the form of gaming the system with affirmative action) in a way that most trans people simply aren’t.
3) If my neighbor tells me they’re trans (or whatever), I’ll try to remember to change the pronouns I use for them (and try to get used to the change). If they claim they’re transracial, I… won’t change anything?
4) There aren’t cute human-interest stories about how suicidal people with race dysphoria spent years begging doctors in the Soviet Union to change race (don’t forget it criminalized homosexuality until very recently).
“I think it's rather telling that whenever a new group has sprung up with this pair of characteristics, the collective reaction (including from trans people themselves) has been one of contempt and dismissal. No one is more fervently opposed to "transracial" people attempting to game affirmative action policies for their own ends than trans activists.”
Yes, but I don’t see how this indicts the trans activists: the default reaction is “you bastards are gaming the system”, and the trans activists can be especially especially virulent whether they think “you’re muscling in on my racket” (as you seem to believe?) but “you’re stealing and tarnishing our label in the public reputation“.
(Again, remember: these people had no right to existence free from harassment less than 20 years ago. This is a big change, and they’re aware that a big backlash will bring back the statu quo ante.
1) I have no idea what this point means. Everyone has a "racial identity" insofar as they have an ethnicitiy.
2) I think trans women demanding to be permitted to compete in female sporting events, or male convicts demanding to serve their sentences in women's prisons constitutes "gaming the system". There are also a significant number of transracial people who aren't gaming the system in any way e.g. many children and teens who presented to the Tavistock Centre in the UK described themselves as trans-Korean in addition to transgender; likewise the teenagers described in this article (https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-have-to-admit-i-still-dont-fully).
3) How often would you use gendered pronouns in a one-to-one conversation with your neighbour?
4) As mentioned above, many of the children who presented to the Tavistock described themselves as trans-Korean in addition to transgender, and experienced grave distress (dare we say "racial dysphoria") about the paleness of their skin and roundness of their eyes. I do not understand why gender dysphoria is deemed to require medical intervention (in the form of hormones and surgery) but racial dysphoria is not.
>Yes, but I don’t see how this indicts the trans activists: the default reaction is “you bastards are gaming the system”, and the trans activists can be especially especially virulent whether they think “you’re muscling in on my racket” (as you seem to believe?) but “you’re stealing and tarnishing our label in the public reputation“.
This debate sort of reminds me of something Dawkins said, that Christians disbelieve in almost all gods (Vishnu, Shiva, Thor etc.) and atheists have just gone one god further than that. The general case seems to be that, if someone claims to "identify as" something other than a identity characteristic which is traditionally determined by a clear and unambiguous physical substrate and which they clearly do not possess (race, age, height, weight, ability status etc.), we should dismiss their concerns out of hands - except in the case of sex, for which we have created this elaborate concept of a "gender identity" wholly distinct from one's sex. No one has yet given me a convincing reason why being "transgender" is legitimate but being "trans-racial", "trans-aged", "trans-disabled" etc. are not.
1) I have no idea what this point means. Everyone has a "racial identity" insofar as they have an ethnicitiy.
What I meant is that gender is a lot more uniform across the Western world at large: if you look at the basic clichés about men and women regarding jobs, clothing, behaviors, there's something more universal here.
While "racial identity" seems much more country-dependent.
2) I don't know what to tell you. Do you genuinely believe that trans people (born XY, claiming to identify as XX) do that because they want to win more easily at sports and rape women in women's bathrooms with the right-thinking people clapping?
I'm asking this seriously. When someone wrote that respecting people's pronouns was the considerate thing to do, jumping to this kind of examples was your reaction. Is it so hard to believe that some people just feel incredibly uneasy to the point of depression with their gender (whatever mix of clothes they could wear, attitudes they're expected to embody, hormone balance, actual genitalia and so on) and feel that they needed drastic change?
And if my neighbor has been nothing but helpful, nice and considerate with me, why shouldn't I make an effort to oblige if they kindly ask me to refer to them by other pronouns?
I do agree that bathrooms or sports (or even what treatments are appropriate to what age and who gets to make the decision) need a much less heated discussion (that comes back, for instance, to the basic biological why men and women are in different categories at sports), but this is not what you've reacted to, and it's not the one I want to push back against.
3) This tends to come up in larger group discussions, and of course there's always the question of the first name. But this doesn't seem central?
4) Height, weight, age are completely quantifiable. Race is annoying, but I'd say it simply doesn't permeate enough behavior to be worth trans-racing.
I think the problems with being "trans-disabled" are minor, as long as you genuinely perform the part and impose the handicap to yourself. (Else you're just lying for gain and sympathy.)
(It does feel disrespectful to those who never had a choice to be disabled or not, but I'd respect the dedication in the thought experiment.)
I'll be completely honest here: I do not have a good explanation for why "transgender" is legitimate. I think Scott mentioned Ozy a decade ago on this stuff, maybe they have some breakdown or something. Aella wrote something that mostly assumed the answer ("instead of making a moral panic and getting at each others' throats, shouldn't we instead focus on the question of how to figure out with greater confidence whether a given child/teenager/adult is, in fact, trans?"), perhaps she explained at some point why she believed so?
However, I believe I do not have to justify to myself that "transgender is legitimate" for the following obvious reason: I've met some. They're not grifters. They're not gaming the system. They'd like nothing better than get to their business in peace.
Asking people to use other pronouns or another name for you is, beyond <text-based woke echo chamber so everyone is text anyway>, a tall ask. It's confusing as heck to be on the receiving side; I'm sure that, most of the time, trans people are well-aware of that, fearful of possible backlash of all kinds, loath to impose it gratuitously, and not expecting much reward from it. What would be the interest of faking it at scale?
>Meaning, if you look at the parts of wokeness that got the widest acceptance among academia, it is those parts which are closest to truth and just have to do with being nice, respecting people and just not being revoltingly evil.
That is egregiously self-serving and assuming the conclusion. What a fantastic lack of charity that anyone that disagrees is "revoltingly evil."
“Using people's preferred pronouns is the courteous, nice, respectful thing to do. And one is often entitled to decide what pronouns others should use with respect to you for the self-ownership or some similar reasons.”
As with many things, it’s complicated. Respect is a two way street. I feel that when people without gender dysphoria use alternative pronouns (I don’t know the stats but I suspect it’s well over 50% of non-standard pronouns havers), they are engaging in highly antisocial behavior.
...Seriously? The closest thing to moral truth is that might makes right. Everything else is subjective. The people in power right now think you're the one that's revoltingly evil, and they are no less wrong than you are. And they will be the ones to decide what is right and wrong in this society.
Anyone who thinks there's some special connection between professors and niceness is either a professor suffering from a delusional level of self-regard, or an ordinary person with very little experience of professors.
Yeah. Having received a PhD and having worked as a teacher for many years, there was often an anti-correlation between those two things. And the modern American University setting is one filled with petty meanness and abuse like no other one been a part of.
Great essay. As a former professor, this problem our priesthoods got themselves into is really bad for society. It is also really bad for the priesthoods, but few of them realize it.
Big changes are coming, but they are aren’t exactly clear.
"My thesis in this essay is that the priesthoods are neither a rent-seeking clique nor ..."
You invested a lot of effort explaining other functions of priesthoods, but relatively little denying-rent-seeking. Aren't the vast majority of these groups all in highly market-protected contexts (a medical bar, tenure, etc.)? Corollary, if those markets were freed (e.g., deregulated), wouldn't competitive pressures clean up the nonsense that can grow without sunshine as a disinfectant? I recognize the many other challenges of deregulation, and so am not in this note calling for a libertarian free-for-all, simply calling out that it strikes me that an important (perhaps first?) use of such groups is rent-seeking. The differentiation between "priesthood" and guild doesn't strike me as large here.
This. Not that we have to conclude that priesthoods are *especially* given to rent-seeking, compared to equivalently cohesive groups of other kinds-- sufficient to say that they're about as much of a rent-seeking clique as, say, Wall Street or the teachers' unions.
> Aren't the vast majority of these groups all in highly market-protected contexts (a medical bar, tenure, etc.)? Corollary, if those markets were freed (e.g., deregulated), wouldn't competitive pressures clean up the nonsense that can grow without sunshine as a disinfectant?
Dr. Oz selling snake oil got him a minor slap on the wrist from the institutions and no impact from The State, AFAICT. So you can be a doctor legally right now and say stupid medical nonsense from a massive pulpit, and the state won't come after you. You'll also, seemingly, make quite a bit of money doing it.
>The average member of the public might think “Campbell soup! That artist is in touch with my everyday existence!” while also being baffled by layers of ironic reference and artistic flourishes outside his puny little brain’s ability to comprehend. A+ instant classic.
Having immersed myself in Andy Warhol's work at the museum dedicated to him in Pittsburgh, I don't think that was his motivation. I think he was trying to be fun and goofy. Willem de Kooning once accused Warhol of being "a killer of fun," but he was the exact opposite.
Just because I like to talk about art: I think Warhol was wrestling the the idea of fine art in the era of high quality image reproducibility, and what that would mean for the priesthood of the fine artist class. I think you could say that Warhol said all the right things to the artist class to get his artwork taken seriously - and there were interesting ideas! - and also trolled the artist class and the consumers of fine art by making art of boring everyday objects and pop celebrity icons. It's wickedly smart.
I think he was also a huge asshole, so, maybe not a lot of fun in person.
Really? Warhol was the guy famous for making pop-art posters of Campbell soup can labels. That's why I thought he's the specific instance Scott had in mind.
In any case, he's a relevant example if not the whole story.
Your epistemology is overly pessimistic. It’s not that hard to tell when a priesthood is going wrong AS LONG AS THERE IS NO CENSORSHIP, because priesthoods still have norms of discourse and intelligent laymen can find the minority with the correct view and notice which side is meeting the other’s points and which side is ducking the other’s points.
I had almost no difficulty doing this over the last 10 years and I was right practically every time, because I was trained in rationalist principles and I AVOIDED doing what all you stupid Bay Area Rationalists did (I won’t go into details here but you know who you are and you know how you fucked up).
But there must be no censorship! Elite mainstream media like the NYT are, precisely because they are subtle in the ways you inappropriately praise here, FAR more harmful to public understanding than should be tolerated, because their subtle dishonesty is *incessant* in service of their agendas. The cure is alternative media, because although most people are not highly discerning and aren’t willing to make even moderate efforts, highly discerning people only need to make moderate efforts to figure out which emperors are naked, as long as there is no censorship.
The censorship in the USA was terrible by comparison with previous eras, but still not so bad that “moderate effort” couldn’t be replaced by “serious effort”; your egregious failure was in not noticing that the censorship problem *was serious*, so your merely moderate efforts weren’t enough.
Outside the USA, censorship is worse and one must make not merely serious but *radical* efforts to discern which priesthoods have gone wrong, and how.
If medical priesthoods have been polluted by political dogma perhaps that is largely because politicians, aware of the public's high regard for doctors and scientists (the opposite of that generally held for politicians!) have involved them increasingly in political matters in the hope their kudos and authority will rub off. Then there has been a sort of back reaction, whereby some flattered medical practitioners have adjusted their attitudes in turn to encourage more political involvement.
Maybe - my impression as a doctor is that a few influential people have been captured and they set the tone in a way that many of us may disagree with but don’t feel able to speak out against
I'm a member of a (very obscure) priesthood--professional linguists. Our professional organization (Linguistic Society of America) has gone the way of other priesthood governing bodies in what could be loosely called 'wokeness'. Although it is not particularly noticeable on the LSA website, it is certainly in the air at our professional conferences. And those who have mildly challenged the status quo (like, for example, John McWhorter) can be chastised or even sanctioned in some way. And some of us are intimidated into keeping silent, precisely because we fear sanctions from our 'peers'.
I have never read anybody whom it was easier to imagine shouting "Get off my lawn!" than John McWhorter. One of those rare people whose arguments push me irresistibly to the other side.
Is it because he thinks African American English is a real language, or his views on the fundamental nature of Creoles? John (who is, FWIW, a friend) is a political liberal (he voted for Obama and Harris, for example) is one of the least likely people to shout 'Get off my lawn". He is in no sense a conservative--he just knows actual facts about language and the people who speak them.
No, it's his terminal grumpiness. The book of his I read was "Doing Our Own Thing," and it was essentially old-fogey-like complaints that nothing is as good as it used to be. McWhorter considers it self-evident that the old stuff is good and the new stuff is anemic, so he spends more space declaring this than analyzing it. It's when he gets to music that I could really see how bad it was. He praises lavishly a lot of dull, meandering, unmemorable and fairly obscure "Great American Songbook" era-songs, not even always getting their titles right, and brushes off genuinely melodic newer pop songs. If those are his personal tastes, it would be fine if he weren't setting his tastes up as the infallible judgment of civilization.
What was the medical field’s opinion of Dr Oz right before he shot to fame?
Dr Oz performed my father's quadruple bypass back in 2007. He didn’t have is own show at that time, but he would go on Oprah occasionally to talk about poop. My dad had worked in the entertainment business and was skeptical about anyone who would want to go on television. He asked an MD professor at Columbia if Dr Oz could be trusted.
“He’s a little kooky, but he has magic hands.”
Oz did a great job on the surgery and my Dad’s still doing well 17 years later.
Maybe this is related to the phenomenon of "physicist who excelled in some particular sub-field embarasses himself when trying to concoct a Theory of Everything". Dr. Oz may have so excelled in cardiac surgery that it gave him unwarranted confidence in his abilities in medicine in general.
The shining example of this to me has always been Michael Jordan. The greatest basketball player who ever lived, decided to retire while he was still on top and switch to playing baseball, which he said he'd always had a secret passion for... and he turned out to be terrible at it.
Isn't there a conspiracy theory that he temporarily quit basketball to avoid a gambling scandal and the baseball thing was a cover?
In any case, I am grateful to him. The first pack of baseball cards I bought had a special edition Michael Jordan card, which I immediately sold back to the vendor for $50. A lot of money for kid back then.
Jordan OPSed .556 in AA as a 31 year old with no active playing experience in over a decade. That's not terrible, that's a very strong suggestion that if he'd switched over before his athletic prime was already fading into the rearview he would have been a solid major league caliber player.
Physicists have had success imperializing other fields. Francis Crick started out in physics before revolutionizing genetics. Greg Cochran continued to work in optical physics while collaborating with evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald, cultural anthropologist Henry Harpending & physical anthropologist John Hawkes. Robin Hanson studied physics before econ. Cochran chalks that up to physicists just being smarter than other scientists, but pure mathematicians appear to be peers in terms of IQ while doing less scientific imperialism from what I can tell.
Jens Gundlach won the Breakthrough Prize for his work on Gravitation, but he also dipped into biology and made substantial contributions to nanopore sequencing. It was fun to watch.
For me, the classic example of an expert in one field who should have stayed there is Richard Dawkins. Brilliant exponent of genetic theory, made a complete ass of himself trying to diagnose religious belief.
I don't think Dawkins is *that* bad on religion. I mean, he's not outstandingly good, no; but he's far better than the average person, or even the average person who writes about religion.
He probably would have better served himself and society as a whole by sticking to evolution, though.
Gadzooks, no. It's been a long time since I read Dawkins on religion, but his ideas of how religious belief works and how and why religious people hold their beliefs is stunningly ignorant as well as hostile to the point of puerility. On the level of an Elon Musk tweet. It was heartbreaking to read, coming from a man so wise and piercingly intelligent on the subject of genetics.
What little I've heard is that surgeons, while officially MDs, are an entirely distinct species. As your quote says, they need to have really good hands, but they don't seem to need to understand the whole of medicine very well. It's an interesting situation, where there may well be two different priesthoods relative to knowledge/skill/interests and yet by social accident, everybody sees them as one priesthood.
Historically, physicians and surgeons were two entirely distinct professions. It'd be interesting to read about how and why they combined. It's like barristers (lawyers who argue in court) and solicitors (lawyers who advise clients and draw up documents), which are still two distinct professions in the UK.
Back when you were talking about the value of your and Aella's surveys, that they were no worse than a standard survey and thus were equally useful, I commented that there's a negative conclusion to that comparison- surveys in general are hokum that tell us very little "real." A mediocre, easily-abused tool for attempting to understand masses of complex systems. Maybe better than "I made it up," but not by much, and weaponizable to the same degree that it's better.
I feel somewhat similarly about your position on new versus old media. New media, in whatever way you think they have to be subtle, they are vastly better at lying because of it! "Nothing ever happens" is most interesting when it's wrong; "media very rarely lies" is concerning because it's so much more dangerous when they do. The damage done by a racist street preacher (or youtuber) is nothing compared to that done by a racist high priest with the backing of institutions.
Unfortunately, the logical endpoint here is something akin to an epistemic nihilism-solipsism, that knowing things beyond the self are basically impossible and meaningless. I don't think that's literally true, but approaches truth quickly, perhaps exponentially, once we're past Dunbar's number. I don't have a good solution here, but...
>And when should we trust non-priest public intellectuals / bloggers / influencers / etc, on the grounds that at least they have a million uncorrelated failure modes instead of one big one?
This question tempts me to say "most of the time." With the non-priests it would take an incredible amount of time and attention to sift the wheat from the chaff, whereas with the priests you're trying to separate the good wheat from the poisoned.
Being radically unconfident about most things is probably safer and healthier than being radically confident about something incredibly destructive. But it comes with a massive set of tradeoffs.
>If the answer is “significantly”, should we be trying to fix them, or to replicate their function in a different structure?
Different structure. Start from scratch (ish). A lot of small liberal arts colleges will be shuttering and the rationalist movement could buy one of those instead of a castle.
>on the grounds that at least they require their mistruths to be subtle (which limits the amount of damage they can do and ensures some correlation with truth)
You cannot have seriously written that sentence. Nothing about their mistruths have to be subtle, limited in the damage they can cause, or correlated to truth. Nothing about the last ten years of "mis/dis/mal/cheap fake/etc" has required subtlety, limits, or correlation to truth! To the extent the damage was limited (to the degree of billions or trillions of dollars, God knows how many life-years, the damage to reputation and Liberalism, rather than to the degree of "literally extinction of civilization"), it was that humans burned out and that Capitalism is somewhat less suicidal than many other priesthood memes.
"I think the priesthoods are still good at their core functions. Doctors are good at figuring out which medicines work. Journalists are good at learning which Middle Eastern countries are having wars today and interviewing the participants about what fighting wars in the Middle East is like. Architects are good at designing buildings that don’t collapse.
But now this truth must coexist with an opposite truth: the priesthoods are no longer trustworthy on anything adjacent to politics."
The trouble is, all of those things--medicines, middle East wars, buildings--are adjacent to politics, at least as now practiced in the West.
The analysis itself mentions how Marxism captured almost every academic field. We've been in "wokeness" land for 10 years (I don't buy the straightforward badness of woke ideas as hard as people in this space do, but admittedly there's some problems) and its star is already fading. I think probably this just happens sometimes.
If we had to find a thing about these ideas that causes them to capture academics more than the general public, it's gotta be the mix of "actually the public doesn't know what's good for them" and demands for ideological purity. That combined is a powerful carrot and stick in fields where reputation is the only currency.
I'm going to second this. I've read a lot about left-wing extremism in 1960s/70s America, and a lot of what went on then is pretty similar. You had a bunch of stupid left-wing ideas overtaking academic, legal, and medical professions, and people too scared to say no to them. This is something that happens in cycles, wokeness is just the most recent one.
I am a member of the priesthood in good standing (MIT CS professor), find the proposed reason for why wokeness took over academia unconvincing, and want to offer a different one.
I'm probably more woke than most of my colleagues---here is the midpoint of a debate I had with Pedro Domingos, opposing an academic free speech petition from what could be called a "woke" perspective https://david-karger.medium.com/a-rebuttal-to-some-cs-academics-free-speech-open-letter-to-the-acm-729ce1cb6caf . However, I consider myself "centrist" woke the same way I consider myself a "centrist" democrat, opposed to the more extreme tenets of wokeness.
I have never seen wokeness as a tool for status, perhaps because I have never really "performed" wokeness in public (the above debate being a very rare exception). I *behave* in ways that some would consider woke (trying to use the pronouns people want, support paying attention to race in school admissions), but I believe (perhaps I am fooling myself) that the motivation for these positions is simply caring about other people. And this points me at Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory, which posits that care for others is one of the fundamental moral values that is overweighted on the left compared to the right. I believe that wokeness generally comes from caring. That the positive parts of wokeness are simply an instantiation of "let me figure out how to be more caring of others", even if it comes at a cost to some of the other moral values such as liberty. I further speculate that if you have a monoculture of people who prioritize caring over the other values, then you have a monoculture that is particularly susceptible to being infected with wokeness.
It's been well understood for decades that academia skews left, ie, is exactly the sort of monoculture that fits my characterization. There are many explanations for why this might be, but since I've already talked about moral foundations let me circle back and propose it as a driver for the monoculture. A big part of academia is about teaching, and the large majority of academic spend their time working with and almost entirely surrounded by college students---ie, young people who in some ways we think of as still being children. So I think that academia draws in a group of people who have a bias towards caring (for children at least). Of course there are exceptions, academics who just want to do research and hate the disruptive distractions of their teaching responsibilities, but I think the vast majority of academics take some please in teaching which gives me a prior towards this foundation of caring for others.
>support paying attention to race in school admissions
How would you react to someone calling you racist because of this?
>and this points me at Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory, which posits that care for others is one of the fundamental moral values that is overweighted on the left compared to the right.
He's walked back some of that work because his original models relied too heavily on religious-focused definitions of purity, and it would be difficult to say now that many "woke" aren't deeply concerned with purity.
I think you make an interesting but self-serving point, in that the degree of "care" is extremely biased and involves so many trade-offs. You *care* more, not just at the expense of other moral foundations, but at elevating certain groups along certain axes over others. In some cases you can rationalize this through historical causes, but at scale it's always going to result in egregious hamfistedness.
Yes, I would agree it's difficult and per my comment above about risking epistemic nihilism, I consider social science stuff that replicates well to be not much more than "directionally true."
I've never seen that heatmap before but the X comment you linked to seems to obviously misrepresent it. The heatmap is made up of concentric circles. That the liberal map peaks at around level 13 and 14 doesn't mean that liberals care more about "plants, trees, and inert entities such as rocks" than they do about family and friends. It means liberals are more likely to include plants, trees, and rocks in their sphere of concern, along with family, friends, and everything in between, whereas conservatives are more likely to limit their sphere of concern to families and friends.
(I take no position one way or the other on the soundness of the paper. I'm responding to the interpretation on display in that X comment)
EDIT: OK, I see now that despite using concentric circles and categories that are increasing inclusive, up to the point of being literally all inclusive ("all things in existence") the researches tried to tell people that the categories were actually non-overlapping, i.e. "all things in existence" doesn't include your immediately family. First: Seriously?!?!? Second: that seems horribly (and unnecessarily) confusing and I question how much the participants really followed those instructions.
Sorry to keep complaining about this, but those heatmaps just seem awful. Why are they two dimensional heatmaps? What does second polar coordinate (phi) represent? The figures have no labels and the caption doesn't explain it. Am I missing something?
I would explain why i don't think it is racist to use race in admissions the same way we use other characteristics in admissions---as one of the many noisy features that can help us predict the outcome of admitting a particular student.
My point was not to argue that care was uniformly good, but to argue that the left overweights it compared to others. This has both good and bad outcomes---i agree that excessive wokeness is bad, even as i believe that much of it is driven by care.
I think this is generally correct. I think that certain ideas in "Wokeness" were natural extensions (some might say proof by reductio ad absurdum of the opposite) of a number of popular academic theories. E.g. Ibrim X Kendi is a counter argument for consequentialism (that intentions don't matter). Another aspect that I think is particularly hard for Americans to conceptualize is the tradeoffs between rights/values e.g. in my view of a just society it is both true that trans-women should be allowed to compete in woman's sports and that cis-women should not have to compete against trans-women (note that both of these cannot be simultaneously True so society's/groups which truth they want to uphold).
Of course two people can care the same amount about a third party and come to different conclusions about the best course of action – welcome to being a parent with a spouse. Try telling your wife that she wants to make different parenting decisions than you do because she "doesn't care as much" about your kid :)
I think this is a wonderful description of how fairly generic center left liberals rolled over in the face of woke. Standing up to it just seems so darn *mean.* But actual woke is dog-eat-dog zero-sum disputes about who should be in power and who should not. It is the polar opposite of nice.
It is *hard* for a nice white person to tell an upset black person they are wrong about race. It is *hard* for a nice dude to tell an upset woman she is wrong about sexism. So, they mostly don't.
(I'm not saying women and black people are *always* wrong about sexism and race, but they very often are).
*Edit* I would also invite you to consider how excessive niceness can generate cruel outcomes. The rules on this blog actually sum things up pretty well, I think. The whole idea of a statement needing to pass through at least two of three gates to be said. Is it nice? Is it true? Is it necessary?
I fully understand how sometimes The Cold Equations are the right choice. My point was not about how academics *should* behave but about how they *do*.
My emotional reaction to your comment is quite mild. I think that reveals that one of the great difficulties in life is extending individual standards of behavior to social systems. E.g., you want to be more caring is a goal that no matter how extremely you follow it, I have a hard time imagining myself objecting to, even though I'm a lot less liberal than you. But *making a society that is more caring* can rapidly cause a lot of problems, even though naively it is just an extension of being personally more caring.
Is it possible priesthoods are solving a problem that no longer exists and is now counterproductive? “Is this person worth talking to or thinking about” makes a lot more sense when you can’t ask an LLM to get all the best arguments for and against any positon, along with evidence. Having a domain jargon acts a lot better as a gating function when you can’t ask the LLM precisely how to make the argument the way an insider would.
I still think we haven’t figured out how to use the internet to actually have conversations at scale. I’d like to work on that problem. Some day.
Someone I know is addicted to junk science documentaries, in which Bigfoot, UFOs, and worm holes, and similar are often discussed, sometimes all in the same episode! I notice Michio Kaku makes regular appearances on these, which must leave his physics priesthood colleagues fuming, especially as he probably earns pots of money in the process.
But it illustrates another point, namely that professionals often relax their priesthoods' standards once their reputation is assured, especially if they are cogging on in years or retired. This may be in pursuing studies their colleagues think misguided at best (e.g. Gerard 't Hooft's contributions to realist physics, which conventional instrumental physicists think is like getting lost down a bottomless rabbit hole), or in extreme cases (Michio Kaku) engaging directly with the hoi polloi!
I think you've missed one step in priesthood genesis. How do priesthoods gain their status?
For some professions like doctors, the answer is obviously through providing direct and beneficial services to the public. But what about the architects, or the mathematicians, or the law socieities?
Here, I think the priesthoods themselves need to be crowned by an external actor. That might have once been a traditional authority (the literal King, or the church, or the government), but post-2000 or so that became the traditional media.
To the extent that the wokeness-capture hypothesis is correct (I'm indifferent and don't care to debate it), I think that's how it could "infect" priesthoods. The mass media itself fractured into a lower-status but more populous right (Fox News) and a higher-status and more elite left, so the status-having media as a whole is more likely to enforce left-orthodoxy than right-orthodoxy.
Particularly in the (US) reaction to the 2000s Iraq War, whole professions may have felt their status threatened by not applying the right critical theories. Trump circa 2015 also seemed like an anti-status Schelling point, perhaps reinforcing the phenomenon.
This seems clearly wrong, at least for mathematicians and most other academics. It literally works like a priesthood, with the older generation ordaining the new one as they prove they have mastered the rules. Academia is centuries old and ordainment has been (mostly) divorced from the mundane world’s events and very much done internally for at least a couple of centuries.
OTOH mathematics is a useful tool for a lot of things and a lot of mathematicians do a lot of teaching. The highest ranks of the priesthood do indeed do research that only a few of even the highest ranks understand, but OTOH the resources needed to support that are quite small and can be quietly added as a surcharge to mathematics' more practical activities.
I think an important aspect of the problem is giving priesthoods hard as opposed to soft power, and the way this tends to naturally happen under regulation.
When academic music is dreadful, this isn't great. But it doesn't do very much damage. No-one needs to pay attention to academic music. They can continue listening to Taylor Swift no matter how atonal the noises coming from the building labeled 'Music Department' are.
The Music Department can try to persuade people that actually its noises are better music. Sometimes (as in architecture), they may convince some status-desparate people to play their music in order to seem intellectual.
But anyone who doesn't mind priests sneering at them can continue to live in McMansions and listen to Taylor Swift.
But if you were to legally require all music to be approved by the Music Department before anyone could perform it, that would be very bad.
And in practice, priesthoods are very good at taking control of regulatory structures. So 'the Fiddle and Drum Association must approve your new song' inevitably ends up meaning 'the Music Priesthood must approve your new song'.
And at this point ordinary people no longer have the ability to ignore the priesthood, because the priesthood has subverted government to enforce its preferences.
This. I didn't have any issue with the priesthoods...until 2020 came along and they extralegally seized totalitarian power (not exaggerating) and refused to give it up for two years.
"In the 1870s, almost all U.S. physicians were still unlicensed."
"the enactment of U.S. state medical licensing laws in the late 1800s was for the primary purpose of reducing competition and allowing physicians to make more money."
"In 1889, Dent v. West Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time upheld a state physician licensing law."
Thats after my lower limit of the distinction between physicians and surgeons in old english
Pulling on that thread gets "Royal Colleges of Surgeons" and "15th century" but it being unclear whats the earilyest date for the concept
> He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1712 and the following year saw the publishing of his Anatomy of the Human Body, which achieved great popularity becoming an essential study source for students, lasting through thirteen editions,[1] mainly because it was written in English instead of Latin as was customary.
1. Is wokeness uniquely virulent? You mention Marxism sweeping the academy, is it just that it happened long enough ago that we have no sense of how disruptive it was at the time?
2. Insofar as wokeness needs a separate explanation, does it have anything to do with the fact that many of the core ideas emerged from within academia? Were they pre-engineered to appeal to smart technical people? Did they gain more status by being associated with another priestly faction?
3. How much of this is a phenomenon of priests vs the priestly support staff, the "nuns" and "deacons"? When I think of the scientific institutions that most ruined their reputations I think of like, Scientific American, which occupies an intermediate position between the priesthood and the public.
I think social media potentially fits in here: I wonder how much things went wrong at regulating the priesthood internally vs regulating something at the boundary between the priesthood and the rest of the world?
For the last point I'm imagining something like a combination of elite overproduction and social media: more potential priests are available for priesthoods, which both lowers the gradient between the inside and the outside, and also leads to larger numbers of people who are adjacent to the priesthood: people who did a year of grad school, or did the Columbia journalism school thing, but didn't end up actually becoming a professor or journalist, or if so ended up as a perpetual adjunct/freelancer, to precarious to be a part of the priesthood and thus subject to its discipline, but still close enough to have a) picked up the academic marxist jargon if there was any in their field and b) close to people who are in the priesthood and maybe in a position to implement some pressure from below.
This is all pretty speculative, but feels like something in this direction is part of the story
Richard Hanania's argument is partly that the current civil rights regime is not what people actually voted for in 1964 (and were explicit at the time, but they got ignored by judges/bureaucrats later).
I should be clear, I don't mean "virulent" pejoratively here, and to whatever extent wokeness or civil rights are destructive, that's not what I'm asking...I mean virulent in terms of how quickly and thoroughly it spread through the "priesthoods".
Purely descriptively, did civil rights in the sixties or Marxism in the thirties(? forties? fifties?) sweep through purportedly neutral institutions in the same way?
Like, to return to this point, I understand that the split of the Futurians from the Greater New York Science Fiction Club was basically because the Futurians wanted to be more Marxist; I don't know how acrimonious the split was, but according to Frederick Pohl, "No CIA nor KGB ever wrestled so valiantly for the soul of an emerging nation as New Fandom and the Futurians did for science fiction".
This was in the 30s, over Communism, but it has the same feeling as fights within fandoms today (I think). Was this representative? Did the same fights play out in universities and other institutions? If so, does this change the necessity for, or the desiderata for, an explanation of what happened with wokeness in the 2010s?
> Is wokeness uniquely virulent? You mention Marxism sweeping the academy, is it just that it happened long enough ago that we have no sense of how disruptive it was at the time?
I've heard it argued that wokeness and Marxism are just cosmetic variations of the same thing, which is traceable back to Hegelian dialectics and Gnosticism. Core of it is the idea that there is literally no such thing as objective truth (at least in a conventional, empirical sense), only liars and sheep, playing social games in which factual claims are one type of weapon among many. When Feynman said "nature cannot be fooled," and when Lysenko built his career on trying anyway, that's the root issue they were disagreeing about.
there is a skeptical/relativist tendency that shows up in all cultures from ancient times to today, but there’s not a single genealogy. the Greeks had the Sophists, China had the legalists. similar ideas recur but there is no continuous line.
left politics tends to be 1) secular 2) skeptical of claims of cultural superiority. in the late 20th century this looked like postmodern relativism about absolute truth claims made by religious and nationalist movements.
but many of the most influential strands of social justice politics as well as Marxism believe pretty strongly in truth claims on many topics. (try promoting postmodern relativism in the USSR!)
and in terms of US political factions the two groups hate each other, apparent convergence of ideas is really more like an attempt to outcompete each other in intra-left debates. (eg Marxists thinking about racialized capitalism, or social justice liberals trying to reframe oppressed identity groups as a kind of new proletariat).
"No line from Hegel to chinese Legalists" is a different claim from "no line from Woke to Marx" or "no line from Marx to Hegel."
> but many of the most influential strands of social justice politics as well as Marxism believe pretty strongly in truth claims on many topics. (try promoting postmodern relativism in the USSR!)
Someone doesn't necessarily need to truly care about - believe in - e.g. the Fulda Gap, as an end in itself, in order to leap to its defense when enemies come near.
> the two groups hate each other,
Do wolves of the same lineage never compete over access to finite hunting grounds? Do siblings never quarrel, even in the absence of such constraints?
I think most 20th century Marxists really truly believed in a lot of ideas. Most importantly development of productive forces initially driven by capitalism and later wisely steered by the Party, would as a result of the historical dialectic inevitably lead to the victory of the proletariat, etc. Like with any ideology, some were cynical, but there were many true believers especially early on.
Likewise woke social justice people are not relativists when it comes to, say, historical claims about American chattel slavery or the merits of colonialism.
There are no doubt connections between left-wing movements, but I do not believe they are simple, and I don't believe that the driving common factor is relativism about truth claims.
By analogy, you could (and many leftists do) look at racists within the Libertarian movement, and say this proves that free market capitalism = white supremacy, but it just wouldn't be historically accurate.
> Core of it is the idea that there is literally no such thing as objective truth (at least in a conventional, empirical sense), only liars and sheep, playing social games in which factual claims are one type of weapon among many.
Damn, Marx sure wasted a bunch of time writing Capital then.
People say their enemies don't care about truth, always, and they'll always have something to point to as argument since arguments are soldiers and all that. (In fact, I suspect a big part of why Marxism gets this is that Marx is making this exact same claim in the other direction: that the "truth" of the dominant institutions represents the desires of the ruling class, rather than the actual truth.) But Marxism and wokeness both make fairly objective, clear-cut, factual claims. They absolutely believe in truth.
> Singer blames Hegel. Hegel viewed all human history as the World-Spirit trying to recognize and incarnate itself. As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated – possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia – and everything is great forever.
> Marx famously exports Hegel’s mysticism into a materialistic version where the World-Spirit operates upon class relations rather than the interconnectedness of all things, and where you don’t come out and call it the World-Spirit – but he basically keeps the system intact.
[...]
> As far as I can tell, Marx literally, so strongly as to be unstrawmannable, believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable.
My claim is "Core of [wokeism/Marxism] is the idea that there is literally no such thing as objective truth" is not true. Marx believed in an objective truth, and believed he had found it, and argued voraciously for it on the basic of facts and reason. This does not mean he was correct about ideas like the inevitable victory of communism and blank slate-ism.
If you think being incorrect means you believe there is no such thing as objective truth, then you have effectively described all humans who have ever lived as disbelieving in objective truth, and thus there is no meaningful separation between wokeism, Marxism, conservatism, liberalism, etc.
> If you think being incorrect means you believe there is no such thing as objective truth,
All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares.
Michael, up above, made essentially the same argument - dragging in greek Sophists and chinese Legalists rather than "all humans who have ever lived" - and I'm not interested in pursuing this further if you don't care to engage in good faith.
I guess what I'm interested in is, what's the mechanism by which dumb people propagated it? A quick skim of the argument you link to sounds consistent with what I suggest above: more elites means both more people exposed to the original idea plus more such people outcompeted in academia/journalism itself who occupy "para-academic" or "para-journalistic" positions where they are both less controlled by whatever professional standards exist, and more in a position to intermediate between the core "priesthoods" and the masses.
Pretty broken. I mean, Trump and politics in general, but also...have you been to a hospital recently? Did that feel like a good, competent experience?
Take a relatively simple model of human flourishing: do people have family, do they have friends, are they healthy, are they wealthy? The US is pretty awesome at wealth, genuinely notably better than the rest of the world and that is genuinely important to preserve, but it does poorly on every other aspect of human flourishing and the trends are in the wrong direction.
"If the answer is “significantly”, should we be trying to fix them, or to replicate their function in a different structure?"
I dunno. Most priesthoods are based around specialized knowledge workers and it's unclear how many of those will be needed as AI develops. Like, in medicine, if you're a radiologist looking over at AI imaging and detection tools, are you confident in the future of your profession? How many government bureaucrats are doing anything that ChatGPT couldn't do? And I don't expect programming jobs to go away but...in a world where FizzBuzz is a real filter, how many programmers are going to survive the coding bots?
A lot of powerful priesthoods have uncertain economic futures in an era where their claim to status is unique cognitive work. And if we don't need them, just let them die. It's happened before, see journalism.
"How would we even begin to do either of those things?"
Certainly gripes about US culture are valid ... but then again, USAnians uniquely value wealth and its correlates -- we could be characterized as a nation with the tastes of the nouveau riche -- and people who like that tend to immigrate to the US. I remember running into one study of Americans as to how they traded off pay rate vs. the meaningfulness of their work. It turns out that generally they prefer better pay and get their "meaning" from the things they *spend* money on.
"have you been to a hospital recently? Did that feel like a good, competent experience?"
Not really sure what you're getting at here, but my n=1 data point is: yes, I was spending significant time at a hospital recently, which is almost never a "good experience" (because the hospital stay is usually necessitated by a sufficiently bad health situation), but given that constraint, I was very impressed by the competence of the doctors and staff, the care received, the facilities, etc.
It doesn't seem to me that the issues with "priesthoods" in the post have concretely changed the quality of hospital care. (Those issues seem more concentrated in various proclamations and health advice put out by professional organizations).
An interesting place to look is the perspective of the patient and doctor during a consultation. Since doctors became a full-fledged priesthood, doctors have expected to pronounce and patients to accept. The internet has changed that. I go into consultations having looked up the relevant literature on Medline. I'm not a scientist so most of it goes by my ears, but I get enough to ask relevant questions and to have a conversation.
That is an entirely different relationship, and probably a much healthier one. Perhaps it's a model for how a priesthoods could evolve: they are a priesthood and they have expertise, but they must now become much more open to challenge from the uninitiated. I choose doctors in part because they are willing to have a semi-technical discussion.
"Open to challenge from the uninitiated" isn't a stable equilibrium in the broader context - works for you because you're putting in the effort to learn, and be respectful, and the discussions are private, and even then some doctors aren't willing to play along, right? Eventually any such priesthood needs to integrate those technological advancements with their own practices, as part of rebuilding legitimacy, and rebuild some new Schelling fence between "initiated" and "everybody knows."
Your mention of Dr. Oz made me think, for some reason, of Paul Krugman. He was a very respected economist who became a blogger and columnist. Some of his columns deal with economics, but most don't. Even his economics-themed columns are mostly shameless partisan hackery. And some are shameless self-promotion. I don't know whether this cost him any credibility within the economics priesthood, but I've never had reason to think it did.
Is this because his shameless hackery is Democratic? Or because his reputation as an economist was already secure before he ventured out? Or that political commentary is considered to be within the legitimate boundary of the Economics priesthood? Maybe something else?
Krugman is a very interesting example, because his past self wrote a critique of his current (or recent) self. In Peddling Prosperity, he talks about serious academics who become nutbars when they move into the role of public talking-head.
Your Science Fiction Fandom point is the result of a really clear error, here; Sci Fi people are not insulated from academia. If you capture Professional Academics you capture Hobbyist Nerd Book Dweebs. Everyone who knows Klingon also knows a great deal about programming or shakespeare or some other thing. This is because Sci Fi Fandom is itself an identity adopted by people who want to be seen as smart. How many midwits did you meet during the first season of Rick and Morty who hung their hat on the idea that it was a smart show for smart people that normies just don't get? How many internet battles have been fought by people defending this idea from the (idiotic, out of touch, evil, malicious) owners of the various fantasy properties who would like to make some more money off it by getting your sister to watch it too?
The proliferation of midwits in the priesthoods due to elite overproduction has got to be a strong contender if we're looking for an explanation of why those priesthoods have become more susceptible to nonsense lately.
I think this is actually just an autist thing. I don't think everybody in fandom or academia is an autist but if you dig into who the load bearing pillars of any given academic discipline or fandom are, I bet you $100 you will find a bunch of autists whose special interests happen to be Star Trek or particle physics. Autists also tend to be rigid thinkers who take things to the utmost ends of their logical conclusions even when those are absurd and to get extremely upset when their mental wonderlands are poked with a stick by some dirty doubter. (I am autistic myself for the record so I can say all this from first-hand experience).
So, I don't think it's that sci-fi fandom and academia overlap in some specific way as that the very passionate people in both environments tend to be a certain kind of person.
I do not believe this was the case, and I was a part of science fiction fandom during the early years of this process. The "woke" capture of SF fandom started with the fans before spreading to the authors and editors, almost none of whom were Professional Academics. Only a small minority of SF fans, authors, and/or editors are university professors or other academics, and even then their status in the SF community is largely independent of their status in academia.
Yes, SF fans are for the most part people who think of themselves as smart and want to be thought of as smart, but "smart" and "academic" are two different things. Very few fans are thinking in terms of "smart, you know, like university professors".
> I’m not entirely satisfied with this theory because wokeness infiltrated non-priesthoods without psychological complexes around in-touchness (eg science fiction fandom) just as quickly and easily as it did the priesthoods;
Subscultures are kind of priesthoods too, see the Geeks, MOPs and sociopaths models: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths. I think this model goes with yours nicely because while you can see wokeness or Marxism or stuff like that as a disease, you can also see it as a kind of predation by some people that can gain by imposing the norms. If you're not a great member of your priesthood but suddenly everyone must care about Ritual Purity Under The Moonlight and for some reason you're better at this than average, you can climb the ranks quickly and become cool and important as a Ritual Purity Under The Moonlight specialist.
> [...] I still have basic trust that something in the New York Times’ non-opinion pages is 99% likely to be factually true - probably spun a bit, probably selected from the space of possible news articles because it supports the Times’ agenda, but factually true [...]
Sure, but then the question becomes: are there such things as the NYT's *non-opinion* pages? If the problem is one of opinion-writing penetrating supposedly factual 'straight' news items, then your distinction becomes unsustainable.
Maybe you've heard the old joke from Soviet times: in some competition, only an American & a Soviet athlete competes, & the American wins. Next day, the *Pravda* intones: "The Soviet competitor placed second, & the American one reached only second to last place." Factually true, but designed to give the wrong impression.
"My thesis in this essay is that the priesthoods are neither a rent-seeking clique nor an epiphenomenon of the distribution of knowledgeable people. It’s not that we need doctors, and by coincidence various medical associations have captured the concept of “doctor” and gotten a monopoly on it. The structure of priesthoods is itself functional. They’re a type of epistemic community that is usually more accurate than - or at least uncorrelated with - the world outside. Most other arrangements of doctors would be less functional. The doctors would get drowned out by other voices and fail to converge, or be lured away by worldly baubles and stop doing good medicine."
Consider also the role of credentialism in all this. A human, any human, with "MD" following their name automatically has a certain standing within the priesthood that the most knowledgable PhD with a research focus on the area of claimed expertise does not.
And maybe it should be that way, in the sense that this is the least sub-optimal. Do you really want "the market" to determine who is and isn't qualified to practice medicine? I think that I may be smarter than the average cat, but I have no clue whether a given course of treatment is medically advisable or not, whether the vet knows what he is doing or not, whether the dose he is giving me is the right medicine or is fit only for dogs.
It varies from discipline to discipline. My guess is Humanities, completely. Social sciences, a big chunk, but again, some more than others. The hard sciences and math have mostly resisted.
2) If the answer is “significantly”, should we be trying to fix them, or to replicate their function in a different structure?
With the terminal ones, best solution would be burn them to the ground and start anew. Universities are currently a Humboldtian, double-headed monster. Perhaps one should go back to Academies, that do research, and Universities, that just teach.
3) How would we even begin to do either of those things?
Mentioned in 2, but the options are always reform or revolution. Reform if it is feasible, new, alternative institutions to be created otherwise, while one starves the previous ones of money and prestige.
> It varies from discipline to discipline. My guess is Humanities, completely.
History gets classified with the humanities, but probably has more worthwhile integrity than most thanks to being anchored in empirical data from archaeology.
Having "derivation of facts from primary sources" as a provably-solid foundation to fall back on makes a big difference for reform vs. revolution sorts of planning.
Not really. I mean, "derivation of facts from primary sources" is too vague. In most cases, one can easily make the sources fit almost any angle, narrative and/or interpretation you wish, including wildly opposing ones.
True (with some quibbles possible). And we have a name for those who claim to exercise divine authority for personal gain, especially those who bend and twist the Word to ingratiate themselves with people who can pay or provide access to power, and it's not complimentary.
I think part of the woke capture story is downstream of the political polarization of the professions. It’s not just that there aren’t any republican professors, there are barely any republican doctors and lawyers, and it’s much easier to be captured by a fringe movement if the values it purports to further are ones that everyone already professes.
Perhaps a key element of priesthoods is a restriction on the number of seats. The easier it is for any churchgoer to become a priest, the faster the social power of the priesthood approaches zero.
I think engineering is a good example of this. There really is no engineering priesthood. People have a vague sense of what engineering schools are “better” than others but the school you went to almost never comes up, especially after you’re a few years into your profession and have some experience. Professors of engineering are not really considered to be priests because what they do on a day to day basis is quite different from what practicing engineers do. The idea of a professor of engineering speaking ex cathedra and expecting his words to be definitive strikes me as absurd and he would be mocked for pomposity. And I think crucially what drives all of this is that it’s relatively easy to become an engineer. There is no cartel rationing out seats at engineering institutions. There is no federal limit on the number of engineering seats that will be funded.
If there were ten times as many doctors (or architects) it seems that the prestige of the priesthood would breakdown. This might be good for the profession overall.
Engineering doesn't need most of the social protections of a priesthood because any fool can tell the difference between an engine that works and one that doesn't, and totally fraudulent engineers can't build working engines. So, easy to find a known-good engineer on short notice, then have them check on subtler details of the others as necessary.
Then again, there is the highly regulated status of "professional engineer", much hard to obtain than an ordinary engineering education, which allows one to peddle "engineering" services to the general public. But maybe that's a regulated profession that doesn't have the sociological features of a priesthood.
It’s weird to me that you list Eero Saarinen as someone who lost architect status by being popular - he’s a pretty high status architect, even if Tom Wolfe loves to amplify the voices that criticize him and pretend that they represent the community rejecting him.
I’m not sure that these priesthoods generate consensus as much as you say - there are some issues on which they do, but others on which they vastly amplify dissent. You’re supposed to have some extreme heterodox views if you’re going to be a member of the priesthood in good standing - though maybe there are particular forms of heterodoxy that are discouraged because they’re too popular with the public.
The big problem I see with individualism in the rationalist community is the emphasis on being like a Tetlock fox - this is how you make your own predictions more accurate, but it does very little to help the accuracy of the community, while a Tetlock hedgehog (which priesthoods encourage) is likely to be personally wrong, but provide interesting new ideas for foxes elsewhere to use to be more accurate.
And a minor point: musicologists aren’t the ones that endorse atonal music - they are more like historians looking at all the non-musical factors that led to the rise of tonality in the 1600s or whatever.
I think that part of the reason that wokeness was so successful in infiltrating many of this post is calling Priesthoods, is that, unlike actual Priesthoods, fields like Medicine are fundamentally progressive. They are concerned with advancing a body of knowledge for a particular purpose; in the case of medicine, that purpose is advancing the health and well-being of their patients and humanity as a whole. Most fields with Priesthoods have a similar goal. Wokeness came in and said, "Here are a bunch of ways that you're failing at helping people you say you care about or that you should care about, and in a bunch of ways you don't have expertise in seeing." This gave wokeness a perfect entry vector, by going in through the established values system, but bypassed the defense mechanisms currently in place, by being academic but in a field that the priesthoods didn't have a background in.
Also, in my field (computational chemistry) I have noticed that the boundary against capitalism seems to be steadily disappearing. When I started my PhD 3 years ago, for a PI to have a company on the side was still viewed as quite unusual (unpure?). These days, even the most traditional professors seems to be starting their own companies.
In a close parallel to the pharma case you mentioned, these companies also still follow some of the rituals of academia: publish in the papers, fund PhD in universities etc.
Scott, Have you read about how H Pylori was found to be the cause of many stomach ulcers? The Australian doctor who made the discovery (by experimenting on himself!) was ignored for decades (if I remember that detail correctly) by the medical establishment because he wasn't from a prestigious college!
Once you realize that medicine was worse than useless for most of its history https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/medicine-as-a-pseudoscience/ it then seems like more of a fluke that it got into value-added practices. They were "priests" beforehand, and there have been "witch doctors" in many cultures who supposedly have sacred knowledge, even if that knowledge was just about how to convince people you have medicinal powers. But as long as The Real Problem of the public being too ignorant to evaluate whether they actually have such knowledge exists https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-real-problemhtml then you can't be confident any kind of priest is going to actually be better than Dr. Oz. There are things like prediction markets to incentivize knowledge and make it public, but track records for doctors/hospitals are resisted. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/dissing-track-recordshtml
There was a recent transition between situations where the median academic/professional viewpoint was something like "we wish we could do something about these social ills, but there are lines we just can't cross" to "huh, why aren't we doing the obvious direct thing and crossing that so-called line anyway? let's just do that!"
(think "oh we'd like to have diverse hiring but obviously we can't do literal quotas" -> "literal quotas. that is what we need." or "we really HOPE the data comes out this way, but we can't just refuse to publish papers where the data comes out the other way" -> "yes we can! and we should! don't publish the papers with the untoward results!")
I don't totally get how this transition happened, but it has to be a different thing than basic political orientation or the "bright idea" of being fashionably ahead of the public, both of which existed for decades or more.
This seems more like a rapid development of common knowledge that traditional "lines" are being crossed all the time without penalty. That would explain the speed of change. Procedural rules and traditional impartiality standards might have been unenforced for a long time, but something made it suddenly very visible that you could get away with flouting them, and then a lot of people did, all at once.
The internet/social media did. The same thing happened with various shoplifting sprees across the USA when people found out rules weren't being enforced.
"Now in-touch-ness is no longer about pleasing the “barbaric yawps” and their middlebrow tastes. It’s about pleasing all the identity groups who each require a special language that only smart people can learn. In fact, you don’t even need to actually please them! You can call Latinos “Latinx”, which they are known to hate, and you will be even more in touch than the Latinxes themselves!"
You claim that your theory doesn't explain the capture of non-priesthoods like science fiction fandom, but what makes SF-fans not part of a priesthood themselves? Sure, their knowledge isn't accredited by a university degree, but this community plays the same status game as other more recognized intellectual communities. Only communities that don't value intellectualism are pretty immune from Wokeness.
Perhaps a fandom is more likely to lose you some prestige among the general public, that's not true for all fandoms (classical music comes to mind).
Conversely, scaling the ranks within some priesthoods isn't always going to gain you prestige with the general public (e.g. fat studies).
All priesthoods are somewhat connected through the university system, which makes prestige somewhat more transferable from one priesthood to the next. Fandoms *can* be very isolated, which makes their prestige less transferable.
I think in the case of "what was different about the 2010s" the big thing you have to pay attention to is that this was the first big chance for a fad to sweep through after basically all of the professions had become partisan monocultures. There were partisan monocultures (e.g. sociology) among the priesthoods before that, but plenty (e.g. medicine) were much more mixed. You could argue a bunch about why that changed and probably get to something like "the increasingly widespread adoption of cosmopolitan values in society led to them becoming an active point of political contestation, and a realignment around cosmopolitanism that tended to sort the significant bulk of educated people into the cosmopolitan party", or you could just say "gay marriage" and be like 65% right.
Anyway, I feel like that does a ton of work; social flashpoint around broad issues of cosompolitan values comes along right after nearly all the priesthoods have aligned onto the same political team because of cosmopolitanism. The interesting question, given that said alignment doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon, is whether any of these priesthoods can evolve norms that apply standard rigorousness checks to claims with partisan valence.
This is a version of strategy decay (https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/strategy-decay-as-an-institutional). The fact that there are first iconoclastic ways to succeed, which get shrouded by rules over time as people discover this is a way to "win", and over time they get goodharted or eroded, sometimes by force. The same can be seen across almost every facet of life where experts reign supreme from medicine to politics to architecture.
I think the flaws of the priesthood of academia are deeper than wokeness. Personal story: Recently I had a visiting professor contract not renewed for my unwillingness to teach a conventional curriculum in an intro psych class, despite my class promoting some pretty woke ideas (e.g. against the genetic basis of intelligence, for racial motives underlying drug scheduling, against traditional grading systems).
From my perspective teaching intro psychology, there’s a tension between two sets of facts, #1) the facts about how to evaluate the validity of a claim (replication, generalizability, large & consistent effects), and #2) the claims that pass these tests. The 2010’s was a time in which a priestly faction emerged that promoted #1, and everyone accepted #1 was a good idea. However, there was no widespread simultaneous rejection of #2. Now, we live in an era of contradiction, in which the priesthood teaches critical thinking, but also the claims that fail the test of critical thinking.
Since the existing priestly class manages hiring & journal’s editorial decisions, the priestly class often anoint new priests who publicly extoll the contributions of the members of hiring committees & editors who mainly contributed #2 (even if indirectly by glorifying adjacent research). However, #2 is often not synonymous with wokeness. Sometimes #2 is “the mind recalls lists of digits in a serial way”, or “the amygdala is the fear center of the brain”.
These things are so esoteric and hard-to-critique and boring-to-critique for an outsider that revolts can only come from an expert/priestly-class. I agree we need priests, but we need the right priests, and I think a partial solution is something boring like working from the rule of law, rather than the rule of man - meaning something like more explicit & transparent criteria for hiring or editorial decisions. For example, empowering the people who run organizations like the Cochrane Review who have explicit standards for ritually-pure communication, who I think do a lot more to advance science and medical decision-making than most.
I, too, teach a college level Intro Psych class, and I can vouch for the accuracy of this. I've run into problems when my teaching deviates from the mandatory textbook the department requires. In my case, it was mostly a matter of emphasis. The chapters on Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis were mandatory, but Darwin's theory of natural selection, the two track model of attention, and, yes, alternatives to biological determinism were not. Given only 14 class sessions, and that the mandatory material was quite extensive, this was a de facto policy of not teaching those ideas. I had a long and painful discussion with my supervisor (a clinical psychologist by training) on exactly what claims regarding how well therapy works and why can be supported and which can't.
It's the communication, no? It's always been the communication. Memetic plagues became easier to transmit with printed books. Easier again with intercontinental travel. Easier yet again each time with the telephone, radio, and television.
Now, we have social media, where anyone can go and see what memetic plagues are falling out of anyone else's head. If you increase transmissibility, you get more infection risk.
Classical music is like a “priesthood” in this sense, and I don’t just mean contemporary composers.
When I was younger, I was annoyed by the snobbery of the classical music world. I’m still annoyed by it, but over time, I’ve come to understand that this snobbery serves at least two useful purposes, and without it, classical music might not exist.
One purpose is to help classical musicians find the fortitude necessary for their vocation. Attaining even basic professional competence in classical music takes a lifetime of grueling work and sacrifice. Years of lessons, and countless hours in the practice room. To prove your mettle you have to make it through a gauntlet of gatekeeping rituals like competitions, auditions, and “juries” (special performances for panels of experts who decide if you’re good enough to be awarded a degree). Once you’re admitted into the ranks of the profession, you’re considered lucky if you eke out a barely-middle-class income without a day job. (Not to mention, there’s a decent chance you’ll get sexually harassed or assaulted somewhere along the way!) In the midst of this life, the idea that someone can learn three guitar chords, groan into a microphone, and make a million dollars feels outrageous! (your perception isn’t quite fair–success in rock and pop music does take work–but it’s directionally correct!). If you’re going to persevere, it helps to believe that what you’re doing is objectively much better and more worthy than the trash or trifles that any other type of “musician” is producing.
(Incidentally, like the members of other “priesthoods”, classical musicians often feel a special kind of resentment toward other classical musicians who have “crossover” success and make a lot of money by appealing to the masses, e.g., Andrea Bocelli. Others manage to become household names while maintaining their reputations within the priesthood, like Yo-yo Ma)
Anyway, the fortitude is tied closely to the second useful purpose of the snobbery, which is to maintain the integrity of the tradition. Classical music performance requires mastery of many technical skills and stylistic nuances that can only be attained through years of one-on-one study with expert teachers. The learning would happen in a fundamentally different way if the teaching was delivered with a mindset of “here is one good way to play one of many good kinds of music on the violin” instead of how it’s actually delivered, which is more like “here is The Correct Way to play Brahms (i.e. proper Music) on the violin”. There’s a kind of moral impetus there, which might actually be essential to the project.
All that being said, my perception is that classical music snobbery has softened a lot over the past 25 years or so. As someone who hates snobbery, this makes me happy, but as someone who loves classical music, this makes me worried.
(I’ll also offer a correction to your perception of the music being written in universities and conservatories… the super-dissonant, atonal stuff hasn’t been in vogue for quite a while–now we’re in a “post-modern” era where nominally just about anything goes, and the actual values and norms are more vague and covert. Notably, this shift has definitely included efforts to get more “in touch”, although it’s not like more people are listening to it… Also–technically, musicologists are the scholars who write scholarly papers about music; the people who write music are still called composers, even if they’re employed by universities.)
This is fascinating. I can't recall a single contemporary classical piece of music that I have heard. Outside of movie theme songs, I thought the field was dead. I suppose the likes of Hans Zimmer isn't though of very highly within the classical priesthood, then?
Soundtracks, (to movies, TV shows, and video games,) are indeed the new repository of classical music. This shouldn't be too shocking; it's not like the great classical composers of old just went around writing music purely for the fun of it. Virtually all of them had patrons who commissioned them to write cool stuff that we enjoy today.
And who's commissioning new instrumental music today? Who are today's patrons? Film, TV, and video game producers.
Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMFCM0SKbnY . It's one of the great pieces of modern-day classical music, performed by an orchestra and choir. It's a four-movement masterpiece that draws heavily on the Classical tradition, including one movement that borrows quite directly from Bach. (You'll recognize it when you hear it, if you're familiar with his works.)
Where did it originate? As the soundtrack to the final boss sequence of one of the most highly-regarded video games of all time.
It's funny you bring up Uematsu, because he apparently had zero training in writing classical music. He really was just going on vibes, which apparently is enough.
Huh. I hadn't heard that. Where did you hear that from?
One thing I *have* heard is that the Prelude, one of his best-known works, was thrown together at the last minute (because he was under immense time pressure) simply by drawing on his training in music theory and pulling out a sequence of standard arpeggios which, as you put it, "vibes" quite well, but is not something an untrained artist would know how to reach for.
I think I just read it somewhere and never bothered to verify it, but here's his Wikipedia bio:
Uematsu was born in Kōchi, Kōchi, Japan.[7] A self-taught musician, he began to play the piano when he was twelve years old,[1] and did not take any formal piano lessons.[8] He has an older sister who also played the piano.[4] After graduating from Kanagawa University with a degree in English, Uematsu played the keyboard in several amateur bands and composed music for television commercials.[1] When Uematsu was working at a music rental shop in Tokyo, a Square employee asked if he would be interested in creating music for some of the titles they were working on. Although he agreed, Uematsu at the time considered it a side job, and he did not think it would become a full-time career. He said it was a way to make some money on the side, while also keeping his part-time job at the music rental shop.[4]
Uematsu seems like he'd be one of those outsiders of the priesthood because he's a commercial video game composer. You're saying that isn't true, that he's a respected member of the priesthood?
I'm not saying anything about his status within the musical community "priesthood." I'm saying that people like him are the modern-day classical music composers, and offering this as an example of well-done modern music in the classical style.
No, Hans Zimmer wouldn't be considered part of this priesthood. The classically trained musicians who play on his film scores are, though.
There are some composers who write music for movies while remaining fully respected in the classical music world. John Corigliano and Nico Muhly are good recent examples. Aaron Copeland and Leonard Bernstein did it too, back in the day.
Classical music composition is not dead! Just very niche. Its quality varies a lot, in my opinion, but some of it's very good! Here's one written in 2008 that I just heard for the first time and like a lot https://youtu.be/ApK3iv2Sfbc?si=aCx_xJ1LjZBIjX6W
In the sense that “every cause wants to be a cult”, is it also the case that every pursuit wants to be a priesthood?
I’ve seen a couple of examples recently where someone wrote about their firsthand experiences of something (e.g. the campus protests), and were dismissed by others: “I’m not going to believe a word he says. He’s not a real journalist, he’s just a blogger.”
There was another case — I wish I could remember where I heard this — where someone said something like “It was OK for Alice to tweet a joke like that, because she’s a professional comedian, but Bob is not, so it’s not OK for him.”
I’m an accountant, so my first snarky thought when I heard this was “Ah, yes. It’s OK for the professional comedians, because they have taken a grueling twelve-hour exam and proven themselves, for the protection of the public. If anyone could just hold themselves out as comedians (by *checks notes* telling jokes), that would be very bad indeed.”
Tweeting at the venues where Alice would be performing comedy seems like it would be *more* effective than tweeting at the company Bob does the books for.
The threat of a boycott against a generic corporation because they have the wrong accountant is largely idle because of the impractical coordination problem - almost nobody is going to know who the company's accountant even is, and the Largest Tweetstorm Ever would reach only a tiny fraction of the company's customers and most of them won't really care.
But the threat of boycott against venues or platforms hosting an entertainer is much more serious, because the boycott doesn't even have to be organized. The tweets are evidence that there is a body of people familiar with Alice's career and so likely follow her genre, who find anything associated with Alice to be revolting. Those people can't help but notice that Alice is the opening act at Venue X tonight because Venue X is prominently advertising the fact, and they will know what sort of jokes she tells because she's presumably been advertising that. So, with no coordination, many people will decide to patronize a different venue, and the venue may find it prudent to choose a different opening act.
> I don’t fully understand why wokeness succeeded at conquering the priesthoods so much more thoroughly than any previous political fad.
Is this really the case, though? Coming from a family of academics with a network of friends in academia, I've heard their stories about how McCarthyism and blacklisting destroyed a lot of careers back in the day. Loyalty oaths were a requirement for employment back then. It seems to me that Woke is the same type of witch-hunting hysteria but with a Leftist twist this time around. And I suspect the numbers of academics and professionals who've lost their jobs to Wokism are much fewer than during the era blacklists. Has anyone really run the numbers?
A claim of 100 professors vs feel free to guess an estimate for what happened during 2020 when I personal wasn't applying for jobs that said "vax required"
What numbers? How do you measure something so subjective? I suspect that if you ask ten people each of whom hate woke, you will get ten different definitions. It's like asking how many people have lost their jobs due to greed, or personal animosity. How could we ever know?
According to Ellen Schrecker in her book _No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities" (1986)_ (which I haven't read) she documents that at least 100 and possibly as many as 150 professors were dismissed from their positions or forced to resign or retire during the McCarthy witch hunts. According to the NCES, by 1960, there were approximately 58K full professors in the US. By 2020, there were 154K. Googling as best I can, it looks like a couple of dozen professors have claimed they were fired for going against the Woke. Given that there are a lot more professors today and that the documented number of firings based on Woke policies is relatively lower than during the McCarthy era, I think it's reasonable to say that the McCarthy witch hunts proportionately affected more academics than the current Woke witch hunts (oh, but witch is a gendered term, I shouldn't use — my bad).
And now that we have Google, we can track the frequency of word usage in the Media. Kevin Drum takes woke-related terms and words and uses Google trends to track their frequency. ;-)
One would have to define what "Woke" is, first. We know what "McCarthyism" was (largely because we remember *who* McCarthy was, the phenomenon was largely traceable back to one person--a bit like an epidemic). And it wasn't limited to academia.
...I don't know why you're complaining about this now? The leftist priesthoods are en route to being purged, to be replaced with new ones. Shouldn't you be happy that the new order will be aligned with your interests? That's all you can really ask for.
How else do you "win"? The liberals tried tolerating dissent, and look how that ended up. Security can only be guaranteed through control. If you can't accept that, you will never be happy.
"The liberals tried tolerating dissent, and look how that ended up."
With three centuries of progress and prosperity, giving billions of people human rights, freedom from famine, and globe-spanning opportunities--things that all but a tiny elite could only dream about before liberals tried tolerating dissent?
...Why are you saying that like it all happened three centuries ago? All of those are relatively recent developments. Until then, society was much more conservative and hierarchial. The church had a grip on the populace. All of that was supplanted with modern liberalization movements in the 20th century.
...But that success is worth nothing if it's just a house of cards that falls apart in less than a century.
That seems optimistic, I dont think trump even could drain the swamp even if he wanted to; theres no reason to think that policy promise isnt a "big ask".
If the true red america was put into power why would scott be invited to the party?
As one of the apparently nonexistent nonmusicologists who deeply loves mid-20th century atonal music, I feel obliged to point out that musicologists do not produce any music, atonal or otherwise, at least not qua musicologists. They analyze it (and its history and so on). Also, some people deeply love mid-20th century atonal music.
Not all priesthoods are the same. My experience in biology (grad student until a few years ago) is that life scientists' politicking and purity rituals and all that is checked by the all-consuming, all-overriding arbiter of "is it true and what is your evidence?". Bio has trends and unpopular opinions and other things that will get you ridiculed, but that's only because they're believed to be genuinely based on and correlated with our best guess of ground truth. If you disagree with the consensus, the burden is on you to prove your point; but if someone else disproves the consensus, the burden is on you to change your views.
Two places where this can fall apart a bit:
1) Race-adjacent genetics research. This wasn't close to my area of specialty, so I don't know the social details of what's going on there. My impression from afar is that race is hot enough politically (*outside* the priesthood) that almost everyone would rather avoid it and spend their time and resources on any other of the endless available research directions.
2) Funding. It's hard to disprove scientific consensus in a grant proposal. More importantly, funding agencies are run by people with their own ideas of what makes the most interesting and exciting research. If your proposals don't align with those ideas, they're going to get beaten by proposals that do. There's a general sense among scientists that this is much, much more true than it was decades ago because there are many fewer (inflation adjusted) dollars per research scientist. Back in the Good Old Days, you'd probably get funded as long as you were capable of doing good work on *something* and could demonstrate that in writing. Now, you also have to be in the top X% of most "interesting"/"important" proposed work, for some scary value of X.
Ugh, it was difficult to be an immunologist during the pandemic. Part of this was because everyone was saying dumb things. Sometimes it was just unproven assertions that went beyond the evidence, other times it was assertions that were contrary to the evidence, and other times it was people not understanding the basic science well enough to know that they were misreading the evidence.
I observed this last one in the comments on this very blog. PhD-level people whose expertise is outside of biology would dive into the primary literature, pull something from a figure that 'suggests X' and pass it around like it was some good insight. The problem is that the original authors of the paper didn't make that assertion for a reason, because it's wrong. Just not in ways the 'uninitiated' could understand.
For example, early on in the pandemic some people were asserting that antibody protection against COVID only lasted about 3 months. Now, the claim wasn't that COVID mutates fast enough that every 3 months you have another strain floating around, but rather that someone who recovered from COVID would be susceptible to reinfection by the same strain within 3-6 months.
At the time, I pointed out that this was unlikely, and why the figure they were referring to did not suggest this conclusion at ALL but was rather a methodological artifact. Further, I noted that IF TRUE this was an extraordinary claim. The finding that COVID was so novel a virus that it could somehow delete disease-specific memory B- and T-cells it would be the most profound discovery for immunology since vaccines (probably more), and COVID-led discoveries would transform medicine more in the next 20 years than the last 100 years. Once I pointed this out, the people who made these observations understood they were in error, but I think it shows a benefit to professional 'priesthoods' that's more than what Scott has outlined. Specifically, there's an education component - often formal - that changes the discussion in two important ways:
1. Education ensures everyone knows "the basics".
Most people publishing in academic journals have read the textbooks, taken the exams, and gotten the degrees to ensure they have a basic understanding of the nuances in the field - and there's a nontrivial number of these. This includes everything the priesthood takes for granted, but that the uninitiated don't even know to ask about. It isn't just about enforcing some shibboleth. It's about the difference between getting it right and coming to the exact opposite conclusion to what would make sense to any 'normie' who had all the background information at their fingertips. Sometimes people skip the education angle and get their expertise through professional exposure, or by plowing through years' of academic review articles and basic research. Honestly, nobody cares how you got there, but it's obvious to anyone if you're new around here because you don't know the basics and we're not about to stop the conversation to catch you up on the last 20 years of background.
An analogy would help here. Find a non-native English speaker and ask them about idioms. Most native speakers use idioms all the time. It would be painful to remove them all from everyday speech, but it is equally difficult to explain every idiom as they come up. Often, you don't even realize you're using them. But to anyone new to the language, idioms can make a discussion nigh impossible to follow without someone there to constantly explain that, no, that French speaker is not actually telling you to cook an egg. The difference with idioms is that it's at least possible to get by without using them at all. When, instead, you have an established store of information that covers multiple textbooks, it's not possible to have the conversation and supply all the reasons why these statistical tests were used, this buffer solution contains magnesium, this timepoint is essential to detecting the phenomenon, etc. At some point, you're not just expected to understand the 'idioms', but to use them correctly yourself, or you can't be part of a productive conversation.
2. During your education, you get to ask all the dumb questions without bothering anyone. And any truly brilliant questions you can save for later - though the ratio of dumb to brilliant is about a million to one. And you don't know the difference!
This includes the most annoying ones, like, "Do you think maybe X causes asthma? Maybe nobody has ever thought of that before!" or the omnipresent, "I heard that Y cures cancer, but pharma companies won't let people know about it because they make too much money on chronic treatment." Honestly, a quick search on PubMed will answer both of these questions. Because, yes, we've thought about if maybe X (or really, X1, X2, X3a and X3b) might cause asthma. We've tried, like a dozen times, but it doesn't seem to be correlated. And you can look up not just that one crappy study of whether Y works in cancer, but its conclusions are based on a rat xenograft model that failed to translate into humans, or the subsequent toxicity profile showed it kills quicker than cancer - and more horrifically.
While earning your BS degree, you get to ask all these questions and mostly get some answers, while also being led to the places you can go to find them for yourself. While earning your PhD, your peers start to expect you to find those answers on your own. Once you enter the 'priesthood' you'll still have dumb questions from time to time, but you'll only toss them into the conversation when nobody else has thought of them, so the question will at least be relevant, instead of something that was answered a decade ago.
There's a reason the uninitiated are excluded from serious discussions within the priesthood, and it's the same reason children are often excluded from 'grown-up' conversations. Because when you're discussing whether you think Sally should get a second opinion about her bunion surgery, the child interjecting with a comment about a bunion cream joke from a cartoon doesn't have the background knowledge they need to contribute meaningfully to the conversation. Nobody tosses the kid out because they're afraid they might have a good point, or because the kid might question the legitimacy of the institutions, or because associating with children might pull the conversation down to 'their level'. They toss them out because they want to have a serious conversation. That requires preparation, and if you don't have the preparation it's obvious to everyone that you're not ready to participate.
I'm not convinced either way, and Scott's writeup didn't significantly change my opinion on the matter. Regardless, I wouldn't judge all of biology to be untrustworthy because it's unable to answer a question, especially a historically specific question like this one.
If, OTOH, you're saying you don't trust the people who made official Declarations of Truth about the origins of COVID because they claim to represent 'the scientific consensus', I would suggest that's a valid condemnation of those specific officials/institutions, and not on 'the priesthood' of biology in general. I have a lot of criticisms of public officials, and how they hijacked the biomedical 'priesthood' and our reputation, while rejecting much of our prior work.
To the epidemiologists who designed airflow on airplanes to reduce the spread of pandemics, it must have been infuriating to see all their hard work undermined by masking policies that ensured airflow was redirected laterally. I doubt they would agree that the people making those policies represented the priesthood, just because they invoked it in their justification of a their asinine ideas.
Lots of research and recommendations made prior to COVID were tossed out the window by people (some of whom should have known better) making panicked decisions and pretending that they were blazing new trails, that nobody had ever thought of any of these things before.
It was difficult for the rank and file to do so. I think the bigger problem was the complete lack of debate at institutions on key decisions. Maybe part of this was because the decisions were top-down, and part of it was that debate had been removed from within the Overton window by social media. But a large part of the benefit of institutions "within the priesthood" is supposed to be the idea that they're separate from outside influence. During COVID they were not.
I agree that these institutions failed to the extent they chose to bow down to decisions by the Fauci-style top-down administrators and not stand up for discussions/debate among the rank and file. And if your assessment from watching that play out is, "you can't trust 'the profession' because they're clearly not functioning according to basic scientific principles" you're making a strong and valid inference.
The loss of trust was earned, and we've lost something until/unless it is earned back. I guess it's easier from where I sit on the inside, because I can say, "A, B, and C are wrong. D is good advice. E has been misinterpreted, but if you know what you're looking at you can use this to guide you to the right answer." Whereas the uninitiated can't parse the difference, so if anything is unreliable the whole edifice loses its value. The "priesthood" loses its value if it's only useful to those on the inside.
So you're saying some (low-ranking) priests are still pure in their hearts despite the ex cathedra proclamations of the priesthood often being outright lies, the high-ranking priests all being corrupt, and basically everyone else supporting them either for advancement or out of fear of excommunication. How is this meaningfully different from condemning the entire priesthood as rotten to the core?
That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that, as with any institution, the structures built for the purposes of advancing the noble aims of the priesthood can also be redirected in ways that undermine those aims. They misuse may be difficult to spot from the outside, but not from the inside. Insiders can still do good work, but they're limited in their ability to correct subjects related to institutional capture.
But if only insiders can trust the priesthood, and only in areas not captured by outside interests, it's kind of useless, isn't it? The priesthood requires the institutions to do the work, but at the same time those institutions are vulnerable in a way that could undermine the whole enterprise. The only answer that I can see is that you need constant, ruthless vigilance against institutional capture, or you risk the whole thing.
The "core" of the biology priesthood isn't rotten, because the "core" isn't the institutions. If you burned down Elsevier tomorrow we'd find other outlets to publish our work. And without the corruption in the academic publishing industry it would probably be a better conversation.
I guess I'm saying that if you want good fruit from the academic tree, you need to constantly prune the institutions that are susceptible to infectious parasitism. A priesthood must be well maintained, and it's only as good as that maintenance.
What soured me was that everything the priesthood of covid said was designed to induce behavior, not to inform. And there's a sort of assumption on rationalist blogs that we were, I guess, supposed to wink and nod at this because we're smart and the priesthood wasn't really talking to us. When they said "antibodies from the most recent strain aren't effective against reinfection, you still must do social distancing and also take this vaccine that was based on a prior variant to be safe" that was clearly absurd, and the only logical reason to say it is that you think if you don't say that, Joe Sixpack - who is pretty sure he must've had covid last month but actually didn't - will decline the vaccine, spread the disease, and so on.
The problem being that once I saw the medical profession doing this with something that I *could* spot, I started to be suspicious that they're doing it to ME on things that I *cannot* spot, and that on some other topic the priesthood is manipulating me and I'm a sucker and a dupe as bad as the idiots who were hiding out in their apartments fearing reinfection a week after recovery. I was just smart enough to see it and be worried about it, but I'm from another profession and I'm not smart enough to actually discern every time they're doing it, so I kind just don't believe them at all now out of aversion to being a sucker.
I understand and fully endorse your perspective. It's the most rational way to view the situation. Personally, I've been trying to sound this alarm for years without getting any traction.
A personal anecdote: we switched pediatricians soon after one of our children was born. I mentioned to the pediatrician we were going to do an adjusted vaccine schedule based on our risk profile. The pediatrician flew into a rage, making a half-dozen outrageous claims and then told us to seriously rethink our decision "before you put your child's life at risk." After the lecture, she left the room with no further discussion.
My wife was confused, asking ME if I really knew what I was talking about. Yeah, I had a PhD in immunology, but this was the pediatrician, after all. I was incensed. I went straight to PubMed and pulled up a dozen articles on a quick and dirty search demonstrating that everything our *former* pediatrician had just told us was false.
And I couldn't help thinking, "I know the science behind all this. I'm educated enough to know exactly where she's making stupid claims and where there's strong evidence for vaccine efficacy. But the average person doesn't." And I realized right there that at least some percentage of the anti-vax movement could be blamed directly on the medical paternalism you're talking about. Because anyone could go to the primary literature and debunk every claim this paternalistic pediatrician made, while at the same time finding NO competing studies backing up anything she said. That person would have "done their own research", come to the only logical conclusion, and justifiably felt that they were in the right and the whole medical establishment was trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes because they're in the pocket of Big Pharma.
And they on nearly every point, they wouldn't be wrong! There's a ton of pharma influence in the industry. Paternalistic doctors really ARE making false statements to get patients to do what they want them to do.
But personally, I do get vaccines for my kids (albeit on a different schedule from the CDC's) because I am convinced by solid evidence that they're effective and beneficial to them, personally. But I understand that a normal person who has an encounter with a paternalistic pediatrician like mine would struggle to arrive at that same position.
I'm not even anti-vax, and she wasn't willing to countenance a slight variation from the official (bloated) vaccine schedule. What would a good pediatrician have done? Personally, I think they would allow me to lean on their expert knowledge in making decisions outside my area of expertise. In this case, she was operating outside HER area of expertise, fine, but if she'd been talking to a non-expert, she could have presented the evidence and said, "Ultimately it's your decision when to get these shots, but there's strong evidence that these vaccinations prevent outbreaks - which are more common in sub-communities where the majority of parents opt out of all vaccination." The patient could then ask something like, "Do you have children, and did you get them vaccinated?" It could be an honest discussion, and while every patient might not make the SAME decision, everyone could at least make an INFORMED decision. Paternalism prevents anyone from making an informed decision, while destroying trust in 'Western medicine'.
The problem of paternalism in medicine is not new. I know there's still some debate within the medical community about the merits/demerits of paternalism. Some still think it's justified in certain emergency situations, where you can't afford for the patient to make the 'wrong' choice. That's what happened during COVID, where a bunch of evidence-free interventions were implemented, like 6ft/2m distancing, masking toddlers in daycare, or any of a number of questionable policy decisions.
And that's fine if you implement the policy while also doing cluster randomized trials to test whether they work or not. But if you've declared something from on high and staked your paternalistic reputation on the veracity of the proclamation, we've learned from sad experience you're not going to be asking whether you might be wrong, nor willing to test your hypothesis in an unbiased way. What the COVID experience suggests is that paternalism introduces an inherent bias that inhibits the collection of good evidence.
So medicine gets to choose: paternalism or evidence-based medicine. You don't get both.
When I was an English major in the 1960's my impression was that the professors were smart people who really loved literature, and for the most part they communicated that enthusiasm. What they taught was close reading. Close reading also could actually be useful in some occupations, such as the legal profession. They also analyzed literary works for myths, archetypes, symbols, etc., which was often interesting, and deepened understanding. So the English department priesthood of that era did some good for their students, IMO. My strong impression is that today a student who loves reading and literature should stay as far away from the English department as possible. The only long-term solution that I can imagine is the wholesale replacement of the existing priesthood with a new priesthood of people who lenjoy literature for its own sake.
Wonderful post. I would love for you to do a book review of "We Have Never Been Woke" by Musa al-Gharbi, which is essentially about what you covered in the "Why Were The Priesthoods So Politically Easy To Capture?" section of this piece.
One really useful technique is to look internationally at other cultures' priesthoods, and see where they agree and disagree with your local recommendations. If you're a Soviet farmer and your local priesthood is preaching Lysenkoism, it's a useful observation that European and American scientists don't agree. Asian (Chinese/Japanese/etc) priesthoods serve a similar role today for Americans, if you're able to translate the papers enough to tell what they're recommending.
This reminds me of a thing I have realized, which is that, despite the fact that I have a few disagreements with modern medicine, I want my doctors to be medically orthodox. Please give me exactly the mainstream advice for my situation! I'm willing to research on my own and develop my own ideas (not like "hippo eyes for colon cancer" but more like "perhaps statins should be given earlier even though my 10-year risk of heart events is low"), but if my doctor agrees with my weird ideas in one area, who knows if she isn't weird and wrong in other areas? Within reason of course.
Oddly I also want this in my actual (Catholic) priest.
I'm somewhat eclectic in my actual religious beliefs (basically blind men and the elephant parable + it makes sense to stick with my culturally default religion), but I want a (Episcopal) priest who believes our catechism fully. If I wanted a grab bag of theology I'd join the UUs.
I think an issue with independent creators, especially those that post often, is that the financial incentive to have a profitable edutainment-business does not exactly align with well-researched and true articles. I think this is especially true on Youtube.
I think left wing social views enjoyed a lot of success over the last 10 years partly because social conservatism came to look ridiculous by being proved seriously and obviously wrong on homosexuality. It then was logical for a lot of image-conscious people to try to distance themselves from social conservatism.
In what sense do you believe that social conservatism was proved seriously and obviously wrong on homosexuality? Not disagreeing with you, just looking to see this claim fleshed out a bit more.
They said that allowing same-sex marriage would lead to a spiral of moral corruption and depravity; the more moderate progressives said gay folks mostly wanted to form normal households and enjoy ordinary spousal benefits such as medical visitation rights. Latter claim was publicly validated by experiment, former not so much.
I mean, I think some of the "slippery slope" arguments rather WERE vindicated. The year before last, the author of this blog wrote an article saying "yeah, maybe it's not GREAT if several thousand teenage girls undergo completely medically unnecessary mastectomies which they will come to regret years down the line, but in the scheme of things it's a drop in the bucket".
That wasn't the particular type of corruption and depravity which social conservatives were predicting. More importantly, many of them were claiming that stable-boring-normie households where the parents happen to be openly gay simply *weren't possible,* on an almost ontological level. Any movement can become a laughingstock when a thing they said couldn't possibly happen is not only suddenly everywhere, but apparently would have been widespread all along if not for them actively suppressing it.
It is quite a stretch to say the latter claim was "publicly validated" due to your use of the word "mostly." No, gay folks mostly *do not* want to form normal households. That it is a fairly small fraction (25% or less), and it's nice that they get to do so, but that was the polite window-dressing to get acceptance, not the bulk of the population.
I think woke is 90% Tumblr, just as the alt-right was 90% 4chan.
Online weirdos of female and male varieties self-segregated to either platform, which structurally catered to and reinforced feminine and masculine social dynamics.
The feminine and masculine, as forces*, are intrinsically pathological when isolated from each other. This often takes the form of purity spirals, but with different dynamics.
Masculine echo chambers fail via obsessive xenophobia. You see this with right-wing twitter, pockets on the religious right, and 4chan. The transformation of anonymous imageboards with loose moderation policies into far right spaces was inevitable; I was posting on 4chan and adjacent sites for the whole critical period, and saw the racism turn from ironic to unironic before my eyes. There was no coordination, no possibility of coordination, and no way to stop it once the memeplex started spreading, at least under the traditional rules of 4chan.
I've never spent any time on Tumblr, but reading a few retrospectives written by Millennial women, it looks like the inevitable feminine counterpart to 4chan. Weird online women flocked to Tumblr, safe behind pseudonyms but able to fulfill the feminine imperative to network, which was impossible on 4chan. Woke is just feminine thinking isolated and taken to a pathological degree, so of course it developed on a site of misfit girls left to build their own civilization on an island without boys.
Woke went mainstream, and white racialism didn't, because we live in a feminized society. The morality of educated Westerners is dominated by stereotypical feminine concerns, especially compassion. If you think of every dumb lefty idea that has made the world worse, normie liberals and conservatives were powerless to oppose it because, in modern Western culture, compassion is a sovereign virtue against which other virtues have no claim (if you pay attention, arguments with lefties always boil down to this). Educated Westerners were primed for the Tumblr memeplex, and it didn't help that a significant portion of secular Millennial priests are women who spent their formative years on Tumblr.
What do you mean, segregated? They obviously lived together, it's just that people understood that they had different places in society. Castes that they could never escape.
"Woke is just feminine thinking isolated and taken to a pathological degree"
I'm not sure I understand, can you offer some examples of pathological feminine thinking that has gone mainstream? Likewise dumb lefty ideas that have made the world worse.
Compassion seems like a pretty good virtue to make sovereign. If you have to have a sovereign one, it might as well be compassion. Some pretty smart people have advocated compassion, a lack of it seems associated with some pretty nasty outcomes. What do you see as the problem?
Seems to me that you aren't arguing against compassion, but impulsive public policy making. You don't have to turn off the part of your brain that feels compassionate toward someone in order to turn on the part of the brain that can make quantitative rational decisions.
Compassion leads to safetyism. So compassion for past and future victims of nuclear power accidents leads to stifling nuclear power and hence global warming/megadeaths from coal.
I think paranoia leads to "safetyism", if I understand that concept correctly. The public didn't stifle nuclear power out of compassion for victims of nuclear power. They did that out of fear of a scary difficult to understand technology. Threats to self seem like it's much more salient than compassion toward others.
Perhaps you are right, though I don’t think paranoia is the right word. I think it is closer to fear and desire to protect one’s self and family, whereas the masculine side would be sacrificially brave. Both can be stupid or not. Just speculating here.
"Compassion seems like a pretty good virtue to make sovereign."
There should be no sovereign virtue*. Compassion has its place, but so does excellence, and order, and loyalty, and every other virtue. In a reasonable country (like Japan), arguments go something like this:
COMPASSION: We can't have gifted programs, they make the other kids feel bad
EXCELLENCE: Academic excellence is good, and so is emotional resilience. The other kids can deal with it.
COMPASSION: We can't throw this guy behind bars forever, he had a bad childhood.
JUSTICE: He killed a man in cold blood, what right does he have to his own life?
ORDER: If we let him out, he's just going to do it again.
COMPASSION: Anyone from a poorer country should be able to move to ours. Look how much better it makes their lives!
TRADITION/LOYALTY: This will break thousands of years of continuity with our ancestors and their culture.
ORDER: The 1-5% who will be repeat criminals, and the 0.00001% of them who will be terrorists, will be enough to ruin our urban spaces and Christmas markets forever.
FAIRNESS: Why are my taxes going to support new arrivals who, on average, will never contribute equally?
In the West, Compassion comes back with "How can you be so mean!" and most people in a decision-making position cave. Cf. Hanania's Women's Tears and the Marketplace of Ideas.
*Save for the Christian virtue of Love, but it's too difficult to cultivate to build a society upon. Cf. the difference between the Christian community before and after Constantine.
I think you are confusing compassion for egalitarianism. One of these is an emotional state, the other is an ideology. Feeling compassionate toward someone doesn't lead to any one specific behavioral response, merely a feeling that someone else's outcomes should receive greater than the default weight.
I think this overstates the utility in industry or, if not the utility, the application of woke as a superweapon for Machiavellian purposes. In certain industries, like (a struggling) journalism, there was probably more cynical, self-serving backstabbing than an area like insurance.
There was also a natural expansion to the CYA framework laid down 30+ years prior. "X sensitivity" seminars and trainings were a thing long before woke took hold. This made expansion easy. This thing is already a thing, we should do more of the thing, because the thing is good.
Politics exist everywhere and people (or some of them) will use what tools are at hand. That 'woke' provides new axes to play politics is true, but I don't think this is the impetus for its proliferation. There are all kinds of horribly dishonest ideas out there that could be useful tools for strivers to get ahead. Why doesn't the priesthood decide those are a Good Thing and adopt those as readily as they adopted this one?
That's the question.
Academics had no issue finding ways to create petty intra-priesthood squabbles to fight for status, put their competitors in their place, and embarrass their foes in 1930, 1960, or 2005.
I don't think of the adoption of woke as a cynical move
but it was adopted because it enabled people to turn personal conflicts into moral crusades in their own minds
your elephant really wanted someone destroyed and adopting wokeness helped you convince yourself and others that doing it is a righteous act of allyship and anti racism
"woke is complaining about something until you get control of it"
You mean like pro-lifers? I know you don't actually mean that, I'm just snarkily pointing out that you are over-simplifying.
As for "before it to defeat a competitor in the bureaucracy you had to either show better results than him or show that their results are not as good as yours"
I'm afraid I have bad news for you, friend. Organizational politics has existed basically forever.
IMO it's critical for the academic priesthood to adopt an oath modeled after the Hippocratic oath that demands they seek the truth and publish without concern for ideological impact. That is necessary as one of the critical features of a priesthood is that they have a special status of trust/responsibility that seperates them from the usual churn of social alliances and economics.
This is especially important with an epistemic priesthood because it only has value if you can rely on the lack of any good counterarguments being raised to be good evidence they don't exist.
The mistake that academics have made is thinking it's enough merely to tell the truth. But if people systemically refuse to say the controversial thing since there are always a few people who genuinely believe the other side it looks to the public like you are just parrotting an ideology.
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And no I don't think the oath will be magic. It won't stop partisan bias. But the key thing it does it provide an excuse. "Why did you publish that article which found no effect of race on incidence of being shot by the police? Don't you think racist policing is a problem.". The oath allows for the reply that you did it out of a sense of duty.
It also just creates a kind of awareness. I hear so many times about researchers openly suggesting ways to get published that undermine the quest for knowledge. A strong reminder of the fact that this is what your profession exists for would help.
Having come out of cognitive psychology in the aughts (i.e., all that heuristics and biases research, too many cases later found fraudulent), I have doubts that there are barriers to corruption among the priesthood. I think there are a lot of corrupt practitioners that others just go along with. I'm not sure there is a strong incentive for competition of ideas; there are certain bedfellows that you never challenge simply because you are on the same priesthood team, however that was determined. I could never wrap my mind around it.
Another problem with the priesthood is that they are not only cloistered professionally. They do so on every social measure, they rarely have friends outside the priesthood, rarely marry outside the priesthood, and are very anxious that their children remain in some priesthood. Too many of them fundamentally believe that they are truly better than the rest of us; if the world was ending they are the chosen few to be on the spaceships to carry on and improve humanity. It's wildly insulting to everyone else.
If a big piece of the problem is indeed the drive to be “in touch” and pander to the hoi polloi, I’m surprised you didn’t tie this to Turchin’s ”surplus elites” theory. Without surplus elites, there would be less reason for all-out war within the priesthood.
Great article. I agree with your thesis and have some observations in response:
1. The internet is massively important in magnifying the problems of priesthood, because of its speed, coordination and persuasiveness as a communication method. Its tendency is to generate alternatives to priesthood that both cooperate and compete with the authority of priesthoods in ways that makes memetic capture rapid and all-pervasive.
2. Everything you said about priesthood as an analogy of course also applies to bonafide priesthoods. The OG priesthoods had a SME status regulating precisely the type of memetic contagions you’re talking about; were what the priests and rabbis came up with better than what the non-SMEs generally come up with? When I compare folk religion to its institutionalized forms, I rarely come away impressed by the former. (This is of course also true for institutionalized atheisms vs its non-institutional forms.)
3. Broken priesthoods are very, very hard to reform. It usually requires some combination of charisma + intelligence + insider status + opportunity to take advantage of social technologies that aren’t being exploited by the broken priesthoods itself. Sometimes the reform can create alternative priesthoods (e.g. the Protestant Reformation), or have other consequences unintended by would-be reformers. Priesthoods are complex systems and it may be that we have to bite the bullet and decide whether an unreformed priesthood is still preferable to the alternative.
4. I don’t know if it is truly possible to avoid priesthoods. It might be easier to start a new one from scratch, if things get bad enough, but I’m skeptical that a society without any priesthoods is capable of functioning and innovating effectively.
> The basic idea behind the priesthoods - have a “smart people only” discussion room with high standards - has obvious appeal. And in many cases, it seems to work.
Can someone justify this claim, without it be socially-epidemically circular in a single case?
("truth has a left wing bias", the study comes from snopes data, snopes has a leftwing bias, democrats believe this study, republicans dont, you can find criticism of snopes)
The Manhattan Project got a bunch of top-shelf nerds together and successfully did something that no ordinary person would previously have thought was possible, nor could any of the individual participants reasonably have accomplished it alone.
that was with human stock from before the current university system, and allot allot of money with inclusion being extremely free(they "invited" nazis to join) the barrier had a different goal then sanity(gaining war advantages)
You asked for a single case of "the basic idea behind the priesthoods, a smart-people-only discussion room with high standards" actually working, in a way that can't be dismissed as circular, self-referential. Atom bombs definitely aren't bullshit; they happened.
The field of physics has been rigorous ever since, because politicians understand that neglecting it, or meddling in ways that threaten core functionality, means they might, themselves, one day "stop being biology and start being physics" https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/ at some better-informed enemy's discretion.
> before the current university system
Literally hundreds of years ago, in a university system the current one is directly descended from, trigonometry became an international matter of life and death when sufficiently long-range cannons made accuracy too hard to just eyeball.
> a different goal then sanity(gaining war advantages)
Sanity has always been instrumental to winning wars, and avoiding unwinnable ones.
I believe successful physics to be the product of "British gentleman science" with my model of how and why it worked being "around the world in 80 days" (rich people making bets), post university physic made string physics and "string bombs" dont exist.
Thats hard to untangle for the reasons you can debate if obama or trump made inflation in, such and such year.
The manhatten project was arguably the death of the old science, and purely timeline wise, we had computers and industrial revolution as technology playing out and maturing. How do you untangle that system of science setting us up for success, is it 90% the theories from that era then decade on decade making better machines? Or 10% and the progress of modern exclusionary science is actaully making progress? Neither is "falsifiable", we cant rerun the experiment with a control
To preempt further examples where I believe theres ambiguity: geocentricism fit the data *less* then the epicycles for 100 years, newton was a lovable loon who did alchemy, turing was then arguably killed by the new system.
Disappointed this doesn't confront a fairly obvious cause of the triumph of Wokeness- the rise of Women Priests.
I'm guessing if you chart the individual medical associations, you'll find a strong correlation between how quickly they fell to Woke and % female DRs.
I don't think it's simply a matter of "they can only tinker on the edges so they're largely trustworthy", at least not in my field. There's a phenomenon in clinical research, where two competing pharma companies will send out expert PhDs to argue with MDs about why their drug is better than the competition. Part of this argument includes arming the PhDs with studies showing that Drug-X was shown to be superior in a RCT directly compared to esDrug-X (the enantiomer that's probably biochemically identical). And if you're new to the field, you might think, "Well it mattered for thalidomide, so maybe the difference here is real!"
Until the other PhD produces a contrary RCT demonstrating that in their head-to-head matchup their drug was superior! And around and around it goes. Because there are all sorts of ways to manipulate the data until you end up far from the truth - especially if there are dollar signs attached.
For more on how bad this can be, see the book, "Ending Medical Reversal" by Vinay Prasad.
Love this lens. I do think it’s a bit narrow for your concluding questions though. Like asking “why did all the monastic orders get Protestant ideas at the same time?” It’s a legitimate question and the details are hairy, but ultimately it’s probably better answered at the macro level.
So “Martin Luther found a climate ripe for revolution because of X, Y, and Z,” and not “the monks of Frieburg were naturally disposed to move drastically given condition Q which was met as consequence of P.”
You mention monoculture and how easy it is for a virus to infect a certain group. I think one of the issues is the insular nature of priesthoods. Not just in terms of their community protecting against the public but of their very ideas. Many people belong to at least one priesthood and so I imagine it's a very relatable experience when you first enter and think "this feels like a dumb way to do this". You push back but the establishment has a very "this is the way we've always done it" type of attitude. You must prove your conformity before being allowed to offer new options, thus limiting the introduction of new "outside" ideas from people who aren't as crazy as the general public, but haven't yet fully conformed to the norms of the priesthood.
A doctor of philosophy used to be a generalist, someone who was well versed in many subjects and whose job as an academic was to be an academic, not just an MD or an architect. The community would then by design be filled with many different ideas from reputable individuals allowing for cross pollination. It was more stable to a virus. In our hyper-specialized world it is considered a problem to be a generalist because you can only ever be part of a single priesthood or at most two. If not you aren't properly committed to the cause and therefore don't need to be taken seriously. No better than the general public but perhaps a bit more annoying because you might have ".edu" at the end of your email address.
It would be impossible to sort through the ideas of the general public, but I think there is a middle ground of being able to sort through the ideas of the outer edges of your community and allowing wider ranging discussions. True we can't trust priesthoods on their takes regarding politics but the tendency to distrust priesthoods or be very strict about "staying in your lane" feels very all-or-nothing.
One important characteristic of priesthoods that Scott didn't mention is that people who take well to belonging to priesthoods are over-represented in them. The people who take well to priesthoods tend to be those who are pretty comfortable with having their performance measured by other people's standards. As undergrads they took grades more seriously -- that sort of thing.
So there's that. Probably relevant to the wokeness issue.
> I’m not entirely satisfied with this theory because wokeness infiltrated non-priesthoods without psychological complexes around in-touchness (eg science fiction fandom) just as quickly and easily as it did the priesthoods
Fandom might not be a "priesthood", but publishing sure is.
To continue to consider the New York Times as an organ of information dissemination after your own doxxing is bizarre. The sheer amount of misinformation campaigns that the medical and news establishments in this country have been involved with in my lifetime is overwhelming.
One can only pine for the truth digging days of Slate Star rather than these disturbing screeds on the comfort and elegance of the hotel room chair published on Astral Glide.
Have you seen videos of Iraqis praising Saddam Hussein (recently, long after he was overthrown), even though he killed most their family and tortured/imprisoned them for years? This is a bit like that.
For example, you can trust New York Times to use Scott's real name when they decide to dox him, as opposed to just making up something (e.g. calling him Scott Alexander Hitler).
One reason not to throw away "priesthoods" is that a "priesthood"- a consensus position on an area of expertise - is the outcome of good epistemology. As pointed out by Kuhn in "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", pre-scientific expertise was (and are) characterised by "schools of thought" because the epistemic chops to identify resolve logical and evidential conflicts between them, didn't exist. Of course, it's also an outcome of the desire to monopolise power and status. But the existence of a consensus does not logically imply either one or the other.
Incidentally the problem that experts tend to claim authority over not just their area,but the definition of the boundary of what that area is, has been well studied in academia under the name "boundary work".
The whole essay reads much more cleanly if you replace the words "smart" and "intelligent" with "arrogant". E.g.,
"As with every failure of the priesthood, their best qualities served as their downfall. Their intelligence made them easy prey for bad ideas that flattered them as intellectuals."
Intelligence does not make you easy prey for bad ideas. That is not what intelligence is! AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
You're cutting a whole thought in half. He didn't say it made them prey "for bad ideas," but "for [bad ideas that flattered them as intellectuals.]" And yes, it's been shown that high intelligence does in fact make you susceptible to certain kinds of mistakes, particularly when it comes to politically-charged topics.
I think a pretty good heuristic is to trust priesthoods with very measurable outcomes - when the chess priesthood tells me a certain move or opening is good or bad I have high trust they're right, because if they got it wrong their fellow priests would own them in their games. I'm cheating using sport as an example as it has artifically clear resolution criteria, but by the same logic I would expect the legal priesthood to give excellent insight on which cases are winnable, and how one would go about winning them.
On this method we would expect emergency medience to give very trustworthy advice on how to stop people dying, shading into less reliable advice from psyciatry on how to restore mental health (still fairly measurable, but not completely). To steal from the post we would expect arcitects to give real insight into how to stop buildings falling down (it is obvious whether the building fell down), but not into whether the building is nice to look at.
Any priesthood for the completely unmeasurable (music, art, theology) is probably best ignored entirely in favour of "what's working in the market". (Confusingly, I think in this example the theology priesthood is academic theologians, and literal Roman Catholic priests are operating in the market.)
IMO, while one can certainly define woke, there's no definition statement that doesn't result in the enclosing discussion devolving to endless nitpicking, as we see in these comments. I propose that we leave woke undefined, stop using it, and return to using preexisting measures for debating ideas. For example, is an idea true? Is it useful? Does it promote worthwhile social norms? I'd rather debate those kinds of things than the degree of wokeness of a proposition and whether that is good or bad. Let's please stop being so meta, especially a form of meta that is not particularly helpful.
Do you believe any of the following terms are useful descriptors: conservative, libertarian, socialist, communist, democratic socialist, feminist, nationalist?
Yes, to some extent. I think those labels are less susceptible to definitional rabbit holes than woke. Having said that, I also don’t think it’s very useful to rate the quality of ideas by for example how conservative they are, rather than the first principles I mentioned above.
"Priesthoods enjoy some protection in their area of specialty - partly because they’re actually smart in that area, partly because they’re forced to be in contact with reality, and partly because internal academic politics incentivize and stoke scientific disagreements. These factors are less protective outside their area of specialty"
Yes, but being priests, they have a respect for other priesthoods (at least to some extinct). Augustinian and Benedictine monks probably hold each other in higher regard than random laymen. And if they will defer to outside expertise, wokeness may only have needed to capture specific priesthoods in order to proliferate like mad. The disciplines that provided the experts on wokeness were the grab bag of priesthoods that intersect history and sociology, and these were woke from day one. They were explicitly founded to propagate wokeness. They could provide 1) data on disparities and 2) a bunch of history supposedly explaining those disparities. I think something like this did indeed happen. Who am I, a mere epidemiologist or electrical engineer or journalist or whatever, to argue with this esteemed scholar of Africana studies with all these nice papers full of data about redlining? One reason I was pretty immune to woke was that I have read an inordinate amount of history, and I could tell many of the history experts were telling *extremely* selective versions of history. I don't think this is the only or even main vehicle for woke, but I think it helps explain why like random astronomers and physical therapists went woke.
*Edit* Thinking about the woke priests a bit more, I don't think they do in fact create knowledge the way other priests do. Like, yes, they care about their reputation within the priesthood, but in these priesthoods, you actually get status not just by publishing papers, but by activism and persecution for "speaking truth to power." They don't actually behave like priests. They behave like Christian martyrs. They always earned prestige by intentionally lowering the gates into politics. I would say these are bad priesthoods even if priesthoods as such are not. So, sure, let's keep old-school priesthoods and nuke everything that has the word "praxis" in its jargon from orbit maybe?
Yup I agree very much with this line of thinking and posted a comment of my own along it. The lens of priesthoods is indeed a useful one but it glosses over the fact that all don’t have the same pedigree and internal process but also at the same time give and receive a certain level of respect for each others ideas.
These were the vector for any real runaway wokeness. It didn’t come from say doctors but doctors accepted it because they necessarily need to accept the opinions of other experts in their fields so that those experts in turn accept them and promote them as experts in medicine.
"People who take egalitarianism seriously are more likely to behave well toward everyone, relative to nonbelievers. It’s therefore in everyone’s interests to convince others that they believe in the equality thesis. One of the best ways to convince others of one’s belief is to actually believe it.
And wokeness isn't just about signaling generalized niceness. .... In an unprecedentedly multiracial, multiethnic, and gender-egalitarian society like ours, the ability to treat people well despite idpol-relevant differences is prosocial enough. It makes you a "better"—certainly less invidious—employee, customer, neighbor, and citizen.
....
In any case, you don't signal you think everyone has equal potential by being nice to your ingroup—everyone does that all the time. To signal that you think everyone has equal potential, you should be nice to your outgroup out of commitment to your ideals. This sets you apart.
By making a land acknowledgment or posting a black square, I show I'm so moral that I'm willing to take the side of the outgroup over that of the ingroup. I take ostentatious, stylized care to promote the interests of the people who are most different from me. Because I just care that much."
I may have a few insights here from the perspective of someone in a priesthood-like grouping which didn't go woke - the English Bar.
It has all the usual priesthood markers: it's based around esoteric knowledge, has its own internal status hierarchies, is incredibly disdainful of outside opinions, has social norms and habits which differ markedly from broader society and polices entry. It's also, a la medicine and to a lesser extent academia, far more hereditary in practice than any normal job.
In 2020/2021, our regulator went woke but got mostly ignored, and part of our recruitment pool went woke. As a profession, though, the only noticeable change was the already left-wing sets had internal drama.*
My guess would be that the two structural differences were 1) contempt for our linked academia and 2) having an internally segregated left wing.
Dealing with the first point, English law has a very different culture to America. A majority of barristers don't have law degrees, they have a GDL (a special stripped-down law degree done at a crammer which teaches you literally only what you're required to know). The bulk of judges will dismiss any argument based on academic law out of hand, and while I assume "law review" exists in some form, it's not going to help you much job-wise. The old joke is that "academic" is the Greek word for "failed."
The upshot of this is that there's no disease-vector out of universities for woke ideas to enter into the profession.
The second point is that there are dedicated left-wing sets, which tends to make other sets more right-wing by default, in particular as the most outspoken leftists are the most keen to join the lefty sets. This suggests a potential off-the-wall solution for wokeness (or whatever comes along next) - set up dedicated woke institutions to suck them all out of mainstream ones. It might, however, just be a British thing; where eg. American newspapers are default-left with some dedicated-right alternatives, British newspapers are default-right with some dedicated-left alternatives.
The caveat to all this is it's a job more generally that involves fairly arrogant, confrontational people who are paid to one-up each other who often harbour faux-aristocratic pretensions, so might have just had a less susceptible pool of people for wokeness, and the UK went less woke more generally.**
*Barristers are self-employed, but work within a chambers ("set") to share administrative staff and cover each other's cases. These are collegiate and hierarchical, and responsible for recruitment into the profession; I don't think structurally there's much difference from university faculties.
**You have a million counter-examples. Other than a the tail-end of gay rights and a brief, failed flirtation with trans-mania, they're all pre-2008.
Being in the UK I do find the hysteria on both woke and anti woke very difficult to know how seriously to take. Casual racism and sexism at the workplace was not that usual not that long ago (I'm not even 40, in finance), so I thought some of the 'woke' changes were pretty good, actually, and witnessed very little of the excesses discussed. Sure, every company had their tokenistic policies, but I'm not aware of these being taken particularly seriously.
on your opinion of the psychoanalysts, i suppose Freud may have been "wrong about everything", but it also seems to me that many prominent experiment-based psychologists were "wrong about everything" in the 2000s -- and in a much less interesting direction! I also don't know how you can make this claim about the 1950s when "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" was delivered in '53
Son of two professors here. I’d say the principle dynamic with which wokeness took hold is a simple heuristic: if more people in side A criticize their own side than people do in side B, then side with side B.
I don’t think this is a bad heuristic, and is a way academics can get a sense of the truth of matters they don’t know too much about.
A great example of this working is people noticing that AI researchers often criticize AI research for moving dangerously fast, and note that this is a cause for concern. (Meanwhile you don’t see a lot of non-AI researchers criticizing AI research for being too slow)
Ok, so I've tried really hard to avoid getting drawn into the "Woke Wars", but I can't help myself anymore, what the hell is "Woke"? And why do I care?
Following the linked articles, it appears to be an inordinate concern with the sensibilities of social minorities. Which I can see could be annoying in many cases. I will use non-mainstream gender norms if someone asks me to, otherwise I don't bother.
Is this another social-media amplified nothing burger? "Lots of people on the internet will be angry at me if I don't cater to their demands!" I'm supposed to care for some reason?
Are psychiatrists delivering sub-optimal care because they were in some hard to define sense "captured by woke?" If not, is this really important enough to get upset over?
Here's what he says: "I will today use the term “social justice politics” to refer to the political movement you are all aware of, the one which combines several schools of academic progressivism such as intersectionality, trans-inclusionary feminism, and anti-racism with a focus on interpersonal relations as the primary site of political activity, resistance towards economic class as a political lens, and a belief in the essentially immutable prevalence of bigotry, all expressed through an abstruse vocabulary that signals adherence to this movement and its social culture."
I think something you entirely missed is the inflation of priesthoods themselves.
There was a time where college degrees were rare and expensive and most people who got them got them in fairly useful and rigorous fields. These people were the ones who filled the priesthoods. Yes there always were music majors and English major making up the art and journalism priesthoods. But I’m thinking the core of those grew from a sort of renaissance man, unitary priesthood and consequently always carried with them a sliver of the original priestdom.
The specializations that followed on them like engineering and medicine and law were always even more pure in priesthood than even those original renaissance generalists as they have strong internal attachments to reality and are not priesthoods merely for the sake of priesthood, rather gained their respect from their demonstrated success at leading both the commoners and the elites to desired outcomes.
But at some point there was an explosion of priesthoods. Gender studies suddenly had a priesthood and they demanded and received if not maybe the same respect as the older priesthoods, at least some measure of it, especially from the other priesthoods. This feels like a massive driver at least some of what he discusses here.
Edit: to carry the argument more fully across the line, to the degree that there is a “wokeness virus” its source was not amongst the unwashed masses but rather from inside certain priesthoods and spread amongst them on the back of the sort of enlightened professional respect required of the priesthoods interacting with each other rather than coming from outside the priesthoods. Looking at those priesthoods and how they came to be in their respective ivory towers seems a glaring part of the conversation.
More succinctly not all priesthoods are equal in their pedigree or commitment and even if they are the same sorts of purity spirals and internal posturing that say protects medicine from charlatans applied to gender studies don’t necessarily lead to similarly desirable outcomes.
Priesthoods are necessarily as you point out arrogant sorts of institutions that must claim to be right in order to survive. But not all claims are equally grounded and applying the same sorts of purity tests to the humanities as you do say in engineering is a huge error. Which is to say some priesthoods don’t have the ingredients required to be self sustaining and this was always somewhat inevitable that it would blow up on them.
> But in the worst-case scenario, all the other doctors are still mad because he’s bringing the medical profession into disrepute.
Unfortunately that is not the worst-case scenario. There's an alternative nasty equilibrium where, instead of punishing bad actors because they'll bring disreptute on everyone else, you deliberately *don't* punish bad actors because doing so would highlight their existence and you worry *that* would bring disrepute on everyone else; whereas if you just avoid handing out any punishments and pretend everything is clean, good chance nobody will notice. (Look at law, say.)
The question of how to get from this bad equilibrium to the good one you describe is I think a pretty important one but unfortunately not one I have any ideas on how to accomplish.
I mean with law, they don't really have much reputation to lose. Everyone already sees them as a bunch of greedy psychopaths who will do anything to win.
Science fiction fandom fell into the same hole, because they also have a priesthood. You can't be a "popular" author, i.e. sell lots of books, and still be a member in good standing. You have to be "literary", or experimental, or something.
Prior to e-books, published science fiction was in serious danger of disappearing up its own fundament. Much of it still is.
Fortunately people have alternatives, so that priesthood is dying out.
You only have to look at the attendance of Worldcon vs. Dragoncon.
Does anyone have examples of the kind of atonal music that academic musicologists (or musicians closely associated with musicology departments) produce today? I know what 20th century atonal music sounds like, but don't know what happened after that, and I wouldn't begin to know how to search for it.
The kind of thing that Scott presumably has in mind with this dig (presumably the plinks and plonks of early Boulez, Milton Babbitt, etc.) mostly went out of fashion a half century ago, but I think Unsuk Chin, who studied with Ligeti, is probably the best-regarded composer still writing in roughly this style. Most younger composers seem to go for some combination of pastiche, minimalism, and sounds based in extended techniques, electronics, noise, etc.
Thank you! Even if they are not as atonal, do you have any examples for these younger composers, who write music today that is popular within academic music composition circles but not outside of them, like Scott would have meant?
I haven't kept up so much with new music and mostly stick to my mid-to-late-20th century favorites. I think Caroline Shaw has done quite well on the awards & commisions circuit, and I've enjoyed some very witty piecea by Sky Macklay (look up 'Many, Many Cadences'). There are a few YouTube channels that specialize in new music, mostly by younger composers. The one that comes to mind is simply called CMaj7, in my experience if you watch one or two videos from living composers, quite a few start popping up from the recommendation algorithm.
As to your second question, I think the answer is all of it? Beethoven himself could descend from the heavens and produce fifty new masterpieces at the level of his last five sonatas and in an equally accessible style and nobody but music students and a few weirdos like me would listen to it.
Maybe not in the academic context, but I'm pretty sure that Beethoven could provide healthy competition to Hans Zimmers and John Williamses of the world.
You might be right! But I am a bit skeptical - despite some similarities on the surface, film music and concert music are pretty different beasts with different modes of engagement. There are already composers writing concert music as colorful and accessible as film music - Bobby Ge comes to mind, or going back a couple generations, late Penderecki, Gorecki & all the other neoromantics. Probably somebody who likes neoromantic music more than I do could provide more examples. But while I guess these composers are more liked than the Elliott Carters & Milton Babbitts of the world, I don't think it is by more than a rounding error.
They do use plenty of literal Beethoven in popular movie soundtracks though, and while those are of course not entire concertos or symphonies, it seems that the beasts have some things in common, at least as far as the "biggest hits" are concerned.
Scott also got this wrong by calling it "musicology". Academic musicology is separate from composition. I have an MA in music composition and have never taken a musicology class. I also have never written music like Scott describes, which as the sibling comment notes, went out of fashion in the 70s. And it was only briefly in fashion starting in the 50s.
That said, I suspect this brief period did a _lot_ of damage to modern composition as a field, driving down the general "classical music" enjoying public's interest in new works.
I think many people with expertise in the field would probably say that the last (Carter) is not _quite_ in the same genre as the first two. I agree, but I doubt anyone without that expertise could really tell the difference.
And finally, one that's also very dissonant but totally different:
Unlike the first three, which I really dislike, I do like this one quite a bit. The big difference is that while it's extremely dissonant, it still has a recognizable structure, repeating ideas, development, etc. It doesn't sound like a bunch of musicians falling down the stairs.
Edit: Doh, you wanted _modern_ examples. As the sibling noted, this stuff is just not that popular these days. I don't know of any younger living composers who write in this style any more.
Thank you, this is already really interesting! If this atonal style is not in fashion anymore, do you have any other examples of contemporary “academic priesthood” music, that roughly matches what Scott describes, where most people outside of the academic circles would look down on it like people look down on modern architecture? Or is Scott wrong about the idea that academic music composition is “out of touch” with the popular tastes?
I saw a NY Philharmonic concert featuring a cello concerto by a composer named Gabriella Smith last November that I absolutely hated. But I don't think the piece is available online, and her other works that _are_ available seem to be quite different, and I like them.
I do think that Scott is sort of wrong about modern music. There are a _lot_ of living composers today producing works that I think are likely to be fairly palatable to a lot of people.
He's one of the most successful living composers, having written 3 operas, with The Hours premiering at The Met in NYC. He's also received the Pulitzer and a Grammy for his work.
Again, while it's not Puccini or Mozart, I think it's fairly comprehensible.
Of course, I could also find examples of weirder music, but I guess my point is that it's quite easy to find new music by living composers that the average classical music listener wouldn't run screaming from.
Indeed these pieces are much more approachable than I would have expected. I especially like the Mazzoli one.
I wouldn't really consider myself a fan of classical music (although I do enjoy listening to it sometimes) and only have passing knowledge of its history, but my impression has always been that the development in the 20th century has mostly been towards abstraction and freedom from rules, from Debussy/Stravinsky to Schoenberg to Babbitt/Boulez and e.g. La Monte Young. But my knowledge mostly ends after the 50's. Maybe it's the same for Scott. This might be a hard question to answer, but would you say the development since then has gone in a specific way, or even in the same way? Is there more abstraction in ways the average listener doesn't recognise? Are there specific definable trends in the classical music of the early 21st century, like atonality in the 20th century? Or did the quest towards abstraction end in the 70s and modern classical music is more a synthesis of the good parts of what came before it?
There was always a proliferation of styles - consider for example the hugely influential French neoclassicists (including Stravinsky, who had an incredible nose for musical fashion, turning to neoclassicism in the twenties and serialism in the fifties), who were probably better known and more influential between the wars than Schoenberg and his students, who were just starting to put out twelve tone music (although they had been writing 'free atonal' music, i.e. not systematically organized for quite some time already). The latter were given all the narrative impetus only by the next generation, in which the avant-garde briefly dominated (and the advocates of which exhibited a tendency to grandiose teleological claims about their stylistic preferences), but in which there still existed a variety of styles. After the seventies there was a lot of fragmentation in both classical and jazz (which intruigingly had developed along a very similar trajectory in a compressed timeframe). Certain pieces that I hear from time to time sound very '21st century' to me, but I'm not in touch enough to guess at the common denominator.
Stravinsky was younger than Schoenberg by the way.
Also, is academic music composition entirely or even mostly about classical music? There is avant-garde music in every genre, from electronic to death metal, and I feel like the people making that music should also be called composers. Are there “academic priesthoods” for other genres as well?
In universities, there are basically three things that are studied and produced.:
* Classical and modern classical (also called "concert" or "art") music.
* Electronic art music (not techno). This was a big things in the 60s-80s (or so). I don't think it's so big any more.
* Jazz.
That's it. Other popular music forms, like pop, rock, or metal, are basically not touched by most music departments. _Maybe_ they have a course one professor teaches for fun that analyzes rock songs or covers song-writing. But you couldn't get a music degree in most departments by writing this sort of stuff.
There is at least one school where I think you could, Berkelee. But that's a very special case, and even there I think the main focus is jazz.
My favorite Gubaidulina piece is her concerto for bassoon and low strings. There is an old (Nonesuch? Naxos?) recording in which the soloist interpreted her instruction to scream, which comes at what must be the technical crux of the piece and a nightmare to perform, as an invitation to actually scream at the top of his lungs, as if being murdered. Apparently she meant to scream into the instrument or produce with it something like a multiphonic scream, which is what other performers do, to my ears not nearly to such powerful effect...
Her pieces for bayan with various string combinations are nice too.
I should also point out that although I did say that the postwar avant-garde style is long out of fashion, I do in fact like that music a lot. Boulez, Babbitt, and Carter would not top my list of recommendations (although all three of them wrote pieces that I enjoy), especially for newcomers to the style. Probably Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Messiaen, Takemitsu, and Dutilleux would...
I would note that the ones you like are mostly not pure serialists. Their music can be quite atonal, but it's _very_ different from the (IMHO) pure trash that Boulez, Babbitt, etc. produced.
But I do think the composers you listed are harder to get into than some of the others I talked about elsewhere in the thread.
Well, I would argue for Messiaen, who more or less invented total serialism (and not just in the four rhythmic etudes; even in his accessible works such as the Quartet fo the End of Time or say the first movement of Visions de l'Amen I think the isorythmic organization is basically already the idea of total serialism and points to a way it could have gone, where the structure actually is there in the sounds, and not just on paper in the background). He's not really thought of that way simply because a lot of his music is too gorgeous.
I do also like serialist works although I don't listen to them nearly as much as when I was younger and more receptuve to the plinkiest of plonks. But really I think even of the ones you mentioned only Babbitt really fits the most stereotypical idea of that soundworld (but Philomel is great!). Pli selon pli & Rituel and pretty much everything later on from Boulez are quite lush & impressionistic. My point was mainly that atonality is a pretty broad umbrella, and even within it there are levels of approachability.
The aftermath of the Iraq War and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) somewhat discredited the status quo liberal norms (and their advocates) throughout much of society. This left the intellectual body in a vulnerable state that allowed more fringe theories to propagate. The academia already had a pretty robust colony of 'critical' thinkers, so it was able to move in pretty aggressively.
How do we account for the exceptions to the rule like Jon Stewart, a comedian (!) who seemed to be held by the media priesthood as their Cardinal despite the fact/because he spent all his time eviscerating them?
Parts of the post on how "priesthoods" work are making overly strong claims based on 1-2 examples.
"Ideas that seem too similar to the public’s get actively penalized" may have been true of architecture, but it is not true in general. It is fairly accurate to say that for an idea to be the priesthood consensus, it must be expressed by a priest in the language & rituals of the priesthood. But sometimes it is not negative if that idea previously came from outside the priesthood (or from the public in general), as long as (e.g.) some economist has built a mathematical model of it or some psychologist has published a RCT supporting it. And individual priests may take interest in ideas outside the priesthood, looking for raw materials that they can spin into their field's version of knowledge.
Speaking to the general public can gain a person status within their priesthood, if it happens in the right way. e.g., Look at the past couple decades of psychology with Dweck, Haidt, Gilbert, Duckworth, etc. publishing books & popular articles, giving TED talks, etc. It varies by field, and depends on how the researcher is communicating with the public. The researcher is an ambassador of the field to the public, so the field cares about whether they are a worthy ambassador - have they proven themselves in their work within the priesthood before going public, are they presenting the Science rather than going off the rails, are they representing the field well? If they're doing it well, the field may view them more highly, as superstar researchers. They can also get a boost from getting a higher profile within the priesthood from other people in the field who hear about them & their work in a more digestible format, who might not have know their work as well from their journal articles which may be more restrained in their claims, written more impenetrably, and/or outside that other person's subarea of research.
As someone who mastered in engineering I notice we weren’t featured in there. Engineering isn’t necessarily cool of course, but we feel ourselves divorced enough from the masses in intellect, along with our scientific colleagues, that we don’t really have to create any artificial distance between ourselves the masses, because it’s already there.
Any intellectual movement that can be taken over by Marxism - which is clearly junk - just can’t be that smart. The “intellectuals”, outside of STEM that are subject to takeover by Marxism, or whatever fad exists at the moment can do so because their intelligence is lacking and their degrees worthless.
If ideas of math as white supremacy were to bleed into engineering we’d soon see the bridges collapsing, planes falling from the sky, and technological advances stalled.
I am increasingly confused about what Scott's position even is regarding "good art". The point about musicologists here, and the entire article "Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste", both treat taste as a mainly social construct. A sufficiently isolated group (likened to priests in both posts) could have their preferences shift over time until they think that bad art is good and good art is bad.
How can this be made consistent with the Bauhaus review, which alleges that certain architecture styles are objectively ugly and even the people producing them secretly agree that they're ugly? Or the passing quotation in last Thursday's AI article that "the AIs are better poets, artists, philosophers—everything; why would anyone care what some human does, unless that human is someone they personally know?" Both of these statements imply a value-scale for art that is inflexible AND widely agreed.
Can someone make this make sense, because I'm reaching the point of just writing off whatever Scott has to say about art. Which would be a shame because the AI Art Turing Test was fun.
I think you are right. He is contradicting himself. I did not agree with his original view — I think it was his original view — that there is no objective standard by which art can be judged — but for a while he seemed to be consistent in his thinking. But yeah, in fact he’s inconsistent. I have noticed before that Scott has trouble making sense of things that are sort of — I dunno, curly. They’ve got a non-rational component.
What I think about art is that some pieces have enough novelty and richness, and are impervious enough to quick predictive processing, that they capture your attention, and paying prolonged attention to them is enjoyable and satisfying. But there is also a component of sort of giving yourself over to the work. At a certain point you stop judging, and just kind of take a ride on the music or the image or the poem. In that way it’s sort of like sex.
Something that comes to mind is the zealous insistence by a certain type of high school English teacher that Shakespeare absolutely must be read by every high schooler, when in fact many of the students don’t understand or even read the materials.
In regards to popularity with the public being stigmatizing within the priesthood: J.R.R. Tolkien once had this to say about what his fellow academics thought of C. S. Lewis's success in writing books:
"In Oxford, you are forgiven for writing only two kinds of books. You may write books on your own subject whatever that is, literature, or science, or history. And you may write detective stories because all dons at some time get the flu, and they have to have something to read in bed. But what you are not forgiven is writing popular works, such as Jack did on theology, and especially if they win international success as his did."
This is funny and clearly written from a place of familiarity and personal history. But if the question is why the various "priesthoods" succumbed to the excesses of the woke fad, isn't there a simpler explanation?
Political polarization by education historically leaned towards Republicans during the 20th century. It had been narrowing for decades, reached parity around 2010, and began to favor Democrats during the late Obama years. Then when Trump was elected, it accelerated to unprecedented levels of left-high education correlation. While many of the priesthoods had a politically left orientation even when education was polarized the other way, this new shift transformed the political spectrum in many priesthoods. Where they formerly ranged from a tail of moderate conservatism through the fat part of the bell curve and back down to a few hard-left sickos, the most conservative tail now constituted a few unfashionably moderate liberals, with the fat part of the curve way left of the general population.
Into this environment arrived the pandemic, followed by the racial unrest of 2020. It was an irresistible opportunity for priestly group exercises of anxiety and purification in the face of the chaotic and often disturbing cultural revanchism of the Trump era (part 1). And there was an unprecedented political center of gravity in every education-correlated institution.
Re. "1950s psychologists were not only wrong about everything, but even wronger than the average member of the public (I’m thinking mostly of psychoanalysis and behaviorism here":
LLMs prove that the objections to the most-extreme behavioristic theory (Skinner's /Verbal Behavior/) were wrong. Replace "high reward signal" with "low prediction error signal", and deep neural nets are behaviorist, I think.
(Chomsky's objections to behaviorism could have been shown to be wrong much earlier.)
I feel like this post needed a prequel post called *So, All Our Priesthoods Got Captured By Woke Last Decade*.
I mean, I'd agree that woke got a lot of universities. Also most of the journalists, though I have the sense that journalists never had great integrity. Some tech, too.
But... did we really get woke scientists? Woke economists? Woke doctors? Was it widespread, or just one or two scandals?
Scott wrote an earlier post about a very woke conference of some large American psychologist's association, possibly the APA. Link, anyone?
/Nature/ is too woke to be considered a scientific journal anymore, as its editors have argued that they must consider whether a scientific finding will advance or hinder racial justice before publishing it. /Science/ has published some editorials along the same lines, but I can't remember what they said or how far they went. /Scientific American/ is not an academic journal, and it's the wokest of them all. Check out their "obituary" for E. O. Wilson.
>Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exaggerate this. There was still a lot of really meaty scientific discussion if you sought it out. But overall the balance was pretty striking.
"Whole fields like anthropology or sociology turned on a dime to become 100% Marxist, only to very gradually shift back or lose turf to other priesthoods with more grounded ideas (many subjects have one priesthood doing it from a Marxist theory perspective, and another - often a sub-branch of economics - doing it from a data-driven perspective)."
Is this really true? Maybe it once was , what, one-third true of sociology, but when has anthropology been 100% or even 33% Marxist (note: just being influenced by Marx as one figure among many or thinking "there are worthwhile things in that Marxian intellectual tradition" does not count)? AFAIK things like structuralism or even trends entirely within the field (e.g., evolutionary anthropology) have been more potent.
Many English Literature academic journals assume that anyone reading them is a Marxist, though there are also some that assume anyone reading them follows Foucault. I remember one issue, I forget of which journal, which was a special issue entirely about how to raise revolutionary consciousness in your students.
In 2015, professor Melissa Click got fired by the U of Missouri for getting some students to forcefully stop a journalist from filming a protest, thereby showing her ignorance of the legality of force, her authority over university land, and the purpose of protests.
The faculty circulated a letter of support for Click. 115 professors counted it. Sadly, the list of who signed it is no longer on the web; but I went thru it at the time, and checked which department each professor was in, and looked up how many professors were in each department at the time I checked. I thus got a list of what fraction of professors in each humanity department supported Click, which I take as a lower bound on what fraction were "woke" because Click's defense for attacking a journalist was that the school was racist against both blacks and whites. The fraction woke would be an upper bound on what fraction are Marxist.
Department #Signed #Faculty % signed
All sciences 7 386 1.8%
Anthropology 0 10 0%
Art 0 18 0%
Film 0 3 0%
Music 2 38 5%
Philosophy 1 9 11%
Communication 3 17 18%
Classical Studies 3 15 20%
Romance Langs & Lit 9 31 29%
History 7 23 30%
Black Studies 3 7 43%
Art Hist & Archaeol 4 8 50%
Sociology 8 13 62%
Religious Studies 10 15 67%
Gender Studies 8 10 80%
German & Russian Studies 10 11 91%
English 38 38 100%
Arts+Humanities 106 266 40%
(Click was not in the English department. She was from the Communications department. 2 professors are missing from the count bcoz they were no longer on the school's website.)
Must be a non-obvious upper bound, since I know Marxists (or people who do not consider themselves Marxist but who are seen as such by virtue of having study groups on Marx and Marxism, etc.) who are not woke. In fact I'm not sure I know anybody who is Marxist in that broad sense and also woke.
I don't know any Marxists who could be considered not woke. They may gripe about the focus on race instead of class, but they vote woke, have primarily woke friends, and cooperate with them in ganging up on the non-woke. I don't know any English Lit journals that publish anti-capitalist propaganda that don't also
The alliance between Marxists and the woke is odd, I'll grant that. Why does a movement against anti-black, anti-trans, anti-Islamic, and colonialist sentiment work in near lockstep with one focused on eliminating capitalists? There's never a note of pro-free-market sentiment among the woke, nor do I hear complaints about the overreach of the woke from Marxists.
I think what "woke" means is not clear by intension, but is clear by extension. We can all identify some woke people, and observe that Marxists are their fellow-travelers. I think it's safe to say that today in the US, both a Marxist and a woke person are more-likely to vote Democrat than a Democrat is.
I can think right now of 5 people I know who posted blogs of outrage when Trump won the election. 2 of them were Marxists; 3 of them were very woke.
Freddie de Boer is about as far from woke as Marxists get, and is still closer to the woke than to the median American. I don't see him voting for Trump anytime soon.
If your main definition of wokeness is not voting for Trump (or voting for the US Dems in general), the term is as vague as to be unusable, just a synonym for being a lib.
> And even though priesthoods can and do stand firm forever, if they fail to present an intelligible case then society can pass them by.
As you point out elsewhere, there is such a gap in specific knowledge between common people and the priesthood that it is difficult for the priesthood to know where to start when common people demand explanation. This frustrates both parties. Still, in many areas such as medicine, the people are at the mercy of the priesthood. This asymmetry breeds resentment in common people because we are forced to follow prescriptions for reasons we can’t explain, which makes us feel foolish.
I think I’d argue that common people, more often than not, can’t understand the case made by the priesthood but are compelled to comply with the priesthood based chiefly on the results of their prescriptions. Common people can’t intelligently object to any theory behind the process only to the process’s results.
The more complex the priesthood’s knowledge becomes, the harder it becomes for them to explain themselves. The harder it becomes for the priesthood to explain themselves, the less buy-in they get from common people and the more harshly the priesthood is judged when shit goes wrong. I think this is pretty evident right now.
My personal answers to these questions is that the priesthoods are very broken, and rather than fix them, we should try to replicate them with parallel institutions. A key way this can succeed is if the right wing gets moderates and/or libertarians on board with their parallel institutions. The problem right now is that most of the parallel institutions are right wing echo chambers. Ideally, people like Scott need to be convinced to leave the legacy institutions and join the parallel institutions, to give them greater respectability and end the echo chamber effect.
This has worked with GMUs economics and the Federalist Society in law schools. We just need this in every field.
Economics is an interesting case, because its Ur-document is a popular tract (The Wealth of Nations). Admittedly, this book was aimed at an intelligent reader, but the goal was to convert the mass of educated citizenry into intuitively "correct" economists, alert to the fallacies of mercantilism. And while the profession has strong priestly elements, from a rigid institutional status hierarchy to lots of inside esoteric technical issues, even its highest-status members (e.g. recent Nobel Memorial Prize winner Acemoglu) often put their latest ideas into books aimed at the general educated reader or the policymaker. Moreover, there has always been a tendency for agenda items generated outside the priesthood to get taken up as topics or even subfields inside the profession, e.g. environmental, urban, racial, educational concerns.
While the centuries-long project of educating the public to "think like economists" has had mixed results, popularizing (or exporting) economic insights outside the profession (if done accurately enough) has never disqualified a priest.
No it's a beautiful insight. Have you been a member of an 'expert group'? I was in the physics priesthood. It was great going to conferences and then sitting around in some bar afterwards, and striking up a conversation with the guy next to you, and you spoke the same language... It was great.
> Also, and it pains me to say this, many of the really good alternative sources are run by former journalists or people with journalistic experience (eg Matt Yglesias - or Jesse Singal, who recently wrote a good piece about exactly this problem).
But Matt Yglesias was a good alternative source before he was a journalist of any note. He and three other people were referred to as the Juicebox Brigade who upset the journalism status quo by publishing their own work and forcing the industry to take note of them.
Journalism was what he wanted to do, and for a decent time he was able to do it. Then he got forced out by political considerations. But we can't attribute his quality as a source to his experience as a journalist, because we know that that reverses the chronology. We want to attribute his experience as a journalist to his talent for journalism.
> we find that going from the most left-wing authored estimate of the taxable top income elasticity to the most right-wing authored estimate decreases the optimal tax rate from 77% to 60%
Um, I'm willing to guarantee that the most right-wing authored estimate of top-end income elasticity does not claim the optimal tax rate is 60% or higher.
Two points about the durability/integrity of the medical priesthood are its international scope with multiple overlapping divisions, as well as the time it's had to develop as an institution. Most developed countries, and many not so developed countries, have something like a medical system that's integrated into the international medical priesthood. So, for example, if one country's radiologists or orthopedic surgeons go off the rails, there isn't just pressure to correct from other domestic priesthoods, but also international pressure from all the other radiologist or orthopedic organizations, etc. There's also been more time to solidify and refine the core mission, ethics, boundaries, etc. of the medical priesthood compared to the priesthood of, I don't know, academic sociologists or something.
Medicine having a more tangible result than many academic disciplines also helps. There are entire fields where academics can be wrong about pretty much everything for a really really long time because their ideas don't collide with reality in the same way that a bad medical theory collides with reality when all your patients start dying because of it. Generally speaking, course correction is more difficult when you're talking about some theoretical Marxist gobbledegook than when you're talking about whether X vs Y surgical procedure causes less blood loss. (And one fundamental reason psychoanalysis turned out to be such a failure as a formal theory and as an enduring clinical enterprise was its stubborn refusal to become integrated into the mainstream medical community and have its ideas subject to scrutiny, testing, revision, etc.)
I think there's an underestimation of how easy it is to make a building that doesn't collapses when you have concrete blocks or limit yourself to two floors.
It would have been harder without modern metal-shaping techniques and other such artifacts, but predominantly architects don't know how to not make buildings collapse and don't need to.
In the 15th century, if you were building a cathedral, you'd need to be pretty good to have it not collapse, but that's a different story.
This is f-ing great! Thank you. I'm going to have to read it again. In my previous life I was a member of the physics priesthood. This is the trifecta of my week. Dan Carlin drops audio book two on Alexander the Great. Lex Fridman does three hours with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And this... I think the short answer is keep the priesthoods and let them reform themselves... they certainly have to display their usefulness to regain our trust. But maybe burn some priesthoods down, and build anew? (Are government bureaucracies priesthoods?)
I have granular and subtle information on the extent to which various sects of the priesthood were infected, but how can I possibly convey this information? "Woke" is a discourse dirty bomb that turns data antimemetic, anyone who approaches it becomes overwhelmed by a lust for maximally sweeping generalisations: shut the fuck up about gradations, fine distinctions between faculties, different possible ethnographic breakdowns of academics as people, the web of vastly different types of actors in the funding and philanthropy space, blah blah blah, just tell me whether I should set the quad on fire or not!
How superficial was the "woke takeover" in various STEM fields? As far as I can tell, the takeover in mathematics and physics was tenuous and partial: professional organizations made statements purporting to show were on the Right Side of History, there was a lot of debate but in the end nothing much happened. (Sometimes rival professional organizations were set up - purportedly non-ideological, but not actually so for the most part, and of course they also became an obvious way for some people who were ideological *and* political ambitious in the more humdrum, banal, sordid sense of "academic politics" to gain salience, not that that was the case for all or even most people involved.)
What was most annoying, to say the least, was not the supposed takeover that never rally happened, but the normalization of behavior that broke every kind of tacit rule: young people got the idea that ad personam arguments (i"your so-called opinion is invalid because you are male" or "your so-called argument is invalid because you are sufficiently white for the purposes of this conversation" being the classic cases) were completely acceptable (and in fact good and clever) and of course the worst part was That Guy (often a guy), who cast himself as the Defender of Women, lecturing women on how to be feminists by reading websites, and giving 2000-word sermons to anybody who pointed out that a certain statistic was doubtful or had been thoroughly debunked, besides enabling the verbal abuse on the part of the motley gang that gathered on his Facebook page. In other words: not so much a takeover as an obnoxious infestation.
PS. In case it is not obvious, I am *not* looking forward to Thermidor.
It’s annoying: I’ve been wrestling with an idea only to watch Scott do it 10x better. I should be used to it, I guess? Also ain’t got time to blog.
I think that Scott’s diagnosis of how this happened feels off. For one, I don’t entirely trust that there was ever a golden age: rather, the politics became explicit instead of implicit. (See, e.g., the changing treatment of gays in the various DSMs.) Wokeness is just the new way in which they are broke. They are still far better than the alternative, of course.
One problem is simply that educational polarization of politics hijacks our tribal brains, as has been extensively demonstrated. But the other problem, I think, is indeed the Internet, in two different ways. The first is that, by globalizing the ways in which people in various groups communicate, the ingroup pressures got way stronger. Moreover, by democratizing the ability to find different views, mistakes are emphasized and the trust in priesthoods collapses, leading to the current epidemic crisis.
I was just discussing this with another frequent poster, who is of the opinion that “this is fine,” for reasons that seem to me to be fairly polarized themselves.
Perhaps this idea of priesthoods as self-renewing institutions is the fundamental reasons for the existence of colleges and graduate schools? Beside producing cohorts of missionaries or low-level clergy (to keep with the metaphor) who are sent out to minister to the laity or the heathen, aren't these academic institutions also (or principally) charged with replenishing the priesthood? A sort of immortal germline, where the rest of the graduating class is the throw-away soma.
It's a good subject, and worth thinking about and exploring. I do have to laugh at the gaping logical hole you created in your own premise; defining priesthoods (correctly, imo) as 1) with an enforced boundary and 2) with a drive to seek internal consensus is smart. But then you spontaneously assign a third trait - "they also want to be cool!" - in order to make your "theory" for how "woke" took them all over work, only to immediately admit that the theory still doesn't work because of demonstrable inaccuracies. It is just very funny to peddle something you know to be false in order to grind a political axe *in an article complaining about people who should know better peddling falsehoods for political purposes*.
I think "wanting to be cool" (in the sense of higher-status than they currently are) is more or less a human universal, and can simply be assumed to be true of any group of people.
I think that's true, but the author of the blog went to great pains to lay out that a key component of priests within priesthoods is that they care about *in group status* at the expense of caring about out-group status, only to completely reverse course in a way that he went on to admit still didn't actually make logical sense (but still spent several paragraphs articulating). I dunno it's just very funny to me that it's so clearly him going "I need a way to work in my political hobbyhorse here, logic be damned" and it occurs in an article complaining about that very trait lol
"As with every failure of the priesthood, their best qualities served as their downfall. Their intelligence made them easy prey for bad ideas that flattered them as intellectuals."
I don't think this is true at all. I think falling for the flattery of being an intellectual is a classic midwit failure mode – a failure of the person who wants to convince himself he's intelligent simply because he knows he has nothing else going for him. If you're actually intelligent you know that "intellectual" isn't remotely the same thing as intelligent; that seems to me to be a baseline criterion for anything worth calling intelligence.
In other words, it's specifically the priesthoods' *lack* of brains that made them easy prey for this type of bad idea, and that in turn is probably related to the immense 20th-century widening of the academic priesthoods, an expansion way past the point where there was at least one genuinely intelligent person to fill each free position so that the priesthoods had to start recruiting midwit strivers.
"I don’t fully understand why wokeness succeeded at conquering the priesthoods so much more thoroughly than any previous political fad."
Same reason Communism succeeded - it appealed to their greed and vanity by promising that power and social status would accrue to the people who embraced it. That's why both ideologies were imposed top-down - the people who cared about the work cared about the work, and the people who cared about being In Change and Important embraced the ideologies that allowed them to club everyone else into line.
>Normies who try to criticize it are almost always wrong. Sometimes an outsider from another priesthood - like a statistician - can land a hit. But it’s pretty rare.
>1950s psychologists were not only wrong about everything, but even wronger than the average member of the public (I’m thinking mostly of psychoanalysis and behaviorism here, but a full list would take all day).
I'm sensing some tension here. If the whole field is corrupt, how can an outsider priest, never mind a normie, legitimately land a hit? By "a hit" you seem to mean an acknowledgement from a priest in good standing, but admit youself that this isn't necessarily correlated with truth and goodness, so the argument seems circular.
The priesthood is an excellent analogy, but I think that you overstate the stupidity of common sense. It actually pretty good for common things. I suggest checking out "Not Born Yesterday" by Mercier.
Priests need to stay in touch with the broader public not just to be cool or with it, but also to keep their esoteric knowledge grounded in a shared social reality.
I suspect that wokeness is as much a symptom of the growing sense of alienation between the priests and the public as it's cause. Wokeness explains to the priests why the public (in its unwoke slumber) no longer trusts them.
More seriously I blame it on the marriage of the right, the christians, and the rich centering on anti intellectualism.
It used to be you got cache from everybody by being some flavor of priest. You got to be a Big Man by getting that degree in X.
Now, nobody gives a shit except other degree in X havers and the surrounding groups. The incoming parties popular platform boils down to "hang all the Jesuits , elevate all the revivalists".
When it comes to why SJism/wokism was so successful, I do think you have hit on part of it, but a lot of it is also just the general mechanisms by which it took over so much of the Blue Tribe in the first place. I don't really want to go on about this right now, but a lot of that IMO is about its disguised illiberalism. When you first encounter it it doesn't seem to be illiberal, it seems to just be *extending* liberalism, and then, oops, eventually you find yourself in an environment where disagreeing with it is disallowed. I think this is an important mechanism by which it gained followers.
I have a very strong sense that this essay is somehow spiritually related to the Mathic world in Neal Stephenson's 𝘈𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮.
Ivory tower intellectual priesthoods that variously cross-pollinate with the public annually, decennially, centennially, or millennially, depending on their order; with each order thus being more/less susceptible to public failure modes versus priesthood failure modes depending on the frequency with which they integrate with the public.
I think potentially a vaild reading of 𝘈𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 might be that the various academic/intellectual specialisms are undertaken by each order depending upon (amongst other factors) that specialism's susceptibility to general-public failure modes..
There is something I think you have totally skipped over, which is the impact of gender balance. Most of these fields that have been captured are female dominated. Women as a whole have very different behavior than men regarding social acceptability of ideas and punishing unacceptable speech; and they have less tendency to pursue interests (or the truth) for their own sake and more tendency to pursue those things only for social status.
Male dominated fields (like psychiatry back in the day) had a tendency to be wrong in a different and novel way; female dominated fields have a tendency to be wrong in exactly the same way as anyone else, which of course negates the whole point of a priesthood.
It seems to me that AI provides a new means to fix or replace priesthoods. There are two modes for this I can think of: superintelligence and tool AI that facilitates better epistemology and consensus building. If superintelligence lives up to the hype, it could replace priesthoods. But if we control the rise of SI, we'll need to go through a trust building process that will likely rely on priesthoods. Decentralized, AI-facilitated fact checking and clustering allows discussions to scale bigger, faster, and with higher fidelity than ever before. This could provide a subtle, assistive third party to help priesthoods become more effective and potentially create wider, subtler boundaries between the priesthood and the public.
600+ well-argued and literate comments at the time of posting this, so what do I have to add?
Let me test the high-decoupling of our audience and host with the elephant in the room. I should add that my own ancestry is half Ashkenazi (though I don't practice the religion), and that I am ABSOLUTELY NOT charging anyone present with any culpability in this--it's largely before our time, and most of the rationalists have served as loci of resistance to the odious trend under question. I believe under most modern forms of ethics, including Christianity, you answer only for your own sins, not those of your relatives. (And your own relatives may have fought against it.)
I think a big influence is the drop in antisemitism after WW2 thanks to the exposure of Hitler's atrocities, allowing a disproportionately leftist Jewish population to enter academia through meritocratic means. Look, we're smarter. I don't know if it's nature, nurture, or both, but count the Nobel Prizes. There's a reason the Nazis didn't get the Bomb! Once there, they shifted the culture to the left, laying the foundations for much of what we see now--cultural anthropology, Cultural Marxism, the ancestor of woke, second-wave feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, and the AMA taking a knee. Boas, Marcuse, Friedan, Steinem, (Judith) Butler, and any others I've missed. (I'll toss in Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin.)
(I'll let our buddy Zubatov at Tablet clarify that, yes, Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory but also a real thing:
At least in part, of course, they gained moral support by advocating for the repeal of Jim Crow, which was horribly unfair by any estimation and was hurting us geopolitically in the Cold War. But that turned into 'disparate impact' and the rest of it. There are some people who are going to say this had to do with the way the Warren court was trying to end Jim Crow, and that's definitely part of it--Hanania's covered this better than me.
I should also add this wasn't entirely Jewish by any means--the 'long march through the institution' was coined by Rudi Dutschke, who was born Christian, and the idea of the working-class socialist intellectual by Antonio Gramsci, who wasn't Jewish either. Most of the theorists of the later ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality, and standpoint theory, such as Derrick Bell, Kimberle' Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Patricia Collins, were not members of the tribe.
And it's not that there aren't any libertarian, conservative or liberal antiwoke Jews--from Ayn Rand to Milton Friedman to Norman Podhoretz to Andrew Breitbart to Edward Blum to, in some senses, our esteemed host, they certainly exist and are important. The issue is that when you have a high-verbal-IQ population with a disproportionately leftist slant, it is going to drive America to the left. It's a statistical thing.
"What am I supposed to do, jump in the oven?" you ask. NO! (I'm not a Groyper or a believer in medieval blood guilt, and besides, there's a good chance I'd have to off myself.) That's counterproductive and self-destructive. It's up to all of us, whether descended from Abraham or not, to do something about this. You fight where you can. You raise money, you intrigue with like-minded colleagues, you form alternate islands of intellectual rigor outside the university like this that can embarrass dishonest academics with graphs and convince the increasing number of smart people outside academia like those in Silicon Valley. If you enjoy playing the long game, you get a PhD in economics or engineering or some other field as-yet uncorrupted and prepare to serve as a foot soldier or landing base when the counterattack on academia comes. If you're in a position where you can act non-anonymously, you do that--assuming self-doxxing is actually useful and not just exposing another heretic to be removed. You can't win with just the intellectual battle, of course, but it becomes necessary when woke finally falls and a new infrastructure has to be built. It's a persuasive role, but if your intelligence is higher than your charisma, well, play the position you're built for and don't worry too much about your ancestry. (Though if it's there, it can be a useful defense against charges of fascism.)
Good luck, my friends, and let's make 'tikkun olam' mean something that will stick in the doxxing NYT's metaphorical throat.
I think a big part is the changing composition of the priesthood. The academia of the 60s was much smaller than today and the average academic very bright, possibly a bit autistic and cared a lot about truth.
Since then white collar jobs with interesting, complicated problems have dramatically increased in number and pay. At the same time academia has grown massively, and has increased the amount of admin and hassle.
Lots of people who would have been academics in the 60s are now working at quant funds, in tech etc. There are a limited number of these sorts of people and as they have gotten rarer in academia the norms have often changed against aggressive debate and eccentricity. The average academic is now much more conformist and agreeable.
The fields which are least impacted by the woke stuff (maths, physics, econ) are those where it is quite hard to study the subject without being smart and a bit autistic, and so have seen less change in the type of people studying it. In contrast a subject like history used to be studied by the sort of person who was completely obsessed by cuneiform tablets. Now a lot of history academics seem like they could easily have become a middle manager in an insurance firm instead.
The changing composition issue has been compounded by the internet, which both made it harder to dissent within academia (twitter pile ons etc) and also exposed a lot of these issues to the wider public (for instance I think in some fields in the 80s they believed some pretty wild stuff, but not sure that impacted public trust, as not many people knew about it).
I’m not sure whether this occurred in other priesthoods outside academia. Journalism in the US seems to have seen a slightly different shift from normal people who could write to posh rich kids, possibly with a similar impact.
The deceits of the priesthoods being more subtle seems, on anything other than aesthetic grounds, to be a bug rather than a feature. Also, aren’t they much more likely to have a wider, deeper, longer-lasting, and therefore more damaging impact?
This reads like a condensed version of a typical sociology-of-the-professions book. (That is meant as praise.) More explicitly normative, though.
...and this observation rings true in my social science-area, in particular related to highly complex economic/game theoretic papers with extensive use of mathematical formulas:
"Because priests are so focused on their reputation, even their mistruths follow certain ritual purity laws. The typical non-priest who lies to support a political cause will repeat some un-fact-checked lurid anecdote, or some utterly idiotic misinterpretation of garbled data. But the deceits of priests are subtle and elegant. They’ll publish a study that observes the forms almost perfectly, then bury something in the footnotes which reveals that it’s irrelevant to any of the real world situations that people would expect it to be relevant to."
Priesthoods are demanded by the fervent. This is where I find religion is less a theology and more a psychology. Some but out non theistic priesthoods in place.
- Seriously, Scott, lots of people genuinely enjoy Schoenberg and Berg while also enjoying Sibelius and Shostakovich and also Stravinsky. Or at least we enjoy some works by each of them. You may say "I did not mean the *first* half of the twentieth century, but then -
- What period is exactly meant? Probably something that reached its peak in the 50s-70s. Back in the late 90s, I had lots of friends in the music department, and they saw Milton Babbitt as a wizened figure from a previous epoch who would sometimes come to the department at odd times to look at the old monastery, with contempt for the heretics and pagans who had taken over written on his face.
- Composers and musicologists are two different tribes. Composers look down on musicologists just as people who see themselves as creators look down on theorists and chroniclers everywhere. Also, most musicologists study much earlier periods in music, no?
- You would have recognized the *same* phenomenon that you cogently describe in a general context ("the priesthood has already thought of that and has spent the last 30 years discussing it") in a music department if you had paid any attention to this particular. I remember someone in the local music department denigrating the 20th century in, what, 2003?
Not that you wouldn't have some easy targets for satire if you actually befriended people in music-department circles. 'I look upon extended technique with contempt. It is beneath my cool.' 'You sexist pig!'
Perhaps the task of preserving useful knowledge in society is actually a really hard problem for flesh-and-blood organisms. Everyone has their own ideas and they're all equally valid from those people's points of view, and people, especially smart people, are prone to manically believing their own new theories and upending everyone's beliefs every year, if anyone will listen to them and give them cult-leader status. Humanity's crystallized knowledge is perhaps actually a very tenuous thing---but for the most part we don't notice this, because we are living in the middle of a giant social-technological solution to it, which is priesthoods.
Knowledge, at some level, is generated by one mental state (something like "lateral thinking" or "manic theorizing" or "so-and-so strange recluse wrote a whole treatise dropping a paradigm-shifting knowledge bomb on the profession".) But it has to be preserved by another one, which crystallizes and disseminates and preserves it. These are people who are less of the sort to generate ideas and more the sort to learn, master, and re-teach them. These people form the bulk of the priesthood: not the prophets but the priests. Their job in society is to keep the framework of knowledge stable.
Meanwhile there are pressures against that stability. There are occasionally brilliant theorists who push on it in a way that eventually get it to buckle. But far more of the pressure comes from the other side: from crazies, imposters, people who think they have good ideas and do not, people who want to dismantle all knowledge because they don't understand it but think they're right anyway. These are all your Youtube theorists and your wackjob crackpots who think they've solved relativity with, like, time crystals.
So the priesthood has to be quite resilient to resist all that pressure. But not so resilient that it resists *all* pressure; sufficiently-good ideas need to be able to replicate and disseminate. This basically looks like there being "some, but not infinite, pressure against new ideas". Your idea has to have legs if it is to survive.
... at least that's how it's supposed to work. But I think what has gone really awry is the gradual conversion to where all college-level professors are supposed to do research foremost, and therefore they are charged to gradually invented new religion to be priesthoods of, instead of preserving existing ones. So their *job* is to change the knowledge instead of keeping it the same, and naturally things flow from there and you end up with Marxist Lit departments or whatever. Which at one level is kinda fine---I'm glad to live in a society where people are paid to think about political theory and where open-minded students are exposed to it--but there is something strange about a university program that is mostly about *new* ideas instead of *old* ones. E.g. an engineering department teaches you how to make computer chips or make bridges foremost, and maybe some cutting-edge research also happens. My impression is that it's kinda the opposite for humanities departments, basically because of this silly "school=research instead of school=training" idea.
Aside, it's not a coincidence that we call non-specialists "laypersons" which originally referred to non-priest members of the church.
Also, your cartoon is, sure, meant to be a criticism of left-wing knowledge, and I agree that it's a shame because having to find a priest is a good thing compared to random Twitter posters or whatever. But the real issue is that that cartoon is just a vibe, and it's almost certainly completely false. If you could do any kind of actual investigation on the subject, you would almost certainly find that priests are right like 99% of the time and random people are right far far less than that. The crux of the issue is really whether it's *true*: *do* priests make things up the same as random people on the internet do? I doubt it. The sensation that it's true is just a sensation, caused by the fact that the news/social media/viral internet heavily amplifies the signals of anyone who's wrong or makes a mistake. I cannot imagine that it stands up to scrutiny.
Scott chanced upon something pretty big here. It turns out that most of academia, Earth's main knowledge institution, might have this giant norm of long dry papers and nonfiction books, largely due to a culture of warding off the hoi polloi.
It could have instead been HPMOR-style or And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes-style stories that transmit knowledge, octoupling the number of people (including experts in other fields) willing to dive into topics, at the price of merely doubling the word count per concept. But the culture mandates that anything other than ultra-direct boring technical documents is seen as unserious.
It’s a more intriguing idea than I would have expected prima facie, so I think it’s worth answering.
1 and 2 explain why this is impractical, 3 and 4 are about why it’s not obvious this would work, and 5 argues that some amount of warding off is, in fact, good – but my point is that it’s downstream of the existing constraints, especially the point I sketch in 2).
(But of course, even if something happens for very good reasons, it doesn’t mean it’ll disappear when these reasons are no more. Cultural inertia is absolutely a thing.)
1) Researching new knowledge, presenting it in a clear form to an expert, and presenting it in a generally engaging way (say, à la HPMOR) are very distinct, difficult skills. All of them are extremely time-consuming and it already takes time to “stay at the top of the game”.
2) making a finding useful to a non-initiate requires giving a ton of background information (everyone systematically underestimates inferential distances, but academics still deal with them every single day). All of this in an engaging, not-dense, light-toned way. All of which takes time to write, and which your expert will not remotely care about because they know it by heart – or rather, they require only the most targeted and specific part of this context.
3) even reading HPMOR does not, in fact, impart basic rationality skills on its own. Yudkowsky reports that many readers asked him: “why not load your mental model of [hyper-competent person who has essentially been running the show, you know who] and take over the world?”.
It’s a legitimate question, but one of those you really, really should expect the writer to have thought about and rejected, especially given that he has Lucius comment about this when discussing the tragedy of Light the Slytherin with Draco.
4) Also, Yudkowsky writes that most of the subtle stuff in fiction is simply not noticed by the reader. Which is why, to convey complex information, you have to avoid being subtle about it.
5) the overwhelming majority of laymen simply aren’t interested in learning the stuff and expect us to validate their delusions (or also have no idea about the inferential distances involved).
Even people who can be assumed to be interested (such as undergrads, since they pay so much for the privilege) will make mounds of gruesome errors that will give their instructors and TAs suicidal urges.
Checking that any given person is, in fact, interested in learning is also a time and energy-consuming process (and those people heavily outnumber academics), so making barriers to entry seems eminently reasonable.
Apologies for the long answer, I don’t have time for a shorter one.
I.
I think you’re missing some obvious explanations for "why did woke took over". Note that various explanations are not mutually exclusive (non of this is substantiated, just guesses) :
1. As science progress and truth is harder and harder to reach, it means truth signals are weaker and weaker. It means that other selections pressures (ie monkey stuff like politics and status) get comparatively stronger and stronger. This is Bad News : it means that woke in no fluke and the theory that "all will be fine again once we get rid of woke" is wrong. It just means *other* memetics parasites will arise, because we haven’t fixed the root issue is "all your optimization pressure in academia now comes from monkey stuff". Note that in my model this is the plague afflicting the field of philosophy since a very long time.
2. After the abject failure of Big Ideologies like Communism and Nazism, we have gone, collectively, away from the policy of "taking ideas seriously". This has beeen substituted with being "data-driven" (as opposed to theory-driven). Before, being a Serious Person meant explaining your policy in terms of its place in the Grand Historical Dialectics and whatever. Now it’s all about the best estimate of the marginal returns on taxation. Both strategies have their advantages/issues, but one big issue with being data-driven is that it’s damn easier to build post-hoc rationalizations on non-contextualized, limited data sets than trying to fit your pet theory in the Accepted Big Picture. In the memetic/genetic analogy, it means higher rates of mutation. We know what happen when you allow viruses to mutate more.
3. The explanation that Bret Devereaux loves to hate (and given the number of times he writes the term "fascism" when he dunks of it, I suspect it’s more the memetic parasit that infests academia that is speaking when he does so, not the man himself) aka "good times create weak men, weak men create hard times". In Bryan Caplan’s mouth, it would be termed "Social Desirability Bias". I basically notice two things : when I read biographies of old academics, there’s a 50% chance that somewhere in the book there will be a passage saying something like "X was a bastard but he was brillant, so everyone respected him". The relatively more recent zeitgeist is at the polar opposite : being brillant does not entitle you to be an asshole. I call "weak mean" the kind of person who takes that zeitgeist seriously and at heart, and who are *terrified* of being called an asshole. An obvious strategy to not being called an asshole is to observe when other people are getting called assholes, and not do what they did. This strategy is obviously exploitable. The modern, refined and advanced form of that exploit is called "woke". The solution is obviously to no longer fear being called an asshole, and it seems to not be such a bad strategy. So we can link the rise of woke with the rise of "weak men" in good times. This explains why this is not limited to academia. This explains why we saw a weaker version of woke appearing earlier in the name of "politically correct" (which is an earlier, more clunky, proof-of-concepts variant of that exploit). In that version, academia is just a victim in a larger memetic warfare strategy (weaponizing the fear of being called an asshole).
II.
"But to a first approximation, there’s only one medical priesthood" : no, this is the third approximation. The second approximation is "there’s only one academic priesthood". The first approximation is "there’s only one priesthood", which encompass media, academia, lobbying, law, education, pundits, and I’m forgetting a lot. When Trump & his acolytes are attacking "The Elites", he’s not narrowly speaking about Critical Race Theory College Professors.
Which makes it such an juicier target for a memetic parasite, and makes any corruption _stronger_. If your field largely fall and rise as much as your neighbor’s field, because you are part of the same Priesthood, just from a different Diocese, it makes it much less attractive to attack the corruption of your neighbor’s field, even if your own field is genuinely less corrupted. On paper the calculus may be more complicated because of the point you’re raising ("those corrupt priests are ridiculing the whole Priesthood"), but I’m not convinced. It only matters if it ridicules the Priesthood in the eyes of someone that matters. If everyone who matters is actually is, if not in the Priesthood, at least in the same Religious Structure (your nuns and deacons), ridiculing Priesthood is not that much a big deal. I’m pretty sure it was the calculus that went with the woke: that the deplorables don’t matter anyway so getting ridiculous in their eyes is no big deal, who cares ? It may even be a plus (I mean, it’s your "Boundary with the Public").
(and yes they’re now discovering, pikachu face, that in a democracy the deplorable actually can matter. oopsies.)
III.
I have more qualms with that part of the article tho :
"But the deceits of priests are subtle and elegant": yes, and this makes them way more dangerous ? The intellectual capital to detect the bullshit in the NYT is way higher than the intellectual capital required to detect the bullshit in infowars. Therefore way more people, and more educated people, and more influential people will predictably fall for the first bullshit. It is worse. You realize it is worse, right ?
Also: it’s easier to fight back against false uncredentialed ideas than false credentialed ideas.
Also: it’s worse when the epistemic institutions of your society is compromised by a memetic parasite, than when the sport institutions of your society is compromised by a memetic parasite. NYT being compromised is worse than Andrew Tate spilling misinformation.
Also: if any epistemologically corrupted college professor can gain your support by just saying "it’s me or Alex Jones", you do realize that you can get college professors arbitrarily as close as corrupted as Alex Jones before you drop your support to them, right ?
> But I still have basic trust that something in the New York Times’ non-opinion pages is 99% likely to be factually true
First, you are a savvy reader. You do realize that when you are giving an advice of the form "I have basic trust in the NYT", you are a feral beast tamer who goes "don’t getting eaten by a feral beast is easy, just don’t show your fear", and then a random child will listen to you, go into the tigers pit saying to himself "I’m not afraid" and get eaten alive. And in this metaphor, by "a child" I mean a slightly less savvy reader than you, which is at least 99% of humankind. Or : you’re going a bit too fast from "as a feral beast tamer I can go into a pit of hungry feral beast relatively safely" to "a pit of hungry feral beasts is not _that_ dangerous".
Also, even in your position of an unusually savvy reader, how confident are you that in the counterfactual world where the NYT is libertarian-aligned and exactly as trustworthy (as in "their lies are elegantly spun") as it is now, you are not part of the crowd that shouts *FDA delenda est* on the top of rooftops ? *Really* that sure ? Are you damn sure that it generalizes to all your beliefs ?
> When should we continue to trust priesthoods, on the grounds that at least they require their mistruths to be subtle (which limits the amount of damage they can do and ensures some correlation with truth)?
I’d rather stay ignorant and be aware of the fact that I’m ignorant than be wrong and think I’m right because I have been fed sufficiently subtle lies that they pass my lie detector, thank you. I don’t see in what world the second situation is doing less damage. It’s very close to saying that "Truth doesn’t matter, because falsehoods are better than ignorance". I prefer my liars brazen rather than subtle. Therefore I want my social epistemic institutions to reward honesty first, then lightly punish obvious and brazen lies, and _heavily_ punish subtle lies. Subtle lies are the *worst* crimes in truth-seeking ; it is an aggravating circumstance, not an attenuating one.
(the difficulty of course is that obvious lies are obvious, whereas subtle lies are closer to an honest mistake ; but if you determine beyond reasonable doubt that what comes out an actor's intellectual production is a continuous stream of subtle lies rather than truth plus honest mistakes ? You should get more mad, not less mad, and punish more, not less. I don’t even see how you can arrive to the opposite conclusion. I mean, part of the difficulty is that as we get to harder and harder problems, the Truth signal is harder and harder to catch, and you’re saying, in this situation: "stealthily sabotaging this very delicate and precise experimental instrument so we arrive to the wrong conlusion but without knowing it is less problematic than openly burning the research notes of your competitor in your petty rivalry". I mean, yes, both are bad, but the first is way worse for everyone involved ?)
> How would we even begin to do either of those things?
I think you mean "academic composition" rather than "academic musicology" which studies music history (and music theory in Europe). You're obviously not a member of the priesthood...
Not at all obvious to me that " wokeness succeeded at conquering the priesthoods so much more thoroughly than any previous political fad."
When I listen to history, universities of the 19th century seem plenty captured by the ideological fads of the day. Thinking of e.g. 1848 revolution in the German confederation here. Or lawyers just before the breakout of the French Revolution. Or the Marxist architects you brought up. That happened at a time when the US government was aggressively anti-communist! Treating approval by the Kremlin as the highest form of praise when the government is looking for communist sympathisers is a lot more extreme than talking about how diversity is great when the government is also talking about how diversity is great.
I'd love to see an analysis of the priesthood-nature of the Internet Engineering Task Force. (They're the people who make the technical standard that make the Internet work.) I was involved with the IETF for five or 10 years, and it's definitely a priesthood in some ways, there is very much an internal status structure and a considerable lack of concern for the opinions of outsiders when those opinions are seen as contrary to the principles of the IETF. OTOH, it does go out of its way to conceptualize itself as "open" and in practice anyone can join its discussion mailing lists or attend its in-person conferences. Care is taken to scatter the in-person conferences around the world. Then again, all work is done in English. But as I phrase it, "Anyone may speak; not all are listened to.", you have to build a reputation in the eyes of the other insiders to actually be inside.
IMHO this should be part of a comprehensive sociological history of the IETF. It basically came out of left field in the 1970s to build the data networking that dominates the world. Compare with the CCITT -- a club of the telephone companies -- that worked on building a data networking system, and effort that grossly failed. One interesting aspect is that while most people who are involved with the IETF are sponsored by their employers in one way or another, one is not seen as representing one's employer at the IETF, your reputation is your own, and if you shill for your employer's interests in a way that is seen as being contrary to the good of the Internet, you lose status.
So to provide context, I finished my undergrad in 1995 and my MA in 1997. Since then, I've worked in tech, but I do go to classical concerts a _lot_ and I always try to find performances of living composers.
So with that out of the way, I think what happened starting in the 70s and 80s is that composition departments became much less dogmatic about what "proper" composition should be. If you look at the new music of those time periods, you can see a lot of different approaches that became popular.
The best known of those is probably minimalism, starting with Glass and Reich. This is still popular today.
Another big one is neo-romanticism, which in my summary would be "new music designed to give you the feels". This tends to be tonal(-ish), feature recognizable melodies, and also the sort of big gestures with associate with the Romantic period. Daron Hagen, who I linked above, is a good example of this sort of music. So is Kevin Puts. I love this stuff.
We also have people like Gubaidulina and other composers who've continued the atonal-but-not-serial work of people like Ligeti, Takemitsu, etc. This work is often dense and atonal, but will still have recognizable reptition, melodies (or melodic fragments), some sort of harmony (maybe based on tone clusters instead of triads). It may also have grand gestures, large-scale development, etc. I think this stuff is tough to get into, but it can be quite rewarding. It can still hit the same emotional resonance that the neo-romantic works do, but I think it takes a bit more effort from listeners to get into the composers work. I like some of this stuff, but it can veer into the impenetrable IMO.
Another comment in the thread mentioned pastiche. This became quite popular as well. This music often combines elements of many genres, including various classical periods (Baroque, Classical, Romantic), along with popular music idioms. It often has a lot of quotations of other pieces. At its worst, I think this sort of music sounds cheesy and low-effort. But it can be great. I recently saw a performance of Michael Daugherty's Le Tombeau de Liberace. This is a great example of this style. I thought the piece was incredible. It was like Vegas meets modern music on an acid trip.
There are other styles of modern music that have flourished as well. One of my favorite modern composers is George Crumb. His works are sort of like a mix of pastiche, super-weird atonalism, and what I can only describe as a sort of ritualistic element. I think Vox Balanae is one of his most approachable works. Here's a wonderful performance of it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGPQLXPV5wE. Another composer who works in this vein is Joseph Schwantner. Check out his Aftertones of Infinity.
And yet another style I would describe as rhymic crunchy noise, like Michael Torke or Louis Andriessen. I generally find this stuff really irritating, though I don't know why. It literally makes me want to leave the room. But my wife loves it!
One more I'd note is a kind of "color-focused" composition, where the focus is on making interesting sounds and contrasting them over the course of the piece. I think Jacob Druckman's work does a lot of this. I'm not a fan, but I think it can be fairly accessible. I just find it kind of boring. I like emotion more than just sound.
And of course lots of composers mix and match many of these style. Kevin Puts wrote an opera version of The Machurian Candidate that mixes neo-romanticism and pastiche. There's a bits of jazz in there to fit with the time period in which its set. And many composers explore different styles over the course of their career. Aaron Copland, famous for his fairly tonal works, wrote some serialism-influenced music later in life! Unsurprisingly, this stuff isn't played nearly as much as his earlier work.
I feel like I'm probably missing a _lot_ of other styles, and of course any style I mention can be further subdivided into a million subthreads (just like modern metal genres).
A brief comment about the GMU economics bloggers. The academics you have spoken to are absolutely correct—there is nothing surprising that these bloggers are not all found at the very top institutions. Blogging (and other kinds of popular media) are generally not considered a core part of a professor’s job duties. I think for the most part blogging wouldn’t be discouraged, but at an R1 institution (like GMU, and the more highly rated departments), the emphasis is on published research, funded grants, etc. Look up, for example, Robin Hanson on Google Scholar, and you will see that he publishes research articles quite infrequently; this wouldn’t be enough to cut it at a top institution.
What does warrant additional explanation is not why relatively few popular econ bloggers are at the very top institutions, but rather why there is such a notable cluster at a single institution like GMU. A large part of the explanation for this is (seriously!) that the Koch Foundation has used enormous donations to GMU and affiliated centers like Tyler Cowen’s Mercatus Center to wield significant influence. The Koch Foundation quite explicitly pushes a libertarian (and conservative) agenda. While having popular and well-read blogs is not an important part of a university’s core function, it is an effective way to influence popular opinion and shape the public discourse. It is documented that the donations to GMU have included stipulations that give the Koch Foundation say over hiring decisions. This lets them select for faculty who may not excel at research contributions to the field of economics, but rather in public dissemination of what they consider friendly ideological content. As you mentioned yourself, these bloggers are not only all at GMU, but they are all (to varying degrees) libertarian in their leanings. This isn’t coincidental.
Whether this lends evidence to the claim that “only your reputation within the priesthood matters”, I’m not entirely sure. Certainly, in order to get hired, only how you are assessed by the hiring committee matters (tautologically). But I don’t think that valuing research contributions over popular outreach (like blogging) is solely about status games or reputation. It seems logical that the main criteria when hiring a doctor should be their skill at practicing medicine, and their success as a blogger should be secondary. When hiring a musician to perform at an event, they should be assessed more by their skill at performing music, and less by their skill at writing a music blog. Similarly, if the core function of a professor is to perform academic research, then blogging to a lay audience is only secondary.
"I’ve been despairing the past few years because the priesthoods have been doing such a bad job - biasing so many pronouncements to fit their political leanings. I was looking forward to seeing what happened after they got taken down a notch. Unfortunately, it’s nothing good."
As an academic, I'd like to make a rather more positive defense, but sometimes it's worth trying other points of view.
So academia expects its (in fact groundless) dictates to be irrefutable, blindly obeyed by a subservient public, and threatens to come down like a ballistic missile on anyone who would dare and try criticize the blessing of their betters, right?
Well, I suppose this would make academia Saddam Hussein. What happened after his regime collapsed, when the US stopped imposing order?
Technological changes explain many social changes.
Washing machines, etc, freed up women to work outside of the house more ⇒ greater rights for women.
STIs became easier to treat ⇒ gay marriage legalised.
Internet allowed strangers to speak without revealing their faces or voices ⇒ gendered languages means stating your pronoun (masc/fem) is a gesture of linguistic kindness to people writing to you.
Then people started getting creative with pronouns as they could now separate their internal and external states. Once the internet got big enough this started flowing back into the offline world.
Academics got captured because there is a directional cohesiveness to various "liberation" struggles; it was an easy story to understand. And they also cared a lot about the lives of their students, who'd come up in this online world, and wanted to peacefully cohabit with them.
Priesthoods can make serious mistakes on stuff that really matters (e.g. masks and covid), but it's pretty rare and soon corrected. The more squishy the field, e.g. sociology, the longer the half-life on serious mistakes.
Art priesthoods (architecture, musicology) likely have an entirely different mechanism to explain their oddness.
Also, in the US political polarisation is unnaturally severe.
There are multiple things going on that I don't really see as related; I see a grand unifying theory of priesthoods as mistaken.
Speaking as a member of a “priesthood” (medicine), the level of consensus within the field with the prevailing politics of the past years (especially in relation to Covid) is a lot less than you may think. The key is enforcement by a handful of “high priests,” with excommunication by those who have found to violate the accepted opinion space. The health care regulatory agency in my country (Australia) has banned doctors from practicing when they said things on social media about Covid lockdowns that people in power didn’t like.
Never have I pivoted so quickly from "engaged and intrigued" to "frustrated and disappointed" with a piece of Scott's writing. The section on priesthoods and "wokeness"-written to be pretty core to the whole discussion--is badly, badly lacking.
I have long felt that Scott has something of a blind-spot around "woke" and "wokeness," but this is the first time I've felt that he's tripped over it in a big way. The trouble is that "wokeness" is this very large, vague, amorphous concept. What's "woke?" Anything vaguely left-coded that the speaker doesn't like. I'm pretty convinced that within the broader culture, this vagueness is exactly the reason the word is so popular: it's easy to decry things as "woke," and it instantly lends you an air of counterculture edginess and standing-up-against-those-people bravado. But precision and narrowness are rationalist virtues, and if you want to understand a complex cultural topic like this it is VITAL that you be more precise than simply saying "woke" and assuming that means anything coherent.
Consider a range of "woke" behaviors that doctors could display. On one end of the range, they are doing things like providing friendly, helpful care to any and all patients (yes, even those who are queer and trans) and treating them with basic courtesy (which yes, involves not deliberately using non-preferred names and pronouns). On the other end of the range lies egregious malpractice like falsifying study results when the conclusions don't match the doctor's ideology, or lying to patients about their medical care for ideological reasons. How many doctors display behaviors on which ends of the range? This seems like a really, REALLY important question to assessing both the quality of the care they're providing and how much the field has been "ideologically captured."
But it actually seems like an utterly irrelevant question to assessing how conservatives relate to doctors. It's quite clear to me that even in a world where every single doctor across the country does the respect-and-courtesy thing, and literally zero of them do the ideologically-based-malpractice thing, very large numbers of conservatives would be just as ready to conclude that "medicine has gone woke," and quickly destroy each others' trust in medicine. The vagueness of the term has been quite effective as a political weapon in other arenas, and I expect it to be equally so here. The whole point of "woke" to my ears is that people who use is as a broad-spectrum pejorative don't need to care about the details of any particular case: they know they don't like it and that's all they feel they need to know.
As far as Scott writing this article goes, I can see of two better paths that could have been followed. One would be to add back in the missing narrowness and precision: cite specific sorts of actions that fall under the umbrella of harmful doctor "wokeness" with some real data to show that yes, this is a case of mandate, this is how bad it is, this is how quickly its getting worse. Or route around the question entirely, and simply talk about how perceptions of doctors have changed over the past couple decades, without trying to say anything about how accurate those perceptions are. Unfortunately, Scott does neither of these things: he takes it as a given that doctors have been captured by wokeness, says very little about what that actually *means* in practice, and then hares off into armchair speculation about why they would do this Vague and Undefined Thing That He's Very Sure They Definitely Did.
>literally zero of them do the ideologically-based-malpractice thing, very large numbers of conservatives would be just as ready to conclude that "medicine has gone woke,"
Quite vehemently disagreed. If it was "literally zero" then they'd have no reason to think medicine has "gone woke," would they? The problem is that there is a "woke" faction, presumably small in number but *extremely* loud and seemingly influential, and seemingly no parallel faction on their side, so to speak.
How broadly do we want to define "doctor"? Literally just practicing MDs, or can we broaden that to "health professionals"?
During the pandemic there were, fairly famously, nurses that got fired for abusing their patients for wearing Trump hats or making "unwoke" comments when they came in. This does not exclude the possibility of more that performed such behaviors but crossed the minimum intelligence threshold to not brag about it on social media. It also does not exclude the possibility of nurses that cared poorly for left-coded patients and didn't brag publicly, of course.
There were multiple public health researchers at prominent institutions (I recall and loathe unrepentant monsters Mark Lipsitch at Harvard, Harald Schmidt at UPenn, I assume there were more) that argued in favor of particular vaccine distribution schedules and restrictions because they kill more white people. This would also kill more minorities because of the delays generated, but that was beside the point. "Health equity" can get you some absolutely horrifying places really fast. More than one way to skin a cat.
See also anti-mask protests kill grandma, but BLM protests are more important than stopping COVID. Et cetera and so forth. The pandemic period had a significant portion of the health field beclowning itself in a "woke" direction, a tiny portion beclowning itself in the ivermectin direction and getting excommunicated for it, and a large silent majority. But a silent majority wields no influence over how the public perceives it!
>The vagueness of the term has been quite effective as a political weapon in other arenas
The vagueness of the term is generated in part because the somewhat, though not entirely, coherent grouping to which it applies abjectly refuses to be named. Decentralization is an incredibly powerful force for an ideology if they can pull it off, and no one can be held responsible.
Defining wokeness is much like the Supreme Court Justice's infamous statement on pornography: "I know it when I see it." I like when Scott is more accurate too, but there are times when the defining is a distraction so that whatever definition is given can be No True Scotsmanned away. If the explicit definition is not the point, and instead is in service to some other point, then I think it's fine to be loose like this.
> Quite vehemently disagreed. If it was "literally zero" then they'd have no reason to think medicine has "gone woke," would they?
I disagree. Consider the following claims:
1) an aluminum tube or a picture of a truck is sufficient evidence that a foreign leader is building nuclear weapons and needs to be put down now,
2) there are pedo-Satanic orgies organized in the basement of a Washington pizzeria and patronized by every prominent Democratic politician,
3) Trump is a puppet of Putin conforming to his plan to destroy America, and that Putin’s hold comes from a recording of Trump with two prostitutes in a Russian hotel.
They have just about no supporting evidence whatsoever. Yet, at some point in recent history, a significant number of Americans believed each of them (probably not at once – I hope).
Think of the inevitable clichés about certain ethnic, religious or political groups.
“Unknown unknowns”, “I’m sure they’re up to no good and I’ll prove it”, “no smoke without fire”, “why do they look like they’re hiding something”, “my boss wants this, I need this job, eh, how much harm could it do” are terribly powerful forces!
A significant part of “I know it when I see it” is that, when you and I both look at “it”, our “knowledge” is strongly correlated (not in the precise statistical sense). For “hardcore pornography” as was the case in the Supreme Court judgement, I have no trouble believing this would be the case.
But is there significant agreement on whether “40% of doctors are calling trans/queer people by their preferred pronouns after making every reasonable inquiry that they are not faking and have no obvious motive for faking” [not a fact, of course, but a hypothetical] counts as “medicine went woke”?
Consider how this fact could be presented in interviews:
“Nearly half of all doctors are enabling lunatics, denying objective reality and destroying the most basic distinction underpinning human society!”
“Two thirds of all doctors will rather let a trans person kill themselves rather than give them medical advice about how to mitigate their dysphoria in the safest way”
"Quite vehemently disagreed. If it was "literally zero" then they'd have no reason to think medicine has "gone woke," would they?"
Yes, they would. You apparently completely ignored the following section, in which I attested the doctors showing basic respect and courtesy to their trans and queer patients would ALSO be considered "woke" by many people. I have heard people complaining about "wokeness" for reasons as silly and trivial as a movie having a female lead, a TV show having literally any queer people at all, or female video game characters universally being stick-thin supermodels. People I know have been yelled at and abused *in public* for dressing in entirely modest but not perfectly gender conforming clothing[1]. I don't pretend to understand it, but there are apparently *quite a lot* of people who consider entirely harmless behaviors and cultural signifiers to be hugely transgressive and threatening, and chose to express this mostly by shouting "woke" and anything and everything that qualifies. And many of them will go on to claim that anyone who doesn't actively reject the people and behaviors they hate are also "woke."
So again, I'm not claiming that literally zero doctors or healthcare workers display egregious or inappropriate politically-motivated behaviors. I'm sure there are no shortage of examples to draw on, just like there are no shortage of examples of cardiologists committing robbery, fraud or murder. Listing examples of such behaviors misses the point quite badly.
If one wants to claim that an entire sector has "gone woke" one REALLY needs to lay out clearly *what that actually means.* By what standard to we judge something woke. "I know it when I see it" is a TERRIBLE standard for anything because I AM NOT YOU. I don't CARE how convinced you are that you can identify "woke" on sight. Your private woke-o-meter isn't legible to me. And it's clear from observation that there are many, MANY people who have private woke-o-meters that output utterly ridiculous results. Probably yours does not, but as long as you and they are talking with the same word and REFUSING TO DISAMBIGUATE then your are putting whatever reputation for reasonableness you may possess to work at the project of laundering all their nonsense and making it look reasonable by association.
That is the fundamental essence of the problem here. You and many others *insist* that there is a serious problem, but when asked to elaborate, you claim to be totally incapable. Do the damn work. Figure out what it is you're actually against, and come back and tell the rest of us. Until you do, it's impossible to take any complaints about "woke" seriously.
[1] To be clear, I do NOT mean anything that anyone would recognize as cross-dressing. Just somebody dressing in a way that de-emphasized their masculine of feminine characteristics because the prefer a somewhat androgynous look.
"The vagueness of the term is generated in part because the somewhat, though not entirely, coherent grouping to which it applies abjectly refuses to be named. Decentralization is an incredibly powerful force for an ideology if they can pull it off, and no one can be held responsible."
I would kindly invite you to apply Occam's Razor to this particular scenario. It shouldn't be hard to do.
If we are to take your hypothesis at face value, then "woke" is a natural grouping for, uh, something that cuts across professions, ages, races, state and national boundaries, subcultures and interest groups, permeating a vast swath of modern society. And yet somehow, despite being a natural, "somewhat coherent" grouping, it's adherents have staunchly and *successfully* resisted being labelled, defined or pinned down in any way less vague than the word "woke" of which you can only say "I know it when I see it."
So, which of these hypothesis sounds simpler:
1. There is actually some real, natural group boundary that millions of people from all walks of life with no apparent connection or central coordination or intent have deliberately managed to obscure at keep hidden...
or
2. You are simply confused and trying to pin a singular name on something that isn't even remotely a unified concept or phenomenon.
If you're a mathy sort, I'd suggest you mind find it helpful to think of this as an exercise in drawing boundary surfaces around one or more clusters in abstract concept-space. Hypothesis 1 is that there is a relatively simple surface, but enemy action has somehow blurred out enough elements of the cluster that nobody has figured out even a good approximation of how to draw it. Hypothesis 2 is that there is no simple surface because the thing you're trying to bound is actually many different clusters that have *some* overlap, but also quite a few places where they are spread quite far apart.
In practice, of course, at least during the Covid debates, *both* the "right" and the "left" (insofar as these correspond to the Covid factions) argued as the bottom soyjak does, ie. referring to someone with a degree standing just behind them. The Covid heretics continuously referred to, say, John Ioannidis's credentials when claiming that Covid was much less lethal than the scientific consensus said it was (and that consensus already, of course, said it was less lethal than what Covid was in public imagination). Later, if participating in debates, one endlessly heard about Robert Malone's work on mRNA or Michael Yeadon's position at Pfizer or so on. Not an anti-priestdom but a counter-priesthood, a heretic priesthood .
In practice there's a similar counter-priesthood serving as a constant point of reference for most similar contrarian viewpoints, at least ones that still operate within the rhetorical bounds of science.
"Later, if participating in debates, one endlessly heard about Robert Malone's work on mRNA " Counter priesthood can be so small that they only have one priest. Creationists say that Intelligent Design is supported by scientists, plural, but only ever name Behe. And there is that one economist who thinks global warming will be beneficial.
There was a post by Scott dealing in detail with the possible reasons people are put in jail, and rehabilitation is just one of them. Probably not the most important, at least it's what I get from Scott's piece (and what I though before).
You have, in no order:
(1) no need for justification: (proportional) punishment for crime is good(TM), regardless of the effect on further crime.
(2) rehabilitation/education, what you speak about
(3)lowering crime by instilling fear of prison in the one incarcerated
* both (2) and (3) hope to lower recidive
(4) instilling fear of prison in others, who may be tempted to commit crime without this threat. Actual incarceration must happen for the threat to be credible
(5) removing the criminal from society for the duration of his sentence, which have a larger effect than one may think given the high percentage of recidive and the very skewed distribution of criminal activity: few people commit the majority of crimes, especially violent crimes.
(5) indeed seems to be responsible for most of prison efficiency, at least for serious crimes which have a very skewed distribution
And I would one of my own, that I do not think Scott mentioned but that is important and linked to the first point, and your "opponent" made me think of that:
(6) ensure state monopoly of violence, by lowering tentation of personal vengeance and vendetta. This is extremly dangerous for modern stable society, and it is getting dangerously tense right now.
Only considering (2) (and maybe (3)) does not seems like a typical point of view, in any country, even if the criminal is a minor...Maybe in some social circles, but not in typical one, be sure of that.
Personally I consider all valids, but the weakest are (2) and (3) (and (4), to a lesser extent) because indeed they do not work much, especially for minors. I am mixed about (1), not really morally but what is a crime and what is proportional can be tricky....Especially as it vary soooo much with culture, both in space and time.
(5) and (6) are the elephant in the room, and (1) is not tricky here, not at all: Gangrape, we are not speaking about regret-sex rape here....so imho you are dead wrong: this judgement is 100% bonker...
Wokeness is a beautiful resolution between contempt for the public and wanting to stay in touch with the public. The public (as represented by the average straight male white guy) is, themselves, out of touch."
Okay, whoa, slow down on that inversion theory, Nietzsche.
Wokeness took over because the New Atheists beat up on religion in the sour mood era of the post 9/11, post War on Terror, post GFC era but that gets old, and by around 2013 SJWs made a big push to spread a new religion of identity politics.
The Priesthoods were dominated by men of high achievement. When it became politically untenable to exclude women of high achievement (it was massively unfair, after all), women's preferences began to dominate, largely because men will do anything to have sex with women - including sell their values, morality, family, etc - and so men simply started complying with the new social regime. It seemed a small thing by comparison. A screw tightens every quarter-turn.
The reason "woke" spread so quickly and thoroughly is that women were finally embedded thoroughly across the economy.
Crime is the issue that cuts through this because women value safety and security above all else.
Hey remember when you claimed to be asexual?
Now you have a wife and child.
It's almost like men will say anything to be accepted by the group they're trying to lead or infiltrate. Our Darwinian imperative overwhelms us.
FWIW, the easiest way to unwoke a person is to drive them through a homeless encampment or into a [redacted area]. They're confronted with more reality in 30 seconds than they've experienced in 30 years.
Do you have evidence that driving a woke person through a homeless encampment works to unwoke them? In my experience woke people get more woke in that scenario, not less. Is San Francisco a hotbed of formerly woke, now unwoke, people?
> The average high-ranked economics department doesn’t care that you have a popular blog. They might even count it against you. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters.
> someone can have literally tens of thousands of fans for doing popular writing in a field, and the amount of extra status it gives them in the field is within a rounding error of zero. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters.
I am a computer science researcher and also run a semi-popular YouTube channel about algorithms. My personal experience with the system not caring is somewhat similar, but I think it’s important to point out that (at least in my case), many researchers I've met consider my work on the channel valuable. However, that work is not science itself but rather a different discipline: science communication. As Scott points out, the academic system was designed to encourage the former and doesn’t care much about the latter.
That said, the narrative that “only the priesthoods that inculcated the most powerful contempt for the public survived to have good discussions and output trustworthy recommendations” feels too grandiose to be particularly useful, at least in the context of the natural sciences as far as I understand them. I would frame it more as a combination of mundane reasons like:
- Scientists are primarily focused on science; science communication is a separate discipline that only some of them personally care about.
- Papers are easy to count, whereas judging whether someone is generally doing a good work as a scientist/mentor/communicator is subjective and hard. This makes paper counting naturally dominant in any system.
Great post on a very important current topic. You very nicely argue that some seemingly unappealing characteristics of priesthoods like inward-lookingness and rituals can be epistemically useful. However, I think you miss something crucial if you want to understand where many important priesthoods went wrong recently.
Priesthoods can differ in specific norms they follow. The priesthood of science adopted as central norms like trying to disconfirm (with logic and evidence) each other’s conclusions, with a larger prestige price obtained the more widely shared those conclusions were. Jonathan Rauch in “The Constitution of Knowledge” tries to single out the norms that make epistemic communities healthy (things like falibilism, objectivity, exclusivity, disconfirmation, accountability, pluralism, civility, professionalism, institutionalism, no bullshitting/learning). When priesthoods drift away from these norms, they become pretty useless epistemically.
I think the crucial element that made wokism spread so much was its (kind of camouflaged) dogmatism. Some seemingly benign ideas were put forward, and questioning them was not only mistaken, but morally wrong. Shielded from criticism, these ideas tended to expand and overwrite even formally central norms in the community. A key failure was to consider that empirical questions (eg. differences between genders or ethnicities) can (and must) be answered by moral principles.
So, the answer to what to do now, might be to understand better the key norms of an epistemically health community, promote this understanding, and make sure that important priesthoods remember that these must remain central.
Channeling my inner Curtis Yarvin, I want to suggest that the situation might be both worse and better than your analysis claims.
Priests still have to eat. And they care about their reputation among other priests because it directly correlates with the ability to put food on the table (even for the tenured minority) (rather than being an evolutionary vestige from times past, as one might otherwise suspect) (in fact this is a huge contributing factor to the totalitarianness of priesthoods: a carpenter doesn't care about opinions of other carpenters as long as his customers are objectively satisfied, a sociologist cares about opinions of his peers entirely).
Normally this produces expected failures in truth-seeking: if most scientists studying health effects of smoking are on the bankroll of tobacco companies, they will keep discovering that nicotine helps with schizophrenia and other illnesses and soothes symptoms of lung cancer. If most scientists studying global warming are on the bankroll of the Department of Energy and other institutions that pay them for discovering that global warning is a serious problem that needs more research, of course they will keep discovering just that (note that this doesn't mean that these discoveries are necessarily *false*, just that they are not knowledge as in justified true belief).
In this framework wokeness took over priesthoods by offering them a new and fascinating array of weapons of internecine warfare, immediately legible to people writing their paychecks. No longer have you to translate your Sacred High Speech to something a clueless bureaucrat can understand as an argument that you should get this grant and not that old white guy. No longer have you wait until you get a lot of citations etc to take on that old white guy by the sheer force of quantified authority. Everyone understands that racism is bad, everyone understands when you point out that you're doing your sociology or climate science in such and such anti-racist ways, so the most anti-racist can win without ever needing to get into the actual subject matter.
On the one hand, this bad because then wokeness is not just a random fluke, a fashion fad, that people can just decide to reject once the scales fall from their eyes.
On the other hand, if it's not a random fluke and not a genuine ideological conviction, but exists downstream of money flows, then you know exactly where to hit it to make it hurt. Threaten to withdraw state funding from schools and universities that teach that white people are bad and they grumble a little then fold with surprisingly little resistance. Or see what happened and how swiftly and frictionlessly it happened when wealthy Jewish alumni of various universities became displeased with the pro-HAMAS protests. Also in the past few days Facebook announced that it will no longer employ fact-checkers, weaken various hate speech rules, and remove tampons from male bathrooms. And sure, people are upset, but in a weirdly muted, resigned way.
All this makes perfect sense in the wokeness-as-a-superweapon-for-internal-status-struggle view. Rolling it back on the orders of the *actual sovereigns* is equivalent to everyone being forced to sign the Geneva convention against the use of poisonous gases. The minority of people that actually benefitted from having those are genuinely upset, the majority performatively complains about the Trump Era but are secretly relieved and go back to playing less dangerous status games.
There are at least two more facets of priesthoods worth considering - the fact that they mediate between the people and the divine, and the fact that they're anointed. In response to this essay, I explore what that could mean for medicine here: https://familymeetingnotes.substack.com/p/the-priesthood-of-medicine
Scott writes “Aurochs in the wilderness probably got diseases only rarely. But cram ten thousand genetically-near-identical cows in a tiny warehouse, and your beef ends up 95% antibiotics by weight. In the same way, the priesthoods are a perfect environment for memetic plagues.”
Memetic plagues is a great descriptor for the periodic creedal passion periods (CPP). We are currently in one of these that began around 2013 and is projected to end around 2027.
Behaviorists were not wrong about everything. Most of Skinner's discoveries in operant conditioning have stood the test of time. He made some mistakes, but behaviorism remains a powerful toolkit for anyone who wants to use it.
"Doctors are good at figuring out which medicines work."
Well, expert medical researchers are good at it. The doctors I have had don't even have time to figure out which medicines work. They just use standard of care according to a recipe.
I did have one doctor who also had a Ph.D. in biology. The hospital referred me to him after I basically said their typical physicians seemed to me to be incompetent. He had his own office and sat in it, unsmiling. He listened carefully to my case and explained the diagnostic procedure that should be followed. When I asked him why the hospital's physicians had not done this, he seemed briefly puzzled by the question, then said, "Because they don't know."
With great respect for Scott, not just due respect, I have to wonder if he's trying to cover himself from being shot at by the priesthood.
Nice piece, but it is screaming for a link to what Musa Al-Gharbi (and before him, Pierre Bourdieu) wrote about "symbolic capitalists" and their ways of increasing different types of capital (e.g., cultural, academic, political) in his new book "We have never been woke".
I'm not willing to be the one to discuss it publicly in depth, but a consideration of the global popularity of caste systems might have a lot of explanatory power here. Caste can be an evolutionary competitive advantage; look at bees.
I'm not sure this version of the priesthood idea, where it refers to a coterie of experts of some sort, is all that useful, it's too general.
I think it would be best to restrict the term to coteries involved in religion or religion-substitutes or secular quasi-religions - and while that needn't necessarily be pejorative, it usually is (e.g. nowadays the woke priesthood, HR departments, etc.).
Perhaps one could extend it to Burham's managerial class (insofar as scientism and the oft-related technocratic perspective are quasi-religions), but that's about as far as it should go.
I have wondered about this mostly in the field of economics, which you mention also. The debate about orthodoxy/heterodoxy (and the whole post-autistic, or real-world economic movements) is quite interesting in this respect. To me it seems that most 'schools of thought' are, in a sense, their own versions of such priesthoods, although there are clear differences in status, number of members and also in terms of quality (that is, quality in relation to some vaguely defined standard of internal coherence and general improvement upon their own knowledge base).
Clearly the 'mainstream' (broadly understood) has the highest quantity, quality and status (with macro DSGE as high priests), without saying anything about content.
But men like Amartya Sen and Daron Acemoglu were great at the neoclassical mathematical stuff, but they also made interesting non-standard contributions, allowing them to have quite a following outside of academic economics. Some of which plainly contradicting with the standard neoclassical story, yet they managed to retain their status.
Nordhaus stayed much more within the neoclassical standards, but managed to impress the political elite and the rest of the econ by introducing climate into his models (even though climate scientists, and some other economists, think he underestimated the impacts).
An interesting point in time is 2007/2008 when it's utter failure to predict the economic crash, in the context of which everybody keeps pointing out that even 'The Queen' herself wondered how no one saw this coming, finally made the priesthood look at other non-standard contributions (Minsky in particular), thereby temporarily broadening the scope of acceptability. (And handing their 'Nobel' to Elinor Ostrom a year or so later, a political scientist who was fully outside of the economic priesthood, to show the world they really are open to criticism, in an attempt to revamp their status as high priests of the social sciences. Ostrom still used the by the economic elite accepted understanding of rationality, making her relatively 'safe' for the priests).
Anyways, so now there's some kind of posthumous integration of Minsky into the annals of priesthood, or at least their intellectual foundations.
So there's this ongoing balance of inside/outside influence, and a balance between political economy/mathematical economics, etc. One in which pre 2007 Minsky was barely interesting to the 'mainstream', or the high priests, as he was a post-keynesian who focussed on debt (and the priesthood had established that money/private debt were irrelevant to the macro-economy). Yet, the priesthood was clearly wrong as worldly affairs showed them (correlated failure). And to show they weren't 'broken', as you call it, they had to internalize his work (even though the work of Minsky could also be seen as a much more fundamental critique on mainstream economics). But does that really unbreak them, or are instead the foundations wrong? I don't really know, but then one wonders how often a priesthood can be caught at being wrong before they get replaced, or people just stop listening to them? Somehow I feel like we're allowing priesthoods to retain their status until a point where their negative impact gets bigger than their positive impacts (but they also always retain some cult following, even though it's outside of mainstream, like Marx, or Mises), but that is exactly what rational thinking should try to avoid if you ask me. We just can't recognise this point on forehand.
I want to satisfy your theory: wokeness infiltrated science fiction and other fandoms *because* they too have a priesthood with psych complexes around in-touchness; perhaps you haven't been deep enough inside them to be aware. I wrote something quite similar to your thesis in those spaces circa 2015.
Great work.
Better than you think it is, if I'm right
(referring to:)
> I’m not entirely satisfied with this theory because wokeness infiltrated non-priesthoods without psychological complexes around in-touchness (eg science fiction fandom)
This is a really smart article. As usual, I think you're too easy on everybody. Get mad! Say to life, fuck these lemons, etc. (the complete Cave Johnson quote has been left as an exercise to the reader).
The best part of this article for me was that it made me realize that, for all its faults, the whole existence of organizations, institutions, priesthoods, serves an important purpose. Like, I'm the kind of person who usually overlooks the Stamp of Approval and figures that the truth will out. But part of the truth out-ing is that it's willing to get that stamp, provided the institution that grants it is not irremediably corrupt.
I have a four-year-old Dell laptop that cost 2,000 € at that time and, after the customized comments were taken into use, experience no problems.
In the field of American studies (and the subset African American studies), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. sits both inside the priesthood (in his Harvard professor role) and outside (with his TV work, notably Finding Your Roots). Like GMU economists, he does more than anyone to bring the public into academic conversations (in this case about history and genealogy) that the priesthood largely controls. I once heard a professor lament "I'd write a whole book slamming him [Gates] but my grandmother would kill me."
There are always popular preists who engage with the public in approved ways. You have to walk a fine line of appealing to the masses but not being heretical, so you need to be both in good standing in two communities. The pope is a person. He is the pope of AAS. There are also sometimes lesser popes. Academics who write popular books, but aren't heretics. Still it's risky, I think of Jared Dimond as a popular priest who the lost a battle and is now mostly considered a heretic.
Diamond's sin is writing outside of his field. He's a biochemist writing history. From historians' perspective, he's not a heretic; he's a rando who doesn't know what he's talking about.
I didn't think he was a chemist at all. I thought he studied birds.
He started out in membrane physiology- ornithology was his second career, and anthropology was his third.
Plus, he didn't really know what he was talking about. Or if he did, he purposely presented the supporting data and ignored examples that contradicted his thesis. I go back and on whether he did this on purpose or not.
I wouldn't say that, i think he's a great and very important public intellectual. Like a lot of big thinkers, he gets some big things wrong (some of them were obvious to me immediately on reading, like the idea that Australia has no easily domesticable wild plants), but I think he gets more right in the end.
It's odd, I've often come across references to Diamond being debunked or discredited, but every time I try to dig into the details it's either minor quibbles that don't really contest his core point, or obvious absurdities like trying to claim Europeans never actually conquered most of the world. Is there a source anywhere that actually tackles the question of "Why Europe?" and comes to a substantially different conclusion than Diamond's?
Same. There's even an entire book claiming to refute one of Diamond's books, and does nothing of the sort. https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0521733669/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar
I've also searched for criticisms of him on r/askhistorians, and I just saw people getting upset that he took on a bigger project than "here's what we learned from digging into this one tomb."
I took a history class freshman year on this exact issue, and my professor's argument was that one of the biggest reasons why the New World was less advanced in terms of military technology was that iron and coal deposits were so far away from each other that it would have been almost impossible to coincidentally make steel, which was almost inevitable in the Old World where such deposits overlapped.
As far as major inaccuracies, iirc one of the biggest was that Diamond had this whole argument about sedentary food production being easier in the Old World leading to more stratified and complex societies leading to military superiority, but the Inca Empire was in fact massive, sedentary/farming-based, and highly stratified. The lack of horses was a major factor in their defeat, but they weren't helpless in the way Diamond describes; they actually persisted fighting the settlers in some capacity for decades, including one point at which they did massive damage to the settler groups by organizing massive groups of people to drop boulders on them.
This is disorganized and I could look for/think of more if you'd like but these were some of the big complaints he had.
Is it a coincidence that both of the individuals supporting Diamond's thesis have typically Jewish names?
This is my experience as well. Anything i read debunking him smells desperation and cope. They are quibbles about the story at the introduction, which is a dumb story and it's wrong, but wasn't the point of the book. The basic point that Eurasia is big east to west, so things moved quickly between different parts, and that mostly explains it, and no one refutes that. They just don't like big thinking and have a priestly visceral reaction to his work. It's kind of shameful. Like I keep waiting for the debunkers to you know get to a point and debunk, but they got nothing.
I came back and edited this...
My main problem with Diamond is he puts theory first and then selectively collects facts to support his theory rather than working from facts to develop a theory. Worse yet, many of his facts are just plain wrong, and he ignores the facts that don't support his theory. The so-called "big thinkers" like Diamond, who like to make grand simplifications while not bothering to dig into the actual data, are really small thinkers who distort our understanding of the world.
Most diseases do not transfer to humans from domesticates, is the most obvious one. Smallpox, ebola, covid, etc, do not come from domesticates. This is a core part of his explanation of the disease gradient between the Americas and the Old World - and the disease gradient is the single biggest factor in the ultimate crushing victory of the Old World - and is actively wrong.
Additionally, the disease gradient worked the opposite way, in Africa's favor, despite the fact that many of the most important domesticates (horses, cows) basically die on contact with Sub-Sahelian African environs due to sleeping sickness.
Okay that actually is an interesting criticism that makes sense, thanks.
I haven't read that book, but as far as I can tell, it argues for the geographic superiority of Eurasia, even including North Africa, over the rest of the world.
Anyone who sums it up as "this is why Europe triumphed" is cheating.
Why Western Europe and not India, the Middle East, or China?
You're not wrong, but answering the sub-question of "why not America, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Oceania" is at least a lot closer to addressing the "Why Europe" question than anything I've seen from his critics.
And don't forget that most of the game-changing inventions that changed the historical dynamics in Europe came from China. Paper and printing, iron and steel production, gunpowder, the compass, mechanical clocks, wheelbarrows, etc. One theory is that the reason China didn't exploit these inventions to dominate the world, is they had a relatively centralized empire most of the time. While Europeans were divided into feuding states that needed to exploit things like gunpowder to gain an advantage of their competitors. Note: I don't buy into this theory.
The short answer is that it wasn't just geographical, although geography played a role- especially in relation to coal sources transportable by waterways.
There was an epistemic layer. The monarch/sovereign state needed to lose it's absolute monopoly on property- in English Common Law the sovereign is also subject to the law. More importantly, religion/the state need to lose its absolute monopoly on truth.
There are other reasons. Guilt/forgiveness cultures are rare- honor/shame far more common. Both the scientific and entrepreneurial industrial revolution required a culture in which the consequences for mistakes and failures could be overcome. Japan has a suicide forest. A campaigner tried to have this changed. The authorities response was 'why would we want to that?'
As a central cultural archetypal figure. Jesus was absolutely essential for the global revolution which raised roughly 85% - 90% of the world's population up out of the types of poverty which most modern Westerners cannot even imagine.
> Is there a source anywhere that actually tackles the question of "Why Europe?" and comes to a substantially different conclusion than Diamond's?
I feel that you're asking a question as if you had looked long and hard, but... if you had looked long and hard surely you would have come across some other explanations.
I suggest two books to get you started:
Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
By: Walter Scheidel
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
By: Joseph Henrich
Both are excellent, in fact far better than GG&S.
As far as "debunking" Diamond, well it depends on the specific argument. The idea that domesticable plants were more available in the fertile crescent has been attacked. I don't know enough to talk about it. Domesticable animals too, for example Zebra can be domesticated. The idea that Europeans were resistant to germs because the lived with domesticated animals seems false too as most germs didn't come through that route. The idea that length of shoreline lead to fragmentation is very tenuous in itself (lots of places with this feature), there are much better explanations.
And so on, and so on.
I like the idea that seasons and agriculture lead to selection for consciousness and intelligence (seemed like a direct consequence of the ideas in GG&S), but Diamond precisely told us that actually Europeans were dumber than Papuans for genetic reasons and because they watch too much TV.
It's less "as if I've looked long and hard" and more that it seems odd to me that people criticizing GG&S never seem to bring up alternate approaches to the question it's addressing. If people think Diamond addressed the question poorly, I would think the natural reaction would be to point to someone they think did it better, but in my experience it seems more common to act offended that he raised the question at all.
And I appreciate the book recommendations, although TBH I'm pretty unlikely to devote the time to read a full book on the subject any time soon.
Diamond,Jared, _Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies_, in the prologue:
"[...] natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies."
Funny how Diamond earlier had mentioned how despicable genetic explanations are, to suddenly come up with a genetic explanation of why Papuans can keep track of plants and animals better than Europeans.
Also, it never occurs to him that once agriculture started it may have created the conditions for the genetic selection of smarter more conscientious people. And yet, he believes that selection did happen, but only for resistance to some diseases.
In short, Diamond suffered very strongly of confirmation bias.
I think Diamond was quite open in the intro to his book that he did it on purpose.
There is a tendency among Jews to want to downplay racial differences because the Jewish religion treats ethnic competition as a matter of kill-or-be-killed (at least at pertains to Jews vs. non-Jews), and this naturally leads them to be fearful of the consequences if people were to believe race is real.
Or maybe they have a millenia-long history of people wanting to eradicate them down to the last child, with one of the latest and closest-to-successful incarnations very much on racial grounds?
What you are describing is Jewish religious teaching, which is not at all the same as history.
Anyone who behaved as the Jews behave, would have caused people to want to kill them. But the Jews behave this way largely because of their belief that others just innately want to kill them.
I’m not sure that “American Studies” counts as a priesthood. I think a priesthood has to have a few things
1. A specialized body of interconnected knowledge. I can’t form a priesthood around knowing ten random facts which any normie could learn if they so wished, the knowledge has to be such that it must be learned sequentially— that is, require a series of inferential steps to acquire. Otherwise, a lay person could learn the subject piecewise, studying whatever parts were relavant to the particular issue without being meaningfully impaired by not knowing the rest of the subject matter.
2. It must be professional: its members must rely on it for a significant portion of their livelyhood. Otherwise the incentives against coruption which Scott discusses don’t work nearly as well. Also, this is the requirement which keeps fandoms from being classified as a priesthood.
3. It has to have public relavance. We care what doctors and lawyers and scientists think becuase we have questions about health or the law of the natural world whose answers the priesthood is better positioned to discover. And we actually care about the answers to these questions, which is from whence the priesthood ultimately derives its power over us.
I maintain that American Studies, as an academic discipline, is not a priesthood, because it fails point 1. If you nuked the discipline from orbit, there is no relavant question which the public would be thereby unable to answer. Certainly, there are interesting questions which a priest could answer better than a random person, but these could be answered by an economist, a historian, or a sociologist just as easily, without the economist, historian, or sociologist knowing the whole basics of American studies, or indeed anything outside their field.
African American Studies is a priesthood.
By Scott's definition of a priesthood, I would argue that it is not -- the definition of a priesthood implies that in normal times, they have an epistemic advantage over the public society.
Academic grievance studies are more like a cult masquerading as a priesthood.
An ephemeral priesthood? Aren't they all?
Lawyers have been a functioning profession for a very long time. Not ephemeral at all on the scale of human societies. Unless you mean a geologic time scale, in which case who cares.
"Law" has. A given type of lawyer has not. Same with "religion" and "medicine." That's not what we're talking about here. Those aren't priesthoods. The group of individuals who have passed the American bar exam and currently practice law is a priesthood.
> 1. A specialized body of interconnected knowledge. I can’t form a priesthood around knowing ten random facts which any normie could learn if they so wished, the knowledge has to be such that it must be learned sequentially— that is, require a series of inferential steps to acquire. Otherwise, a lay person could learn the subject piecewise, studying whatever parts were relavant to the particular issue without being meaningfully impaired by not knowing the rest of the subject matter.
I would dispute that. Medical textbooks are available in any decent library. Any amateur can read up the literature on any medical specialty, it takes some time and smarts, but is quite possible. Case in point: our host has offered literally hundreds of articles on all kinds of topics a mile removed from his medical specialty (e.g. on economics, or literature, or philosophy) and seems rarely be hampered by not knowing the secrets of any particular priesthood.
Your medicine skill level is not what makes you a part of the physicians priesthood any more than a PhD in theology makes you a Catholic priest. It does not matter how much you know about medicine, if you operate on people without being ordained as a priest, you will go to jail, just like any bishop would excommunicate any layperson who decided that they know enough theology to celebrate the Eucharist.
These priesthoods which enjoy a state-sponsored monopoly (Lawyers are another one) are generally the the tightest knit communities: if you are kicked out of your profession, you are just an unemployed person with a maxed skill which is about as professionally useful to you as if you had spend a decade leveling up your Star Trek lore.
My own field is STEM academics, which is a little more porous. Sure, nobody will publish you without a STEM-adjacent degree (and preferably a PhD degree and an important professor co-author), but at least you can move between subfields. The phrase "Go back to your outer electron orbitals and do not sully this room with your presence, chemist!" is rarely if ever spoken.
"and seems rarely be hampered by not knowing the secrets of any particular priesthood"
I'd say he is often hampered by lack of field-specific expertise but does an admirable job of compensating for it through general smarts, extensive research, and interaction with his readership that includes experts in many of those topics. Still, he says lots of things that end up needing correction or clarification, and would be absolutely silly to try to publish in a journal of that field.
Likewise in medicine, you can read up on a specific problem and often learn details that most doctors wouldn't know off hand, but if you tried to put that knowledge into practice without consulting a doctor first you'd be likely to screw up in important ways.
...is this analogous to Stephen Jay Gould or John Kenneth Galbraith? (See: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/evolute.html
> Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there.
)
Steven pinker is another example of this, with his popular writing and Harvard psychology professorship.
Accepting the premise that this "infection" was worse than previous infections -- it could be that this "virus" (wokeness) was more virulent than other viruses OR that the immune system of the priesthood was weaker than for previous infections.
You seem to favor the former explanation, but I think the latter is far more likely. We are literally in the middle of the largest revolution in communication technology in human history; the barrier between inside and outside the priesthood is radically different than it was before.
Now, I think that academics have done a *particularly poor job* of adapting to the reality of communication today. I study social media and politics, and I think that the way academic twitter evolved was a disaster: mixing our professional communication with our political beliefs in an open, activist-heavy platform was an immunological nightmare. I think you and I agree about this. But I think it means that the success of "wokeness" is epiphenomenal to the specific tenets of it.
I wrote about this recently -- "Musk Bad" is a strategically useful frame to get academics to stop using Twitter, but really the problem is "Twitter Bad for Priesthood"
https://www.chronicle.com/article/universities-should-abandon-x
I disagree with your implied claim that current inequalities ALWAYS reflect group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts in the distant past. There's the obvious rebuttal (which inequalities? does the fact that men are stronger than women indicate that men as a sex committed wrongful acts in the past to bring about this state of affairs? or that Norwegians are taller than Japanese?), but even if you're limiting yourself to economic inequality, there are innumerable counter-examples.
Well, as in many things, the concept itself is an important tool to admit within your model of the world. Much better to be able to grasp that than to live in some delusional Just World in which you're convinced that everyone only gets precisely what they deserve by rights of their own skill and effort. But as in many things, it being an important tool does not mean it can then be applied indiscriminately to ANY problem and produce equally useful results. Don't use a hammer to drive in screws.
I don't think this is the fundamental idea that wokeness is based on; I don't think it's original to wokeness; I don't think woke people are the only ones who believe it (many or most conservatives acknowledge the reality of intergenerational wealth and privilege); and many ideas or beliefs that people consider "woke" are obviously wholly disconnected from this idea (e.g. most apologists for wokeness in this thread are invoking the idea that respecting people's preferred pronouns is just "being a decent person", and gender ideology obviously does not derive from the idea that "current inequalities... reflect group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts").
It's not the only idea that's foundational to wokeness but most of the others are equally reasonable at their core. For instance gender ideology grows from the basic liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone.
That's such a bizarre gloss of the connection between the two beliefs that I'm rather flabbergasted. In no particular order:
1) The NORMATIVE belief that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone does not in anyway imply the FACTUAL claim that everyone has an intrinsic, ineffable "gender identity" knowable only to themselves.
2) Many liberals (e.g. JK Rowling) are more than willing to meet trans people halfway and say that how they choose to live their lives is their business. Proponents of gender ideology do not accept this and demand nothing less than absolute fealty to their worldview, and openly call for violence against people who do not recognise that trans women are literally women.
3) Most active proponents of gender ideology either do not recognise the "active harms" caused by their worldview (e.g. women convicts being raped in prison by "trans women" with fully intact male genitalia; children who have been permanently sterilised because they erroneously believed that medical transition is the only route to happiness and flourishing
4) If gender ideology flows logically from the liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone else, you would expect trans activists to be rather live and let live politically. I think it's fair to say that this is not remotely the case.
5) If gender ideology flows logically from the liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone else, why are trans activists not ardent supporters of transracial people? If all trans people are demanding is the right to live their lives in peace in a way that makes them happy, why don't they extend the same courtesy to transracial people?
I believe randomness exists, which doesn't fit a Just World, but it also has nothing to do with wokeness.
Randomness obviously exists - either in the form of literal quantum randomness, or pseudo-randomness arisen from complex causal chains too long and entangled for us to interpret them as more than background noise. That is also obviously a factor. But if you see some kind of difference between two groups that has statistical significance then obviously that can not easily be written off as mere coincidence, and that's where having more articulate explanations than just "everyone gets what they deserves" comes in play.
Again, I don't think this should be applied bluntly to answer EVERY question. I agree some people go to ridiculous extremes to deny any contribution of individual merit or luck just like some people go to ridiculous extremes to deny any systemic biases. All of these are real effects that play off each other. Which produces which result is an empirical question that should be studied as such, not by starting with an answer and then working out the rationalisations for it.
I'm not talking about differences between groups, but between individuals.
I think you are straw-manning what they said. I think it's true that current inequalities are always _partially_ downstream of past acts, but in the sort of trivial sense that in a complicated world, _everything_ is partially downstream of things in the distant pass (and yes, I think limiting this discussion to social/cultural/economic inequalities is what was meant/intended in the first comment).
But what they actually said was that the idea that acts in the distant past impact current inequalities is true and important. I do think that that basic idea is sort of undeniable and obviously true. It is almost never the _only_ factor and it is very often not even the most _important_ factor (and not that rarely it is a _trivial_ factor), but it is ~always _a_ factor.
Excluding literal biological facts, I would actually be curious to hear an inequality that was in no way influenced by some at historical misdeed (even if it's only a misdeed by today's standards). Everything is downstream of somebody conquering, raping, pillaging someone else (something that is pretty universally frowned upon these, days, even if was the norm 1000 years ago).
>Excluding literal biological facts, I would actually be curious to hear an inequality that was in no way influenced by some at historical misdeed
I think that's goalpost-moving. Every inequality was "influenced" by historical misdeed in the sense that history is holistic and cause always precedes effect. Lomwad seemed to be making a stronger claim, that present economic inequalities are always directly caused (in whole or in part) by wrongful acts in the past.
But in an effort to answer your question, one trivial example is that, when you look at median American household salary by ethnicity, it does not remotely tally with recent historical examples of who was conquering, raping and pillaging who. Japanese Americans who had all of their possessions stolen from them and were forced into internment camps bounced back within a generation, without any raping or pillaging required (however you interpret that metaphorically). It's no exaggeration to say that the descendants of Japanese Americans who were interned during the war are wealthier than the descendants of the white Americans who interned them. American Jews famously make more money and wield more power and influence than the American average (particularly in specific industries like the film industry), but many of them can only trace their history in the US as far back as the 1930s, arriving there with little more than the shirts on their backs. To a first approximation, they didn't achieve their enviable position in American society by conquering, raping and pillaging - on the contrary, the only reason they came to the US was to ESCAPE from being conquered, raped and pillaged.
Nearly eleven years ago (!), Scott pointed out that, contra the standard progressive narrative, the American states which practiced slavery until the Civil War are generally poorer than the American mean (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-the-least-powerful-force-in-the-universe/). If you can conquer, rape and pillage for hundreds of years until you are forced to stop doing so by the people who voluntarily stopped doing so several decades prior, and end up not just on parity with them but actually worse off, that ought to prompt some reflection as to how much explanatory power the "economic inequality is always the result of historical misdeeds" theory really holds.
Slave states were poorer than their northern, industrialised cousins already at the time of the Civil War, *that's why they lost the war*. I agree that the general idea that all evil results in wealth is wrong (and in fact is itself pretty dangerous: it suggests zero sum thinking, and once you adopt that mindset, you're left with either "I should sacrifice myself for the sake of others" or "I should hurt others for the sake of myself". The people who push that idea would like you to pick the former... but we know that in practice lots of people, if they internalise that mindset, choose the latter). But obviously there are forms of wealth that could not have been possible without committing certain evil acts.
For example the US' vast territory and natural resources were undeniably conquered at the expenses of other people who previously occupied them. War and genocide were involved. I don't think anyone can be blamed much for bringing smallpox to the Americas - not enough medical knowledge for anyone to do anything about it, even the most peaceful expedition imaginable would have caused the same tragedy - but the various acts of enslavement and genocide are entirely on those who perpetrated them.
That said, I agree we should actually stress that sometimes - more often than one would think, in fact - being an antisocial asshole is not just evil, it's ALSO stupid and simply hurts everyone around. Being a slaver wasn't just evil, it was also counterproductive, it created a class of lazy backwards aristocrats too busy keeping their own slaves from murdering them to do anything else productive with their time, and curtailed the slaves' own potential to contribute to society. Lose-lose. I do think that one big problem with the current leftist thought is this focus on zero sum mindset, which as I said is bad when people buy it. It's like this cultural substrate actually *primes* people to become fascists (which is what you get when a zero sum minded person takes the selfish path to the logical end: I can only survive by murdering and pillaging others, and everything else is just a pretty lie made up to stifle me).
I agree entirely with all of the above.
> Excluding literal biological facts,
This assumes that there are such things as innate biological facts, a position with which certain elements of woke dogma seem to disagree.
If two people buy the same number of lottery tickets, and only one of them wins the jackpot, the resulting wealth inequality is completely independent of historical misdeeds.
(One could try to argue that the existence of inequality-producing lotteries could itself be a result of historical misdeeds, but as long as the lottery itself is fair, historical misdeeds have absolutely nothing to do with which player wins.)
True, but then who's more likely to better retain and invest the money they won - the person from a relatively affluent family who received a good education and is experienced in the ways of money, or the beggar from a long legacy of beggars who's easily scammed and has no ideas for what to do with money beyond spending it on necessities and luxuries?
Individuals can buck trends, but on large samples, these sort of effects will probably produce a systematic self-reinforcing feedback loop in which money draws in more money.
If you can't figure out the answer to that "obvious rebuttal" faster than you typed it out you haven't really thought about this much. If the rebuttal is obvious the person you're talking to is as capable of coming up with a good answer as you are, so when you haven't bothered it seems both disrespectful and like the prelude to a death-by-a-thousand-questions situation. It feels in bad faith.
If you answer the first 3 to 5 objections you have to an idea for yourself, from the honest, good faith position of people who believe that idea, you'll have more productive, deeper discussions (and understanding), and people like me will feel less like giving you (I admit) lightly condescending advice.
It's an obvious rebuttal to ME. There are plenty of people in the world (including many who comment on Scott's articles) who actively deny that there are any natural inequalities in male and female strength and athletic performance whatsoever, and insist that any allegedly innate disparities are purely the result of socialisation.
To me, the idea that some inequalities are just natural and biological (such as the difference in male and female strength and speed) and hence not the result of some historical misdeed seems so obvious as to hardly require any justification, but apparently there are people who disagree with me. Maybe it's dismissive of me to say that I think it's bonkers to believe otherwise, but there does come a point where you have to be like "if you don't believe this, this is a you problem". Am I obliged to engage with flat earthers in "good faith"? The idea that women would be just as strong as men if not for socialisation seems at least as insane and obviously wrong as the belief that the earth is flat.
You've been incredibly prolific in this comment section, and occasionally I've caught a well-expressed glimpse of my own beliefs in some of what you say, esp. regarding the denialism of biology latent in vocal and extreme trans-related activism.
This being said, I have some lightly patronising advice of my own concerning your contributions:
(i) You do not seem to have sufficient knowledge in biology to be an adequate foil to the biology-deniers who trigger you so.
(ii) You do not seem to engage with non-biology-related challenges to your worldview in good faith. As commenters gave gone to great length to convey to you, it's possible for many of the trans-rights-conveyed points to be correct or have value even as their extreme versions go off the rails and deny reality. Acknowledging these points when you can will go some way towards bolstering your own argumentation.
(iii) Your tone and choice of words consistently suggest that this is a highly personally and/or politically charged topic for you. To put it bluntly, you come across as a hater, or at the very least someone who thinks trans people are in some way ill-intentioned as a group, or collectively harmful.
These collectively mean that, at least to my eyes, you are hurting your own cause, at least in this context.
In this comments section, have any of the assertions I've made regarding biology been factually inaccurate?
Y'all are obsessed with the smallest, most inconsequential things. Literally nobody's average bench press means anything. If you're frustrated it's because you can't get past the most superficial, surface parts of the issue. As I said, the rebuttal is so obvious you haven't bothered to actually think about it or why other people don't find it compelling. You've decided you win and nobody else is operating in reality when all you've done is read the jacket copy.
There's only one of me. I'm not a system.
> current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit but also group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts or at least first-mover advantage in the distant past and maintained through collective action today
The OPs claim was that inequalities do not *solely* arise from a single clause, so why are you claiming an implicit "ALWAYS"?
What the OP said:
>current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit but also group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts
That seems definitive, without any obvious hedging. If they'd said "current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit, but CAN also..." or "MAY also", it'd be more equivocal and I wouldn't find it as objectionable.
I disagree to the extent that I think the OP's statement includes the possiblity of a contribution approaching zero and we can never be definitive enough about these things to gain certainty, but I see where you're coming from.
I assume that most "viruses" are based on some amount of truth. A truth that doesn't overreach (and so is therefore a net positive) is a reform, while a truth that overreaches (and so is therefore a net negative) is a virus.
"The closer to the truth, the better the lie, and the truth itself, when it can be used, is the best lie."
— Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov
I think you're overstating the case. The only undeniable part is the mundane observation that history can sometimes have lingering influences on the present. The rest is debatable. The presumption that we should separate the population into semi-arbitrary groups, and then consider average differences between them on any desirable trait or outcome to be a grave injustice is not obvious.
Yeah, wokeness, much like Marxism, gets at a fundamental truth of the world. They see the problems quite well in many cases, but some of their solutions are bad or impractical. Trying to declare them nothing but left-wing wonk untethered to reality is a denial of reality as sweeping as anything else. It's just a denial that rests on consensus.
The problem is that both tend to think they have identified *the* fundamental truth rather than just *a* fundamental truth, and thus pound every "nail" they see with their hammer (and sickle).
The whole "priesthood" thing happening here is just as overreaching and significantly less useful and explanatory. *Shrug*
As an apologist for wokeness I disagree with this characterization. Certainly this is how *some* woke people think but for me the reason to look beyond "individual merit" is the factors in society that prevent individual merit from being measured effectively. Such as racism and misogyny that are still with us. While you can look for the roots of these issues in the past, the way they arose has no effect on how I think they should be addressed now.
So when the woke use "white male" as a slur, as I have encountered many times, does that count as racism and misandry? If not, why not?
“Solely” is doing a lot of work here. It’s frankly incredibly disingenuous to pretend that’s what the dispute over wokeness was about, whether inequality was “solely” due to merit. And wokeness also came with a whole host of prescriptions that absolutely do not undeniably follow from this premise.
The "immune system" in academic fields that are estranged from industries has been incredibly weak since the recession. Because of poor funding and rising wages outside of the academy, a comparatively large proportion of people who remain in these fields are making a financial sacrifice for ideological reasons. However, donors are also disproportionately likely to be ideologues: a recent study found that donors were systematically more extreme than party voters. This mirrors the Marxist takeover in the 20th century, where USSR funded academic institutions to ideologically capture them. That would mean not only is the immune system weak and the virus potent, but the patient is living in close quarters with an infected community, to stretch the metaphor.
I would add that I think there is a major reason for weak immune system, linked to how scientific priesthood differ from classic priesthood: It builds theories both predictive and falsifiable about some aspect of the world which can be independently tested, giving an alternative (but royal) entry into priesthood stardom: come with something more predictive than the current best, or falsify the current best, and you will get a fast ticket to cardinal or pope level, regardless of how remote to priesthood you were. It used to work in fields with strong experimental wings, difficult theories but easy falsification and big bonus for being right in the form of new technology. Hard science, especially since industrial revolution. However, since WWii which marked it's peak in term of technological trickling down, there is a clear crisis there, essentially closing the fast path (aka reality check) and I feel that not only hard science is much less immune to crazy ideological derive than it was, but it de-anchored the soft sciences and let them devolve back into classic religion-like priesthood
It seems intuitive to me that the thing that is causing all this chaos is social media. It is the thing that happened right when everything started becoming crazy. Hank Green has a really good video on how humanity is going through a moment because of it. (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8PndpFPL8g) (Are we allowed to link stuff? If not I'm sorry) . It seems like it's causing a lowestcommondenominatorification of everything. Outside priesthoods this looks like advice about eating capybara testicles to cure your cancer. In priesthoods the lowest common denominator ended up being all the woke stuff.
Sorry but why is wokeness bad? Is this term used differently in the US? I can't really think of a reason why it's a problem to address someone the way they want to be addressed?
This seems like a "assumed clear" premise to the whole text but I don't get why that should be clear. Wokeness is as far as I know not defined very well and some parts of it may be bad while some parts are probably good and most are just noise.
Nevermind I asked this question some time ago already and apparently it really IS a different beast in the US and also what Scott seems to fear is for me more in the word "censorship" and not in the word wokeness. Im still assuming getting "canceled" is not as bad as it is told but I'm not from the US and also not someone with opinions that he usually canceled so I'm probably biased.
> what Scott seems to fear is for me more in the word "censorship" and not in the word wokeness.
idk about scott, but I doubt american freedom of speech is going anywhere(an american hillbilly has more freedom to say slurs then the British royal family)
Communism, the death of merit, child genital mutilation are worse.
I think our incoming administration is even more interested in restricting speech than our outgoing administration was, and hope our institutions are robust enough to resist.
.... While Im anti trusting trump and the elon h1b drama was last week; there were just purges of wrong thinkers during 2020 in a historical moment of mass-fear.
Im aware of a few cases of claims of elon removing blue checks, it aint 2020. If trump has *any* power over blueskys banning people Id be positively shocked.
Well, the question of whether trump has the power is really just another version of whether our institutions are robust enough to resist what he wants.
in 2020 there are just emails from the government telling the social medias to censor people and *they did*; its established fact this happened, your being absurd to claim your more worried about it happening now, when it already happened then; even if you believe trump will do it with 99% odds, 99% < 1
Trump could be pure evil, he wont have the same crisis as "biden" did to censor; and I was still speaking the entire time(tho I am unemployable apparently)
bro he's literally suing Ann Selzer for putting out a poll he didn't like right now.
I was unaware of this news story but still not 2020; lets not forget how hysterical everyone got and how that horrible line of families breaking down was crossed, jobs were lost.
A politically active person getting politically induced legal threats have always been a flaw with american freedom of speech(hence the slapp laws existing in the first place) this is a return to the norm, maybe a return to a slow tend line of decline if you wish.
His lawsuit will almost certainly fail, he hasn't proposed any "disinformation czars," he hasn't said "There's No Guarantee to Free Speech on Misinformation or Hate Speech, and Especially Around Our Democracy" (https://reason.com/volokh/2024/08/08/vp-candidate-tim-walz-on-theres-no-guarantee-to-free-speech-on-misinformation-or-hate-speech-and-especially-around-our-democracy/).
Trump sucks in many ways, including wasting time on the lawsuit, but I do not think there's any way he will be worse on free speech than the Biden or theoretical Harris admins.
I'm referring to things like:
- Refusing to publish studies that contradict woke premises (eg that immigration might have negative effects, or that anti-police campaigns backfired, or that some problem might not be caused by racism)
- Saying false things because they think it is helpful for activism (eg that anti-lockdown protests would spread COVID, but anti-police-brutality ones wouldn't)
- Doing extreme and controversial things because it supposedly corrects a disparity (eg prioritizing COVID vaccines based on race rather than age, even knowing this would result in thousands of extra deaths)
- Prioritizing identity/activism rather than merit in hiring and promotion decisions, for example basing hiring on "diversity statements".
- Extreme versions of language policing like calling criminals "justice-involved individuals"
- Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who objects to the above, and of people who object to that, and so on recursively
- Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who points these things out or gives the public information about them
I'm saying this because Leo had a real question and I want to answer it, but let's try to avoid turning this comments section into one big "wokeness: good or bad" fight.
Ok thanks. As I said afaik this stuff just doesn't exist in Germany and all of this is for me more in the term "censorship" and not wokeness.
In Germany afaik all of this is just fantasy "I'm the real victim here" published by the far-right and nazi people to propagate THEIR censorship as justified.
This make it very confusing when suddenly there are posts like this where I'm not assuming far right ideology and agenda that use these dangers as a real problem to solve when it's not actually a real problem in my region.
There absolutely is stuff like diversity hiring in Germany. I distinctly recall one instance where a postdoc position was advertised for women only, despite this being literally illegal. I didn't go out of my way to seek this out, a friend of mine organically stumbled across it as he was looking for positions (spoiler: he didn't get an interview).
As you said it is illegal. Your friend could have used this to make some money. (It is also illegal to exclude trans people and apparently there is someone who uses this to claim money multiple times because someone forgot to include a "d" in his ad but that's also just a fringe case. Like assholes exist. That doesn't make it a social problem. But maybe I'm biased idk. In my bubble people tend to be sexist and racist and "phobic" against everything not cis-heterosexual and not even called out for it. They DO complain a lot about being called out for it and not "being able to say anything at all anymore" while saying the things they say the can't say anymore without anything happening.)
Wokeness is a frustratingly broad term, and seems to be used about anything to the left of Mussolini that the speaker doesn't like.
I don't doubt that the examples Scott cite are real, and I agree that they are very bad, but 99% of the time I come across someone complaining about wokeness it is someone trying to sell me on the idea that the west has fallen because the latest dumb blockbuster had a black woman in a leading role, or something of similar substance.
This makes it very hard for me to know the extent to which this is a real problem or not outside the US. I'm not American, but I'm willing to take the word of Scott and a few other writers who have presented concrete evidence of 'wokeness' in the sense Scott uses the term being a problem there. Of course there is no shortage of people claiming it's a problem in Europe as well, but it all seems to be the same sort of complaints Leo mentions above (which again, is also on par with 99% of the American complaints), in so far as there is any signal beyond that, it gets lost in the noise.
Disputes over terminology are generally worse than useless, but in this case I think it would be in the best interest of people who want to talk about the real problem Scott is describing here, to come up with another term to help normies distinguish their concerns from the "I'm just mad I can't say the n-word at work anymore" crowd.
> distinguish their concerns from the "I'm just mad I can't say the n-word at work anymore" crowd
...when the concern is woke censorship, aka "X doubled down on saying the n-word at work and ended up leaving their job because they picked this particular hill to die on", how are they to distinguish that from the crowd?
>As I said afaik this stuff just doesn't exist in Germany
>In Germany afaik all of this is just fantasy "I'm the real victim here" published by the far-right and nazi people to propagate THEIR censorship as justified.
I think a lot of people both inside and outside Germany would vehemently disagree with both your description of reality and your particular framing on this. I would encourage you to at least entertain the possibility that you might be misfiring here if your stance is that "too much wokeness" as described by Scott is something unique to the Anglosphere.
Which is not to say that nazis *don't* use it as an excuse.
Sure, probably- I'm going to back out of this conversation as I'm not German and I don't want to overclaim my own knowledge of the situation. All I was trying to say was that the OC felt very confident and my baseline (which I've also adjusted a little) was way off that of Leo.
Hm okay. I really doubt that. Do you have any concrete evidence when people were actually canceled or censored or self-censored for stuff like Scott mentioned in Germany or Europe? I know only of people who complain very loud to an audience of right leaning people that they are being cancelled while making a lot of money with racist and sexist stuff they say and are preaching to that same audience.
Or maybe you have an idea where I can get this problem that is not infested with Nazis? I just can't relate at all to the stuff that Scott is describing. That to me sounds like something to be feared if the far right will get the majority, which is not unlikely to happen soon. Not something I have to be afraid of from the left.
Edit: sorry I misformulated: evidence that this is done systematic and frequent. Not some uniq cases where it happened somewhere once.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/on-bounded-distrust/
Ctrl-F "TM", first result. Unfortunately the news site linked is in Swedish, but if you search for "Kristina Sundquist", you'll find a bunch of RW news sites repeating it.
The first result I saw was the phrase "COVID treatment". If I require a matching case, there's a comment by Bella Marte which contains zero links. What is the Swedish citation?
Lol. I'm French, so I kinda institutionally hate Germany, but if we park the word "woke" for a minute, is it not the case that German elites are so utterly captured by group think that they
1. thought Nordstream was a good idea?
2. Did not blink at welcoming an unprecedented number of mainly unskilled non- German speaking immigrants?
3. Phased out nuclear power when anyone with 2 non-group-think captured neurons to rub together could see that it would make absolutely everything (prices, carbon, energy supply, dependency on Russia) worse?
4. Don't seem to have blinked at the fact that senior politicians actually falsified documents to that end?
5. Don't blink that people can punished _more_ for complaining about rapists than for the actual (as per a valid trial) raping ?
I think that last category is your "victim card" extreme right - if so, don't they have a point??
The last one is certainly woke, and probably the second one (at least if you had the same "this will be GREAT and everyone who disagrees is a Nazi" that we had) but 1, 3, 4 are just the combination of leftism and being unable to see that actions have consequences other than the ones you wish they had (a prerequisite for many forms of leftism)?
Dude, you literally live in a country were a rape victim got a harsher sentence than her rapist for saying mean things about him on social media just because the rapist was from a minority group. Are you arguing in bad faith and playing dumb or are just dumb?
No I'm not. It wasn't "mean things" it was threats. It wasn't because he was from a minority group but because he was a minor. Are YOU arguing in food faith or why are you ignoring this?
Edit: oops wrong post. If you mean me and the case about that one guy that was a minor and the woman who threatened him in his messages it still applies. If not I have to first look up what case you are talking about.
I despise Nazism, but I think Holocaust denial is free speech (as the latter is, in it's pure form, descriptive while the former is normative). And yet the latter is illegal along with the former. That is not related to American "wokeness" but it is a similar problem IMO.
FWIW this same claim was made in the U.S. for a long time before the Overton window shifted. Antone who said this sort of thing was a problem was dismissed as far right.
Hm okay. Might be that it will get there in Germany. Can't see it atm for several reasons. I'll try to have an eye open for stuff like this.
It could well be the case that you are surrounded by legit racist and people whining and exaggerating as well. Those can both be true at once. These are scary times for everyone and I think that tends to amplify our instinctive tribal responses.
Alright. I'll look out for the other side.
Along these lines, it should be obviously true that in any given bubble the Overton window may be at any given location. Even if the average Overton window lands too high up, for an individual it may be too low. Since many media outlets broadcast to very large areas, their own Overton window may seem bizarrely biased in one direction to one region, while in another its biased in the opposite direction. Then, since an individual just doesn't inhabit the other bubbles, it looks like the media outlet is just a malicious actor.
Here is a concrete case in Germany. The wikipedia article even explicitly talks about the controversy over the media bias. Now you could argue there are good reasons the media was biased, but you can make those arguments with many groups that media outlets selectively decide not to apply this to. I think this is a prime example of what this sub would consider as woke overreach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany#Criticism_of_media_and_government_coverage
Though I do think Germany is less woke than the US right now, because in the US, selective reporting and even highlighting of race doesn't get up roars. It's basically the bog standard.
In fact I was in Germany a year after this incident. I talked with a group of women raising awareness for sexual assault and they mentioned this very incident. They proclaimed to not be aware this was a mostly migrant caused event. Bias is like make up when it's working. You won't notice it, but you will be influenced by it.
Addendum: it can be hard to say whether there is bias for or against something in a society. If you boil it down it can be hard to find where bias is even bad because most biased people claim to have a good reason for it! Almost by definition some must. In the US, there has been a shift where powerful actors (CEOs, politicians, any public figure, and especially universities) absolutely can say and do mean things to right wing groups, but will get absolutely demolished for doing that to left wing groups in any way. And it's not reflective of the public average. This is a problem because these powerful institutions of course have control over others. There are right wing powerful actors, but for the most part they aren't institutions most people have to go through, unlike jobs and universities.
"Bias is like make up when it's working. You won't notice it, but you will be influenced by it."
Oh, that is lovely.
>afaik this stuff just doesn't exist in Germany
It does: https://web.archive.org/web/20240628155933/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/28/german-woman-given-harsher-sentence-than-rapist-for-calling/
That's... Not a good example. One sentence is due to insult which can be argued that it's to harsh in this case. The other sentence was "nothing" because of age rules that have nothing to do with wokeness. Both a combined to an argument even though they have not much to do with each other. The people you need to address for lowering the general age rules for sentencing are different people than the ones you need to address so people get no sentences for insults. Also she could have insulted him just fine with no consequences if she used slightly different words.
>One sentence is due to insult which can be argued that it's to harsh in this case.
Well yeah, that's exactly what I'm arguing. And I'm arguing that it's "too harsh" because wokeness has arrived in Germany.
I don't know how anyone can sincerely entertain the idea that wokeness hasn't arrived in Germany, while also being cognizant of the fact that one can be literally imprisoned (albeit briefly) for describing a convicted rapist as a "disgusting freak" in a private communication. If that's not what liberal and conservative people are complaining about when they complain about wokeness, what else could it be?
I looked it up. She was sentenced not only for insult but also for threatening. It was direct communication alright, but directly to the one. Also she was one of 140 cases after his contact info had been leaked.
Imagine if this had been the wrong contact info.
Who are the different people who determine young people can't be sentenced vs insulters can be?
I thought the one about young people is in the constitution but that wasn't right. So the people who could change that are actually the same people. What I meant is that these are very different political goals and campaigns if you want to achieve them and the one about young people being sentenced has not to do much with wokeness in my opinion.
Also, there are convicted male sex offenders currently being housed in German women's prisons: https://reduxx.info/germany-trans-identified-male-convicts-transferred-to-womens-prisons-ahead-of-new-gender-self-identification-law/
The Guardian reports that German trans athletes are permitted to play in the sexed football league of their choosing: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/jun/23/transgender-footballers-in-germany-can-choose-men-or-women-team
The more I read, the more baffled I am by your claim that wokeness just doesn't exist in Germany.
If I may refer to my upthread comment (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods/comment/85238653) the misunderstanding here is that race questions and trans questions come as a package (="woke") in the US and that package as a whole has no equivalent in Germany.
Scott's definition of woke at the beginning of this subthread put an emphasis on race. A comment about that definition cannot be invalidated by making a point about trans.
I don't understand your comment. Are you suggesting that unless a country has succumbed to the full complement of identitarian grievances, it cannot be said to have "gone woke"?
That seems kind of silly to me. It's not a binary yes/no. Even someone who thinks the term "woke" is a conservative dog-whistle would surely concede that Germany is wokER than, say, Saudi Arabia.
The conversation unfolded something like this (simplifying):
A: What is wokeness?
B: [Something about race]
A: OK we don't have that in Germany
C (you): I am baffled that you would say that, these links clearly state that you have trans-rights.
I would invite you to not be baffled by that fact that somebody who earnestly inquires what wokeness is and gets told it is a race thing would not take trans rights into account when judging whether wokeness exists in their country. The "we don't have that" comment was a direct response to a very specific subset of what wokeness might be.
Also, your claim that there is no racial wokeness in Germany just seems plain wrong. Thousands of people participated in George Floyd protests, some of which escalated into violence (no one killed, thankfully): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Germany
My claim in the post I linked (not sure if you followed the link) was not that there is no US style wokeness in Germany but that people who are trying to import US style wokeness to Germany wholesale are extremely confused about how the world works.
The George Floyd situation itself, whatever you want to make of it, does not have an equivalent in Germany. Not in a naive "it could never happen here" sense but in the practical sense that the dynamics that lead up to George Floyd are just not present.
Hopefully the issue that Scott has with "wokeness" is not that people hold opinions and sometimes protest to voice these opinions in the abstract, but how it influences policy. I am truely at a loss what kind of policy change Germany could implement in reaction to George Floyd and, I claim, so are the protesters.
Note that according to your own wikipedia source, the only thing that happened in reaction to those protests was that then head of government Merkel condemned racism as a "very very terrible thing".
You might want to call that condemnation as such "woke" but that would be ahistorical: German anti-racist sentiment follows from the experience of Nazi-Germany not from the US civil-rights movement.
See third paragraph here for a German example that seems pretty nonpartisan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany#Criticism_of_authorities,_government,_and_police.
I think the reaction after Fukushima that pushed Germany to stop nuclear power plant and instead burn lignite is another example of very damaging purity spiral (Claude estimates 200k/300k DALYs since 2011).
Yeah, but the Green Party in Germany has been anti-nuke basically since its inception.
The claim wasn't that this is a new phenomenon, just that it increased in the last years.
This idea that nuclear energy is something to be avoided reaching as far back probably served as an "obvious truth" on which post-fukushima-fear could crystalize into a reinvigorated political movement. In that sense, using this well known and seemingly obvious "truth" that nuclear power is essentialy bad, replaced the need for an actual argument derived from data in (re-)starting that movement. I think this replacement of factual arguments with "obvious truths" is the basis of Scotts gripe with Wokeness
I knew/know nothing about German politics, but I still remember visiting Germany's pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai. It was a giant friendly pavilion completely devoted to energy, proudly presenting how Germany was moving away from "dirty" polluting sources to renewable ones. And listed in the "dirty" sources was nuclear power, with no justification and barely a mention anywhere else in the three-story building. (It was probably easiest to just lie by omission and trust that the general public already "knew" how horrible nuclear was.) I was shocked and very disappointed.
I was even more disturbed at the end when they made you take a "survey" by exiting the presentation through one of two doors: the door that said you agree with everything they said, want clean energy, are a good person, and wish to make the world a better place ... and (cough, sneer) the OTHER door. They actually had cameras set up to count which door people used. It felt almost dystopian. I imagine propaganda works even better when you make people commit to it with a physical action.
So, even five years ago, the German priesthoods were already in a post-truth virtue spiral, doing their best to deceive/herd the public - but only for the goodest of good reasons, naturally!
Every time there is any discussion about wokeness, the automatic response to that is 'none of this is real, stop claiming to be the victim when you are the oppressor'. I couldn't tell you whether it existed in Germany but I can tell you that I've seen a hundred people post the exact thing you posted about America, even though every point Scott mentioned is something specific that specifically happened.
Independently, every argument that occurs in America is automatically imported to every other country, whether it applies there or not.
Independently, wokeness is not uniquely American in its virulence. There's no reason to assume Germany's own priesthoods wouldn't be susceptible to it.
So, if 'what's bad about wokeness' was an honest question i.e. you're positively disposed to it to start with, I recommend *not* assuming it doesn't actually exist in Germany. Positive disposition about wokeness produces this assumption it doesn't exist, whether it exists or not. Unless you know for sure that you would not have made this mistake about America if you were American, this assumption seems verifiably uncorrelated with reality.
Ok I'll look out for it more. It's really hard to actually filter it from all the far-right noise. I realised I'm not really surrounded by intellectual people in my everyday life so maybe that's why this alley seems abstract to me.
On Scott's first point, I did an internship with a European think-tank focusing on migration (based in Paris, but with a couple of German researchers), and one of the big discussions, held relatively openly, was: "can we publish this research if it makes migrants look bad, and therefore provides ammunition to the far-right?" I got the impression that this attitude was ubiquitous across the European think-tank space, and I'd assume it's prevalant in Universities as well.
Also... Scott mentioned extreme language policing. As I'm sure you know, there's lots of language in Germany that's literally illegal. Björn Höcke was fined around $30,000 for saying: "Alles für Deutschland". There's also some deplatforming of speakers at Universities because of their views, but I don't know how that compares to UK/US levels.
Not quite what Scott meant, but my (very left-wing) brother lives in Dresden and told me the other day that "woke" (he didn't use the word...) things like pushing the use of awkward gender neutral language, and seeing healthy normal male behaviours (taking your t-shirt off at the bouldering wall was his example) as somehow "toxic" - are some of the main factors, besides immigration, behind the increasing popularity of the far-right in East Germany.
Yes, far-right people around the world are very hypocritical and try to exaggerate this problem and use it cynically for political ends. But it's very easy to see similar problems that the U.S. has in Germany.
Germany, for obvious historical reasons, has erradicated the term "race" successfully from public discourse. Even in far right rhetoric, insofar as it reaches the public, you would find racist sentiments phrased in terms of a mythical German birthright [the "mythical" being my addition, this is left implicit].
On a more practical level Germany's closest equivalent to racial tension is probably still a lot closer to US relationship to "Mexicans" (as used in Trump speeches, not the neutral sense of the word) than it is to US actual racial tension a la BLM.
This state of affairs is very confusing to less smart people on both ends of the spectrum who import their political wholesale from US media (aka "the internet") in the same way we import the MCU and Taylor Swift (aka the US is obviously our cultural hegemon, this should not even be a debate).
So you will for example find confused leftists desparately trying to adapt a concept like PoC to a society where this is not really relevant and confused rightists worrying about affirmative action style positive discrimination in a society where even asking someone to identify as a member of a race would be a serious faux-pas.
Potentially as a consequence of this, the role that "woke" has in US discourse (as far as I am a aware of it) - as a generic slur used by the right wing for politics they don't like - is filled by "green" in Germany. So when, as it happened recently, CSU tells their voters that they would not want to work with "the greens" they are not referring to the green party specifically, they refer to "green" as the great other. If you are in search of a conceptual rather than literal translation of "woke" that is the concept space I would suggest to start looking at.
And in Russia, all the things from Scott's comment and many of the other worst things are done in the name of state ideology, which can be defined with minimal simplification as anti-woke...
How would you distinguish the attempts to destroy careers as a feature of wokeness and not simply the excommunicatory maintenance of the priesthood you described in your original post? I assume there is some degree to which you might say that the practice of excommunication within wokeness is more severe than the standard practice outside of it, but I am curious what specific discrepancies you see between the two.
Can you clarify what you mean?
I thought the main difference was the 'reasons for excommunication'.
We believe their pre-wokeness excommunication reasons as positively correlated with producing good doctors, and post-wokeness reasons to be negatively correlated? I may be simply failing reading comprehension.
The last two features that Scott listed in his definition of wokeness included:
- Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who objects to the above, and of people who object to that, and so on recursively
-Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who points these things out or gives the public information about them
Which seem to me to be behaviors inherent to priesthood at all points in history (as well detailed in the original post) and not unique to wokeness. My original question was what features of the excommunication that happened during wokeness not present previously? I would not find an answer like, "there was more excommunication going on" to be satisfactory, but something like "excommunication during wokeness was more highly contagious between friends/colleagues," to be insightful. I think Scott touches on this with the first quoted point (saying it happens "recursively"), but I am also curious what other discrepancies he (or anyone else who was a member of a priesthood in which wokeness circulated/circulates) has noticed.
Also, forgive me if I'm misinterpreting, but I think what you're saying can be boiled down to:
Good excommunication = not woke
Bad excommunication = woke
(Good/bad derived directly from positively/negatively correlated with producing good doctors)
This seems extremely reductive to me, surely woke isn't just "bad." Even if you think it is bad and irredeemable it surely is more nuanced than just anything that is "negatively correlated with producing good ______ (doctors, scientists, artists, politicians, etc.)." I take issue with a number of things commonly referred to under the category "woke" and am also a defender of some. To make a horrible mistake, I'll get personal and acknowledge that I'm trans.
When Scott notes as a facet of wokeness
- Refusing to publish studies that contradict woke premises
I find I agree somewhat. I think there is a lot of valuable research that could be done on transhood that is not being undertaken because it is a politically charged arena. While I think *currently* that most of the political charge is being delivered by the right, I think the impetus of this political charge was delivered by liberal activism, which is imo the precursor that mutated into wokeness.
But when Scott writes,
---
Wokeness is a beautiful resolution between contempt for the public and wanting to stay in touch with the public. The public (as represented by the average straight male white guy) is, themselves, out of touch. Not just out of touch, but the enemy of in-touch-ness, the ones who must be conquered and transcended in order to be truly in touch. By learning what pronouns to use for trans people (etc, etc), you’re learning secret knowledge, feared and loathed by the masses, that makes you cool and in touch with the youth (considered as an abstract mass). You will gender your trans patients exactly correctly, and their eyes will go wide and they’ll think “Wow, doctors are so cool and in touch, not like all the other people I meet.”
---
I think there's a lot missing here. I don't think being sensitive to pronoun-usage around trans patients is simply a way to elevate the medical priesthood into being "in touch," I think it's an actually valuable addition to the responsibilities of medical professionals. I can say firsthand that in any medical experience I have ever had post-transition it has been glaringly obvious as to whether or not the medical professional has earnestly thought about displaying sensitivity towards their trans patients before. I once had a breast sonogram done and was referred to as "he" while the doctor had the ultrasound wand pressed into my breast. It was a little bit surreal.
Both of these statements are trans-focused, as that is the facet of wokeness that I am most apt to speak about its impact on, but I'd like to be clear that I find the overall shift away from wokeness a net good. I was a pretty vocal supporter of wokeness a few years ago when in high school/as a freshman in college, but ironically transition gave me the space to start to notice my discontent with and question it.
I do think that wokeness was more effective as a political tool than as a means of enacting social good/justice, but I also think that for many who were shelved by the ideology of wokeness, and who are now feeling more comfortable and less pressured, there can be a tendency to mislabel other phenomena as within the category of wokeness and to over-vilify it.
Scott described it as a "memetic plague," which I think is pretty fair. The particular manifestation it took in the U.S. was certainly viral, and fits my own key requirement which is "temporary." I think wokeness was a temporary viral outbreak and should be contained and examined for better understanding and the production of a vaccine. I think also that it was able to spread throughout our societal body very rapidly because our body is itself in disrepair and failing. There are very real, immense tensions present in the foundations of our socioeconomic and political systems (I have a U.S. perspective here, but socioeconomically speaking neoliberalism and globalism are highly international affairs), and I am operating with a sense of a high likelihood of a major schism happening within the next 20 years (medium-high for the next 10 years). I think there is a danger to ascribing malfunctions in these foundational systems to wokeness and believing them to be temporary. It'd be like looking at a dead patient who had COVID and saying "COVID killed this person" without examining their lungs first to notice they had asthma. COVID can kill people, but that person's lungs were already structurally unsound. It's also important not to over-vilify wokeness by saddling it with certain behaviors that are natural facets of human social dynamics and politics, especially ones that are heightened by tension caused by structural failures in our foundational systems (tensions of race and class seem to me to be the most pertinent examples here). It'd be like looking at a dead patient who had COVID and saying "COVID killed this person" without noting that they were 105 years old. People can die from COVID, but also removing COVID won't remove death.
This was meant to be a reply and it's gotten out of hand in length, so I'll include my own summary/description of wokeness here so that I'm not speaking too abstractly without putting some skin in the game for others to critique.
I'd define wokeness primarily as the "application of techniques of resistance to an apparatus of oppression to the actually existing apparatus of suppression." I think wokeness was really just young people learning about the horrors of historical oppression and pre-supposing the moral right and responsibility to fight viciously without critically analyzing the current state of affairs (the contemporary suppression of certain social groups was treated as though it were oppression). That was the ignition, but the wick and fuel were the various priesthoods (most notably the social sciences and art/media institutions), the hyper-connectivity and algorithmically rewarded outrage-loops of social media (traditional media exhibited some of this too), and the capitalization by mega-corporate structures who saw this as an opportunity to earn brownie points among a coalition (young people and Democrats) they sensed the greatest democratic threat from (interest in taxation).
There's a world of difference between "doctor gets excommunicated for promoting quack medicine" and "doctor gets excommunicated for refusing to take a knee".
Diversity statements don’t end up with prioritizing activism more than research - nothing is going to change the fact that at top universities, people hire on the basis of research prestige, with teaching, diversity, and service being just tiny rounding errors you can see at the edges. But the diversity statements and teaching statements mean that sometimes you make some tie-breaking differences on these grounds.
This is not accurate. A diversity statement is a forced political statement and researchers who fail to adequately endorse the necessary DEI doctrines are filtered out of the applicant pool. By filtering out qualified candidates on ideological grounds you are necessarily putting activism ahead of research. The mere existence of diversity statements signals a stifling culture which will encourage many capable people to avoid academia altogether.
This is not accurate. A diversity statement (or “statement on inclusive excellence”, as the University of California called them when they were part of the process) is a fourth document, parallel to the research statement, teaching statement, and service statement, in which a candidate says what they have been doing to promote inclusive excellence, just as their other statements say what they’ve been doing in research, teaching, and service. Most of the time, no one pays much attention to anything other than the research statement, but if you’ve got some nice-sounding thing you can spin well in one of the others, it can be a little advantage. Occasionally, a particularly woke or anti-woke statement on inclusive excellence will trigger someone on the committee, and they’ll act on it by objecting to something about your research. But it certainly doesn’t function as a litmus test in practice, even if it’s a fun dark fantasy to imagine.
Do you know of any examples where a person explicitly rejected the tenets of DEI in their statement and was hired?
You mean, said specifically that they think it would be bad to help students from different backgrounds succeed? No.
I also haven’t seen anyone who was hired who said in their teaching statement that it’s a bad thing to teach students.
Can you give me an example of some of the tenets of DEI that you think someone might legitimately disagree with, that would be relevant to mention? I don’t agree with most of the tenets of education policy, but it’s still not too hard to write a statement about teaching that emphasizes the positive. It should be easy enough to do the same for a statement about “inclusive excellence”, which is a very broad phrase, that I assume most people can agree they are working towards, even if their vision of it is different from someone else’s vision.
I'm politically leftist, but it annoys me greatly that universities considered diversity statements an appropriate thing to require from their staff. I think you're interpreting the parent comment about "filtering out right-leaning people" very narrowly here. I don't think most of the filtering is happening to conservatives who decide to risk their career by making a particularly anti-woke diversity statement. It happens before that. Anti-woke individuals are discouraged from even applying to institutions that require diversity statements.
Imagine if instead universities were requiring staff to write statements on how they are upholding the morals and values of Jesus Christ. Sure, maybe in practice most academics don't pay much attention to these Christian values statements, and professors rarely get fired or lose funding over them. It's still a strong signal that those of us who don't believe in Christian values aren't welcome. And it's still disturbing that non-Christians would have to hide their beliefs and pay lip-service to Christian values or risk blowback that we'd much rather not deal with.
Just so you know, there ARE still hospitals in Germany where you don't get hires if your not Christian and this is actually legal.
I was short listed for a job at Notre Dame and had to give a statement about how my research supports their Christian mission. It’s not too hard to write something about how the study of the epistemology of uncertainty is important for all belief systems, including religious ones, and it has the benefit of being true.
The inclusive excellence statements are similarly annoying, but also not too hard, even if you’re opposed to a lot of wokeness, as long as you don’t actually believe that it’s a good thing to discourage students who don’t fit in.
Prioritizing COVID vaccines based on race rather than age was also expected to kill more black people (specifically, elderly ones missing out on vaccines going to younger people)! Its only virtue was that it would kill even more elderly white people.
All of these things do seem bad. I think this post would be vastly, enormously stronger if at least some of these were actually in the relevant section of the body (hopefully with some actual examples and citations). Instead, there's a brief bit about using the right pronouns for people and a link to a years-old blog post about one particular conference.
This really highlights my frustration with the entire term "woke" and why I wish we could excise it as a unitary concept. It's exactly the same thing as "eargrayish." It's blending perfectly benign and innocuous things incredibly extreme and outlandish things for (as far as I can tell) the sole purpose of pretending they're the same. It is significantly harmful to any attempts at clarity and precision around social trends.
"It's blending perfectly benign and innocuous things incredibly extreme and outlandish things for (as far as I can tell) the sole purpose of pretending they're the same."
Although the term in vogue at the time was "social justice' rather than "woke", Scott has been observing this phenomenon for at least a decade: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/ (of course, it is the wokists themselves, in those examples, who are trying to conflate outlandish claims with unobjectionable ones for self-serving ends)
The past usage of the term "social justice" was noticeably narrower than the present usage of the term "woke." I'd guess this is partly a function of the length: it's so easy to slip "woke" into a sentence or phrase, that people seem to do it constantly. Regardless, calling a person an "SJW," or an article or program "social justice focused" seemed to have a relatively clear and consistent meaning in a way that is not at all true of "woke."
Again, Scott's foremost example of doctors being "woke" IN THE POST is simply calling people by their preferred pronouns. Millions of people do this *every single day* with no fanfare. How many people do ANY of the things Scott mentions in his comment above on a daily, monthly or yearly basis? Probably many orders of magnitude less. For that matter, hearkening back to the social justice post you linked, how many *individual people* use words or terms in the motte-and-bailey fashion regularly? Probably not all that many.
(While I think the motte-and-bailey is a useful schema to be aware of, it's biggest weakness--one that Scott exemplifies in his own writing--it's that very often the people using a term in incompatible senses are in fact DIFFERENT PEOPLE. It may make communication frustrating if one person understands a term to mean X and another understands it to mean Y, but it's not a sign of anyone trying to trick you.)
All these things are obviously bad to me, but I would still be tempted to self identify as woke, because I take seriously the idea that more than nothing should be done to reduce the effect of historic inequalities on modern opportunities, and that as long as they're not harming anyone, I don't see why I should mind if someone wants to present socially as a woman even if born genetically male (although my detailed beliefs on this topic are probably annoying to both sides), and that in many cases increasing diversity has some value in and of itself, and that most refugees are good, moral people in difficult circumstances that are a net benefit to the country they move to and would be even more so if given more support and less hatred.
Those beliefs, even though mildly held would be enough to get me labelled as woke by what feels like most users of the term.
Like Leo Yankovic, in the bubbles in which I move I'm much more likely to come across what seems like bad faith uses of 'woke' to harrass people and invert victimhood than the actual negative things listed. Of course, I fully accept that outrageously bad things have been done in support of those ideas and those bad things should be fought by everyone - I can't think of any signficant ideas that isn't true of, and in my embubbled state, it can be difficult to accurately evaluate where the balance is.
I realised my bubble isn't very intellectual in my everyday life. That might be why I only see the other problem of people being sexist and homophobic and racist and not being called out for it. I assume that if I had a more academic everyday life where people in my level of intelligence are not also mostly my friends and peers I would have experienced "cancel culture" more.
Not necessarily. I live in a pretty intellectual bubble and have never seen much of cancel culture. Mind you, I’ve never seen much sexism or homophobia – but pretty much everyone I’m around reports experiencing much more sexism and homophobia than cancel culture.
It seems to be a “Different Worlds” thing. That makes it hard to determine the significance of what’s actually happening.
I have a few doubts regarding the Wokeness and career path. Usually the people making this claims come from an academic background and often miss on the wider scale of the population. Most of the people don't work in these environments. Eg, a person whose views align with Labour Unions or with Communism fear that being vocal about their opinions will result in job insecurity and as a result stay silent, this is a kind of situation that often gets ignored (since these people don't have platforms to scale up their views) but nevertheless still counts as censorship. My field of work is very corporate (as is most of the population) and you are free to share your opinion only if it aligns with a perpetuation of the regent structure. So in some way you only benefit in these environments if you align with their values and it might not be so different from other career paths that you mention.
How different is this from the wokeness paradigm?
You should probably add this to the article as a footnote or something.
I have a big problem with addressing a male person who raped someone with his fully intact penis as "she", actually.
I get that. But I don't think there are very many cases where genuine trans people use this and don't plan on ever transitioning. I don't even think there are that many trans people but that's a different problem.
>But I don't think there are very many cases where genuine trans people use this and don't plan on ever transitioning.
I don't know what you mean by this.
I assumed you are opposed to people who want to be addressed as female and haven't transitioned (trough operation, hormones etc) and don't plan to ever do this and also raped someone pre-transitoning. If someone goes through surgery and hormone treatment and have raped someone I assumed you would be fine with calling them she.
If by "surgery" you mean penectomy and vaginoplasty (something which only 5-13% of trans women undergo), perhaps.
If by "surgery" you mean facial feminisation surgery, I don't think I'd be fine with it.
>"genuine" trans people
Gatekeeping like that even has an insulting name in the LGBT+ community- "truscum."
What we've all been told is that nobody gets to decide who's genuine and who isn't; assuming away Fionn's problem isn't particularly charitable.
Yeah okay. I can get that this could become a problem at some point.
> What we've all been told is that nobody gets to decide who's genuine and who isn't
Always remember, the ones telling us that there can be no valid empirical criteria by which someone can say "this person is not trans" — making the claim literally unfalsifiable by design — always try to invoke the name of "science" to give themselves validity.
>>"genuine" trans people
> Gatekeeping
Give ground on rapists wanting to go to female prision if you dont want to be a laughing stock
Most trans people don’t get all the surgical interventions. Transitioning is usually more about the social presentation than about medical alterations.
Likewise allowing pre-op trans (M2F) convicts to be transferred to female prisons. That is asking for trouble.
Has this happened in Germany? O,o this would be a big point of "I've overlooked this" if it actually happened.
It did. Didn't knew that.
I appreciate a lot that you did actually checked it and posted about it.
And even better, he said that he would update significantly if it were true BEFORE he looked it up!
Wokeness in general is a very Anglophonic thing, so I'm not surprised that it hasn't been noticable to non-Anglophone countries.
I mean, Anglophones are living in the dreamtime. They can just tweak a few pronouns and off they go. Other languages have gender built right into every part of a sentence; when it's impossible to say, e.g., "I'm not surprised" without specifying a (traditional, binary) gender for the "I" with every word, the whole movement dies before it's even born. People do create and learn entire constructed languages, but those communities are very very small.
I guarantee you that French wokies have found a way, although the courts rejected it for official documents because it isn't actually French any more.
So: Bienvenue à tous nos nouveaux étudiants !
Becomes: Bienvenue à tou.te.s nos nouve.aux.lles étudiant.e.s !
While I wholeheartedly agree that this is an abomination, I feel compelled to point out that the aim is “woke-inspired but not by the usual themes derided as woke in the US”. It’s not about gender fluidity or race, it’s about the belief that the French rule of “masculine as default grammatical gender” turns women away from certain male-dominated study fields.
I think it is a mix... one did not suffice without the other, or perhaps rather it took wokish mindset to conceive of such a thing.
Interesting. Not every language though. Eg Scandinavian languages don't have traditional gender built into every party of sentences.
This particular strain of it is but if you zoom out enough you can see similar thought patterns in post-revolutionary French denouncements, Chinese struggle sessions etc. without even getting into the 20th century German or Eastern bloc experiences - in character if not in severity.
And maybe this all starts to become irrelevant now we're living in the online era of "we're all Anglo now". This thread discussion is only taking place in one language of course.
It's often said on the right that Woke is a Marxist doctrine; I'm not conversant enough to understand to weigh in on that but it does occur to me that especially the racial identity factors of Woke in America are probably substitutionary for what in Europe would be expressed in class-based conflict (Europe until recently not having enough racial minorities to really matter), so communism, socialism. Note that this doesn't explain the gender aspects of Woke, however.
Exactly. It's the same old Marxist ideas of oppressor vs. oppressed conflict and the need for revolutionary changes to resolve the oppression, just with a different axis defining oppressor vs. oppressed.
And with a hefty dose of postmodern derived things like Critical Theory and Queer Theory.
America is the only real country where politics happens, and the rest of the West are just colonies who pretend to have their own politics while actually receiving ours.
For my part, my impression is that Europe is in general both less woke than the US (more restrictions on trans kids' ability to transition, for example. as another, more obviously anti-muslim policy) while still managing to have a bigger problem with censorship.
Mostly I would credit the 1st amendment for this - I believe Germany also guarantees free speech rights, but the guarantee doesn't have the teeth behind it that 1st amendment jurisprudence does. For example, you often see people online say that "hate speech isn't free speech". But this is contrary to US law - arbitrarily hateful speech still gets the protection of the 1st amendment as long as it doesn't also include incitement to imminent lawless action, the standards for which are quite high.
One example for Germany in particular is the way laws against anti-semitism have been used against pro-palestine speakers. This kind of thing would never get someone imprisoned in the US under current law. Other commentators point out woke ways in which this kind of censorship happens as well.
IMO the US has taken the superior position on both of these axes, but I do understand how someone less woke than me would disagree.
I'm not entirely sure this is on-topic, since I'm talking about laws, rather than "priesthoods", but I hope it's a useful perspective to add to those you've already seen.
In Germany, you can get arrested for writing bad things about dead people. It's a shock to me to hear that Germany has any kind of free speech guarantee.
https://www.lewik.org/term/15693/violating-the-memory-of-the-dead-section-189-german-criminal-code/
It's interesting how these things are all over the place - Europe has *terrible* freedom of speech compared to the U.S., but better freedom of the press (barring the absolutely terrible U.K., which seems intent on always combining the worst parts of Europe and America).
This article by Scott might make a good intro on Scott's problems with wokeness: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
Thx. That seems much more sensible.
Very late response, but question relevant to my recent life. I moved approximately from the Bay Area to NRW about 2 years ago, and the whole cultural landscape people assume for politics is very very different. Which gets trippy when people use overlapping words or are arguing for "more" or "less" with different assumptions of the current level.
Germany's got its own political woke-like elements, of course, but the wokeness Scott is talking about is way more present/instrusive/relevant/powerful/hated in the US. You're not insane, people are talking about this from wildly different contexts.
Don't you think you're giving priesthoods too much credit, even outside politics-adjacent areas? What about replication crises? What about Science Fictions and p-hacking etc etc?
All of these were discovered and brought to light by priesthood members. You know about them because they won their relevant intra-priesthood disputes.
But not always through priesthood channels. Data colada is a blog. Science Fictions is a pop book. The practices exposed by publications like these persist, don't they? And until they spilled out of the priesthood, the priesthood protected its own, didn't it?
My impression is that these were first discussed through priesthood channels, and after the discussion was interesting, people wrote popular books describing what had happened.
I agree that Data Colada is somewhat a counterexample insofar as it sometimes directly releases new results through the blog.
Datacolada is run by professors. It's priests telling on priests. They're not using the ritual forms of communication, but it's still priests.
Renegade priests!
They’re not renegades! They’re seen as important parts of the community, and are respected as its own security system!
Insider-outsiders https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/05/21/the-insider-outsider-perspective-jim-bouton-example/
You weren't reading the complaints about p-hacking in Science and Nature that came out around the same time, maybe before.
Unless the post is supposed to apply only to priesthoods after a certain time T, where T can vary but it's definitely always in the past (trust me), then I don't see how that's supposed to help. How do I know which current-time priesthoods are totally making things up, but will become trustworthy after they get their internal disputes sorted?
It seems to me that the fact that priesthoods that totally do make things up have existed for extended period of time, like most of them pre-replication-crisis, or the 1950s psychology that you mentioned, totally invalidates the whole argument. The final part about priests being subtle about their lies seems in clear contradiction with this. In what way were 1950s psychologists subtle?
If you're implying that the replication crisis is a one-off event, and now that we've gone through it, we can be confident that we won't have these kind of extreme cases in the future, I could get behind that, but that should have been the meat of the article, instead of anecdotal evidence of how a few specific priesthoods work.
I'm impressed, you succinctly diagnosed this blog post as freeform off the top of the head musings that don't really work together or add up to much. I guess not every post can be a winner.
These are just the ones we know about. And even if an argument has been won, that doesn't mean there has been any meaningful action taken; its just another ritual for priesthood members to step through before creating more crap.
People never believe me, but I saw a lot of outright fraud back in the day. People looked the other way, or weaker professionals took the downfall (postdocs). There were whispers and no consequences.
Right. Scott's answer is a bit too dismissive to the point of question-begging.
"What about the massive scandal where we found out a large percent of the Hard Science Data was functionally equivalent to the meme's 'I made it up' meme?"
"It was scientists who discovered the error, which proves that Science works!"
No. It proves that people cheat the system, sometimes systemically. We put up safeguards to catch careless cheaters, but every system is vulnerable to cheaters commensurate with the incentives that attract successful cheaters.
The question is how well does the profession police itself? If one decade it discovers a massive cheating scandal and the next decade the whole place is overtaken by BS woke ideology, this suggests massive vulnerabilities that have yet to be seriously shored up.
Does religion get credit for biology because mandrel was a priest and darwin believed? Of course criticism comes from people connected to the system, the system is where the people are.
There was more than one system, in multiple different parts of the world. And yet, it's telling that virtually the entirety of the foundations of modern science were laid within one specific system, and not elsewhere.
?
America is a super power, maybe europe could've be seperate but theres allot of cultural overlap
Every ~~successful~~ rich enough region is a semi-real nation state(with russia and china being the semi-nation states), if universitys "infect" nation states, theres a different theory for why all the world uses university's
Its kinda unclear to me what you mean by system here, there were joint american-soviet science projects when it was debatable they were "the 2" systems. Am I to love all aspects of modern science because islum sucks at knowledge-work, what if I just wanted a red state college to be anti-woke would physics stop working?
I took his statement of a system to reference what we call The Enlightenment and and associated scientific process and reasoning which came out of Europe some centuries ago.
If so thats been like.. 5? political systems taking over since
French monarchy, British monarchy, gutted British monarchy, reconstruction america, fdr's america; the lines are blurry and you can debate who took over the enlightenment when; but if all of them were capable of maintaining the engine of science, why not a 6th?
Great post, I wonder if this is not too dismissive of a real problem:
"But I still have basic trust that something in the New York Times’ non-opinion pages is 99% likely to be factually true - probably spun a bit, probably selected from the space of possible news articles because it supports the Times’ agenda, but factually true - in a way I don’t believe for random YouTubers. And I expect the spin to have some level of elegance."
Lying by engineering a sample bias is probably one of the most insidious and dangerous form of lying because it directly targets a very vulnerable point of cognition.
It directly targets vulnerability in information theory and probability theory, the reason for p-hacking and the replication crisis. It is mathematically impossible to detect without knowing about the data gathering and filtering procedure, about knowing about confounders, statistical paradoxes like Simpson's etc. It can be used to obscure distinction between accidental correlations and real causation.
There should be a burden of proof on the purveyor of information that this is not happening. Suspicions of inculcating a sample bias should be investigated and loudly called out every time, not dismissed as fair game.
It's a worse form of lying because it's much harder to verify, than outright black and white factual lies. It can mislead much more.
“Don’t intentionally omit evidence that clearly contradicts your point” is also a clear and very useful rule, and I don’t think we should be letting journalists get away with violating it.
If the journalist reports “Chinese troops bombs hospital, 300 children burned to death”, but omits (or even just de-emphasizes by waiting until the seventh paragraph of the article to mention it) that the Chinese were fighting the Zizian Echatomological Collective who were building a launch complex for biological agents on the roof of the hospital, and that the children burned to death not in the hospital, but in a nearby orphanage mined by the ZEC as hostages, then I think that journalist’s bias is a problem.
The NYT is not quite at that level, but it’s way too close to it to just say “meh, some bias is unavoidable”.
The places where the NYT straight up lies are also incredibly dangerous, because they're both non random (carefully selected for maximum impact) and believed (since they're just rare enough that people turn off their bounded distrust).
>It's a worse form of lying because it's much harder to verify, than outright black and white factual lies. It can mislead much more.
It can more easily mislead people with high epistemic standards and background knowledge (mostly people in or affiliated with the priesthood.) I think we're observing in our modern informational climate though that you don't need lies nearly this sophisticated to mislead people en-masse. The average person isn't playing the informational game at a level such that this sort of deception is called for.
While "Nothing Ever Happens" was going around tech-right twitter circles, someone remarked that it's the most reliable prediction in history, but it's only interesting when it's wrong.
Scott's position on old versus new media is sort of a mirror to that; yes, they're *mostly* reliable, but all the more insidious for it! The NYT is much more skilled at lying than Joe Tuber dreams of being, and not everyone is going to have the capability of recognizing that. They get what they want in the moment and make an ineffectual correction 10 or 100 years later.
If you're only concerned with some specific factual claim rather than broader statistical trends, though, that sort of liar is quite useful to have around. Better yet, have at least two or three fully independent ones with well-known, mutually hostile agendas, and then whatever details they all manage to agree on are very unlikely to be wrong in any provable way - with, crucially, minimal effort on the reader's part.
Naturally that system breaks down when the supposedly-rival news sources start to coordinate behind the scenes, in pursuit an agenda the reader doesn't understand.
This would be a much stronger argument if Joe Tuber didn't still somehow manage to gather thousands of followers by saying that the Moon is made of cheese. Insidious lies aren't any more dangerous if the public is dumb enough to buy the blatant stupid lies too anyway. At least the insidious ones can't deviate that much from the truth to stay insidious!
I suppose it depends how we draw the lines of insidiousness.
Speaking of the NYT, historically they got a Pulitzer for being wildly wrong about the Holodomor and that lasted long enough and pervasively enough that almost certainly had impact on the public's reaction (and the government reaction?). What about more recent untruths (since untruth can include not-technically-lies like omissions that potentially change the interpretation, selective reporting, etc)?
If Joe Tuber convinces 1% of people the moon is cheese, and this has no effect on the world other than people being wrong, that's sad.
If the NYT convinces 1% of people that they should stop calling the cops and just be victimized, that's tragic. But at least they know the moon is mostly rock, right?
Unfortunately Joe Tuber can also convince people of things that have real world impact, but (so far) it's the NYTs of the world that wield influence more effectively.
Also ignores that a) a not insignificant number of JoeTuber's viewers may in fact not actually be people and b) there is (probably) a massive power differential between JoeTuber's readership and the NYT's.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's that clear. But generally speaking the solution obviously isn't "burn the existing media to the ground and let a million Joe Tubers organically grow and reinvent the wheel from scratch" because that will be definitely even worse.
Obviously a lie with more reach will have more effect, even if it is in itself subtler. And obviously a lie about something that touches your life directly has more effect than one about some random scientific fact you will never really care about (such as the chemical makeup of the Moon). Though that said, the Joe Tubers of this world aren't shy with lies that touch your life directly either. The classic examples being alternative medical therapies, with which they probably actively kill lots of people (by the opportunity cost of them not using the actual therapies, when not because the alternative therapy is literally harmful) all the time.
In many ways sample bias is an inherent problem with journalism as a whole. Simply reporting every prominent murder in a country of hundreds of millions creates a sample bias. Normal people with brains evolved for a village of 100 people tops hear all of that and feel "whew that's a whole lot of murders, the world is really going to the dogs". You should like report a random murder every 15 years if you wanted to convey the correct feeling of danger rather than the correct information (which is virtually useless to most people who aren't homicide detectives anyway).
You also get to decide what's a "prominent murder". And surely it would be better to precommit to "report every thousdandth murder" than "one every [time period]" if you want to be giving an accurate impression.
Yeah, I didn't mean this as a prescription of what to actually do. It would be very complex to design. I'm just outlining the issue.
I'd say any murder of e.g. a big political figure is prominent in that it affects lots of people with its consequences. In fact there's multiple examples of those that have literally changed history (Archduke Franz Ferdinand being the most blatant one). Same can apply for murders of other people with some influence like industrialists or journalists. But when it comes to "husband kills wife over infidelity" or "robber kills victim" then sure, they reflect some kind of crime trend which may be indicator of a social problem, but that's much better understood by aggregated statistics than individual sensationalised news.
Not to mention those high profile murders that are selected purely because of their "true crime" spectacular value which springs exactly from the fact that they are unique and unusual. For example I remember in Italy when Amanda Knox was put under trial and convicted (now generally acknowledged wrongly) for the Meredith Kercher murder. The entire thing was turned into a circus and treated as a whodunnit played out at the national news scale. Quite a shameful display.
What Scott is saying is that you have two options: (1) the information source that has subtle and insidious lies (2) the information source that has blatant lies. I agree that the first option is pretty terrible. But it's not the *worst* possible option!
Like any major news source, the NYT has a reputation they'd like to uphold, and so they try to avoid printing obvious, blatant lies. But also like any major news source, they need engaging, gripping articles to make money, so they fudge the truth. What's the alternative? Web sites with no reputation to upload just go for blatant clickbait lies because that is successful, so that's worse. Whereas a major news organization that never fudges the truth to make the article more exciting loses readership and money to those that do.
Sigh.
I agree that's what Scott is saying. I wonder though if we could get to a journalism culture where engineering a biased sampling is as much, if not more of a reputation hit (since it's a more powerful weapon for disinformation that targets a fundamental knowledge transmission weak point).
It's more difficult to prove but when there is good evidence for an infraction, it should discredit journalists at least as much as other forms of lying.
But wait, why is the one that has blatant lies worse? If they’re blatant, it means you can easily notice them and adapt your interpretation to compensate.
The problem with subtle and insidious lies is that they’re hard to notice and compensate for (even when you notice them), and therefore much more likely to succeed in manipulating you. That’s why we have scary words like “insidious”.
Nobody lies in a way that's blatant to the person they're lying to, that would be obviously dumb. What I'm talking about is lies that are blatant if you spend a bit of time researching. As opposed to lies that are not easy to verify, even with a bit of work.
Think about all the obvious misinformation that spreads on Twitter or Facebook. 20% of people know it's obviously false, but 80% don't take the time to even think if it's true, let alone google it, and so they believe it and spread it.
Even in the scientific community, there are differences about whether each individual paper/journal/subfield should display a "balanced" perspective of all the data or whether the field as a whole should give a balanced picture, with unbalanced subunits being freely published. For example, I've seen claims that Italian physicists were more prone to publishing anomalous experimental results on the principle that suppressing them, even if one's prior were that they were erroneous, would distort rather than improve the quality of the literature overall. Other national traditions saw publishing iffy results as polluting the literature.
The NYT is no different. It can be a useful part of a balanced information diet and is unlikely to unsubtly just make things up, as Scott said. But if you rely too heavily on it you will get a lot of stuff wrong.
> This was supposed to go well, because the priests are smarter than everyone else. But a natural result of these qualities is that all the priests get one-shotted by some bias which is especially appealing to smart people (and especially repugnant to the public who they’re actively trying to differentiate themselves from), lock it in as consensus, then stand firm as a rock in response to the rest of the world telling them they’re wrong.
This is the problem with listening to smart people. Far too many people value intelligence far too highly, without bothering to control for more important factors like character, experience, and morality.
We used to understand this; the "evil genius" was a staple of our entertainment a few generations ago, a warning that a person could be both very intelligent and very wrong. But somewhere along the way, we've lost sight of that. Today we've largely replaced thinking of people as good or evil with thinking of them as smart or stupid. When someone espouses ideas that look terrible to us, we tend to think they must be some kind of idiot, rather than that their values are out of alignment.
Let's look at the most stereotypical extreme example of all. There are plenty of good reasons why people admired Adolf Hitler, and why some continue to do so to this day. This was a man who took a war-torn country ravaged by hyperinflation and built it up into a Great Power nation in the course of less than a decade. This is not something a moron, or even someone of average intelligence, is capable of. And if you only look at that, and conveniently ignore or deny the horrendous evils he did, he looks like a really amazing guy. But he's not an amazing guy; he's evil. An evil genius.
This poses an interesting question, then: How to develop a "priesthood" structure where people are selected for, and gain status within the priesthood by, being *good* rather than simply being smart?
> Intelligence is in general correlated with morality
And you know this because intelligent people told you so?
As opposed to whom? All the idiots I read?
> He took power in the middle of the Great Depression so there was nowhere to go but up; all countries recovered from it.
Fair point. Counterpoint: "all countries" did not suffer from hyperinflation as a part of the Great Depression. There's a reason that the name of Weimar Germany is proverbial for hyperinflationary horror: what they experienced was a (largely) unique phenomenon.
> It was obviously stupid to try to fight the British Empire, Soviet Union, and United States at the same time; a smarter leader would’ve stopped at Czechoslovakia or even the Fall of France and kept Germany’s status as a leading power.
He didn't try to fight the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States at the same time. The USA was brought into the war as a response to some pretty intense provocation from Japan, not from Germany.
Germany declared war on the US, not the other way round.
And he wasn't even obligated by his treaty with Japan to do so. In the case of the UK, he actually had intended to avoid war with him, but by refusing to accept any compromise he agreed to made Chamberlain convinced there was no upside to giving in any more to someone determined to relitigate the Great War.
> pretty intense provocation from Japan
Yeah, they cut off America's oil supply, a move which, if not violently responded to immediately, would have weakened the United States enough to enable it to be conquered easily.
US oil imports for the full year of 1937 represented about 8 days of domestic production (27,484,000 barrels of imports, vs. 3,500,000 barrels per day of production), according to figures from the US Energy Information Administration.
It's a joke that reverses the parties; the US (along with the British and Dutch) cut off the Japanese oil imports.
"The USA was brought into the war as a response to some pretty intense provocation from Japan, not from Germany."
Nope, the Germans declared war on the US themselves.
And this catastrophic decision was partly motivated by Hitler's persuasion that a rich, spoilt nation full of Jewish and black cultural influence will be no match for the tough Aryans on the battlefield.
Boy, did he go wrong.
Hyperinflation in Germany ended around 1924, Hitler had nothing to do with it.
I didn't say he ended it; I said that it was a (largely) unique problem Germany faced that made them worse off than most other countries, even after it was over.
You did write "suffer from hyperinflation as a part of the Great Depression." I think I know what you meant but it's not what you wrote.
I wrote that suffering from hyperinflation was not a typical experience that other countries had as a part of the Great Depression; that German hyperinflation was not related to the Great Depression.
The hyperinflation was over before the Great Depression started. It was *deflation* (which other countries *did* face during the Depression) that garnered the Nazis enough support to take power.
I think what you're criticizing Hitler for here is not lack of intelligence, but lack of wisdom. As any D&D player could point out, they're different things.
>Intelligence is in general correlated with morality because intelligent people are less likely to believe in zero-sum thinking, which is the root of most immoral behaviors that seek to harm others rather than expand the pie.
It’s good to know smart people managed to finally pin down morality but disappointing to hear I’m too dumb to practice it. I can take some comfort in knowing I’m a scoundrel by birth and not by choice.
I guess intelligence’s stranglehold on morality means machine learning is on the verge of turning all mankind into degenerates.
You read "likely to" as "are the only ones capable of"?
What would you expect from a dumb scoundrel?
Isn't it possible that people with lower income and education live in a context that is inherently more zero sum?
Hitler might have had more charisma than intelligence, but the people actually running the show (Heydrich, Speer, Eichman) was almost certainly extremely intelligent. They probably also didn't believe in the party's own propaganda ( Eichman famously told the mossad agents who captured him that he was never like those lowbrow Der Sturmer readers).
Intelligence are negatively correlated with crime, probably because crime is a very bad strategy in a civilized state. Committing genocide can be a great way to make a career in a totalitarian regime, and so intelligent people have no problems doing it.
If you are poor, you're in a zero sum reality -- resources spent on one thing mean a probation somewhere else. Conversely, it's easy for the wealthy to be consequential "good".... and intelligence is correlated with wealth.
This is a great comment
> This poses an interesting question, then: How to develop a "priesthood" structure where people are selected for, and gain status within the priesthood by, being *good* rather than simply being smart?
I think much, much more of the problem being highlighted here is that if you have domain expertise and intelligence in, say, medicine, 99% of the reason you know how to treat cancer is domain expertise and 1% is intelligence. So if you, a trained doctor, are called upon to opine on (say) inner city crime, you must either have domain expertise (i.e. do serious reading and research on the subject, comparing different sources, etc), or you are just going to be talking bullshit. You might be marginally better at talking bullshit than a random person, since as a doctor you interact with the sorts of people involved in inner city crime and are intelligent, but only in the same way that a chaplain with a Master's who does hospice care will know a bit more about medicine than the average person because the people he's talking to are involved in medicine (since they are dying).
The woke are loud and salient. But within most "priesthoods" there are a majority of people just doing the work who don't really care about that side of things. I don't think it is an accurate portrayal to say that, for example, all of psychology has been taken by woke.
I agree! I wrote:
"I think the priesthoods are still good at their core functions. Doctors are good at figuring out which medicines work. Journalists are good at learning which Middle Eastern countries are having wars today and interviewing the participants about what fighting wars in the Middle East is like. Architects are good at designing buildings that don’t collapse. But now this truth must coexist with an opposite truth: the priesthoods are no longer trustworthy on anything adjacent to politics. "
Fair, but you are cherrypicking a bit. Priesthoods in most fields in the Humanities are not at all good at figuring out anything beyond rhetorical grievance posturing.
They only have "experts" rather than experts https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-experts/
A very "priesthood" position to take.
Defund the Humanities!
> I don't think it is an accurate portrayal to say that, for example, all of psychology has been taken by woke.
Depends on how pedantic you want to be regarding the meaning of the word "all."
I have a friend who completed a degree in psychology last year. We talked a lot about the studies and the courses, and there were required classes about how it was every therapist's affirmative duty to prioritize principles of DEI and Social Justice in their practice. And this was at a school that an outsider who knew them only by reputation would assume to be a rather conservative university.
To my thinking, that's close enough to "all of psychology has been taken by woke" as to make no difference.
I have my masters in a psychology field and have never taken a DEI class. I've never even read a DEI paper. And I went to UPenn which many consider to be very woke
When? As I said, this happened last year. And this wasn't simply my friend's biased retelling of events filtered through personal perception; I saw the actual course material they were being taught.
2018-2019
I don't doubt your friend. There are certainly parts of academia that are absolutely captured. My point is that one shouldn't overgeneralize.
Saying that you had to take one class that said all this is very different from saying that you have to actually prioritize this in your own work.
You seem to like doing apologetics for these horrible, toxic ideas that you also seem to disagree with. If they're bad ideas, why not just say they're bad ideas instead of saying, "oh it's actually fine to be around ideas we already know are bad, get over it"
There is a priestly halfway house which earns the enmity of both the yawping barbarians and the priests: the expert witness, disparaged by the masses as a hired gun and by the academic community as a money-grubbing apostate. (Can you tell I spent 35 years as one?)
There is a position that must require a character of steel to maintain epistemic humility and evenhandedness.
Something I always find fascinating is that medicine was a prestigious and high status profession for 2400 years before there was any useful medicine to provide.
How are you defining the point where there began to be "useful medicine to provide"? Wherever it is, I can assure you that there are thousands of years worth of satisfied patients before that point who would disagree with you.
Controlling for placebo effect?
Would you make the statement about snake oil salesman, shamans that would burn incense, homeopaths?
I grant that there are many satisfied patients, huge numbers of them. Am curious at to what you think that indicates.
Some of those treatments likely actually did something effective, even though the people who did them never did randomized controlled trials. Just like traditional practices of nixtamalizing corn and boiling cassava had important nutritional features that weren’t understood by the cultures that adopted corn and cassava outside the Americas until scientific study later identified what was going on.
Random interventions can have positive effects.
I assume we've looked at historically accepted interventions, identified a few like the ones you mentioned as actually useful even if their claimed mechanisms were incorrect, but on balance is there not a consensus that the net effect of 'medicine' was neutral to negative, after controlling for placebo effect?
I think the 19th century veil makes this hard to judge if the "consensus" is based on any evidence or if things got worse as the medical profession was starting and they extrapolated backwards.
“is there not a consensus that the net effect of 'medicine' was neutral to negative, after controlling for placebo effect?” Not who you were talking to but I definitely don’t think there’s a solid consensus on that...
Food practices are engaged in by more people for more of the time. There is more cultural selection for them. Medicine can remain harmful for a longer amount of time because people only use it when likely to die anyway.
Even the placebo effect is probably just regression to the mean.
Like it or not, placebo effect is still an effect. They were providing a service, however minor it was.
Autopoiesis would naturally tend to promote specific common interventions as more successful than others because people intuitively will attempt to mimic interventions that work. Even snake oil salesmen understood that you should keep fevers low and isolate sick people from other members of the family.
We tend to miss this because we seriously underestimate the number of specific unique practices doctors employ. Simply going to a doctor to seek treatment is already using a number of incredible technologies:
- Identifying a class of person who can perform medicine
- Training that person to specifically practice medicine based on documented cases
- Having a group of people approve the kinds of material doctors can be trained with
- Requiring doctors to have completed supervised practical medical activities before being allowed to practice medicine
- Identifying a location where medicine is practiced, separate from normal life, and equipped with the tools necessary to complete planned tasks
These things are all incredible and, in fact, NOT obvious to laymen starting from first principles. Many of them are thousands of years old. Medicine is many, many thousands of best practices BEYOND just “controlling for placebo” in studies.
In the absence of actual medicine that works, strong placebo isn't too shabby.
One of the things I always find amusing is that patient satisfaction scores are not associated with improved health (and likely are weakly inversely associated with health!). For thousands of years, medicine consisted of "amusing the patient while Nature cured the disease."
There is a very old discussion of this on the sub.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/1nvRiyJHEX
> How are you defining the point where there began to be "useful medicine to provide"?
The point at which Christian Scientists stop outliving the general population. I think it was some point around the middle of the 20th century, though I'm unable to find a good source for that.
Yes. The tribal "medicine man" is almost high-status by definition.
To be fair, ancient medicine was pretty good at patching up wounds and even fixing broken bones, and healing other injuries, where this would not have naturally happened satisfactorily or at all.
For example, in one battle Henry V copped an arrow in his face that penetrated right to the back of his skull. He would never have survived if his doctor hadn't invented and quickly constructed a new instrument to clasp the arrow head and slowly withdraw it, then sterilize the wound with honey and wine.
Also, decent (by contemporary standards) doctors and healers knew literally thousands of herbal remedies, and their uses, and these often did work.
If anyone is more interested in the Henry V incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bradmore
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KloG4RLSVkY
Another anecdote. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV sustained a major jousting injury in 1350. His neck vertebrae were damaged, he was paralyzed for some time, and never completely recovered.
But the emergency action of a very experienced doctor probably saved his life, and he was able to manage the realm competently for 28 more years, before dying of old age at 62 years of age.
A 11-page modern medical article (in Czech, but easily translatable by Google into English), based on examinations of his skeleton, is here:
https://cspzl.dent.cz/pdfs/sto/2016/04/01.pdf
Yup https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/medicine-as-a-pseudoscience/
I probably disagree with this.
Surely they had useful knowledge about antiseptics, sedatives, operations like caesareans, amputations, bonesetting etc. Also medical professionals tended to know more about lifestyle risks, hygiene, diet and exercise etc.
I'd estimate that the majority of medical professionals have had a net positive health impact on the societies in which they've operated for as long as they've existed.
But there might be a pattern (like the GMU example) where less prestigious medical people (e.g. midwives, traditional bonesetters) had more of a positive impact than the "priesthood" of more prestigious medical experts who espoused weird theories about foul humours, blood-letting and wu-xing/ yin-yang.
blood-letting is a solid treatment option for acute de compensating congestive heart failure and a few other conditions. very few things are simple
Surgeons and people treating wounds in general tended to know their stuff (within the limits of knowledge).
Internal medicine was _terrible_ and very likely harmful on average. This might explain homeopathy - at the time, water was preferable to what passed as drugs. For the longest time they were stuck in the Galenic mode of thought, with emetics and bloodletting.
(Psychiatry was even more appalling.)
I recall Rasputin might have actually succeeded in making the hemophiliac tsarevich feel better because at least he stopped court doctors from giving aspirin, an anticoagulant, to the aforementioned hemophiliac.
Probably tens of thousands of years before that as well; primitive tribes usually have some kind of witch doctor and that witch doctor is usually pretty high status.
But as others have said it's likely that some of them did something not completely ineffective some of the time, even if it's just advising the patient to rest and giving them the old oo-ee-oo-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla-bing-bang.
IIRC, according to Herodotus, a court doctor in Persia successfully saved an empress mother from breast cancer with a mastectomy. Pretty impressive, with iron age tools and hygiene! Even if most medicine was ineffective, I assume the most skilled physicians with access to the best tools could still accomplish things.
I think your theory works a lot better if you drop the assumption at the purpose of a priesthood is to produce the truth, and instead assume that purpose is to produce status for its own members first, with truth coming only sometimes as a byproduct.
Social groups of all kinds orient themselves around some conception of “good”, which is might include some mix of truth about some part of the world, but at its core is a function of values. All social groups need “we are better than others because”, and preistly classes say “ we know what’s true”. That conception of good becomes the inflexible root prior that drives actions and perceptions, as well as determining status within the group.
You gain status not by being more accurate but by increasing the groups conception of the gulf between it and the unwashed masses. Not all truths are equal - those truths which increase the prestige of the priests are far more valuable that truths which would argue the priests are less special than they think. Falsehoods which aren’t obviously false but boost the status of the group will be contested internally; the more subtle the falsehood, if it boosts group status the more likely you should expect the priests to adopt it.
We should then expect that a priesthood will converge on the truth only if they face significant selective pressure from the world outside of it. In the case of medicine, it’s patient patients dying or not dying. But that’s weak, and you should expect it to reward things like, doctor seeking status at the cost of their patient’s long-term well-being as long as it doesn’t produce gruesome deaths that are obviously attributable to bad medical advice. If a theory produces advice that drives most people crazy over long periods of time so they kill themselves with bad diet and bad lifestyle, this set of beliefs could get high status within the priestly class because it increases that conception of why they are good. This is probably true even if it produces bad health outcomes among the priests! All that matters is the status of the group. Converging on truth is only useful if it boosts that status. If it threatens that status, it’s harmful to the group and punished aggressively.
In order for a preistly class to change consensus, it needs to have feedback from reality that’s intensely painful; anything “embarrassing” can be dismissed as the mawping barbarians not getting it. This is especially true in an era when people can associate with like minded persons and ignore everyone on the outside. There’s a reason the democrats are now talking about changing some of the woke stuff; it’s only because they lost.
In the case of architecture, the feedback from the outside world is basically nonexistent, aside from who gets funded. The same is true of much of academia. When the funding agencies are the government or other groups with approximately infinite money, I think we should expect them to converge on nonsense.
This means, we should expect wokeness and other memes to infect areas in inverse proportion to how often and how painfully they get feedback from reality. As the world gets wealthier, we should expect increasingly insane preistly classes because the only thing tying them to reality is funding. When you define what’s high status for outsiders (ie architecture, art), you’ve got that on lock. Hence decades of string theory producing literally nothing useful, and yet still it gets all the funding in physics.
Show me a priestly class with guaranteed funding and I’ll show you a group unmoored from reality, high on their own supply and convinced only the barbarians think otherwise.
The solution is a priesthood that determines status internally but depends on funding decisions by average people.
Scientist, circa 1900: “We’ve got this model that tells you what kind of light a heated body emits.”
Layman: “Sure, please go on. “
Scientist: “So it’s not perfect, but it works pretty well, and if you look at stars, it tells us how hot they ought to be based on their overall color.”
Layman: “Cool. Does it tell you something about radiators?”
Scientist: “No, we tried, but there are too many assumptions in this model and it completely breaks down for radiators.”
Layman: “And you want to make it better.”
Scientist: “No, it’s basically irrelevant to radiators. But when you look closely at the model, it tells you something weird. It tells you that stars should radiate an infinite quantity of energy.”
Layman: “And you want to harness it! Good man.”
Scientist: “No, there’s no such thing as an infinite quantity of energy.”
Layman: “That’s a garbage model, then.”
Scientist: “No, it’s worked really well whenever we tested it. It’s just that it doesn’t add up in extreme regions.”
Layman: “And why should we care? No real person is ever going to see any hint of these ‘extreme regions’. Get back to earth, man.”
Scientist: “But I have this idea for an explanation. It sounds really cool and promising! But I need time and peace to think through its implications and how to test it properly.”
Layman: “No. Just do useful stuff. Like radiators. It’s freezing here.”
And this is how Max Planck became a radiator repairman, Albert Einstein stayed a paper-pusher, and quantum physics never got invented.
For the members, the purpose is to generate status. But for the community as a whole, encouraging members to explore weird parts of idea space is how you get the community to end up finding truths that no one would think of otherwise.
Academia was conquered and separated from feedback https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/conquest-and-liberation-of-academia
This builds a lot on the Meta-Contrarian article
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
Funny. On the one hand, priesthoods have issues, problems and in hindsight, can turn out to be completely wrong, on the science, on standards, on ethics. On the other, this is completely normal because humans duh!™, we can't have positive feedback loops and incentives and transparency and rules, because boring™, and really, I like my cool aid, what does it matter if the ingredients are toxic, it feels like velvet as it rolls off my tongue, that sugar rush is just so fantastic! And moreover, my favorite publisher is not ranked #74 because they're pushing pulp rubbish, no sir, it's because they don't have street cred. That's just a branding problem. Why would anyone believe such a thing as the truth exists?
In medical school and trying to grapple with this. We had a “scandal” recently where, during a student group election, someone released the public voting records of each candidate to “make sure you see how everyone voted before committing to their leadership.”
Sharing any opinion that asks for nuance or fact-checking has legitimately made people the subject of public scorn—I once mentioned the ICD codes for maternal mortality become more granular as it relates to the reported significantly increased rates after our professor cited them without context, and was accused of being a conservative shill (obviously in misalignment with everything I have ever expressed otherwise). Multiple peers are now effectively persona non grata.
In a profession that requires we work in teams constantly and rely on the expertise of others, I worry about how these dynamics affect that. To be fair, medicine has always been a “my buddy gets the referral” career, so maybe I’m idealizing a past that doesn’t exist/being cynical about a present that’s just a repeat of that.
I think the only way out of this moment is to keep your head down and work on what you care about, especially with slowly changing tides that are realizing the damage these paradigms can do.
The link to the APA meeting entry links to a google search of it rather than the article directly - was this intended?
Seems fixed
typo? "on ideas opposite the values of the public"
I find the doctors example weird because the priesthood is enforced at gunpoint and it would probably look different otherwise. Journalism is interesting in that it isn't at least as straight forwardly
Some big things like software don't have much of a priesthood.
> Some big things like software don't have much of a priesthood.
Maybe no successfully exclusionary ones, but rust, the concern trolls with community guidelines are making an attempt; oo and uncle bob did the rounds.
the gatekeeping mantra of traditional priesthood is "where's your degree, bozo?"
software has 2 such mantras.
the first is "RTFM, moron"
the second, which is far more powerful, is "lets take this to a side channel to discuss"
(clarification 1: the way software is gatekept is by a combination of shibboleths and invite-only discussion groups where the actual important decisions happen)
(clarification 2: I think gatekeeping is good and we should have more of it in the world)
The meme is horribly misleading. The guy in the bottom right should have the red-and-green quadrants behind him.
Diderot's maxim might be applicable. This "Tanya Swinney" is wrong in the first half of her tweet (DDT is great!), but her second half has the right spirit.
How do you update when you agree violently with a priesthood after minimal training about a specific claim, but are not a priest?
Personal examples for me are the Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, and buddhist meditation. Experiencing both after 1-5% of the training an actual musicologist and monk go through.
I updated hard to 'buddhism is close to 100% true' and 'I have zero interest in exploring more stuff like this, but I will listen to it once a year and enjoy it immensely' in a way that I think is pretty random. I don't know why I have spent no time thinking about whether other non-popular music items would be worth exploring also.
About as much as you would have updated if you had disagreed.
Scott,
Circa last summer's trump insurrection debate I wrote a little parable in a style many people said was reminiscent of you, which analogized judges to priests: https://broodingomnipresence.substack.com/p/the-parable-of-the-greatest-commandment
I think the parable is widely misunderstood, but what I was going for kind of dovetails with what you're saying here: people back then were just utterly shocked that *judges* could decide presidential qualifications (as if they hadn't done so in the past). So I wrote a little story about how judges aren't necessarily more objectively qualified than anyone else to make these decisions, but we have them there because SOMEONE has to.
There's some pretty profound implications there (and in other areas) for jobs irreplaceable by AI. These priests...they often don't have some objective benchmark of performance we can compare "alternatives" to...there's no "universal objective legal standard" that we can compare judging to and determine who is doing "good judging" and who is doing "bad judging"...we just need some human to make the call.
You're entire framing is too cynical. A priesthood is a religious caste, and one of the defining features of religion is that it believes in revealed truths, i.e. things that you have to believe are true because they were told to you by a higher and unquestionable power.
What you seem to be talking about are academics in (mostly soft, or at least messy) sciences, and one of the defining features of science is that it rejects the concept of revealed truth in favor of empiricism and experimentation. Some sciences (the hard ones) are more firmly grounded in this than others, and we absolutely need to be on guard against what Hayek called scientism (using a scientific facade to lend credibility to non-scientific ideas), but I still think it's too cynical to use the term priesthood.
It matters because how you frame this influences the answers to your questions, at least in part. If you really think academia is a religious caste then your model for how to fix it should be the Reformation, i.e. you need to convince the relevant people that the capital-T Truth has *actually* been revealed to you, and that they've been following corrupt heretics. But if you think academia is actually just a bunch of scientists, or people who at least want to be scientists, that became too politically homogeneous (in this case left wing, but the same problems would apply if the homogeneity had been in the other direction) and too obsessed with political power, then your solution should be to appeal to their scientific ethos and force them into confrontation with reality.
Also, it would probably be good to: 1) diversify academic funding sources so that academics aren't so dependent on government funding, and as a result be so susceptible to political edicts; 2) limit the scope of government power so that fewer academic disciplines overlap with government policy, thus limiting the corrupting influence of political power. But I'm libertarian-ish, so of course I'd say that.
The people who swore to the motto "Nullius in verba," on no one's word, rejected revealed truth in favor of empiricism. Those who preach the doctrine of "Trust the experts" instead are indeed best characterized as a priesthood.
No, they aren't. The experts are still trying to use the scientific method, or at least that's their ideal, even if they sometimes fall short.
The people saying "Trust the experts" are trying to protect their prestige and political power. That's a common human reaction and it does not, on its own, make someone a "priest" or a believer in revealed truth.
"For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of ~~God~~ using the scientific method enact whatever they wanted anyways."
It's a metaphor.
Well, people talk about political ideologies literally being quasi-religions, so it's not really clear to me that this *is* a metaphor.
But the point I'm trying to make is that, if it is, it's not a very good or effective one, for the reasons I outlined above.
This is a good point, particularly as to the implications that the analogy holds. Another example: there's been a recent trend where the university president or department chair writes letters to the faculty expressing concern/shock/denunciation regarding some current event (an officer-involved shooting or a supreme court decision, for instance). Academics and non-academics alike tend to chafe at these letters. If the institution is a priesthood, then the solution is to write better letters on more salient current events. If the institution is a scientific community, then the solution is to stop writing letters on topics that do not directly leverage the scientific expertise of the letter writer, or to stop writing such letters entirely. IMO the latter is preferred but it requires a different analogy.
Defining the essence of religion as "revealed truth" feels a bit too narrow to me, and is possibly an artifact of abrahamic bias or something. E.g. my impression of Hinduism is it's centered less on beliefs, and more about ritual purity.
this really depends on which Hindu believer you're talking to. But, doctrinal beliefs do play an important role, for some more than others.
I think we're trying to establish distributed trust/consensus, and the two standard methods for that are proof of stake and proof of work. Membership of the priesthood is proof-of-stake, since you risk getting defrocked if you're lying, while most kinds of ritual purity are proof-of-work--ideally, it's easier to tweet out 100 dubious claims than write 100 dubious papers. For a while, people used "empiricism" and "quackery" interchangeably when talking about medicine, because saying "I tried it and it works" is easier than coming up with relevant citations from Galen and Aristotle.
Proof of stake has taken a big hit with the loss of public trust, but it looks like our ability to do proof of work is about to be completely annihilated by generative AI so I agree we need to find a way back to proof of stake.
The old SSC is back! Let him cook.
"This might be a natural consequence of the priesthoods’ drive to separate themselves from the public."
John Carey, who was a professor of English at Oxford, had a theory that modernism in literature was a conspiracy by the elite to develop a form of literature that the newly-literate general public still couldn't understand. He wrote an entire book about this, titled "The Intellectuals and the Masses."
Tyler Cowen has a theory of avant-garde art you might be interested in https://www.jstor.org/stable/1061469
I think that there are 2 things to say here.
Firstly, I think that you underestimate the degree to which wokeness got accepted by the priesthood because it was closer to the moral truth than what came before.
Using people's preferred pronouns is the courteous, nice, respectful thing to do. And one is often entitled to decide what pronouns others should use with respect to you for the self-ownership or some similar reasons.
Similarly, there are good reasons to believe that reparations for slavery are in principle justified even if implementation is a lot more complicated, and that ongoing police brutality in the US is a problem.
Meaning, if you look at the parts of wokeness that got the widest acceptance among academia, it is those parts which are closest to truth and just have to do with being nice, respecting people and just not being revoltingly evil.
There is a motte and bailey being played by both sides here. From the left, the motte is parts of wokeness which are most likely to be true and good. The bailey is the claim that all sorts of illiberal nonsense is required once you accept the more plausible aspects.
From the right, the motte is the observation that there is a lot of illiberal nonsense being peddled. The bailey is the claim that all wokeness, including the things that all decent people should accept are wrong.
So we need to be specific about what the wokeness virus is, which parts are true (or at least closer to the truth) and which parts are not.
Secondly, a lot of these things are self correcting in the long run. I write papers, other people write different papers, people look carefully at the arguments and eventually errors will get corrected. A lot of illiberal nonsense is fashionable in certain quarters for now. As long as we continue chipping away at problems and there is sufficient communication and collaboration between different priesthoods, these errors will be detected and removed.
> Using people's preferred pronouns is the courteous, nice, respectful thing to do.
This is true, to some extent. But that only correlates with "close to the moral truth" if you subscribe to a warped values system that values "nice" above "truth" or "reality" or "honesty."
> And one is often entitled to decide what pronouns others should use with respect to you for the self-ownership or some similar reasons.
And now you're getting into coercion and attempting to impose dishonest "niceness" upon people who do not subscribe to that value system.
> Similarly, there are good reasons to believe that reparations for slavery are in principle justified even if implementation is a lot more complicated, and that ongoing police brutality in the US is a problem.
No, there really aren't. There was a valid case for reparations about a century and a half ago, when there were still victims to be made whole and perpetrators to be corrected. Today, everyone who was involved in slavery is dead, and so are all their grandchildren. So people who speak of "reparations for slavery" are talking about punishing some people for crimes they did not commit, to enrich other people who were not a victim of those crimes. The very idea makes a mockery of justice.
As for "ongoing police brutality," the data does not support the claims made. The incorrect claims are so atrociously bad that not only do the woke consistently overestimate actual levels of police violence by multiple orders of magnitude, but so do non-woke people aware of the problem and trying to give better estimates correcting for woke nonsense.
>This is true, to some extent. But that only correlates with "close to the moral truth" if you subscribe to a warped values system that values "nice" above "truth" or "reality" or "honesty."
You know, I recall there being a classic SSC post about exactly this problem.
("Warped" values system? Warped from what?)
>> Using people's preferred pronouns is the courteous, nice, respectful thing to do.
>This is true, to some extent. But that only correlates with "close to the moral truth" if you subscribe to a warped values system that values "nice" above "truth" or "reality" or "honesty."
What makes you think this is a 'warped' values system? Don't we ourselves use just such a value system when we ask ourselves "Is it (a) necessary, (b) kind, and/or (c) true," which is such a prominent feature of discourse on this board when constructing our posts? Are we all 'warped' here?
Maybe some people do. Me, I believe in _ex falso quodlibet:_ if you begin by accepting false premises, you can end up "proving" any incorrect conclusion.
That is entirely incompatible with rationalism.
I know I’m going to regret asking, but have you read Scott’s decade-old “the categories were made for man, not man for the categories”? The claim that a trans person (say, male to female) is making is not that they have a vagina and a uterus (apart from intersex people, but whatever).
Not acknowledging their preferred pronouns is basically saying “the categories for man/woman are fine in their genitalia-based meanings, I’m not making an exception for you, and if that causes you pain, then sucks to be you”.
In a way, it’s good! Categories are not concrete (except sometimes in mathematics) so it falls to us to enforce them so that they don’t dissolve in meaninglessness.
But then you can’t define these people away as being illogical or breaking the basic tenets of reason.
Also, less than 20 years ago, trans people had to be very private to this information lest they reap scorn and mockery from everyone else. Don’t they deserve to exist in peace in this brave new 21s century of ours? Acknowledging their existence doesn’t harm anyone, and, sure, there are trickier questions about athletic teams, age-appropriate limitations, how much input doctors should have, the potential for abuse and so on.
> The claim that a trans person (say, male to female) is making is not that they have a vagina and a uterus
No, it's worse than that. It's that having a vagina and a uterus does not make you a woman. The claim is the destruction of "male and female." The claim is, as you put it, an attempt to "dissolve in meaninglessness" what it is to be a man or a woman.
> Not acknowledging their preferred pronouns is basically saying
"I will not be coerced into affirming delusions. If you thought you were Napoleon, I would not treat you as if you were, and I won't on this either." It's amazing how quickly one of the most basic principles of psychiatry — do not affirm delusions — goes out the window and gets twisted into some sort of bizarre moral obligation to affirm the delusion instead, when people start to make a political issue out of it.
> Don’t they deserve to exist in peace in this brave new 21s century of ours?
Not if they refuse to leave others in peace. When they go making an issue out of it and trying to coerce others into affirming things that are not true, they forfeit "deserve to live in peace" status, the same as anyone else.
> Acknowledging their existence doesn’t harm anyone
Two incorrect statements for the price of one. Calling it an issue of "existence" is a massive motte-and-bailey argument. Literally no one is saying "these people do not exist." Of course they exist. They're being very loud and making a nuisance of themselves; they couldn't do that if they weren't there. But that does not make their delusional claims legitimate, any more than a person existing who believes himself to be Napoleon makes his delusional claim legitimate.
Second, it creates *massive* harm in the real, personal, non-abstract sense. Immediately after you say "this doesn't harm anyone" you list several areas where it does indeed cause harm to people. So we can start there.
Now add to that the intense harms caused by surgical transitioning. It wrecks a person's body, causing a laundry list of horrible, often lifelong conditions that sounds like an over-the-top parody of the "side effects may include" section of a pharmaceutical ad. Read up on detransitioners and some of the horrific things they've had to deal with.
Now add to that the intense harms caused by *social* transitioning, and social contagion. Read up on people like Sage, a girl who decided to play the "I'm really a boy" game because "all the girls in school" were "identifying as" something other than normal heterosexual girls. School officials were all too happy to play along, which ended up sending the poor girl down a year-long hell of exploitation, sex trafficking, drugs, abuse, and being kidnapped by the legal system to be used as a political pawn. When she was finally returned to her family, the tearful girl uttered the absolutely heartbreaking words, "I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to have friends."
The fact is, legitimate gender dysphoria is like acne: it attacks young people, it's usually embarrassing and uncomfortable for a few years, *and then it goes away.* In the vast majority of cases, people grow out of it as they grow into their adult bodies. This is one theory to explain why long-term suicide rates have been observed to go *up,* not down, in affirmed transgender individuals: because when they finally come to themselves and realize that they were a man/woman all along, and not the woman/man they've been pretending to be, and see the irreversible harm they've done to their bodies along the way, they just can't cope with it.
Activists tend to dismiss detransitioners, saying they make up "only" about 1-2% of people who transition. This is insanely short-sighted, as it's a well-known truism in business that for every 1 person who complains about your product/service, there are 10-100 having the same problem and saying nothing. And that's for neutral products where there is no social or political pressure not to complain. The implications here are staggering!
I'll try to ask this in a snappy way before I answer in a more collected way to some of your points: "are you sure you don't have Trans Derangement Syndrome?"
> No, it's worse than that. It's that having a vagina and a uterus does not make you a woman. The claim is the destruction of "male and female." The claim is, as you put it, an attempt to "dissolve in meaninglessness" what it is to be a man or a woman.
As a matter of formal logic, the categories were already broken. Proof: intersex people exist. Among eight billion people, biology has a lot of ways to be weird.
(By the way, what is your definition of "be a woman"? Have a vagina? A uterus? No X chromosome? Be *born* with a vagina? Any of these would have seemed legitimate 50 years ago, wouldn't they -- but what about edge cases, or today's chirurgy?)
However, this didn't make the categories useless, because the exceptions are so few. There are men, women, and a tiny body of exceptions. If you add trans people, we're talking about the categories being porous for 0.5-1% of people. As long that this is stable, this does not seem like dissolving the category in meaninglessness.
> Not if they refuse to leave others in peace. When they go making an issue out of it and trying to coerce others into affirming things that are not true, they forfeit "deserve to live in peace" status, the same as anyone else.
Do you believe that every school employee, every politician, every judge should lose the right to live in peace should it turn out that the Christian God does not, in fact, exist?
And should the Bible turn out to be literally true, should we instead hound and harass biology and geology teachers?
If so, I admire your consistency, but question your wisdom. If not, why? Aren't they forcing children to saying that which is untrue every single day of their lives, and maligning them if they do not?
> Calling it an issue of "existence" is a massive motte-and-bailey argument. Literally no one is saying "these people do not exist." Of course they exist. They're being very loud and making a nuisance of themselves; they couldn't do that if they weren't there. But that does not make their delusional claims legitimate
I agree that "acknowledging their existence" sounds better as a slogan than anything else. What I mean is the following: treat them as actual human beings deeply suffering for something which is out of their control, without being mocked, insulted, or harassed as a group, let alone for politically motivated reasons.
Especially if you believe that they have a delusion, are sick and need treatment, using them as punching-ball is even less psychiatric practice.
(Sure, the activist is extraordinarily annoying and it is human, if petty, to indulge in a bit of retaliation. But the vast majority of trans people are not their online ambassadors.)
> Second, it creates *massive* harm in the real, personal, non-abstract sense. Immediately after you say "this doesn't harm anyone" you list several areas where it does indeed cause harm to people. So we can start there.
I'm missing the part where "changing pronouns when you talk of some specific person" (a purely verbal, individual-to-individual issue) implies the most insane takes on everything I'm mentioning afterwards.
> Now add to that the intense harms caused by surgical transitioning. It wrecks a person's body, causing a laundry list of horrible, often lifelong conditions that sounds like an over-the-top parody of the "side effects may include" section of a pharmaceutical ad.
So, you have this awful procedure which does all this, and you think that most adults will undergo it without understanding what they're heading into? This doesn't sound quite right.
I'm assuming that on the contrary, the people undergoing it have done their research, been informed by their doctors, and decided they wanted it anyway. On this blog, we believe that people are free to make their own mistakes and wreck their own lives, do we not?
(So yes, limiting them to adults seems more than perfectly reasonable.)
Relatedly, to what extent is something a delusion if you can in fact bring it, or a close approximation of it, about? To get back to your Napoleon example, the guy will never be Napoleon. He may grow out of it -- or we could just make a simulation for him to be Napoleon in. Again, not hurting anyone?
> Now add to that the intense harms caused by *social* transitioning, and social contagion.
Yeah, that one's an issue and I'm not sure what to do with it. Involving the legal system at all is bonkers except perhaps in the most extreme cases. Parents have a tricky role here: teenagers basically get high by defying their parents and calling them old farts who never understood anything to life.
BTW, would you have a link to your claims about Sage's story? The NY Post's account (they're not woke, right?), which is the first one I found, did not seem to involve any element of social contagion, but instead a lot of bullying including threats to "rape Sage until she liked boys".
Can we at least agree that this is wrong and should not happen, regardless of Sage's "gender identity" (or delusion, if this is what you think it is), even if she asked the boys in question to call her by male pronouns every single day?
> The fact is, legitimate gender dysphoria is like acne: it attacks young people, it's usually embarrassing and uncomfortable for a few years, *and then it goes away.* In the vast majority of cases, people grow out of it as they grow into their adult bodies.
In cases of social contagion, it seems clearly true. But as far as I can tell, a non-insignificant number of older people have decided to transition as well, and there's no clear reason why the gender dysphoria go away with age. For some, it will be sufficiently acute that the sex-change operation may well be the best way to diminish their suffering.
I'm not sure I believe your theory, but I suppose I'll gladly read (if perhaps not answer) if you elaborate on where the statistic comes from and what it exactly is.
> Activists tend to dismiss detransitioners, saying they make up "only" about 1-2% of people who transition. This is insanely short-sighted, as it's a well-known truism in business that for every 1 person who complains about your product/service, there are 10-100 having the same problem and saying nothing. And that's for neutral products where there is no social or political pressure not to complain. The implications here are staggering!
So, by this truism, about 200-2000% of Americans detest Trump but say nothing?
More seriously, this sounds a bit too general a counter-argument. Activists gotta activize, but I'm skeptical they wouldn't account for that (and is the 1-2% stat, that I also remember seeing, from activists?).
Even if this is the case (which I guess would make me update, but not to the point of calling "being trans" a delusion), all the more reason to accept reassigning pronouns, no? Isn't it the easiest intervention to reverse on an individual basis, and at least one good way to test if you do have some form of dysphoria that is actually there to stay?
It seems like you’re coming at this from a place of treating “truth” or “honesty,” as you define it, as the highest value. But most people do not place one value above all others like this, and in all honesty, when someone claims that they do it’s hard to believe them.
Consider just a few examples:
Truth vs Kindness: You are a soldier returning from war. You served with a friend, who did not make it home. He died calling for a high-school girlfriend. His widowed spouse asks you what his last words were.
Truth vs Respect: You are a guest at a friends house, and they have spent all day preparing a meal for you and many others. You do not particularly care for the food. Over dinner, in front of everyone, someone asks you, “how are you liking the chicken?”
Truth vs Justice: You are a detective executing a search at the property of a mob boss who has thus far been untouchable. You discover smoking-gun evidence, but it is in a freestanding garage, and your warrant only covers the house. But the garage has a window, and if you claim you saw the evidence through the window, it will be admissible and the mob boss goes away. Do you claim it?
Truth vs Family: Your brother has been selling pot to his high school friends, and just turned 18. You’ve been trying to explain to him that this is a bad idea, but hey, teenagers. Bad news gets worse and the cops show up at your door asking about weed at the school and whether your brother is involved. Are you honest?
If capital-t “Truth” really is the highest value for you, then it should win in all these situations, as well as more extreme ones (e.g. “do you ‘prioritize honesty’ even when Nazis are asking you ‘which way did the Jew go?’). But for 99.9% of humanity, capital-T Truth is *an* important value, but not the *absolute* value. It’s important, it’s not a trump card to always put above other values – rather it’s valuable but constantly traded off against other values. They'll prioritize truth in some of these scenarios but not others. I myself would be honest about the mob boss scenario but probably lie in the other 3.
And that .01% for which it really is an absolute value generally aren’t good examples of what we’d think of as functional humans – they’re subject to all the extreme examples and problems hard utilitarians are (“Would you really drown 100 babies to if it yielded more QALY’s than it cost?”).
So I guess the question is which bucket you see yourself in:
(1) Truth really is the absolute value, and you really do think that the ‘moral’ thing to do when asked is be honest and tell the Turks where the Armenians are hiding.
(2) Truth is not really an absolute value for you, you just think that it’s more important to “speak truth” about what you believe someone’s gender to be rather than prioritizing kindness and calling them ‘he’ or ‘they’ or whatever if that’s their preference.
If #1, be prepared for pretty much nobody to agree, and IMO for very good reason.
If #2, be prepared for others to ask you what the harm of prioritizing kindness is in a situation so perfunctory, and for them to respond with doubt if you claim that using someone’s preferred pronouns somehow destroys the foundations of western thought in a way that telling grandma that no, you really do like the sweater doesn’t.
> Truth vs Kindness
"It was a real ugly time. I'd rather not dredge up those memories, and in all honesty, you probably wouldn't want to know." There's a massive difference between being honest with people and being Jim Carrey from Liar, Liar.
> Truth vs Respect
"It was OK. A bit dry though." This *is* showing respect: if no one ever tells them that their cooking is bad, they'll never know they're doing anything wrong, and they'll just continue to cook badly forever.
> Truth vs Justice
If the case was that important I'd make sure to get the warrant right before conducting the search.
> Truth vs Family
If you knew me and my actual non-hypothetical RL brother, you wouldn't even bother asking this question. Let's just say, you're hitting a little too close to home here, and certain bad things have happened that would not have happened had my parents valued truth a little more highly.
U.S. police is bad (likely mostly due to super-short training times and a messed-up esprit de corps), but this is not particularly racially correlated when you look at the actual data (police are less likely to kill black people per event, and more likely to harass them).
'This is true, to some extent. But that only correlates with "close to the moral truth" if you subscribe to a warped values system that values "nice" above "truth" or "reality" or "honesty."'
Which it often is in personal interactions. Quoting Mencken: "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
So I do it out of politeness in direct interactions, the same way I wouldn't say that sweater is ugly even though it is.
>Meaning, if you look at the parts of wokeness that got the widest acceptance among academia, it is those parts which are closest to truth and just have to do with being nice, respecting people and just not being revoltingly evil.
Which parts are you referring to?
>Using people's preferred pronouns is the courteous, nice, respectful thing to do.
Is it "courteous, nice and respectful" for a woman to use the "preferred pronouns" of the male person who raped her with his fully intact penis, because said rapist claims to believe that he is really a woman?
I think the answer is obviously "yes", it's just that we don't really feel we ought to demand courtesy or respect from the woman in this case.
Precisely. As Adam Smith famously put it, "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent." Simply valuing being generically "nice" as the highest virtue is a perversion of morality.
I think this is the exact motte and bailey Murali is referencing: in the vast majority of cases where someone defers to another's pronouns there is no "guilty" or "innocent"; and no one is saying it's the highest virtue... Just that it is _a_ virtue and in most normal interactions there's no very strong overriding considerations to the contrary.
This is like someone saying, "saying please and thank you is nice and courteous" and getting the response, "what about a rapist who forces their victim to thank them afterwards at gunpoint? Is that courteous?"
Like, yes, sometimes the basics of courtesy are not actually courteous; also there are times where they remain courteous but we acknowledge there are reasons to be rude (you'd be ok with a rape victim not saying thank you to her rapist even in a situation that otherwise would demand it, eg he passes her something out of reach) but we are pretty deep into the bailey here.
> in most normal interactions there's no very strong overriding considerations to the contrary.
The overriding consideration is honesty.
Honestly very rarely overrides courtesy in ordinary interactions: you almost never tell people your honest opinion of their looks, or their religious beliefs, or whatever in ordinary professional and semi-professional settings
What has it got to do with it? Any group has bad actors, agreed; a denomination based on one’s sole declaration has an inherent potential for abuse, sure.
But are you claiming that because there has been bad actors calling themselves trans, this disqualifies everyone calling themselves trans?
What other group would you be willing to apply this reasoning too?
Truthfully, I cannot think of any other group in which membership in that group is conferred solely on the basis of performative declaration, and in which members of that group demand special privileges as a result of their group membership. I can't prove that a self-identified Christian really does believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, but because they aren't generally demanding special privileges, it's irrelevant.
I think it's rather telling that whenever a new group has sprung up with this pair of characteristics, the collective reaction (including from trans people themselves) has been one of contempt and dismissal. No one is more fervently opposed to "transracial" people attempting to game affirmative action policies for their own ends than trans activists.
This is a fair point. But it’s also important to look at differences. Here are some that come to mind.
1) gender is a universal (at least Western in a very broad sense) experience in a way that race isn’t (it seems like an American hysteria foremost).
2) The prominent “ambassadors” of transracialism are asking for money and a job (in the form of gaming the system with affirmative action) in a way that most trans people simply aren’t.
3) If my neighbor tells me they’re trans (or whatever), I’ll try to remember to change the pronouns I use for them (and try to get used to the change). If they claim they’re transracial, I… won’t change anything?
4) There aren’t cute human-interest stories about how suicidal people with race dysphoria spent years begging doctors in the Soviet Union to change race (don’t forget it criminalized homosexuality until very recently).
“I think it's rather telling that whenever a new group has sprung up with this pair of characteristics, the collective reaction (including from trans people themselves) has been one of contempt and dismissal. No one is more fervently opposed to "transracial" people attempting to game affirmative action policies for their own ends than trans activists.”
Yes, but I don’t see how this indicts the trans activists: the default reaction is “you bastards are gaming the system”, and the trans activists can be especially especially virulent whether they think “you’re muscling in on my racket” (as you seem to believe?) but “you’re stealing and tarnishing our label in the public reputation“.
(Again, remember: these people had no right to existence free from harassment less than 20 years ago. This is a big change, and they’re aware that a big backlash will bring back the statu quo ante.
1) I have no idea what this point means. Everyone has a "racial identity" insofar as they have an ethnicitiy.
2) I think trans women demanding to be permitted to compete in female sporting events, or male convicts demanding to serve their sentences in women's prisons constitutes "gaming the system". There are also a significant number of transracial people who aren't gaming the system in any way e.g. many children and teens who presented to the Tavistock Centre in the UK described themselves as trans-Korean in addition to transgender; likewise the teenagers described in this article (https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-have-to-admit-i-still-dont-fully).
3) How often would you use gendered pronouns in a one-to-one conversation with your neighbour?
4) As mentioned above, many of the children who presented to the Tavistock described themselves as trans-Korean in addition to transgender, and experienced grave distress (dare we say "racial dysphoria") about the paleness of their skin and roundness of their eyes. I do not understand why gender dysphoria is deemed to require medical intervention (in the form of hormones and surgery) but racial dysphoria is not.
>Yes, but I don’t see how this indicts the trans activists: the default reaction is “you bastards are gaming the system”, and the trans activists can be especially especially virulent whether they think “you’re muscling in on my racket” (as you seem to believe?) but “you’re stealing and tarnishing our label in the public reputation“.
This debate sort of reminds me of something Dawkins said, that Christians disbelieve in almost all gods (Vishnu, Shiva, Thor etc.) and atheists have just gone one god further than that. The general case seems to be that, if someone claims to "identify as" something other than a identity characteristic which is traditionally determined by a clear and unambiguous physical substrate and which they clearly do not possess (race, age, height, weight, ability status etc.), we should dismiss their concerns out of hands - except in the case of sex, for which we have created this elaborate concept of a "gender identity" wholly distinct from one's sex. No one has yet given me a convincing reason why being "transgender" is legitimate but being "trans-racial", "trans-aged", "trans-disabled" etc. are not.
1) I have no idea what this point means. Everyone has a "racial identity" insofar as they have an ethnicitiy.
What I meant is that gender is a lot more uniform across the Western world at large: if you look at the basic clichés about men and women regarding jobs, clothing, behaviors, there's something more universal here.
While "racial identity" seems much more country-dependent.
2) I don't know what to tell you. Do you genuinely believe that trans people (born XY, claiming to identify as XX) do that because they want to win more easily at sports and rape women in women's bathrooms with the right-thinking people clapping?
I'm asking this seriously. When someone wrote that respecting people's pronouns was the considerate thing to do, jumping to this kind of examples was your reaction. Is it so hard to believe that some people just feel incredibly uneasy to the point of depression with their gender (whatever mix of clothes they could wear, attitudes they're expected to embody, hormone balance, actual genitalia and so on) and feel that they needed drastic change?
And if my neighbor has been nothing but helpful, nice and considerate with me, why shouldn't I make an effort to oblige if they kindly ask me to refer to them by other pronouns?
I do agree that bathrooms or sports (or even what treatments are appropriate to what age and who gets to make the decision) need a much less heated discussion (that comes back, for instance, to the basic biological why men and women are in different categories at sports), but this is not what you've reacted to, and it's not the one I want to push back against.
3) This tends to come up in larger group discussions, and of course there's always the question of the first name. But this doesn't seem central?
4) Height, weight, age are completely quantifiable. Race is annoying, but I'd say it simply doesn't permeate enough behavior to be worth trans-racing.
I think the problems with being "trans-disabled" are minor, as long as you genuinely perform the part and impose the handicap to yourself. (Else you're just lying for gain and sympathy.)
(It does feel disrespectful to those who never had a choice to be disabled or not, but I'd respect the dedication in the thought experiment.)
I'll be completely honest here: I do not have a good explanation for why "transgender" is legitimate. I think Scott mentioned Ozy a decade ago on this stuff, maybe they have some breakdown or something. Aella wrote something that mostly assumed the answer ("instead of making a moral panic and getting at each others' throats, shouldn't we instead focus on the question of how to figure out with greater confidence whether a given child/teenager/adult is, in fact, trans?"), perhaps she explained at some point why she believed so?
However, I believe I do not have to justify to myself that "transgender is legitimate" for the following obvious reason: I've met some. They're not grifters. They're not gaming the system. They'd like nothing better than get to their business in peace.
Asking people to use other pronouns or another name for you is, beyond <text-based woke echo chamber so everyone is text anyway>, a tall ask. It's confusing as heck to be on the receiving side; I'm sure that, most of the time, trans people are well-aware of that, fearful of possible backlash of all kinds, loath to impose it gratuitously, and not expecting much reward from it. What would be the interest of faking it at scale?
>Meaning, if you look at the parts of wokeness that got the widest acceptance among academia, it is those parts which are closest to truth and just have to do with being nice, respecting people and just not being revoltingly evil.
That is egregiously self-serving and assuming the conclusion. What a fantastic lack of charity that anyone that disagrees is "revoltingly evil."
“Using people's preferred pronouns is the courteous, nice, respectful thing to do. And one is often entitled to decide what pronouns others should use with respect to you for the self-ownership or some similar reasons.”
As with many things, it’s complicated. Respect is a two way street. I feel that when people without gender dysphoria use alternative pronouns (I don’t know the stats but I suspect it’s well over 50% of non-standard pronouns havers), they are engaging in highly antisocial behavior.
I don't believe in any objective moral truths. But in terms of descriptive truths, I don't believe wokeness "pays rent" https://www.readthesequences.com/Making-Beliefs-Pay-Rent-In-Anticipated-Experiences
> moral truth
...Seriously? The closest thing to moral truth is that might makes right. Everything else is subjective. The people in power right now think you're the one that's revoltingly evil, and they are no less wrong than you are. And they will be the ones to decide what is right and wrong in this society.
"Feel-good" activities don't overlap with morality as much as you seem to be saying.
Anyone who thinks there's some special connection between professors and niceness is either a professor suffering from a delusional level of self-regard, or an ordinary person with very little experience of professors.
Yeah. Having received a PhD and having worked as a teacher for many years, there was often an anti-correlation between those two things. And the modern American University setting is one filled with petty meanness and abuse like no other one been a part of.
Great essay. As a former professor, this problem our priesthoods got themselves into is really bad for society. It is also really bad for the priesthoods, but few of them realize it.
Big changes are coming, but they are aren’t exactly clear.
"My thesis in this essay is that the priesthoods are neither a rent-seeking clique nor ..."
You invested a lot of effort explaining other functions of priesthoods, but relatively little denying-rent-seeking. Aren't the vast majority of these groups all in highly market-protected contexts (a medical bar, tenure, etc.)? Corollary, if those markets were freed (e.g., deregulated), wouldn't competitive pressures clean up the nonsense that can grow without sunshine as a disinfectant? I recognize the many other challenges of deregulation, and so am not in this note calling for a libertarian free-for-all, simply calling out that it strikes me that an important (perhaps first?) use of such groups is rent-seeking. The differentiation between "priesthood" and guild doesn't strike me as large here.
This. Not that we have to conclude that priesthoods are *especially* given to rent-seeking, compared to equivalently cohesive groups of other kinds-- sufficient to say that they're about as much of a rent-seeking clique as, say, Wall Street or the teachers' unions.
> Aren't the vast majority of these groups all in highly market-protected contexts (a medical bar, tenure, etc.)? Corollary, if those markets were freed (e.g., deregulated), wouldn't competitive pressures clean up the nonsense that can grow without sunshine as a disinfectant?
Dr. Oz selling snake oil got him a minor slap on the wrist from the institutions and no impact from The State, AFAICT. So you can be a doctor legally right now and say stupid medical nonsense from a massive pulpit, and the state won't come after you. You'll also, seemingly, make quite a bit of money doing it.
>The average member of the public might think “Campbell soup! That artist is in touch with my everyday existence!” while also being baffled by layers of ironic reference and artistic flourishes outside his puny little brain’s ability to comprehend. A+ instant classic.
Having immersed myself in Andy Warhol's work at the museum dedicated to him in Pittsburgh, I don't think that was his motivation. I think he was trying to be fun and goofy. Willem de Kooning once accused Warhol of being "a killer of fun," but he was the exact opposite.
Just because I like to talk about art: I think Warhol was wrestling the the idea of fine art in the era of high quality image reproducibility, and what that would mean for the priesthood of the fine artist class. I think you could say that Warhol said all the right things to the artist class to get his artwork taken seriously - and there were interesting ideas! - and also trolled the artist class and the consumers of fine art by making art of boring everyday objects and pop celebrity icons. It's wickedly smart.
I think he was also a huge asshole, so, maybe not a lot of fun in person.
He was describing the whole caste there, not just Warhol, or even at all.
Really? Warhol was the guy famous for making pop-art posters of Campbell soup can labels. That's why I thought he's the specific instance Scott had in mind.
In any case, he's a relevant example if not the whole story.
Your epistemology is overly pessimistic. It’s not that hard to tell when a priesthood is going wrong AS LONG AS THERE IS NO CENSORSHIP, because priesthoods still have norms of discourse and intelligent laymen can find the minority with the correct view and notice which side is meeting the other’s points and which side is ducking the other’s points.
I had almost no difficulty doing this over the last 10 years and I was right practically every time, because I was trained in rationalist principles and I AVOIDED doing what all you stupid Bay Area Rationalists did (I won’t go into details here but you know who you are and you know how you fucked up).
But there must be no censorship! Elite mainstream media like the NYT are, precisely because they are subtle in the ways you inappropriately praise here, FAR more harmful to public understanding than should be tolerated, because their subtle dishonesty is *incessant* in service of their agendas. The cure is alternative media, because although most people are not highly discerning and aren’t willing to make even moderate efforts, highly discerning people only need to make moderate efforts to figure out which emperors are naked, as long as there is no censorship.
The censorship in the USA was terrible by comparison with previous eras, but still not so bad that “moderate effort” couldn’t be replaced by “serious effort”; your egregious failure was in not noticing that the censorship problem *was serious*, so your merely moderate efforts weren’t enough.
Outside the USA, censorship is worse and one must make not merely serious but *radical* efforts to discern which priesthoods have gone wrong, and how.
If medical priesthoods have been polluted by political dogma perhaps that is largely because politicians, aware of the public's high regard for doctors and scientists (the opposite of that generally held for politicians!) have involved them increasingly in political matters in the hope their kudos and authority will rub off. Then there has been a sort of back reaction, whereby some flattered medical practitioners have adjusted their attitudes in turn to encourage more political involvement.
Maybe - my impression as a doctor is that a few influential people have been captured and they set the tone in a way that many of us may disagree with but don’t feel able to speak out against
I'm a member of a (very obscure) priesthood--professional linguists. Our professional organization (Linguistic Society of America) has gone the way of other priesthood governing bodies in what could be loosely called 'wokeness'. Although it is not particularly noticeable on the LSA website, it is certainly in the air at our professional conferences. And those who have mildly challenged the status quo (like, for example, John McWhorter) can be chastised or even sanctioned in some way. And some of us are intimidated into keeping silent, precisely because we fear sanctions from our 'peers'.
I have never read anybody whom it was easier to imagine shouting "Get off my lawn!" than John McWhorter. One of those rare people whose arguments push me irresistibly to the other side.
Is it because he thinks African American English is a real language, or his views on the fundamental nature of Creoles? John (who is, FWIW, a friend) is a political liberal (he voted for Obama and Harris, for example) is one of the least likely people to shout 'Get off my lawn". He is in no sense a conservative--he just knows actual facts about language and the people who speak them.
No, it's his terminal grumpiness. The book of his I read was "Doing Our Own Thing," and it was essentially old-fogey-like complaints that nothing is as good as it used to be. McWhorter considers it self-evident that the old stuff is good and the new stuff is anemic, so he spends more space declaring this than analyzing it. It's when he gets to music that I could really see how bad it was. He praises lavishly a lot of dull, meandering, unmemorable and fairly obscure "Great American Songbook" era-songs, not even always getting their titles right, and brushes off genuinely melodic newer pop songs. If those are his personal tastes, it would be fine if he weren't setting his tastes up as the infallible judgment of civilization.
What was the medical field’s opinion of Dr Oz right before he shot to fame?
Dr Oz performed my father's quadruple bypass back in 2007. He didn’t have is own show at that time, but he would go on Oprah occasionally to talk about poop. My dad had worked in the entertainment business and was skeptical about anyone who would want to go on television. He asked an MD professor at Columbia if Dr Oz could be trusted.
“He’s a little kooky, but he has magic hands.”
Oz did a great job on the surgery and my Dad’s still doing well 17 years later.
Maybe this is related to the phenomenon of "physicist who excelled in some particular sub-field embarasses himself when trying to concoct a Theory of Everything". Dr. Oz may have so excelled in cardiac surgery that it gave him unwarranted confidence in his abilities in medicine in general.
The shining example of this to me has always been Michael Jordan. The greatest basketball player who ever lived, decided to retire while he was still on top and switch to playing baseball, which he said he'd always had a secret passion for... and he turned out to be terrible at it.
Isn't there a conspiracy theory that he temporarily quit basketball to avoid a gambling scandal and the baseball thing was a cover?
In any case, I am grateful to him. The first pack of baseball cards I bought had a special edition Michael Jordan card, which I immediately sold back to the vendor for $50. A lot of money for kid back then.
Never heard of that conspiracy theory, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone came up with the idea.
Personally, I'm more partial to the Bugs Bunny theory... 😜
Jordan OPSed .556 in AA as a 31 year old with no active playing experience in over a decade. That's not terrible, that's a very strong suggestion that if he'd switched over before his athletic prime was already fading into the rearview he would have been a solid major league caliber player.
Physicists have had success imperializing other fields. Francis Crick started out in physics before revolutionizing genetics. Greg Cochran continued to work in optical physics while collaborating with evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald, cultural anthropologist Henry Harpending & physical anthropologist John Hawkes. Robin Hanson studied physics before econ. Cochran chalks that up to physicists just being smarter than other scientists, but pure mathematicians appear to be peers in terms of IQ while doing less scientific imperialism from what I can tell.
Jens Gundlach won the Breakthrough Prize for his work on Gravitation, but he also dipped into biology and made substantial contributions to nanopore sequencing. It was fun to watch.
For me, the classic example of an expert in one field who should have stayed there is Richard Dawkins. Brilliant exponent of genetic theory, made a complete ass of himself trying to diagnose religious belief.
Hard disagree.
You don't even say which half of the comment you disagree with. It'd be pretty amazing if it was both.
Oh well spotted. I was referring to the latter.
I don't think Dawkins is *that* bad on religion. I mean, he's not outstandingly good, no; but he's far better than the average person, or even the average person who writes about religion.
He probably would have better served himself and society as a whole by sticking to evolution, though.
Gadzooks, no. It's been a long time since I read Dawkins on religion, but his ideas of how religious belief works and how and why religious people hold their beliefs is stunningly ignorant as well as hostile to the point of puerility. On the level of an Elon Musk tweet. It was heartbreaking to read, coming from a man so wise and piercingly intelligent on the subject of genetics.
What little I've heard is that surgeons, while officially MDs, are an entirely distinct species. As your quote says, they need to have really good hands, but they don't seem to need to understand the whole of medicine very well. It's an interesting situation, where there may well be two different priesthoods relative to knowledge/skill/interests and yet by social accident, everybody sees them as one priesthood.
Historically, physicians and surgeons were two entirely distinct professions. It'd be interesting to read about how and why they combined. It's like barristers (lawyers who argue in court) and solicitors (lawyers who advise clients and draw up documents), which are still two distinct professions in the UK.
Back when you were talking about the value of your and Aella's surveys, that they were no worse than a standard survey and thus were equally useful, I commented that there's a negative conclusion to that comparison- surveys in general are hokum that tell us very little "real." A mediocre, easily-abused tool for attempting to understand masses of complex systems. Maybe better than "I made it up," but not by much, and weaponizable to the same degree that it's better.
I feel somewhat similarly about your position on new versus old media. New media, in whatever way you think they have to be subtle, they are vastly better at lying because of it! "Nothing ever happens" is most interesting when it's wrong; "media very rarely lies" is concerning because it's so much more dangerous when they do. The damage done by a racist street preacher (or youtuber) is nothing compared to that done by a racist high priest with the backing of institutions.
Unfortunately, the logical endpoint here is something akin to an epistemic nihilism-solipsism, that knowing things beyond the self are basically impossible and meaningless. I don't think that's literally true, but approaches truth quickly, perhaps exponentially, once we're past Dunbar's number. I don't have a good solution here, but...
>And when should we trust non-priest public intellectuals / bloggers / influencers / etc, on the grounds that at least they have a million uncorrelated failure modes instead of one big one?
This question tempts me to say "most of the time." With the non-priests it would take an incredible amount of time and attention to sift the wheat from the chaff, whereas with the priests you're trying to separate the good wheat from the poisoned.
Being radically unconfident about most things is probably safer and healthier than being radically confident about something incredibly destructive. But it comes with a massive set of tradeoffs.
>If the answer is “significantly”, should we be trying to fix them, or to replicate their function in a different structure?
Different structure. Start from scratch (ish). A lot of small liberal arts colleges will be shuttering and the rationalist movement could buy one of those instead of a castle.
>on the grounds that at least they require their mistruths to be subtle (which limits the amount of damage they can do and ensures some correlation with truth)
You cannot have seriously written that sentence. Nothing about their mistruths have to be subtle, limited in the damage they can cause, or correlated to truth. Nothing about the last ten years of "mis/dis/mal/cheap fake/etc" has required subtlety, limits, or correlation to truth! To the extent the damage was limited (to the degree of billions or trillions of dollars, God knows how many life-years, the damage to reputation and Liberalism, rather than to the degree of "literally extinction of civilization"), it was that humans burned out and that Capitalism is somewhat less suicidal than many other priesthood memes.
> sift the wheat from the chaff, whereas with the priests you're trying to separate the good wheat from the poisoned.
I love this metaphor! Thanks!
But why assume that once you've separated the wheat from the chaff, none of the wheat is poisoned? YouTubers can be subtle too.
"I think the priesthoods are still good at their core functions. Doctors are good at figuring out which medicines work. Journalists are good at learning which Middle Eastern countries are having wars today and interviewing the participants about what fighting wars in the Middle East is like. Architects are good at designing buildings that don’t collapse.
But now this truth must coexist with an opposite truth: the priesthoods are no longer trustworthy on anything adjacent to politics."
The trouble is, all of those things--medicines, middle East wars, buildings--are adjacent to politics, at least as now practiced in the West.
I think this might just be recency bias.
The analysis itself mentions how Marxism captured almost every academic field. We've been in "wokeness" land for 10 years (I don't buy the straightforward badness of woke ideas as hard as people in this space do, but admittedly there's some problems) and its star is already fading. I think probably this just happens sometimes.
If we had to find a thing about these ideas that causes them to capture academics more than the general public, it's gotta be the mix of "actually the public doesn't know what's good for them" and demands for ideological purity. That combined is a powerful carrot and stick in fields where reputation is the only currency.
I'm going to second this. I've read a lot about left-wing extremism in 1960s/70s America, and a lot of what went on then is pretty similar. You had a bunch of stupid left-wing ideas overtaking academic, legal, and medical professions, and people too scared to say no to them. This is something that happens in cycles, wokeness is just the most recent one.
...so, when does your $19.99 supplement go on sale? ;)
It already is: https://www.amazon.com/Unsong-Scott-Alexander/dp/B0D57BYS3Y
I am a member of the priesthood in good standing (MIT CS professor), find the proposed reason for why wokeness took over academia unconvincing, and want to offer a different one.
I'm probably more woke than most of my colleagues---here is the midpoint of a debate I had with Pedro Domingos, opposing an academic free speech petition from what could be called a "woke" perspective https://david-karger.medium.com/a-rebuttal-to-some-cs-academics-free-speech-open-letter-to-the-acm-729ce1cb6caf . However, I consider myself "centrist" woke the same way I consider myself a "centrist" democrat, opposed to the more extreme tenets of wokeness.
I have never seen wokeness as a tool for status, perhaps because I have never really "performed" wokeness in public (the above debate being a very rare exception). I *behave* in ways that some would consider woke (trying to use the pronouns people want, support paying attention to race in school admissions), but I believe (perhaps I am fooling myself) that the motivation for these positions is simply caring about other people. And this points me at Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory, which posits that care for others is one of the fundamental moral values that is overweighted on the left compared to the right. I believe that wokeness generally comes from caring. That the positive parts of wokeness are simply an instantiation of "let me figure out how to be more caring of others", even if it comes at a cost to some of the other moral values such as liberty. I further speculate that if you have a monoculture of people who prioritize caring over the other values, then you have a monoculture that is particularly susceptible to being infected with wokeness.
It's been well understood for decades that academia skews left, ie, is exactly the sort of monoculture that fits my characterization. There are many explanations for why this might be, but since I've already talked about moral foundations let me circle back and propose it as a driver for the monoculture. A big part of academia is about teaching, and the large majority of academic spend their time working with and almost entirely surrounded by college students---ie, young people who in some ways we think of as still being children. So I think that academia draws in a group of people who have a bias towards caring (for children at least). Of course there are exceptions, academics who just want to do research and hate the disruptive distractions of their teaching responsibilities, but I think the vast majority of academics take some please in teaching which gives me a prior towards this foundation of caring for others.
>support paying attention to race in school admissions
How would you react to someone calling you racist because of this?
>and this points me at Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory, which posits that care for others is one of the fundamental moral values that is overweighted on the left compared to the right.
He's walked back some of that work because his original models relied too heavily on religious-focused definitions of purity, and it would be difficult to say now that many "woke" aren't deeply concerned with purity.
I think you make an interesting but self-serving point, in that the degree of "care" is extremely biased and involves so many trade-offs. You *care* more, not just at the expense of other moral foundations, but at elevating certain groups along certain axes over others. In some cases you can rationalize this through historical causes, but at scale it's always going to result in egregious hamfistedness.
One can't discuss moral foundations of care without The Heatmap: https://x.com/robkhenderson/status/1655122246724116482?lang=en (or link to full article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0)
The comments on x point out some fairly substantial difficulties with this analysis
Yes, I would agree it's difficult and per my comment above about risking epistemic nihilism, I consider social science stuff that replicates well to be not much more than "directionally true."
Scott's been writing about Newtonian Ethics (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/17/newtonian-ethics/) for a long time, and it's one of the areas where he has some overlap with a certain kind of woke attitude.
I've never seen that heatmap before but the X comment you linked to seems to obviously misrepresent it. The heatmap is made up of concentric circles. That the liberal map peaks at around level 13 and 14 doesn't mean that liberals care more about "plants, trees, and inert entities such as rocks" than they do about family and friends. It means liberals are more likely to include plants, trees, and rocks in their sphere of concern, along with family, friends, and everything in between, whereas conservatives are more likely to limit their sphere of concern to families and friends.
(I take no position one way or the other on the soundness of the paper. I'm responding to the interpretation on display in that X comment)
EDIT: OK, I see now that despite using concentric circles and categories that are increasing inclusive, up to the point of being literally all inclusive ("all things in existence") the researches tried to tell people that the categories were actually non-overlapping, i.e. "all things in existence" doesn't include your immediately family. First: Seriously?!?!? Second: that seems horribly (and unnecessarily) confusing and I question how much the participants really followed those instructions.
Sorry to keep complaining about this, but those heatmaps just seem awful. Why are they two dimensional heatmaps? What does second polar coordinate (phi) represent? The figures have no labels and the caption doesn't explain it. Am I missing something?
I would explain why i don't think it is racist to use race in admissions the same way we use other characteristics in admissions---as one of the many noisy features that can help us predict the outcome of admitting a particular student.
My point was not to argue that care was uniformly good, but to argue that the left overweights it compared to others. This has both good and bad outcomes---i agree that excessive wokeness is bad, even as i believe that much of it is driven by care.
I think this is generally correct. I think that certain ideas in "Wokeness" were natural extensions (some might say proof by reductio ad absurdum of the opposite) of a number of popular academic theories. E.g. Ibrim X Kendi is a counter argument for consequentialism (that intentions don't matter). Another aspect that I think is particularly hard for Americans to conceptualize is the tradeoffs between rights/values e.g. in my view of a just society it is both true that trans-women should be allowed to compete in woman's sports and that cis-women should not have to compete against trans-women (note that both of these cannot be simultaneously True so society's/groups which truth they want to uphold).
Of course two people can care the same amount about a third party and come to different conclusions about the best course of action – welcome to being a parent with a spouse. Try telling your wife that she wants to make different parenting decisions than you do because she "doesn't care as much" about your kid :)
I think this is a wonderful description of how fairly generic center left liberals rolled over in the face of woke. Standing up to it just seems so darn *mean.* But actual woke is dog-eat-dog zero-sum disputes about who should be in power and who should not. It is the polar opposite of nice.
Relevant: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/womens-tears-win-in-the-marketplace
It is *hard* for a nice white person to tell an upset black person they are wrong about race. It is *hard* for a nice dude to tell an upset woman she is wrong about sexism. So, they mostly don't.
(I'm not saying women and black people are *always* wrong about sexism and race, but they very often are).
*Edit* I would also invite you to consider how excessive niceness can generate cruel outcomes. The rules on this blog actually sum things up pretty well, I think. The whole idea of a statement needing to pass through at least two of three gates to be said. Is it nice? Is it true? Is it necessary?
Isn't the niceness rule om this blog just about niceness in form (eg not being rude or insulting) as opposed to niceness in content?
Yup! As long as you're not like the guy on the left in this image, you're fine. https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/578/682/575.jpg
I fully understand how sometimes The Cold Equations are the right choice. My point was not about how academics *should* behave but about how they *do*.
My emotional reaction to your comment is quite mild. I think that reveals that one of the great difficulties in life is extending individual standards of behavior to social systems. E.g., you want to be more caring is a goal that no matter how extremely you follow it, I have a hard time imagining myself objecting to, even though I'm a lot less liberal than you. But *making a society that is more caring* can rapidly cause a lot of problems, even though naively it is just an extension of being personally more caring.
Is it possible priesthoods are solving a problem that no longer exists and is now counterproductive? “Is this person worth talking to or thinking about” makes a lot more sense when you can’t ask an LLM to get all the best arguments for and against any positon, along with evidence. Having a domain jargon acts a lot better as a gating function when you can’t ask the LLM precisely how to make the argument the way an insider would.
I still think we haven’t figured out how to use the internet to actually have conversations at scale. I’d like to work on that problem. Some day.
Asking the LLM is effectively asking the priesthood. It's just a different medium than sending an inquisitive email or looking for a paper.
Someone I know is addicted to junk science documentaries, in which Bigfoot, UFOs, and worm holes, and similar are often discussed, sometimes all in the same episode! I notice Michio Kaku makes regular appearances on these, which must leave his physics priesthood colleagues fuming, especially as he probably earns pots of money in the process.
But it illustrates another point, namely that professionals often relax their priesthoods' standards once their reputation is assured, especially if they are cogging on in years or retired. This may be in pursuing studies their colleagues think misguided at best (e.g. Gerard 't Hooft's contributions to realist physics, which conventional instrumental physicists think is like getting lost down a bottomless rabbit hole), or in extreme cases (Michio Kaku) engaging directly with the hoi polloi!
I think you've missed one step in priesthood genesis. How do priesthoods gain their status?
For some professions like doctors, the answer is obviously through providing direct and beneficial services to the public. But what about the architects, or the mathematicians, or the law socieities?
Here, I think the priesthoods themselves need to be crowned by an external actor. That might have once been a traditional authority (the literal King, or the church, or the government), but post-2000 or so that became the traditional media.
To the extent that the wokeness-capture hypothesis is correct (I'm indifferent and don't care to debate it), I think that's how it could "infect" priesthoods. The mass media itself fractured into a lower-status but more populous right (Fox News) and a higher-status and more elite left, so the status-having media as a whole is more likely to enforce left-orthodoxy than right-orthodoxy.
Particularly in the (US) reaction to the 2000s Iraq War, whole professions may have felt their status threatened by not applying the right critical theories. Trump circa 2015 also seemed like an anti-status Schelling point, perhaps reinforcing the phenomenon.
This seems clearly wrong, at least for mathematicians and most other academics. It literally works like a priesthood, with the older generation ordaining the new one as they prove they have mastered the rules. Academia is centuries old and ordainment has been (mostly) divorced from the mundane world’s events and very much done internally for at least a couple of centuries.
OTOH mathematics is a useful tool for a lot of things and a lot of mathematicians do a lot of teaching. The highest ranks of the priesthood do indeed do research that only a few of even the highest ranks understand, but OTOH the resources needed to support that are quite small and can be quietly added as a surcharge to mathematics' more practical activities.
I think an important aspect of the problem is giving priesthoods hard as opposed to soft power, and the way this tends to naturally happen under regulation.
When academic music is dreadful, this isn't great. But it doesn't do very much damage. No-one needs to pay attention to academic music. They can continue listening to Taylor Swift no matter how atonal the noises coming from the building labeled 'Music Department' are.
The Music Department can try to persuade people that actually its noises are better music. Sometimes (as in architecture), they may convince some status-desparate people to play their music in order to seem intellectual.
But anyone who doesn't mind priests sneering at them can continue to live in McMansions and listen to Taylor Swift.
But if you were to legally require all music to be approved by the Music Department before anyone could perform it, that would be very bad.
And in practice, priesthoods are very good at taking control of regulatory structures. So 'the Fiddle and Drum Association must approve your new song' inevitably ends up meaning 'the Music Priesthood must approve your new song'.
And at this point ordinary people no longer have the ability to ignore the priesthood, because the priesthood has subverted government to enforce its preferences.
This. I didn't have any issue with the priesthoods...until 2020 came along and they extralegally seized totalitarian power (not exaggerating) and refused to give it up for two years.
The doctors' cartel is much older.
Do you have a good idea of when? I have a lower limit but thats all, for all I know its been a unbroken chain since before written history.
From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_license,
"In the 1870s, almost all U.S. physicians were still unlicensed."
"the enactment of U.S. state medical licensing laws in the late 1800s was for the primary purpose of reducing competition and allowing physicians to make more money."
"In 1889, Dent v. West Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time upheld a state physician licensing law."
Thats after my lower limit of the distinction between physicians and surgeons in old english
Pulling on that thread gets "Royal Colleges of Surgeons" and "15th century" but it being unclear whats the earilyest date for the concept
> He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1712 and the following year saw the publishing of his Anatomy of the Human Body, which achieved great popularity becoming an essential study source for students, lasting through thirteen editions,[1] mainly because it was written in English instead of Latin as was customary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cheselden
If someone claimed "doctors have been regulated by states since rome" I probably just believe them, bet you could keep pulling
Some random thoughts:
1. Is wokeness uniquely virulent? You mention Marxism sweeping the academy, is it just that it happened long enough ago that we have no sense of how disruptive it was at the time?
2. Insofar as wokeness needs a separate explanation, does it have anything to do with the fact that many of the core ideas emerged from within academia? Were they pre-engineered to appeal to smart technical people? Did they gain more status by being associated with another priestly faction?
3. How much of this is a phenomenon of priests vs the priestly support staff, the "nuns" and "deacons"? When I think of the scientific institutions that most ruined their reputations I think of like, Scientific American, which occupies an intermediate position between the priesthood and the public.
I think social media potentially fits in here: I wonder how much things went wrong at regulating the priesthood internally vs regulating something at the boundary between the priesthood and the rest of the world?
For the last point I'm imagining something like a combination of elite overproduction and social media: more potential priests are available for priesthoods, which both lowers the gradient between the inside and the outside, and also leads to larger numbers of people who are adjacent to the priesthood: people who did a year of grad school, or did the Columbia journalism school thing, but didn't end up actually becoming a professor or journalist, or if so ended up as a perpetual adjunct/freelancer, to precarious to be a part of the priesthood and thus subject to its discipline, but still close enough to have a) picked up the academic marxist jargon if there was any in their field and b) close to people who are in the priesthood and maybe in a position to implement some pressure from below.
This is all pretty speculative, but feels like something in this direction is part of the story
It's been argued that they're the same thing: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
Richard Hanania's argument is partly that the current civil rights regime is not what people actually voted for in 1964 (and were explicit at the time, but they got ignored by judges/bureaucrats later).
I should be clear, I don't mean "virulent" pejoratively here, and to whatever extent wokeness or civil rights are destructive, that's not what I'm asking...I mean virulent in terms of how quickly and thoroughly it spread through the "priesthoods".
Purely descriptively, did civil rights in the sixties or Marxism in the thirties(? forties? fifties?) sweep through purportedly neutral institutions in the same way?
Like, to return to this point, I understand that the split of the Futurians from the Greater New York Science Fiction Club was basically because the Futurians wanted to be more Marxist; I don't know how acrimonious the split was, but according to Frederick Pohl, "No CIA nor KGB ever wrestled so valiantly for the soul of an emerging nation as New Fandom and the Futurians did for science fiction".
This was in the 30s, over Communism, but it has the same feeling as fights within fandoms today (I think). Was this representative? Did the same fights play out in universities and other institutions? If so, does this change the necessity for, or the desiderata for, an explanation of what happened with wokeness in the 2010s?
> Is wokeness uniquely virulent? You mention Marxism sweeping the academy, is it just that it happened long enough ago that we have no sense of how disruptive it was at the time?
I've heard it argued that wokeness and Marxism are just cosmetic variations of the same thing, which is traceable back to Hegelian dialectics and Gnosticism. Core of it is the idea that there is literally no such thing as objective truth (at least in a conventional, empirical sense), only liars and sheep, playing social games in which factual claims are one type of weapon among many. When Feynman said "nature cannot be fooled," and when Lysenko built his career on trying anyway, that's the root issue they were disagreeing about.
i don’t think this is right.
there is a skeptical/relativist tendency that shows up in all cultures from ancient times to today, but there’s not a single genealogy. the Greeks had the Sophists, China had the legalists. similar ideas recur but there is no continuous line.
left politics tends to be 1) secular 2) skeptical of claims of cultural superiority. in the late 20th century this looked like postmodern relativism about absolute truth claims made by religious and nationalist movements.
but many of the most influential strands of social justice politics as well as Marxism believe pretty strongly in truth claims on many topics. (try promoting postmodern relativism in the USSR!)
and in terms of US political factions the two groups hate each other, apparent convergence of ideas is really more like an attempt to outcompete each other in intra-left debates. (eg Marxists thinking about racialized capitalism, or social justice liberals trying to reframe oppressed identity groups as a kind of new proletariat).
> but there is no continuous line.
"No line from Hegel to chinese Legalists" is a different claim from "no line from Woke to Marx" or "no line from Marx to Hegel."
> but many of the most influential strands of social justice politics as well as Marxism believe pretty strongly in truth claims on many topics. (try promoting postmodern relativism in the USSR!)
Someone doesn't necessarily need to truly care about - believe in - e.g. the Fulda Gap, as an end in itself, in order to leap to its defense when enemies come near.
> the two groups hate each other,
Do wolves of the same lineage never compete over access to finite hunting grounds? Do siblings never quarrel, even in the absence of such constraints?
I think most 20th century Marxists really truly believed in a lot of ideas. Most importantly development of productive forces initially driven by capitalism and later wisely steered by the Party, would as a result of the historical dialectic inevitably lead to the victory of the proletariat, etc. Like with any ideology, some were cynical, but there were many true believers especially early on.
Likewise woke social justice people are not relativists when it comes to, say, historical claims about American chattel slavery or the merits of colonialism.
There are no doubt connections between left-wing movements, but I do not believe they are simple, and I don't believe that the driving common factor is relativism about truth claims.
By analogy, you could (and many leftists do) look at racists within the Libertarian movement, and say this proves that free market capitalism = white supremacy, but it just wouldn't be historically accurate.
> Core of it is the idea that there is literally no such thing as objective truth (at least in a conventional, empirical sense), only liars and sheep, playing social games in which factual claims are one type of weapon among many.
Damn, Marx sure wasted a bunch of time writing Capital then.
People say their enemies don't care about truth, always, and they'll always have something to point to as argument since arguments are soldiers and all that. (In fact, I suspect a big part of why Marxism gets this is that Marx is making this exact same claim in the other direction: that the "truth" of the dominant institutions represents the desires of the ruling class, rather than the actual truth.) But Marxism and wokeness both make fairly objective, clear-cut, factual claims. They absolutely believe in truth.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/13/book-review-singer-on-marx/
> Singer blames Hegel. Hegel viewed all human history as the World-Spirit trying to recognize and incarnate itself. As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated – possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia – and everything is great forever.
> Marx famously exports Hegel’s mysticism into a materialistic version where the World-Spirit operates upon class relations rather than the interconnectedness of all things, and where you don’t come out and call it the World-Spirit – but he basically keeps the system intact.
[...]
> As far as I can tell, Marx literally, so strongly as to be unstrawmannable, believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable.
My claim is "Core of [wokeism/Marxism] is the idea that there is literally no such thing as objective truth" is not true. Marx believed in an objective truth, and believed he had found it, and argued voraciously for it on the basic of facts and reason. This does not mean he was correct about ideas like the inevitable victory of communism and blank slate-ism.
If you think being incorrect means you believe there is no such thing as objective truth, then you have effectively described all humans who have ever lived as disbelieving in objective truth, and thus there is no meaningful separation between wokeism, Marxism, conservatism, liberalism, etc.
> If you think being incorrect means you believe there is no such thing as objective truth,
All squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares.
Michael, up above, made essentially the same argument - dragging in greek Sophists and chinese Legalists rather than "all humans who have ever lived" - and I'm not interested in pursuing this further if you don't care to engage in good faith.
CRT originated in lawschools, and then dumber people promulgated heretical versions of it https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/heresy/
I guess what I'm interested in is, what's the mechanism by which dumb people propagated it? A quick skim of the argument you link to sounds consistent with what I suggest above: more elites means both more people exposed to the original idea plus more such people outcompeted in academia/journalism itself who occupy "para-academic" or "para-journalistic" positions where they are both less controlled by whatever professional standards exist, and more in a position to intermediate between the core "priesthoods" and the masses.
To try to answer the actual questions:
"How broken are priesthoods?"
Pretty broken. I mean, Trump and politics in general, but also...have you been to a hospital recently? Did that feel like a good, competent experience?
Take a relatively simple model of human flourishing: do people have family, do they have friends, are they healthy, are they wealthy? The US is pretty awesome at wealth, genuinely notably better than the rest of the world and that is genuinely important to preserve, but it does poorly on every other aspect of human flourishing and the trends are in the wrong direction.
"If the answer is “significantly”, should we be trying to fix them, or to replicate their function in a different structure?"
I dunno. Most priesthoods are based around specialized knowledge workers and it's unclear how many of those will be needed as AI develops. Like, in medicine, if you're a radiologist looking over at AI imaging and detection tools, are you confident in the future of your profession? How many government bureaucrats are doing anything that ChatGPT couldn't do? And I don't expect programming jobs to go away but...in a world where FizzBuzz is a real filter, how many programmers are going to survive the coding bots?
A lot of powerful priesthoods have uncertain economic futures in an era where their claim to status is unique cognitive work. And if we don't need them, just let them die. It's happened before, see journalism.
"How would we even begin to do either of those things?"
uh............
Modern people could be lonelier because entertainment tech has improved https://www.slowboring.com/p/sitting-at-home-alone-has-become
Certainly gripes about US culture are valid ... but then again, USAnians uniquely value wealth and its correlates -- we could be characterized as a nation with the tastes of the nouveau riche -- and people who like that tend to immigrate to the US. I remember running into one study of Americans as to how they traded off pay rate vs. the meaningfulness of their work. It turns out that generally they prefer better pay and get their "meaning" from the things they *spend* money on.
"have you been to a hospital recently? Did that feel like a good, competent experience?"
Not really sure what you're getting at here, but my n=1 data point is: yes, I was spending significant time at a hospital recently, which is almost never a "good experience" (because the hospital stay is usually necessitated by a sufficiently bad health situation), but given that constraint, I was very impressed by the competence of the doctors and staff, the care received, the facilities, etc.
It doesn't seem to me that the issues with "priesthoods" in the post have concretely changed the quality of hospital care. (Those issues seem more concentrated in various proclamations and health advice put out by professional organizations).
An interesting place to look is the perspective of the patient and doctor during a consultation. Since doctors became a full-fledged priesthood, doctors have expected to pronounce and patients to accept. The internet has changed that. I go into consultations having looked up the relevant literature on Medline. I'm not a scientist so most of it goes by my ears, but I get enough to ask relevant questions and to have a conversation.
That is an entirely different relationship, and probably a much healthier one. Perhaps it's a model for how a priesthoods could evolve: they are a priesthood and they have expertise, but they must now become much more open to challenge from the uninitiated. I choose doctors in part because they are willing to have a semi-technical discussion.
"Open to challenge from the uninitiated" isn't a stable equilibrium in the broader context - works for you because you're putting in the effort to learn, and be respectful, and the discussions are private, and even then some doctors aren't willing to play along, right? Eventually any such priesthood needs to integrate those technological advancements with their own practices, as part of rebuilding legitimacy, and rebuild some new Schelling fence between "initiated" and "everybody knows."
Yeah as a doctor I enjoy having educated patients who’ve done some limited research
I cannot tell whether this is serious or sarcastic (maybe that's the point)
It was meant in earnest
Most of the time
Although yes there are certainly people out there with strong unconventional opinions which is a different kind of challenge
Your mention of Dr. Oz made me think, for some reason, of Paul Krugman. He was a very respected economist who became a blogger and columnist. Some of his columns deal with economics, but most don't. Even his economics-themed columns are mostly shameless partisan hackery. And some are shameless self-promotion. I don't know whether this cost him any credibility within the economics priesthood, but I've never had reason to think it did.
Is this because his shameless hackery is Democratic? Or because his reputation as an economist was already secure before he ventured out? Or that political commentary is considered to be within the legitimate boundary of the Economics priesthood? Maybe something else?
> Is this because his shameless hackery is Democratic?
Yes. If you doubt this, ask yourself what the reaction would have been if Krugman had written op-eds in support of Donald Trump's economic policies.
Krugman is a very interesting example, because his past self wrote a critique of his current (or recent) self. In Peddling Prosperity, he talks about serious academics who become nutbars when they move into the role of public talking-head.
OTOH he's up-front about it; he titles his column "The Conscience of a Liberal".
As I recall, his blog was "The Conscience of a Liberal" - his column just had his name.
Your Science Fiction Fandom point is the result of a really clear error, here; Sci Fi people are not insulated from academia. If you capture Professional Academics you capture Hobbyist Nerd Book Dweebs. Everyone who knows Klingon also knows a great deal about programming or shakespeare or some other thing. This is because Sci Fi Fandom is itself an identity adopted by people who want to be seen as smart. How many midwits did you meet during the first season of Rick and Morty who hung their hat on the idea that it was a smart show for smart people that normies just don't get? How many internet battles have been fought by people defending this idea from the (idiotic, out of touch, evil, malicious) owners of the various fantasy properties who would like to make some more money off it by getting your sister to watch it too?
The proliferation of midwits in the priesthoods due to elite overproduction has got to be a strong contender if we're looking for an explanation of why those priesthoods have become more susceptible to nonsense lately.
I think this is actually just an autist thing. I don't think everybody in fandom or academia is an autist but if you dig into who the load bearing pillars of any given academic discipline or fandom are, I bet you $100 you will find a bunch of autists whose special interests happen to be Star Trek or particle physics. Autists also tend to be rigid thinkers who take things to the utmost ends of their logical conclusions even when those are absurd and to get extremely upset when their mental wonderlands are poked with a stick by some dirty doubter. (I am autistic myself for the record so I can say all this from first-hand experience).
So, I don't think it's that sci-fi fandom and academia overlap in some specific way as that the very passionate people in both environments tend to be a certain kind of person.
The prototype: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Gernsback
I do not believe this was the case, and I was a part of science fiction fandom during the early years of this process. The "woke" capture of SF fandom started with the fans before spreading to the authors and editors, almost none of whom were Professional Academics. Only a small minority of SF fans, authors, and/or editors are university professors or other academics, and even then their status in the SF community is largely independent of their status in academia.
Yes, SF fans are for the most part people who think of themselves as smart and want to be thought of as smart, but "smart" and "academic" are two different things. Very few fans are thinking in terms of "smart, you know, like university professors".
> I’m not entirely satisfied with this theory because wokeness infiltrated non-priesthoods without psychological complexes around in-touchness (eg science fiction fandom) just as quickly and easily as it did the priesthoods;
Subscultures are kind of priesthoods too, see the Geeks, MOPs and sociopaths models: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths. I think this model goes with yours nicely because while you can see wokeness or Marxism or stuff like that as a disease, you can also see it as a kind of predation by some people that can gain by imposing the norms. If you're not a great member of your priesthood but suddenly everyone must care about Ritual Purity Under The Moonlight and for some reason you're better at this than average, you can climb the ranks quickly and become cool and important as a Ritual Purity Under The Moonlight specialist.
> [...] I still have basic trust that something in the New York Times’ non-opinion pages is 99% likely to be factually true - probably spun a bit, probably selected from the space of possible news articles because it supports the Times’ agenda, but factually true [...]
Sure, but then the question becomes: are there such things as the NYT's *non-opinion* pages? If the problem is one of opinion-writing penetrating supposedly factual 'straight' news items, then your distinction becomes unsustainable.
Maybe you've heard the old joke from Soviet times: in some competition, only an American & a Soviet athlete competes, & the American wins. Next day, the *Pravda* intones: "The Soviet competitor placed second, & the American one reached only second to last place." Factually true, but designed to give the wrong impression.
Posts like this are why I read this space.
"My thesis in this essay is that the priesthoods are neither a rent-seeking clique nor an epiphenomenon of the distribution of knowledgeable people. It’s not that we need doctors, and by coincidence various medical associations have captured the concept of “doctor” and gotten a monopoly on it. The structure of priesthoods is itself functional. They’re a type of epistemic community that is usually more accurate than - or at least uncorrelated with - the world outside. Most other arrangements of doctors would be less functional. The doctors would get drowned out by other voices and fail to converge, or be lured away by worldly baubles and stop doing good medicine."
Consider also the role of credentialism in all this. A human, any human, with "MD" following their name automatically has a certain standing within the priesthood that the most knowledgable PhD with a research focus on the area of claimed expertise does not.
And maybe it should be that way, in the sense that this is the least sub-optimal. Do you really want "the market" to determine who is and isn't qualified to practice medicine? I think that I may be smarter than the average cat, but I have no clue whether a given course of treatment is medically advisable or not, whether the vet knows what he is doing or not, whether the dose he is giving me is the right medicine or is fit only for dogs.
> Do you really want "the market" to determine who is and isn't qualified to practice medicine?
Yes. Or rather, let everyone practice medicine, and let people choose whom to come to.
End occupational licensing. Break the doctors' cartel.
1) How broken are priesthoods?
It varies from discipline to discipline. My guess is Humanities, completely. Social sciences, a big chunk, but again, some more than others. The hard sciences and math have mostly resisted.
2) If the answer is “significantly”, should we be trying to fix them, or to replicate their function in a different structure?
With the terminal ones, best solution would be burn them to the ground and start anew. Universities are currently a Humboldtian, double-headed monster. Perhaps one should go back to Academies, that do research, and Universities, that just teach.
3) How would we even begin to do either of those things?
Mentioned in 2, but the options are always reform or revolution. Reform if it is feasible, new, alternative institutions to be created otherwise, while one starves the previous ones of money and prestige.
> It varies from discipline to discipline. My guess is Humanities, completely.
History gets classified with the humanities, but probably has more worthwhile integrity than most thanks to being anchored in empirical data from archaeology.
Yes, that part of History. But most of it ain't archeology, as is as prone to woke relativist games as any of the other Humanities.
Having "derivation of facts from primary sources" as a provably-solid foundation to fall back on makes a big difference for reform vs. revolution sorts of planning.
Not really. I mean, "derivation of facts from primary sources" is too vague. In most cases, one can easily make the sources fit almost any angle, narrative and/or interpretation you wish, including wildly opposing ones.
Every reflection of priesthoods inevitably suborns the creation of a new priesthood by another name
I think the Mormons just have laymen with no separate priests.
True (with some quibbles possible). And we have a name for those who claim to exercise divine authority for personal gain, especially those who bend and twist the Word to ingratiate themselves with people who can pay or provide access to power, and it's not complimentary.
I think part of the woke capture story is downstream of the political polarization of the professions. It’s not just that there aren’t any republican professors, there are barely any republican doctors and lawyers, and it’s much easier to be captured by a fringe movement if the values it purports to further are ones that everyone already professes.
Perhaps a key element of priesthoods is a restriction on the number of seats. The easier it is for any churchgoer to become a priest, the faster the social power of the priesthood approaches zero.
I think engineering is a good example of this. There really is no engineering priesthood. People have a vague sense of what engineering schools are “better” than others but the school you went to almost never comes up, especially after you’re a few years into your profession and have some experience. Professors of engineering are not really considered to be priests because what they do on a day to day basis is quite different from what practicing engineers do. The idea of a professor of engineering speaking ex cathedra and expecting his words to be definitive strikes me as absurd and he would be mocked for pomposity. And I think crucially what drives all of this is that it’s relatively easy to become an engineer. There is no cartel rationing out seats at engineering institutions. There is no federal limit on the number of engineering seats that will be funded.
If there were ten times as many doctors (or architects) it seems that the prestige of the priesthood would breakdown. This might be good for the profession overall.
Engineering doesn't need most of the social protections of a priesthood because any fool can tell the difference between an engine that works and one that doesn't, and totally fraudulent engineers can't build working engines. So, easy to find a known-good engineer on short notice, then have them check on subtler details of the others as necessary.
Then again, there is the highly regulated status of "professional engineer", much hard to obtain than an ordinary engineering education, which allows one to peddle "engineering" services to the general public. But maybe that's a regulated profession that doesn't have the sociological features of a priesthood.
Generally good!
It’s weird to me that you list Eero Saarinen as someone who lost architect status by being popular - he’s a pretty high status architect, even if Tom Wolfe loves to amplify the voices that criticize him and pretend that they represent the community rejecting him.
I’m not sure that these priesthoods generate consensus as much as you say - there are some issues on which they do, but others on which they vastly amplify dissent. You’re supposed to have some extreme heterodox views if you’re going to be a member of the priesthood in good standing - though maybe there are particular forms of heterodoxy that are discouraged because they’re too popular with the public.
The big problem I see with individualism in the rationalist community is the emphasis on being like a Tetlock fox - this is how you make your own predictions more accurate, but it does very little to help the accuracy of the community, while a Tetlock hedgehog (which priesthoods encourage) is likely to be personally wrong, but provide interesting new ideas for foxes elsewhere to use to be more accurate.
And a minor point: musicologists aren’t the ones that endorse atonal music - they are more like historians looking at all the non-musical factors that led to the rise of tonality in the 1600s or whatever.
I think that part of the reason that wokeness was so successful in infiltrating many of this post is calling Priesthoods, is that, unlike actual Priesthoods, fields like Medicine are fundamentally progressive. They are concerned with advancing a body of knowledge for a particular purpose; in the case of medicine, that purpose is advancing the health and well-being of their patients and humanity as a whole. Most fields with Priesthoods have a similar goal. Wokeness came in and said, "Here are a bunch of ways that you're failing at helping people you say you care about or that you should care about, and in a bunch of ways you don't have expertise in seeing." This gave wokeness a perfect entry vector, by going in through the established values system, but bypassed the defense mechanisms currently in place, by being academic but in a field that the priesthoods didn't have a background in.
The initial few paragraphs reminded me of a fun article "It takes two to think" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-02074-2.
Also, in my field (computational chemistry) I have noticed that the boundary against capitalism seems to be steadily disappearing. When I started my PhD 3 years ago, for a PI to have a company on the side was still viewed as quite unusual (unpure?). These days, even the most traditional professors seems to be starting their own companies.
In a close parallel to the pharma case you mentioned, these companies also still follow some of the rituals of academia: publish in the papers, fund PhD in universities etc.
Scott, Have you read about how H Pylori was found to be the cause of many stomach ulcers? The Australian doctor who made the discovery (by experimenting on himself!) was ignored for decades (if I remember that detail correctly) by the medical establishment because he wasn't from a prestigious college!
Once you realize that medicine was worse than useless for most of its history https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/medicine-as-a-pseudoscience/ it then seems like more of a fluke that it got into value-added practices. They were "priests" beforehand, and there have been "witch doctors" in many cultures who supposedly have sacred knowledge, even if that knowledge was just about how to convince people you have medicinal powers. But as long as The Real Problem of the public being too ignorant to evaluate whether they actually have such knowledge exists https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-real-problemhtml then you can't be confident any kind of priest is going to actually be better than Dr. Oz. There are things like prediction markets to incentivize knowledge and make it public, but track records for doctors/hospitals are resisted. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/dissing-track-recordshtml
There was a recent transition between situations where the median academic/professional viewpoint was something like "we wish we could do something about these social ills, but there are lines we just can't cross" to "huh, why aren't we doing the obvious direct thing and crossing that so-called line anyway? let's just do that!"
(think "oh we'd like to have diverse hiring but obviously we can't do literal quotas" -> "literal quotas. that is what we need." or "we really HOPE the data comes out this way, but we can't just refuse to publish papers where the data comes out the other way" -> "yes we can! and we should! don't publish the papers with the untoward results!")
I don't totally get how this transition happened, but it has to be a different thing than basic political orientation or the "bright idea" of being fashionably ahead of the public, both of which existed for decades or more.
This seems more like a rapid development of common knowledge that traditional "lines" are being crossed all the time without penalty. That would explain the speed of change. Procedural rules and traditional impartiality standards might have been unenforced for a long time, but something made it suddenly very visible that you could get away with flouting them, and then a lot of people did, all at once.
The internet/social media did. The same thing happened with various shoplifting sprees across the USA when people found out rules weren't being enforced.
"Now in-touch-ness is no longer about pleasing the “barbaric yawps” and their middlebrow tastes. It’s about pleasing all the identity groups who each require a special language that only smart people can learn. In fact, you don’t even need to actually please them! You can call Latinos “Latinx”, which they are known to hate, and you will be even more in touch than the Latinxes themselves!"
You claim that your theory doesn't explain the capture of non-priesthoods like science fiction fandom, but what makes SF-fans not part of a priesthood themselves? Sure, their knowledge isn't accredited by a university degree, but this community plays the same status game as other more recognized intellectual communities. Only communities that don't value intellectualism are pretty immune from Wokeness.
Perhaps a fandom is more likely to lose you some prestige among the general public, that's not true for all fandoms (classical music comes to mind).
Conversely, scaling the ranks within some priesthoods isn't always going to gain you prestige with the general public (e.g. fat studies).
All priesthoods are somewhat connected through the university system, which makes prestige somewhat more transferable from one priesthood to the next. Fandoms *can* be very isolated, which makes their prestige less transferable.
I think in the case of "what was different about the 2010s" the big thing you have to pay attention to is that this was the first big chance for a fad to sweep through after basically all of the professions had become partisan monocultures. There were partisan monocultures (e.g. sociology) among the priesthoods before that, but plenty (e.g. medicine) were much more mixed. You could argue a bunch about why that changed and probably get to something like "the increasingly widespread adoption of cosmopolitan values in society led to them becoming an active point of political contestation, and a realignment around cosmopolitanism that tended to sort the significant bulk of educated people into the cosmopolitan party", or you could just say "gay marriage" and be like 65% right.
Anyway, I feel like that does a ton of work; social flashpoint around broad issues of cosompolitan values comes along right after nearly all the priesthoods have aligned onto the same political team because of cosmopolitanism. The interesting question, given that said alignment doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon, is whether any of these priesthoods can evolve norms that apply standard rigorousness checks to claims with partisan valence.
This is a version of strategy decay (https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/strategy-decay-as-an-institutional). The fact that there are first iconoclastic ways to succeed, which get shrouded by rules over time as people discover this is a way to "win", and over time they get goodharted or eroded, sometimes by force. The same can be seen across almost every facet of life where experts reign supreme from medicine to politics to architecture.
I think the flaws of the priesthood of academia are deeper than wokeness. Personal story: Recently I had a visiting professor contract not renewed for my unwillingness to teach a conventional curriculum in an intro psych class, despite my class promoting some pretty woke ideas (e.g. against the genetic basis of intelligence, for racial motives underlying drug scheduling, against traditional grading systems).
From my perspective teaching intro psychology, there’s a tension between two sets of facts, #1) the facts about how to evaluate the validity of a claim (replication, generalizability, large & consistent effects), and #2) the claims that pass these tests. The 2010’s was a time in which a priestly faction emerged that promoted #1, and everyone accepted #1 was a good idea. However, there was no widespread simultaneous rejection of #2. Now, we live in an era of contradiction, in which the priesthood teaches critical thinking, but also the claims that fail the test of critical thinking.
Since the existing priestly class manages hiring & journal’s editorial decisions, the priestly class often anoint new priests who publicly extoll the contributions of the members of hiring committees & editors who mainly contributed #2 (even if indirectly by glorifying adjacent research). However, #2 is often not synonymous with wokeness. Sometimes #2 is “the mind recalls lists of digits in a serial way”, or “the amygdala is the fear center of the brain”.
These things are so esoteric and hard-to-critique and boring-to-critique for an outsider that revolts can only come from an expert/priestly-class. I agree we need priests, but we need the right priests, and I think a partial solution is something boring like working from the rule of law, rather than the rule of man - meaning something like more explicit & transparent criteria for hiring or editorial decisions. For example, empowering the people who run organizations like the Cochrane Review who have explicit standards for ritually-pure communication, who I think do a lot more to advance science and medical decision-making than most.
I, too, teach a college level Intro Psych class, and I can vouch for the accuracy of this. I've run into problems when my teaching deviates from the mandatory textbook the department requires. In my case, it was mostly a matter of emphasis. The chapters on Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis were mandatory, but Darwin's theory of natural selection, the two track model of attention, and, yes, alternatives to biological determinism were not. Given only 14 class sessions, and that the mandatory material was quite extensive, this was a de facto policy of not teaching those ideas. I had a long and painful discussion with my supervisor (a clinical psychologist by training) on exactly what claims regarding how well therapy works and why can be supported and which can't.
It's the communication, no? It's always been the communication. Memetic plagues became easier to transmit with printed books. Easier again with intercontinental travel. Easier yet again each time with the telephone, radio, and television.
Now, we have social media, where anyone can go and see what memetic plagues are falling out of anyone else's head. If you increase transmissibility, you get more infection risk.
Classical music is like a “priesthood” in this sense, and I don’t just mean contemporary composers.
When I was younger, I was annoyed by the snobbery of the classical music world. I’m still annoyed by it, but over time, I’ve come to understand that this snobbery serves at least two useful purposes, and without it, classical music might not exist.
One purpose is to help classical musicians find the fortitude necessary for their vocation. Attaining even basic professional competence in classical music takes a lifetime of grueling work and sacrifice. Years of lessons, and countless hours in the practice room. To prove your mettle you have to make it through a gauntlet of gatekeeping rituals like competitions, auditions, and “juries” (special performances for panels of experts who decide if you’re good enough to be awarded a degree). Once you’re admitted into the ranks of the profession, you’re considered lucky if you eke out a barely-middle-class income without a day job. (Not to mention, there’s a decent chance you’ll get sexually harassed or assaulted somewhere along the way!) In the midst of this life, the idea that someone can learn three guitar chords, groan into a microphone, and make a million dollars feels outrageous! (your perception isn’t quite fair–success in rock and pop music does take work–but it’s directionally correct!). If you’re going to persevere, it helps to believe that what you’re doing is objectively much better and more worthy than the trash or trifles that any other type of “musician” is producing.
(Incidentally, like the members of other “priesthoods”, classical musicians often feel a special kind of resentment toward other classical musicians who have “crossover” success and make a lot of money by appealing to the masses, e.g., Andrea Bocelli. Others manage to become household names while maintaining their reputations within the priesthood, like Yo-yo Ma)
Anyway, the fortitude is tied closely to the second useful purpose of the snobbery, which is to maintain the integrity of the tradition. Classical music performance requires mastery of many technical skills and stylistic nuances that can only be attained through years of one-on-one study with expert teachers. The learning would happen in a fundamentally different way if the teaching was delivered with a mindset of “here is one good way to play one of many good kinds of music on the violin” instead of how it’s actually delivered, which is more like “here is The Correct Way to play Brahms (i.e. proper Music) on the violin”. There’s a kind of moral impetus there, which might actually be essential to the project.
All that being said, my perception is that classical music snobbery has softened a lot over the past 25 years or so. As someone who hates snobbery, this makes me happy, but as someone who loves classical music, this makes me worried.
(I’ll also offer a correction to your perception of the music being written in universities and conservatories… the super-dissonant, atonal stuff hasn’t been in vogue for quite a while–now we’re in a “post-modern” era where nominally just about anything goes, and the actual values and norms are more vague and covert. Notably, this shift has definitely included efforts to get more “in touch”, although it’s not like more people are listening to it… Also–technically, musicologists are the scholars who write scholarly papers about music; the people who write music are still called composers, even if they’re employed by universities.)
This is fascinating. I can't recall a single contemporary classical piece of music that I have heard. Outside of movie theme songs, I thought the field was dead. I suppose the likes of Hans Zimmer isn't though of very highly within the classical priesthood, then?
Soundtracks, (to movies, TV shows, and video games,) are indeed the new repository of classical music. This shouldn't be too shocking; it's not like the great classical composers of old just went around writing music purely for the fun of it. Virtually all of them had patrons who commissioned them to write cool stuff that we enjoy today.
And who's commissioning new instrumental music today? Who are today's patrons? Film, TV, and video game producers.
Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMFCM0SKbnY . It's one of the great pieces of modern-day classical music, performed by an orchestra and choir. It's a four-movement masterpiece that draws heavily on the Classical tradition, including one movement that borrows quite directly from Bach. (You'll recognize it when you hear it, if you're familiar with his works.)
Where did it originate? As the soundtrack to the final boss sequence of one of the most highly-regarded video games of all time.
It's funny you bring up Uematsu, because he apparently had zero training in writing classical music. He really was just going on vibes, which apparently is enough.
Huh. I hadn't heard that. Where did you hear that from?
One thing I *have* heard is that the Prelude, one of his best-known works, was thrown together at the last minute (because he was under immense time pressure) simply by drawing on his training in music theory and pulling out a sequence of standard arpeggios which, as you put it, "vibes" quite well, but is not something an untrained artist would know how to reach for.
I think I just read it somewhere and never bothered to verify it, but here's his Wikipedia bio:
Uematsu was born in Kōchi, Kōchi, Japan.[7] A self-taught musician, he began to play the piano when he was twelve years old,[1] and did not take any formal piano lessons.[8] He has an older sister who also played the piano.[4] After graduating from Kanagawa University with a degree in English, Uematsu played the keyboard in several amateur bands and composed music for television commercials.[1] When Uematsu was working at a music rental shop in Tokyo, a Square employee asked if he would be interested in creating music for some of the titles they were working on. Although he agreed, Uematsu at the time considered it a side job, and he did not think it would become a full-time career. He said it was a way to make some money on the side, while also keeping his part-time job at the music rental shop.[4]
Wow! TIL.
Uematsu seems like he'd be one of those outsiders of the priesthood because he's a commercial video game composer. You're saying that isn't true, that he's a respected member of the priesthood?
I'm not saying anything about his status within the musical community "priesthood." I'm saying that people like him are the modern-day classical music composers, and offering this as an example of well-done modern music in the classical style.
No, Hans Zimmer wouldn't be considered part of this priesthood. The classically trained musicians who play on his film scores are, though.
There are some composers who write music for movies while remaining fully respected in the classical music world. John Corigliano and Nico Muhly are good recent examples. Aaron Copeland and Leonard Bernstein did it too, back in the day.
Classical music composition is not dead! Just very niche. Its quality varies a lot, in my opinion, but some of it's very good! Here's one written in 2008 that I just heard for the first time and like a lot https://youtu.be/ApK3iv2Sfbc?si=aCx_xJ1LjZBIjX6W
Wow, so much good music. This is the most useful thread is quite a while...
How does the priesthood feel about Arvo Part? He's the only living composer who normal people seem to listen to.
Yeah, they accept him.
normal people also listen to and enjoy Ligeti (2001), Caroline Shaw and John Adams (e.g. Call me by your Name).
And people who like modernist music are still normal people, they just have weird taste.
In the sense that “every cause wants to be a cult”, is it also the case that every pursuit wants to be a priesthood?
I’ve seen a couple of examples recently where someone wrote about their firsthand experiences of something (e.g. the campus protests), and were dismissed by others: “I’m not going to believe a word he says. He’s not a real journalist, he’s just a blogger.”
There was another case — I wish I could remember where I heard this — where someone said something like “It was OK for Alice to tweet a joke like that, because she’s a professional comedian, but Bob is not, so it’s not OK for him.”
I’m an accountant, so my first snarky thought when I heard this was “Ah, yes. It’s OK for the professional comedians, because they have taken a grueling twelve-hour exam and proven themselves, for the protection of the public. If anyone could just hold themselves out as comedians (by *checks notes* telling jokes), that would be very bad indeed.”
It's more "I can get Bob fired by tweeting at his employer, so he better fall in line. Alice is self-employed/independently wealthy, so whatever."
Tweeting at the venues where Alice would be performing comedy seems like it would be *more* effective than tweeting at the company Bob does the books for.
The threat of a boycott against a generic corporation because they have the wrong accountant is largely idle because of the impractical coordination problem - almost nobody is going to know who the company's accountant even is, and the Largest Tweetstorm Ever would reach only a tiny fraction of the company's customers and most of them won't really care.
But the threat of boycott against venues or platforms hosting an entertainer is much more serious, because the boycott doesn't even have to be organized. The tweets are evidence that there is a body of people familiar with Alice's career and so likely follow her genre, who find anything associated with Alice to be revolting. Those people can't help but notice that Alice is the opening act at Venue X tonight because Venue X is prominently advertising the fact, and they will know what sort of jokes she tells because she's presumably been advertising that. So, with no coordination, many people will decide to patronize a different venue, and the venue may find it prudent to choose a different opening act.
> I don’t fully understand why wokeness succeeded at conquering the priesthoods so much more thoroughly than any previous political fad.
Is this really the case, though? Coming from a family of academics with a network of friends in academia, I've heard their stories about how McCarthyism and blacklisting destroyed a lot of careers back in the day. Loyalty oaths were a requirement for employment back then. It seems to me that Woke is the same type of witch-hunting hysteria but with a Leftist twist this time around. And I suspect the numbers of academics and professionals who've lost their jobs to Wokism are much fewer than during the era blacklists. Has anyone really run the numbers?
> Has anyone really run the numbers?
I believe reason did, but good luck finding that sort of thing from the search engine political filters
https://www.thefire.org/news/new-red-scare-taking-over-americas-college-campuses
A claim of 100 professors vs feel free to guess an estimate for what happened during 2020 when I personal wasn't applying for jobs that said "vax required"
What numbers? How do you measure something so subjective? I suspect that if you ask ten people each of whom hate woke, you will get ten different definitions. It's like asking how many people have lost their jobs due to greed, or personal animosity. How could we ever know?
According to Ellen Schrecker in her book _No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities" (1986)_ (which I haven't read) she documents that at least 100 and possibly as many as 150 professors were dismissed from their positions or forced to resign or retire during the McCarthy witch hunts. According to the NCES, by 1960, there were approximately 58K full professors in the US. By 2020, there were 154K. Googling as best I can, it looks like a couple of dozen professors have claimed they were fired for going against the Woke. Given that there are a lot more professors today and that the documented number of firings based on Woke policies is relatively lower than during the McCarthy era, I think it's reasonable to say that the McCarthy witch hunts proportionately affected more academics than the current Woke witch hunts (oh, but witch is a gendered term, I shouldn't use — my bad).
And now that we have Google, we can track the frequency of word usage in the Media. Kevin Drum takes woke-related terms and words and uses Google trends to track their frequency. ;-)
https://jabberwocking.com/wokeness-has-declined-24-over-the-past-three-years/
Woke peaked in 2020, but we've had a recent upsurge in wokeness in the last quarter...
https://jabberwocking.com/wokeness-up-4-points-in-q4/
One would have to define what "Woke" is, first. We know what "McCarthyism" was (largely because we remember *who* McCarthy was, the phenomenon was largely traceable back to one person--a bit like an epidemic). And it wasn't limited to academia.
...I don't know why you're complaining about this now? The leftist priesthoods are en route to being purged, to be replaced with new ones. Shouldn't you be happy that the new order will be aligned with your interests? That's all you can really ask for.
I think it's fair to say that of basically every public thinker I know, Scott would be the least happy to win in a way that burns the commons.
How else do you "win"? The liberals tried tolerating dissent, and look how that ended up. Security can only be guaranteed through control. If you can't accept that, you will never be happy.
"The liberals tried tolerating dissent, and look how that ended up."
With three centuries of progress and prosperity, giving billions of people human rights, freedom from famine, and globe-spanning opportunities--things that all but a tiny elite could only dream about before liberals tried tolerating dissent?
...Why are you saying that like it all happened three centuries ago? All of those are relatively recent developments. Until then, society was much more conservative and hierarchial. The church had a grip on the populace. All of that was supplanted with modern liberalization movements in the 20th century.
...But that success is worth nothing if it's just a house of cards that falls apart in less than a century.
That seems optimistic, I dont think trump even could drain the swamp even if he wanted to; theres no reason to think that policy promise isnt a "big ask".
If the true red america was put into power why would scott be invited to the party?
As one of the apparently nonexistent nonmusicologists who deeply loves mid-20th century atonal music, I feel obliged to point out that musicologists do not produce any music, atonal or otherwise, at least not qua musicologists. They analyze it (and its history and so on). Also, some people deeply love mid-20th century atonal music.
Not all priesthoods are the same. My experience in biology (grad student until a few years ago) is that life scientists' politicking and purity rituals and all that is checked by the all-consuming, all-overriding arbiter of "is it true and what is your evidence?". Bio has trends and unpopular opinions and other things that will get you ridiculed, but that's only because they're believed to be genuinely based on and correlated with our best guess of ground truth. If you disagree with the consensus, the burden is on you to prove your point; but if someone else disproves the consensus, the burden is on you to change your views.
Two places where this can fall apart a bit:
1) Race-adjacent genetics research. This wasn't close to my area of specialty, so I don't know the social details of what's going on there. My impression from afar is that race is hot enough politically (*outside* the priesthood) that almost everyone would rather avoid it and spend their time and resources on any other of the endless available research directions.
2) Funding. It's hard to disprove scientific consensus in a grant proposal. More importantly, funding agencies are run by people with their own ideas of what makes the most interesting and exciting research. If your proposals don't align with those ideas, they're going to get beaten by proposals that do. There's a general sense among scientists that this is much, much more true than it was decades ago because there are many fewer (inflation adjusted) dollars per research scientist. Back in the Good Old Days, you'd probably get funded as long as you were capable of doing good work on *something* and could demonstrate that in writing. Now, you also have to be in the top X% of most "interesting"/"important" proposed work, for some scary value of X.
Ugh, it was difficult to be an immunologist during the pandemic. Part of this was because everyone was saying dumb things. Sometimes it was just unproven assertions that went beyond the evidence, other times it was assertions that were contrary to the evidence, and other times it was people not understanding the basic science well enough to know that they were misreading the evidence.
I observed this last one in the comments on this very blog. PhD-level people whose expertise is outside of biology would dive into the primary literature, pull something from a figure that 'suggests X' and pass it around like it was some good insight. The problem is that the original authors of the paper didn't make that assertion for a reason, because it's wrong. Just not in ways the 'uninitiated' could understand.
For example, early on in the pandemic some people were asserting that antibody protection against COVID only lasted about 3 months. Now, the claim wasn't that COVID mutates fast enough that every 3 months you have another strain floating around, but rather that someone who recovered from COVID would be susceptible to reinfection by the same strain within 3-6 months.
At the time, I pointed out that this was unlikely, and why the figure they were referring to did not suggest this conclusion at ALL but was rather a methodological artifact. Further, I noted that IF TRUE this was an extraordinary claim. The finding that COVID was so novel a virus that it could somehow delete disease-specific memory B- and T-cells it would be the most profound discovery for immunology since vaccines (probably more), and COVID-led discoveries would transform medicine more in the next 20 years than the last 100 years. Once I pointed this out, the people who made these observations understood they were in error, but I think it shows a benefit to professional 'priesthoods' that's more than what Scott has outlined. Specifically, there's an education component - often formal - that changes the discussion in two important ways:
1. Education ensures everyone knows "the basics".
Most people publishing in academic journals have read the textbooks, taken the exams, and gotten the degrees to ensure they have a basic understanding of the nuances in the field - and there's a nontrivial number of these. This includes everything the priesthood takes for granted, but that the uninitiated don't even know to ask about. It isn't just about enforcing some shibboleth. It's about the difference between getting it right and coming to the exact opposite conclusion to what would make sense to any 'normie' who had all the background information at their fingertips. Sometimes people skip the education angle and get their expertise through professional exposure, or by plowing through years' of academic review articles and basic research. Honestly, nobody cares how you got there, but it's obvious to anyone if you're new around here because you don't know the basics and we're not about to stop the conversation to catch you up on the last 20 years of background.
An analogy would help here. Find a non-native English speaker and ask them about idioms. Most native speakers use idioms all the time. It would be painful to remove them all from everyday speech, but it is equally difficult to explain every idiom as they come up. Often, you don't even realize you're using them. But to anyone new to the language, idioms can make a discussion nigh impossible to follow without someone there to constantly explain that, no, that French speaker is not actually telling you to cook an egg. The difference with idioms is that it's at least possible to get by without using them at all. When, instead, you have an established store of information that covers multiple textbooks, it's not possible to have the conversation and supply all the reasons why these statistical tests were used, this buffer solution contains magnesium, this timepoint is essential to detecting the phenomenon, etc. At some point, you're not just expected to understand the 'idioms', but to use them correctly yourself, or you can't be part of a productive conversation.
2. During your education, you get to ask all the dumb questions without bothering anyone. And any truly brilliant questions you can save for later - though the ratio of dumb to brilliant is about a million to one. And you don't know the difference!
This includes the most annoying ones, like, "Do you think maybe X causes asthma? Maybe nobody has ever thought of that before!" or the omnipresent, "I heard that Y cures cancer, but pharma companies won't let people know about it because they make too much money on chronic treatment." Honestly, a quick search on PubMed will answer both of these questions. Because, yes, we've thought about if maybe X (or really, X1, X2, X3a and X3b) might cause asthma. We've tried, like a dozen times, but it doesn't seem to be correlated. And you can look up not just that one crappy study of whether Y works in cancer, but its conclusions are based on a rat xenograft model that failed to translate into humans, or the subsequent toxicity profile showed it kills quicker than cancer - and more horrifically.
While earning your BS degree, you get to ask all these questions and mostly get some answers, while also being led to the places you can go to find them for yourself. While earning your PhD, your peers start to expect you to find those answers on your own. Once you enter the 'priesthood' you'll still have dumb questions from time to time, but you'll only toss them into the conversation when nobody else has thought of them, so the question will at least be relevant, instead of something that was answered a decade ago.
There's a reason the uninitiated are excluded from serious discussions within the priesthood, and it's the same reason children are often excluded from 'grown-up' conversations. Because when you're discussing whether you think Sally should get a second opinion about her bunion surgery, the child interjecting with a comment about a bunion cream joke from a cartoon doesn't have the background knowledge they need to contribute meaningfully to the conversation. Nobody tosses the kid out because they're afraid they might have a good point, or because the kid might question the legitimacy of the institutions, or because associating with children might pull the conversation down to 'their level'. They toss them out because they want to have a serious conversation. That requires preparation, and if you don't have the preparation it's obvious to everyone that you're not ready to participate.
I'm not convinced either way, and Scott's writeup didn't significantly change my opinion on the matter. Regardless, I wouldn't judge all of biology to be untrustworthy because it's unable to answer a question, especially a historically specific question like this one.
If, OTOH, you're saying you don't trust the people who made official Declarations of Truth about the origins of COVID because they claim to represent 'the scientific consensus', I would suggest that's a valid condemnation of those specific officials/institutions, and not on 'the priesthood' of biology in general. I have a lot of criticisms of public officials, and how they hijacked the biomedical 'priesthood' and our reputation, while rejecting much of our prior work.
To the epidemiologists who designed airflow on airplanes to reduce the spread of pandemics, it must have been infuriating to see all their hard work undermined by masking policies that ensured airflow was redirected laterally. I doubt they would agree that the people making those policies represented the priesthood, just because they invoked it in their justification of a their asinine ideas.
Lots of research and recommendations made prior to COVID were tossed out the window by people (some of whom should have known better) making panicked decisions and pretending that they were blazing new trails, that nobody had ever thought of any of these things before.
It was difficult for the rank and file to do so. I think the bigger problem was the complete lack of debate at institutions on key decisions. Maybe part of this was because the decisions were top-down, and part of it was that debate had been removed from within the Overton window by social media. But a large part of the benefit of institutions "within the priesthood" is supposed to be the idea that they're separate from outside influence. During COVID they were not.
I agree that these institutions failed to the extent they chose to bow down to decisions by the Fauci-style top-down administrators and not stand up for discussions/debate among the rank and file. And if your assessment from watching that play out is, "you can't trust 'the profession' because they're clearly not functioning according to basic scientific principles" you're making a strong and valid inference.
The loss of trust was earned, and we've lost something until/unless it is earned back. I guess it's easier from where I sit on the inside, because I can say, "A, B, and C are wrong. D is good advice. E has been misinterpreted, but if you know what you're looking at you can use this to guide you to the right answer." Whereas the uninitiated can't parse the difference, so if anything is unreliable the whole edifice loses its value. The "priesthood" loses its value if it's only useful to those on the inside.
So you're saying some (low-ranking) priests are still pure in their hearts despite the ex cathedra proclamations of the priesthood often being outright lies, the high-ranking priests all being corrupt, and basically everyone else supporting them either for advancement or out of fear of excommunication. How is this meaningfully different from condemning the entire priesthood as rotten to the core?
That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that, as with any institution, the structures built for the purposes of advancing the noble aims of the priesthood can also be redirected in ways that undermine those aims. They misuse may be difficult to spot from the outside, but not from the inside. Insiders can still do good work, but they're limited in their ability to correct subjects related to institutional capture.
But if only insiders can trust the priesthood, and only in areas not captured by outside interests, it's kind of useless, isn't it? The priesthood requires the institutions to do the work, but at the same time those institutions are vulnerable in a way that could undermine the whole enterprise. The only answer that I can see is that you need constant, ruthless vigilance against institutional capture, or you risk the whole thing.
The "core" of the biology priesthood isn't rotten, because the "core" isn't the institutions. If you burned down Elsevier tomorrow we'd find other outlets to publish our work. And without the corruption in the academic publishing industry it would probably be a better conversation.
I guess I'm saying that if you want good fruit from the academic tree, you need to constantly prune the institutions that are susceptible to infectious parasitism. A priesthood must be well maintained, and it's only as good as that maintenance.
What soured me was that everything the priesthood of covid said was designed to induce behavior, not to inform. And there's a sort of assumption on rationalist blogs that we were, I guess, supposed to wink and nod at this because we're smart and the priesthood wasn't really talking to us. When they said "antibodies from the most recent strain aren't effective against reinfection, you still must do social distancing and also take this vaccine that was based on a prior variant to be safe" that was clearly absurd, and the only logical reason to say it is that you think if you don't say that, Joe Sixpack - who is pretty sure he must've had covid last month but actually didn't - will decline the vaccine, spread the disease, and so on.
The problem being that once I saw the medical profession doing this with something that I *could* spot, I started to be suspicious that they're doing it to ME on things that I *cannot* spot, and that on some other topic the priesthood is manipulating me and I'm a sucker and a dupe as bad as the idiots who were hiding out in their apartments fearing reinfection a week after recovery. I was just smart enough to see it and be worried about it, but I'm from another profession and I'm not smart enough to actually discern every time they're doing it, so I kind just don't believe them at all now out of aversion to being a sucker.
I understand and fully endorse your perspective. It's the most rational way to view the situation. Personally, I've been trying to sound this alarm for years without getting any traction.
A personal anecdote: we switched pediatricians soon after one of our children was born. I mentioned to the pediatrician we were going to do an adjusted vaccine schedule based on our risk profile. The pediatrician flew into a rage, making a half-dozen outrageous claims and then told us to seriously rethink our decision "before you put your child's life at risk." After the lecture, she left the room with no further discussion.
My wife was confused, asking ME if I really knew what I was talking about. Yeah, I had a PhD in immunology, but this was the pediatrician, after all. I was incensed. I went straight to PubMed and pulled up a dozen articles on a quick and dirty search demonstrating that everything our *former* pediatrician had just told us was false.
And I couldn't help thinking, "I know the science behind all this. I'm educated enough to know exactly where she's making stupid claims and where there's strong evidence for vaccine efficacy. But the average person doesn't." And I realized right there that at least some percentage of the anti-vax movement could be blamed directly on the medical paternalism you're talking about. Because anyone could go to the primary literature and debunk every claim this paternalistic pediatrician made, while at the same time finding NO competing studies backing up anything she said. That person would have "done their own research", come to the only logical conclusion, and justifiably felt that they were in the right and the whole medical establishment was trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes because they're in the pocket of Big Pharma.
And they on nearly every point, they wouldn't be wrong! There's a ton of pharma influence in the industry. Paternalistic doctors really ARE making false statements to get patients to do what they want them to do.
But personally, I do get vaccines for my kids (albeit on a different schedule from the CDC's) because I am convinced by solid evidence that they're effective and beneficial to them, personally. But I understand that a normal person who has an encounter with a paternalistic pediatrician like mine would struggle to arrive at that same position.
I'm not even anti-vax, and she wasn't willing to countenance a slight variation from the official (bloated) vaccine schedule. What would a good pediatrician have done? Personally, I think they would allow me to lean on their expert knowledge in making decisions outside my area of expertise. In this case, she was operating outside HER area of expertise, fine, but if she'd been talking to a non-expert, she could have presented the evidence and said, "Ultimately it's your decision when to get these shots, but there's strong evidence that these vaccinations prevent outbreaks - which are more common in sub-communities where the majority of parents opt out of all vaccination." The patient could then ask something like, "Do you have children, and did you get them vaccinated?" It could be an honest discussion, and while every patient might not make the SAME decision, everyone could at least make an INFORMED decision. Paternalism prevents anyone from making an informed decision, while destroying trust in 'Western medicine'.
The problem of paternalism in medicine is not new. I know there's still some debate within the medical community about the merits/demerits of paternalism. Some still think it's justified in certain emergency situations, where you can't afford for the patient to make the 'wrong' choice. That's what happened during COVID, where a bunch of evidence-free interventions were implemented, like 6ft/2m distancing, masking toddlers in daycare, or any of a number of questionable policy decisions.
And that's fine if you implement the policy while also doing cluster randomized trials to test whether they work or not. But if you've declared something from on high and staked your paternalistic reputation on the veracity of the proclamation, we've learned from sad experience you're not going to be asking whether you might be wrong, nor willing to test your hypothesis in an unbiased way. What the COVID experience suggests is that paternalism introduces an inherent bias that inhibits the collection of good evidence.
So medicine gets to choose: paternalism or evidence-based medicine. You don't get both.
"When should we continue to trust priesthoods, on the grounds that at least they require their mistruths to be subtle"
This was personally NOT my experience of the year 2020
(Take your pick at which priesthood I'm referencing here)
When I was an English major in the 1960's my impression was that the professors were smart people who really loved literature, and for the most part they communicated that enthusiasm. What they taught was close reading. Close reading also could actually be useful in some occupations, such as the legal profession. They also analyzed literary works for myths, archetypes, symbols, etc., which was often interesting, and deepened understanding. So the English department priesthood of that era did some good for their students, IMO. My strong impression is that today a student who loves reading and literature should stay as far away from the English department as possible. The only long-term solution that I can imagine is the wholesale replacement of the existing priesthood with a new priesthood of people who lenjoy literature for its own sake.
Wonderful post. I would love for you to do a book review of "We Have Never Been Woke" by Musa al-Gharbi, which is essentially about what you covered in the "Why Were The Priesthoods So Politically Easy To Capture?" section of this piece.
One really useful technique is to look internationally at other cultures' priesthoods, and see where they agree and disagree with your local recommendations. If you're a Soviet farmer and your local priesthood is preaching Lysenkoism, it's a useful observation that European and American scientists don't agree. Asian (Chinese/Japanese/etc) priesthoods serve a similar role today for Americans, if you're able to translate the papers enough to tell what they're recommending.
This reminds me of a thing I have realized, which is that, despite the fact that I have a few disagreements with modern medicine, I want my doctors to be medically orthodox. Please give me exactly the mainstream advice for my situation! I'm willing to research on my own and develop my own ideas (not like "hippo eyes for colon cancer" but more like "perhaps statins should be given earlier even though my 10-year risk of heart events is low"), but if my doctor agrees with my weird ideas in one area, who knows if she isn't weird and wrong in other areas? Within reason of course.
Oddly I also want this in my actual (Catholic) priest.
I'm somewhat eclectic in my actual religious beliefs (basically blind men and the elephant parable + it makes sense to stick with my culturally default religion), but I want a (Episcopal) priest who believes our catechism fully. If I wanted a grab bag of theology I'd join the UUs.
Exactly! I was raised as a UU and...yes.
We are so back.
Great essay.
I think an issue with independent creators, especially those that post often, is that the financial incentive to have a profitable edutainment-business does not exactly align with well-researched and true articles. I think this is especially true on Youtube.
I think left wing social views enjoyed a lot of success over the last 10 years partly because social conservatism came to look ridiculous by being proved seriously and obviously wrong on homosexuality. It then was logical for a lot of image-conscious people to try to distance themselves from social conservatism.
In what sense do you believe that social conservatism was proved seriously and obviously wrong on homosexuality? Not disagreeing with you, just looking to see this claim fleshed out a bit more.
They said that allowing same-sex marriage would lead to a spiral of moral corruption and depravity; the more moderate progressives said gay folks mostly wanted to form normal households and enjoy ordinary spousal benefits such as medical visitation rights. Latter claim was publicly validated by experiment, former not so much.
I mean, I think some of the "slippery slope" arguments rather WERE vindicated. The year before last, the author of this blog wrote an article saying "yeah, maybe it's not GREAT if several thousand teenage girls undergo completely medically unnecessary mastectomies which they will come to regret years down the line, but in the scheme of things it's a drop in the bucket".
That wasn't the particular type of corruption and depravity which social conservatives were predicting. More importantly, many of them were claiming that stable-boring-normie households where the parents happen to be openly gay simply *weren't possible,* on an almost ontological level. Any movement can become a laughingstock when a thing they said couldn't possibly happen is not only suddenly everywhere, but apparently would have been widespread all along if not for them actively suppressing it.
> a spiral of moral corruption and depravity;
Uh huh.
It is quite a stretch to say the latter claim was "publicly validated" due to your use of the word "mostly." No, gay folks mostly *do not* want to form normal households. That it is a fairly small fraction (25% or less), and it's nice that they get to do so, but that was the polite window-dressing to get acceptance, not the bulk of the population.
What makes you believe that left wing social views have been more successful than conservatism in the last 10 years?
I think woke is 90% Tumblr, just as the alt-right was 90% 4chan.
Online weirdos of female and male varieties self-segregated to either platform, which structurally catered to and reinforced feminine and masculine social dynamics.
The feminine and masculine, as forces*, are intrinsically pathological when isolated from each other. This often takes the form of purity spirals, but with different dynamics.
Masculine echo chambers fail via obsessive xenophobia. You see this with right-wing twitter, pockets on the religious right, and 4chan. The transformation of anonymous imageboards with loose moderation policies into far right spaces was inevitable; I was posting on 4chan and adjacent sites for the whole critical period, and saw the racism turn from ironic to unironic before my eyes. There was no coordination, no possibility of coordination, and no way to stop it once the memeplex started spreading, at least under the traditional rules of 4chan.
I've never spent any time on Tumblr, but reading a few retrospectives written by Millennial women, it looks like the inevitable feminine counterpart to 4chan. Weird online women flocked to Tumblr, safe behind pseudonyms but able to fulfill the feminine imperative to network, which was impossible on 4chan. Woke is just feminine thinking isolated and taken to a pathological degree, so of course it developed on a site of misfit girls left to build their own civilization on an island without boys.
Woke went mainstream, and white racialism didn't, because we live in a feminized society. The morality of educated Westerners is dominated by stereotypical feminine concerns, especially compassion. If you think of every dumb lefty idea that has made the world worse, normie liberals and conservatives were powerless to oppose it because, in modern Western culture, compassion is a sovereign virtue against which other virtues have no claim (if you pay attention, arguments with lefties always boil down to this). Educated Westerners were primed for the Tumblr memeplex, and it didn't help that a significant portion of secular Millennial priests are women who spent their formative years on Tumblr.
> The feminine and masculine, as forces*, are intrinsically pathological when isolated from each other.
Which has been understood for millennia, wisdom that we disregard to our own detriment.
"Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man"
— 1 Corinthians 11:11
...But there is inevitably a hierarchy regardless.
They've mostly been segregated during the past millennia though, moreso than in the modern world.
What do you mean, segregated? They obviously lived together, it's just that people understood that they had different places in society. Castes that they could never escape.
"Woke is just feminine thinking isolated and taken to a pathological degree"
I'm not sure I understand, can you offer some examples of pathological feminine thinking that has gone mainstream? Likewise dumb lefty ideas that have made the world worse.
Compassion seems like a pretty good virtue to make sovereign. If you have to have a sovereign one, it might as well be compassion. Some pretty smart people have advocated compassion, a lack of it seems associated with some pretty nasty outcomes. What do you see as the problem?
Compassion gets pathological when it is blind to reason/quantification or applied selectively to certain groups and not others.
See eg the cases mentioned by Scott in a comment above. Eg when vaccines were prioritized by race instead of age.
Or when policing was reduced after BLM, leading to a lot more dead black people, due to increased murder rates and traffic accidents.
Consider also cases when compassion is applied selectively to criminals but not their victims, or broader society.
Seems to me that you aren't arguing against compassion, but impulsive public policy making. You don't have to turn off the part of your brain that feels compassionate toward someone in order to turn on the part of the brain that can make quantitative rational decisions.
Compassion leads to safetyism. So compassion for past and future victims of nuclear power accidents leads to stifling nuclear power and hence global warming/megadeaths from coal.
I think paranoia leads to "safetyism", if I understand that concept correctly. The public didn't stifle nuclear power out of compassion for victims of nuclear power. They did that out of fear of a scary difficult to understand technology. Threats to self seem like it's much more salient than compassion toward others.
Perhaps you are right, though I don’t think paranoia is the right word. I think it is closer to fear and desire to protect one’s self and family, whereas the masculine side would be sacrificially brave. Both can be stupid or not. Just speculating here.
"Compassion seems like a pretty good virtue to make sovereign."
There should be no sovereign virtue*. Compassion has its place, but so does excellence, and order, and loyalty, and every other virtue. In a reasonable country (like Japan), arguments go something like this:
COMPASSION: We can't have gifted programs, they make the other kids feel bad
EXCELLENCE: Academic excellence is good, and so is emotional resilience. The other kids can deal with it.
COMPASSION: We can't throw this guy behind bars forever, he had a bad childhood.
JUSTICE: He killed a man in cold blood, what right does he have to his own life?
ORDER: If we let him out, he's just going to do it again.
COMPASSION: Anyone from a poorer country should be able to move to ours. Look how much better it makes their lives!
TRADITION/LOYALTY: This will break thousands of years of continuity with our ancestors and their culture.
ORDER: The 1-5% who will be repeat criminals, and the 0.00001% of them who will be terrorists, will be enough to ruin our urban spaces and Christmas markets forever.
FAIRNESS: Why are my taxes going to support new arrivals who, on average, will never contribute equally?
In the West, Compassion comes back with "How can you be so mean!" and most people in a decision-making position cave. Cf. Hanania's Women's Tears and the Marketplace of Ideas.
*Save for the Christian virtue of Love, but it's too difficult to cultivate to build a society upon. Cf. the difference between the Christian community before and after Constantine.
I think you are confusing compassion for egalitarianism. One of these is an emotional state, the other is an ideology. Feeling compassionate toward someone doesn't lead to any one specific behavioral response, merely a feeling that someone else's outcomes should receive greater than the default weight.
woke is complaining about something until you get control of it
the thing that made wokeness spread so rapidly in organizations was that it is a very strong weapon in office warfare
before it to defeat a competitor in the bureaucracy you had to either show better results than him or show that their results are not as good as yours
with wokeness you can bring unrelated accusations of wrong think
and since there is no objectiveness in woke the determining factor in who wins is office clout
which means people with clout in the org have a strong incentive to impose wokeness in the office
This seems like the best explanation I have seen so far.
I think this overstates the utility in industry or, if not the utility, the application of woke as a superweapon for Machiavellian purposes. In certain industries, like (a struggling) journalism, there was probably more cynical, self-serving backstabbing than an area like insurance.
There was also a natural expansion to the CYA framework laid down 30+ years prior. "X sensitivity" seminars and trainings were a thing long before woke took hold. This made expansion easy. This thing is already a thing, we should do more of the thing, because the thing is good.
Politics exist everywhere and people (or some of them) will use what tools are at hand. That 'woke' provides new axes to play politics is true, but I don't think this is the impetus for its proliferation. There are all kinds of horribly dishonest ideas out there that could be useful tools for strivers to get ahead. Why doesn't the priesthood decide those are a Good Thing and adopt those as readily as they adopted this one?
That's the question.
Academics had no issue finding ways to create petty intra-priesthood squabbles to fight for status, put their competitors in their place, and embarrass their foes in 1930, 1960, or 2005.
I don't think of the adoption of woke as a cynical move
but it was adopted because it enabled people to turn personal conflicts into moral crusades in their own minds
your elephant really wanted someone destroyed and adopting wokeness helped you convince yourself and others that doing it is a righteous act of allyship and anti racism
"woke is complaining about something until you get control of it"
You mean like pro-lifers? I know you don't actually mean that, I'm just snarkily pointing out that you are over-simplifying.
As for "before it to defeat a competitor in the bureaucracy you had to either show better results than him or show that their results are not as good as yours"
I'm afraid I have bad news for you, friend. Organizational politics has existed basically forever.
IMO it's critical for the academic priesthood to adopt an oath modeled after the Hippocratic oath that demands they seek the truth and publish without concern for ideological impact. That is necessary as one of the critical features of a priesthood is that they have a special status of trust/responsibility that seperates them from the usual churn of social alliances and economics.
This is especially important with an epistemic priesthood because it only has value if you can rely on the lack of any good counterarguments being raised to be good evidence they don't exist.
The mistake that academics have made is thinking it's enough merely to tell the truth. But if people systemically refuse to say the controversial thing since there are always a few people who genuinely believe the other side it looks to the public like you are just parrotting an ideology.
--
And no I don't think the oath will be magic. It won't stop partisan bias. But the key thing it does it provide an excuse. "Why did you publish that article which found no effect of race on incidence of being shot by the police? Don't you think racist policing is a problem.". The oath allows for the reply that you did it out of a sense of duty.
It also just creates a kind of awareness. I hear so many times about researchers openly suggesting ways to get published that undermine the quest for knowledge. A strong reminder of the fact that this is what your profession exists for would help.
Having come out of cognitive psychology in the aughts (i.e., all that heuristics and biases research, too many cases later found fraudulent), I have doubts that there are barriers to corruption among the priesthood. I think there are a lot of corrupt practitioners that others just go along with. I'm not sure there is a strong incentive for competition of ideas; there are certain bedfellows that you never challenge simply because you are on the same priesthood team, however that was determined. I could never wrap my mind around it.
Another problem with the priesthood is that they are not only cloistered professionally. They do so on every social measure, they rarely have friends outside the priesthood, rarely marry outside the priesthood, and are very anxious that their children remain in some priesthood. Too many of them fundamentally believe that they are truly better than the rest of us; if the world was ending they are the chosen few to be on the spaceships to carry on and improve humanity. It's wildly insulting to everyone else.
If a big piece of the problem is indeed the drive to be “in touch” and pander to the hoi polloi, I’m surprised you didn’t tie this to Turchin’s ”surplus elites” theory. Without surplus elites, there would be less reason for all-out war within the priesthood.
OTOH, it seems to me that there are always going to be "surplus elites" unless the elites have very low fertility.
Not what Turchin has found. In principle you just need the elite class to be growing no faster than the economy.
Great article. I agree with your thesis and have some observations in response:
1. The internet is massively important in magnifying the problems of priesthood, because of its speed, coordination and persuasiveness as a communication method. Its tendency is to generate alternatives to priesthood that both cooperate and compete with the authority of priesthoods in ways that makes memetic capture rapid and all-pervasive.
2. Everything you said about priesthood as an analogy of course also applies to bonafide priesthoods. The OG priesthoods had a SME status regulating precisely the type of memetic contagions you’re talking about; were what the priests and rabbis came up with better than what the non-SMEs generally come up with? When I compare folk religion to its institutionalized forms, I rarely come away impressed by the former. (This is of course also true for institutionalized atheisms vs its non-institutional forms.)
3. Broken priesthoods are very, very hard to reform. It usually requires some combination of charisma + intelligence + insider status + opportunity to take advantage of social technologies that aren’t being exploited by the broken priesthoods itself. Sometimes the reform can create alternative priesthoods (e.g. the Protestant Reformation), or have other consequences unintended by would-be reformers. Priesthoods are complex systems and it may be that we have to bite the bullet and decide whether an unreformed priesthood is still preferable to the alternative.
4. I don’t know if it is truly possible to avoid priesthoods. It might be easier to start a new one from scratch, if things get bad enough, but I’m skeptical that a society without any priesthoods is capable of functioning and innovating effectively.
> The basic idea behind the priesthoods - have a “smart people only” discussion room with high standards - has obvious appeal. And in many cases, it seems to work.
Can someone justify this claim, without it be socially-epidemically circular in a single case?
("truth has a left wing bias", the study comes from snopes data, snopes has a leftwing bias, democrats believe this study, republicans dont, you can find criticism of snopes)
The Manhattan Project got a bunch of top-shelf nerds together and successfully did something that no ordinary person would previously have thought was possible, nor could any of the individual participants reasonably have accomplished it alone.
that was with human stock from before the current university system, and allot allot of money with inclusion being extremely free(they "invited" nazis to join) the barrier had a different goal then sanity(gaining war advantages)
You asked for a single case of "the basic idea behind the priesthoods, a smart-people-only discussion room with high standards" actually working, in a way that can't be dismissed as circular, self-referential. Atom bombs definitely aren't bullshit; they happened.
The field of physics has been rigorous ever since, because politicians understand that neglecting it, or meddling in ways that threaten core functionality, means they might, themselves, one day "stop being biology and start being physics" https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/ at some better-informed enemy's discretion.
> before the current university system
Literally hundreds of years ago, in a university system the current one is directly descended from, trigonometry became an international matter of life and death when sufficiently long-range cannons made accuracy too hard to just eyeball.
> a different goal then sanity(gaining war advantages)
Sanity has always been instrumental to winning wars, and avoiding unwinnable ones.
I believe successful physics to be the product of "British gentleman science" with my model of how and why it worked being "around the world in 80 days" (rich people making bets), post university physic made string physics and "string bombs" dont exist.
Thats hard to untangle for the reasons you can debate if obama or trump made inflation in, such and such year.
The manhatten project was arguably the death of the old science, and purely timeline wise, we had computers and industrial revolution as technology playing out and maturing. How do you untangle that system of science setting us up for success, is it 90% the theories from that era then decade on decade making better machines? Or 10% and the progress of modern exclusionary science is actaully making progress? Neither is "falsifiable", we cant rerun the experiment with a control
To preempt further examples where I believe theres ambiguity: geocentricism fit the data *less* then the epicycles for 100 years, newton was a lovable loon who did alchemy, turing was then arguably killed by the new system.
> "British gentleman science"
...was, by the definitions in the post we're commenting on, a priesthood.
No, by definition a gentleman scientist was self funded
> When should we continue to trust priesthoods
Why do you have the option? I simply; dont.
I find it hard to imagine jumping off cliffs believing really hard I can fly, it seems to be a blunt fact they airnt trustworthy.
Disappointed this doesn't confront a fairly obvious cause of the triumph of Wokeness- the rise of Women Priests.
I'm guessing if you chart the individual medical associations, you'll find a strong correlation between how quickly they fell to Woke and % female DRs.
I think this is an underexplored contributing factor
I don't think it's simply a matter of "they can only tinker on the edges so they're largely trustworthy", at least not in my field. There's a phenomenon in clinical research, where two competing pharma companies will send out expert PhDs to argue with MDs about why their drug is better than the competition. Part of this argument includes arming the PhDs with studies showing that Drug-X was shown to be superior in a RCT directly compared to esDrug-X (the enantiomer that's probably biochemically identical). And if you're new to the field, you might think, "Well it mattered for thalidomide, so maybe the difference here is real!"
Until the other PhD produces a contrary RCT demonstrating that in their head-to-head matchup their drug was superior! And around and around it goes. Because there are all sorts of ways to manipulate the data until you end up far from the truth - especially if there are dollar signs attached.
For more on how bad this can be, see the book, "Ending Medical Reversal" by Vinay Prasad.
Love this lens. I do think it’s a bit narrow for your concluding questions though. Like asking “why did all the monastic orders get Protestant ideas at the same time?” It’s a legitimate question and the details are hairy, but ultimately it’s probably better answered at the macro level.
So “Martin Luther found a climate ripe for revolution because of X, Y, and Z,” and not “the monks of Frieburg were naturally disposed to move drastically given condition Q which was met as consequence of P.”
You mention monoculture and how easy it is for a virus to infect a certain group. I think one of the issues is the insular nature of priesthoods. Not just in terms of their community protecting against the public but of their very ideas. Many people belong to at least one priesthood and so I imagine it's a very relatable experience when you first enter and think "this feels like a dumb way to do this". You push back but the establishment has a very "this is the way we've always done it" type of attitude. You must prove your conformity before being allowed to offer new options, thus limiting the introduction of new "outside" ideas from people who aren't as crazy as the general public, but haven't yet fully conformed to the norms of the priesthood.
A doctor of philosophy used to be a generalist, someone who was well versed in many subjects and whose job as an academic was to be an academic, not just an MD or an architect. The community would then by design be filled with many different ideas from reputable individuals allowing for cross pollination. It was more stable to a virus. In our hyper-specialized world it is considered a problem to be a generalist because you can only ever be part of a single priesthood or at most two. If not you aren't properly committed to the cause and therefore don't need to be taken seriously. No better than the general public but perhaps a bit more annoying because you might have ".edu" at the end of your email address.
It would be impossible to sort through the ideas of the general public, but I think there is a middle ground of being able to sort through the ideas of the outer edges of your community and allowing wider ranging discussions. True we can't trust priesthoods on their takes regarding politics but the tendency to distrust priesthoods or be very strict about "staying in your lane" feels very all-or-nothing.
One important characteristic of priesthoods that Scott didn't mention is that people who take well to belonging to priesthoods are over-represented in them. The people who take well to priesthoods tend to be those who are pretty comfortable with having their performance measured by other people's standards. As undergrads they took grades more seriously -- that sort of thing.
So there's that. Probably relevant to the wokeness issue.
> I’m not entirely satisfied with this theory because wokeness infiltrated non-priesthoods without psychological complexes around in-touchness (eg science fiction fandom) just as quickly and easily as it did the priesthoods
Fandom might not be a "priesthood", but publishing sure is.
Heh, this seems like the answer. I think it can be observed that gaming audiences stay right wing, but gaming publication veers hard to left.
To continue to consider the New York Times as an organ of information dissemination after your own doxxing is bizarre. The sheer amount of misinformation campaigns that the medical and news establishments in this country have been involved with in my lifetime is overwhelming.
One can only pine for the truth digging days of Slate Star rather than these disturbing screeds on the comfort and elegance of the hotel room chair published on Astral Glide.
Have you seen videos of Iraqis praising Saddam Hussein (recently, long after he was overthrown), even though he killed most their family and tortured/imprisoned them for years? This is a bit like that.
For example, you can trust New York Times to use Scott's real name when they decide to dox him, as opposed to just making up something (e.g. calling him Scott Alexander Hitler).
You cannot trust popular youtubers the same way.
One reason not to throw away "priesthoods" is that a "priesthood"- a consensus position on an area of expertise - is the outcome of good epistemology. As pointed out by Kuhn in "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", pre-scientific expertise was (and are) characterised by "schools of thought" because the epistemic chops to identify resolve logical and evidential conflicts between them, didn't exist. Of course, it's also an outcome of the desire to monopolise power and status. But the existence of a consensus does not logically imply either one or the other.
Incidentally the problem that experts tend to claim authority over not just their area,but the definition of the boundary of what that area is, has been well studied in academia under the name "boundary work".
The whole essay reads much more cleanly if you replace the words "smart" and "intelligent" with "arrogant". E.g.,
"As with every failure of the priesthood, their best qualities served as their downfall. Their intelligence made them easy prey for bad ideas that flattered them as intellectuals."
Intelligence does not make you easy prey for bad ideas. That is not what intelligence is! AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
You're cutting a whole thought in half. He didn't say it made them prey "for bad ideas," but "for [bad ideas that flattered them as intellectuals.]" And yes, it's been shown that high intelligence does in fact make you susceptible to certain kinds of mistakes, particularly when it comes to politically-charged topics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_OApdxcno
I think a pretty good heuristic is to trust priesthoods with very measurable outcomes - when the chess priesthood tells me a certain move or opening is good or bad I have high trust they're right, because if they got it wrong their fellow priests would own them in their games. I'm cheating using sport as an example as it has artifically clear resolution criteria, but by the same logic I would expect the legal priesthood to give excellent insight on which cases are winnable, and how one would go about winning them.
On this method we would expect emergency medience to give very trustworthy advice on how to stop people dying, shading into less reliable advice from psyciatry on how to restore mental health (still fairly measurable, but not completely). To steal from the post we would expect arcitects to give real insight into how to stop buildings falling down (it is obvious whether the building fell down), but not into whether the building is nice to look at.
Any priesthood for the completely unmeasurable (music, art, theology) is probably best ignored entirely in favour of "what's working in the market". (Confusingly, I think in this example the theology priesthood is academic theologians, and literal Roman Catholic priests are operating in the market.)
IMO, while one can certainly define woke, there's no definition statement that doesn't result in the enclosing discussion devolving to endless nitpicking, as we see in these comments. I propose that we leave woke undefined, stop using it, and return to using preexisting measures for debating ideas. For example, is an idea true? Is it useful? Does it promote worthwhile social norms? I'd rather debate those kinds of things than the degree of wokeness of a proposition and whether that is good or bad. Let's please stop being so meta, especially a form of meta that is not particularly helpful.
Do you believe any of the following terms are useful descriptors: conservative, libertarian, socialist, communist, democratic socialist, feminist, nationalist?
Yes, to some extent. I think those labels are less susceptible to definitional rabbit holes than woke. Having said that, I also don’t think it’s very useful to rate the quality of ideas by for example how conservative they are, rather than the first principles I mentioned above.
"Priesthoods enjoy some protection in their area of specialty - partly because they’re actually smart in that area, partly because they’re forced to be in contact with reality, and partly because internal academic politics incentivize and stoke scientific disagreements. These factors are less protective outside their area of specialty"
Yes, but being priests, they have a respect for other priesthoods (at least to some extinct). Augustinian and Benedictine monks probably hold each other in higher regard than random laymen. And if they will defer to outside expertise, wokeness may only have needed to capture specific priesthoods in order to proliferate like mad. The disciplines that provided the experts on wokeness were the grab bag of priesthoods that intersect history and sociology, and these were woke from day one. They were explicitly founded to propagate wokeness. They could provide 1) data on disparities and 2) a bunch of history supposedly explaining those disparities. I think something like this did indeed happen. Who am I, a mere epidemiologist or electrical engineer or journalist or whatever, to argue with this esteemed scholar of Africana studies with all these nice papers full of data about redlining? One reason I was pretty immune to woke was that I have read an inordinate amount of history, and I could tell many of the history experts were telling *extremely* selective versions of history. I don't think this is the only or even main vehicle for woke, but I think it helps explain why like random astronomers and physical therapists went woke.
*Edit* Thinking about the woke priests a bit more, I don't think they do in fact create knowledge the way other priests do. Like, yes, they care about their reputation within the priesthood, but in these priesthoods, you actually get status not just by publishing papers, but by activism and persecution for "speaking truth to power." They don't actually behave like priests. They behave like Christian martyrs. They always earned prestige by intentionally lowering the gates into politics. I would say these are bad priesthoods even if priesthoods as such are not. So, sure, let's keep old-school priesthoods and nuke everything that has the word "praxis" in its jargon from orbit maybe?
Yup I agree very much with this line of thinking and posted a comment of my own along it. The lens of priesthoods is indeed a useful one but it glosses over the fact that all don’t have the same pedigree and internal process but also at the same time give and receive a certain level of respect for each others ideas.
These were the vector for any real runaway wokeness. It didn’t come from say doctors but doctors accepted it because they necessarily need to accept the opinions of other experts in their fields so that those experts in turn accept them and promote them as experts in medicine.
I thought this was a reasonable take:
"People who take egalitarianism seriously are more likely to behave well toward everyone, relative to nonbelievers. It’s therefore in everyone’s interests to convince others that they believe in the equality thesis. One of the best ways to convince others of one’s belief is to actually believe it.
And wokeness isn't just about signaling generalized niceness. .... In an unprecedentedly multiracial, multiethnic, and gender-egalitarian society like ours, the ability to treat people well despite idpol-relevant differences is prosocial enough. It makes you a "better"—certainly less invidious—employee, customer, neighbor, and citizen.
....
In any case, you don't signal you think everyone has equal potential by being nice to your ingroup—everyone does that all the time. To signal that you think everyone has equal potential, you should be nice to your outgroup out of commitment to your ideals. This sets you apart.
By making a land acknowledgment or posting a black square, I show I'm so moral that I'm willing to take the side of the outgroup over that of the ingroup. I take ostentatious, stylized care to promote the interests of the people who are most different from me. Because I just care that much."
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-origin-of-woke-a-george-mason
I may have a few insights here from the perspective of someone in a priesthood-like grouping which didn't go woke - the English Bar.
It has all the usual priesthood markers: it's based around esoteric knowledge, has its own internal status hierarchies, is incredibly disdainful of outside opinions, has social norms and habits which differ markedly from broader society and polices entry. It's also, a la medicine and to a lesser extent academia, far more hereditary in practice than any normal job.
In 2020/2021, our regulator went woke but got mostly ignored, and part of our recruitment pool went woke. As a profession, though, the only noticeable change was the already left-wing sets had internal drama.*
My guess would be that the two structural differences were 1) contempt for our linked academia and 2) having an internally segregated left wing.
Dealing with the first point, English law has a very different culture to America. A majority of barristers don't have law degrees, they have a GDL (a special stripped-down law degree done at a crammer which teaches you literally only what you're required to know). The bulk of judges will dismiss any argument based on academic law out of hand, and while I assume "law review" exists in some form, it's not going to help you much job-wise. The old joke is that "academic" is the Greek word for "failed."
The upshot of this is that there's no disease-vector out of universities for woke ideas to enter into the profession.
The second point is that there are dedicated left-wing sets, which tends to make other sets more right-wing by default, in particular as the most outspoken leftists are the most keen to join the lefty sets. This suggests a potential off-the-wall solution for wokeness (or whatever comes along next) - set up dedicated woke institutions to suck them all out of mainstream ones. It might, however, just be a British thing; where eg. American newspapers are default-left with some dedicated-right alternatives, British newspapers are default-right with some dedicated-left alternatives.
The caveat to all this is it's a job more generally that involves fairly arrogant, confrontational people who are paid to one-up each other who often harbour faux-aristocratic pretensions, so might have just had a less susceptible pool of people for wokeness, and the UK went less woke more generally.**
*Barristers are self-employed, but work within a chambers ("set") to share administrative staff and cover each other's cases. These are collegiate and hierarchical, and responsible for recruitment into the profession; I don't think structurally there's much difference from university faculties.
**You have a million counter-examples. Other than a the tail-end of gay rights and a brief, failed flirtation with trans-mania, they're all pre-2008.
Being in the UK I do find the hysteria on both woke and anti woke very difficult to know how seriously to take. Casual racism and sexism at the workplace was not that usual not that long ago (I'm not even 40, in finance), so I thought some of the 'woke' changes were pretty good, actually, and witnessed very little of the excesses discussed. Sure, every company had their tokenistic policies, but I'm not aware of these being taken particularly seriously.
on your opinion of the psychoanalysts, i suppose Freud may have been "wrong about everything", but it also seems to me that many prominent experiment-based psychologists were "wrong about everything" in the 2000s -- and in a much less interesting direction! I also don't know how you can make this claim about the 1950s when "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" was delivered in '53
Son of two professors here. I’d say the principle dynamic with which wokeness took hold is a simple heuristic: if more people in side A criticize their own side than people do in side B, then side with side B.
I don’t think this is a bad heuristic, and is a way academics can get a sense of the truth of matters they don’t know too much about.
A great example of this working is people noticing that AI researchers often criticize AI research for moving dangerously fast, and note that this is a cause for concern. (Meanwhile you don’t see a lot of non-AI researchers criticizing AI research for being too slow)
Ok, so I've tried really hard to avoid getting drawn into the "Woke Wars", but I can't help myself anymore, what the hell is "Woke"? And why do I care?
Following the linked articles, it appears to be an inordinate concern with the sensibilities of social minorities. Which I can see could be annoying in many cases. I will use non-mainstream gender norms if someone asks me to, otherwise I don't bother.
Is this another social-media amplified nothing burger? "Lots of people on the internet will be angry at me if I don't cater to their demands!" I'm supposed to care for some reason?
Are psychiatrists delivering sub-optimal care because they were in some hard to define sense "captured by woke?" If not, is this really important enough to get upset over?
No, concern with the sensibilities of social minorities (do minorities share a sensibility? nobody informed me!) isn't it.
Here's what he says: "I will today use the term “social justice politics” to refer to the political movement you are all aware of, the one which combines several schools of academic progressivism such as intersectionality, trans-inclusionary feminism, and anti-racism with a focus on interpersonal relations as the primary site of political activity, resistance towards economic class as a political lens, and a belief in the essentially immutable prevalence of bigotry, all expressed through an abstruse vocabulary that signals adherence to this movement and its social culture."
So it's just the social justice movement.
Freddie deBoer has a quick rundown of what the word "woke" (or as he refers to it, "social justice politics") means: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/some-principles-and-observations
Sorry, responded to the wrong person. Please see my response to Garald.
I think something you entirely missed is the inflation of priesthoods themselves.
There was a time where college degrees were rare and expensive and most people who got them got them in fairly useful and rigorous fields. These people were the ones who filled the priesthoods. Yes there always were music majors and English major making up the art and journalism priesthoods. But I’m thinking the core of those grew from a sort of renaissance man, unitary priesthood and consequently always carried with them a sliver of the original priestdom.
The specializations that followed on them like engineering and medicine and law were always even more pure in priesthood than even those original renaissance generalists as they have strong internal attachments to reality and are not priesthoods merely for the sake of priesthood, rather gained their respect from their demonstrated success at leading both the commoners and the elites to desired outcomes.
But at some point there was an explosion of priesthoods. Gender studies suddenly had a priesthood and they demanded and received if not maybe the same respect as the older priesthoods, at least some measure of it, especially from the other priesthoods. This feels like a massive driver at least some of what he discusses here.
Edit: to carry the argument more fully across the line, to the degree that there is a “wokeness virus” its source was not amongst the unwashed masses but rather from inside certain priesthoods and spread amongst them on the back of the sort of enlightened professional respect required of the priesthoods interacting with each other rather than coming from outside the priesthoods. Looking at those priesthoods and how they came to be in their respective ivory towers seems a glaring part of the conversation.
More succinctly not all priesthoods are equal in their pedigree or commitment and even if they are the same sorts of purity spirals and internal posturing that say protects medicine from charlatans applied to gender studies don’t necessarily lead to similarly desirable outcomes.
Priesthoods are necessarily as you point out arrogant sorts of institutions that must claim to be right in order to survive. But not all claims are equally grounded and applying the same sorts of purity tests to the humanities as you do say in engineering is a huge error. Which is to say some priesthoods don’t have the ingredients required to be self sustaining and this was always somewhat inevitable that it would blow up on them.
> But in the worst-case scenario, all the other doctors are still mad because he’s bringing the medical profession into disrepute.
Unfortunately that is not the worst-case scenario. There's an alternative nasty equilibrium where, instead of punishing bad actors because they'll bring disreptute on everyone else, you deliberately *don't* punish bad actors because doing so would highlight their existence and you worry *that* would bring disrepute on everyone else; whereas if you just avoid handing out any punishments and pretend everything is clean, good chance nobody will notice. (Look at law, say.)
The question of how to get from this bad equilibrium to the good one you describe is I think a pretty important one but unfortunately not one I have any ideas on how to accomplish.
I mean with law, they don't really have much reputation to lose. Everyone already sees them as a bunch of greedy psychopaths who will do anything to win.
Science fiction fandom fell into the same hole, because they also have a priesthood. You can't be a "popular" author, i.e. sell lots of books, and still be a member in good standing. You have to be "literary", or experimental, or something.
Prior to e-books, published science fiction was in serious danger of disappearing up its own fundament. Much of it still is.
Fortunately people have alternatives, so that priesthood is dying out.
You only have to look at the attendance of Worldcon vs. Dragoncon.
Does anyone have examples of the kind of atonal music that academic musicologists (or musicians closely associated with musicology departments) produce today? I know what 20th century atonal music sounds like, but don't know what happened after that, and I wouldn't begin to know how to search for it.
The kind of thing that Scott presumably has in mind with this dig (presumably the plinks and plonks of early Boulez, Milton Babbitt, etc.) mostly went out of fashion a half century ago, but I think Unsuk Chin, who studied with Ligeti, is probably the best-regarded composer still writing in roughly this style. Most younger composers seem to go for some combination of pastiche, minimalism, and sounds based in extended techniques, electronics, noise, etc.
Thank you! Even if they are not as atonal, do you have any examples for these younger composers, who write music today that is popular within academic music composition circles but not outside of them, like Scott would have meant?
I haven't kept up so much with new music and mostly stick to my mid-to-late-20th century favorites. I think Caroline Shaw has done quite well on the awards & commisions circuit, and I've enjoyed some very witty piecea by Sky Macklay (look up 'Many, Many Cadences'). There are a few YouTube channels that specialize in new music, mostly by younger composers. The one that comes to mind is simply called CMaj7, in my experience if you watch one or two videos from living composers, quite a few start popping up from the recommendation algorithm.
As to your second question, I think the answer is all of it? Beethoven himself could descend from the heavens and produce fifty new masterpieces at the level of his last five sonatas and in an equally accessible style and nobody but music students and a few weirdos like me would listen to it.
Maybe not in the academic context, but I'm pretty sure that Beethoven could provide healthy competition to Hans Zimmers and John Williamses of the world.
You might be right! But I am a bit skeptical - despite some similarities on the surface, film music and concert music are pretty different beasts with different modes of engagement. There are already composers writing concert music as colorful and accessible as film music - Bobby Ge comes to mind, or going back a couple generations, late Penderecki, Gorecki & all the other neoromantics. Probably somebody who likes neoromantic music more than I do could provide more examples. But while I guess these composers are more liked than the Elliott Carters & Milton Babbitts of the world, I don't think it is by more than a rounding error.
They do use plenty of literal Beethoven in popular movie soundtracks though, and while those are of course not entire concertos or symphonies, it seems that the beasts have some things in common, at least as far as the "biggest hits" are concerned.
Scott also got this wrong by calling it "musicology". Academic musicology is separate from composition. I have an MA in music composition and have never taken a musicology class. I also have never written music like Scott describes, which as the sibling comment notes, went out of fashion in the 70s. And it was only briefly in fashion starting in the 50s.
That said, I suspect this brief period did a _lot_ of damage to modern composition as a field, driving down the general "classical music" enjoying public's interest in new works.
Also, here's a few examples:
* Milton Babbitt - Partitions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk8Z8Wo2tcM
* Pierre Boulez - Piano Sonata No. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy1atgXYSRs
* Elliott Carter - Night Fantasies for piano - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8m8Xj3EG-o
I think many people with expertise in the field would probably say that the last (Carter) is not _quite_ in the same genre as the first two. I agree, but I doubt anyone without that expertise could really tell the difference.
And finally, one that's also very dissonant but totally different:
* Sofia Gubaidulina - Piano Sonata - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0li78BsGcYA
Unlike the first three, which I really dislike, I do like this one quite a bit. The big difference is that while it's extremely dissonant, it still has a recognizable structure, repeating ideas, development, etc. It doesn't sound like a bunch of musicians falling down the stairs.
Edit: Doh, you wanted _modern_ examples. As the sibling noted, this stuff is just not that popular these days. I don't know of any younger living composers who write in this style any more.
Thank you, this is already really interesting! If this atonal style is not in fashion anymore, do you have any other examples of contemporary “academic priesthood” music, that roughly matches what Scott describes, where most people outside of the academic circles would look down on it like people look down on modern architecture? Or is Scott wrong about the idea that academic music composition is “out of touch” with the popular tastes?
I saw a NY Philharmonic concert featuring a cello concerto by a composer named Gabriella Smith last November that I absolutely hated. But I don't think the piece is available online, and her other works that _are_ available seem to be quite different, and I like them.
I do think that Scott is sort of wrong about modern music. There are a _lot_ of living composers today producing works that I think are likely to be fairly palatable to a lot of people.
For example, here's a piano trio by Daron Hagen, who I studied with during my undergrad - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky7UjX5Kgf8
I didn't listen to the whole piece yet, but jumping around in it, it seems to be fairly tonal and not too out there.
Here's a double bass concert by Missy Mazzoli - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz4E5lIt9bM
This has more atonality, but still, I think it's not too difficult to listen to. It has melodies, repetition, comprehensible rhythms, etc.
Mazzoli is probably one of the most widely performed living composers right now.
And one more .. Here's an excerpt from a very new opera, The Hours by Kevin Puts - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpg8gAdpHlc
He's one of the most successful living composers, having written 3 operas, with The Hours premiering at The Met in NYC. He's also received the Pulitzer and a Grammy for his work.
Again, while it's not Puccini or Mozart, I think it's fairly comprehensible.
Of course, I could also find examples of weirder music, but I guess my point is that it's quite easy to find new music by living composers that the average classical music listener wouldn't run screaming from.
Indeed these pieces are much more approachable than I would have expected. I especially like the Mazzoli one.
I wouldn't really consider myself a fan of classical music (although I do enjoy listening to it sometimes) and only have passing knowledge of its history, but my impression has always been that the development in the 20th century has mostly been towards abstraction and freedom from rules, from Debussy/Stravinsky to Schoenberg to Babbitt/Boulez and e.g. La Monte Young. But my knowledge mostly ends after the 50's. Maybe it's the same for Scott. This might be a hard question to answer, but would you say the development since then has gone in a specific way, or even in the same way? Is there more abstraction in ways the average listener doesn't recognise? Are there specific definable trends in the classical music of the early 21st century, like atonality in the 20th century? Or did the quest towards abstraction end in the 70s and modern classical music is more a synthesis of the good parts of what came before it?
See this comment for what's basically a response from him: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/on-priesthoods/comment/85329503
There was always a proliferation of styles - consider for example the hugely influential French neoclassicists (including Stravinsky, who had an incredible nose for musical fashion, turning to neoclassicism in the twenties and serialism in the fifties), who were probably better known and more influential between the wars than Schoenberg and his students, who were just starting to put out twelve tone music (although they had been writing 'free atonal' music, i.e. not systematically organized for quite some time already). The latter were given all the narrative impetus only by the next generation, in which the avant-garde briefly dominated (and the advocates of which exhibited a tendency to grandiose teleological claims about their stylistic preferences), but in which there still existed a variety of styles. After the seventies there was a lot of fragmentation in both classical and jazz (which intruigingly had developed along a very similar trajectory in a compressed timeframe). Certain pieces that I hear from time to time sound very '21st century' to me, but I'm not in touch enough to guess at the common denominator.
Stravinsky was younger than Schoenberg by the way.
Also, is academic music composition entirely or even mostly about classical music? There is avant-garde music in every genre, from electronic to death metal, and I feel like the people making that music should also be called composers. Are there “academic priesthoods” for other genres as well?
In universities, there are basically three things that are studied and produced.:
* Classical and modern classical (also called "concert" or "art") music.
* Electronic art music (not techno). This was a big things in the 60s-80s (or so). I don't think it's so big any more.
* Jazz.
That's it. Other popular music forms, like pop, rock, or metal, are basically not touched by most music departments. _Maybe_ they have a course one professor teaches for fun that analyzes rock songs or covers song-writing. But you couldn't get a music degree in most departments by writing this sort of stuff.
There is at least one school where I think you could, Berkelee. But that's a very special case, and even there I think the main focus is jazz.
My favorite Gubaidulina piece is her concerto for bassoon and low strings. There is an old (Nonesuch? Naxos?) recording in which the soloist interpreted her instruction to scream, which comes at what must be the technical crux of the piece and a nightmare to perform, as an invitation to actually scream at the top of his lungs, as if being murdered. Apparently she meant to scream into the instrument or produce with it something like a multiphonic scream, which is what other performers do, to my ears not nearly to such powerful effect...
Her pieces for bayan with various string combinations are nice too.
I should also point out that although I did say that the postwar avant-garde style is long out of fashion, I do in fact like that music a lot. Boulez, Babbitt, and Carter would not top my list of recommendations (although all three of them wrote pieces that I enjoy), especially for newcomers to the style. Probably Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Messiaen, Takemitsu, and Dutilleux would...
I would note that the ones you like are mostly not pure serialists. Their music can be quite atonal, but it's _very_ different from the (IMHO) pure trash that Boulez, Babbitt, etc. produced.
But I do think the composers you listed are harder to get into than some of the others I talked about elsewhere in the thread.
Well, I would argue for Messiaen, who more or less invented total serialism (and not just in the four rhythmic etudes; even in his accessible works such as the Quartet fo the End of Time or say the first movement of Visions de l'Amen I think the isorythmic organization is basically already the idea of total serialism and points to a way it could have gone, where the structure actually is there in the sounds, and not just on paper in the background). He's not really thought of that way simply because a lot of his music is too gorgeous.
I do also like serialist works although I don't listen to them nearly as much as when I was younger and more receptuve to the plinkiest of plonks. But really I think even of the ones you mentioned only Babbitt really fits the most stereotypical idea of that soundworld (but Philomel is great!). Pli selon pli & Rituel and pretty much everything later on from Boulez are quite lush & impressionistic. My point was mainly that atonality is a pretty broad umbrella, and even within it there are levels of approachability.
To be fair, I've only heard a tiny bit of Boulez's music. I just hated what I heard so much that I've never explored further.
FWIW, I adore Messiaen, including the Quartet.
The aftermath of the Iraq War and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) somewhat discredited the status quo liberal norms (and their advocates) throughout much of society. This left the intellectual body in a vulnerable state that allowed more fringe theories to propagate. The academia already had a pretty robust colony of 'critical' thinkers, so it was able to move in pretty aggressively.
How do we account for the exceptions to the rule like Jon Stewart, a comedian (!) who seemed to be held by the media priesthood as their Cardinal despite the fact/because he spent all his time eviscerating them?
Someone's on Nazir
Parts of the post on how "priesthoods" work are making overly strong claims based on 1-2 examples.
"Ideas that seem too similar to the public’s get actively penalized" may have been true of architecture, but it is not true in general. It is fairly accurate to say that for an idea to be the priesthood consensus, it must be expressed by a priest in the language & rituals of the priesthood. But sometimes it is not negative if that idea previously came from outside the priesthood (or from the public in general), as long as (e.g.) some economist has built a mathematical model of it or some psychologist has published a RCT supporting it. And individual priests may take interest in ideas outside the priesthood, looking for raw materials that they can spin into their field's version of knowledge.
Speaking to the general public can gain a person status within their priesthood, if it happens in the right way. e.g., Look at the past couple decades of psychology with Dweck, Haidt, Gilbert, Duckworth, etc. publishing books & popular articles, giving TED talks, etc. It varies by field, and depends on how the researcher is communicating with the public. The researcher is an ambassador of the field to the public, so the field cares about whether they are a worthy ambassador - have they proven themselves in their work within the priesthood before going public, are they presenting the Science rather than going off the rails, are they representing the field well? If they're doing it well, the field may view them more highly, as superstar researchers. They can also get a boost from getting a higher profile within the priesthood from other people in the field who hear about them & their work in a more digestible format, who might not have know their work as well from their journal articles which may be more restrained in their claims, written more impenetrably, and/or outside that other person's subarea of research.
As someone who mastered in engineering I notice we weren’t featured in there. Engineering isn’t necessarily cool of course, but we feel ourselves divorced enough from the masses in intellect, along with our scientific colleagues, that we don’t really have to create any artificial distance between ourselves the masses, because it’s already there.
Any intellectual movement that can be taken over by Marxism - which is clearly junk - just can’t be that smart. The “intellectuals”, outside of STEM that are subject to takeover by Marxism, or whatever fad exists at the moment can do so because their intelligence is lacking and their degrees worthless.
If ideas of math as white supremacy were to bleed into engineering we’d soon see the bridges collapsing, planes falling from the sky, and technological advances stalled.
I am increasingly confused about what Scott's position even is regarding "good art". The point about musicologists here, and the entire article "Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste", both treat taste as a mainly social construct. A sufficiently isolated group (likened to priests in both posts) could have their preferences shift over time until they think that bad art is good and good art is bad.
How can this be made consistent with the Bauhaus review, which alleges that certain architecture styles are objectively ugly and even the people producing them secretly agree that they're ugly? Or the passing quotation in last Thursday's AI article that "the AIs are better poets, artists, philosophers—everything; why would anyone care what some human does, unless that human is someone they personally know?" Both of these statements imply a value-scale for art that is inflexible AND widely agreed.
Can someone make this make sense, because I'm reaching the point of just writing off whatever Scott has to say about art. Which would be a shame because the AI Art Turing Test was fun.
There is no such thing as objectively good/bad art
I think you are right. He is contradicting himself. I did not agree with his original view — I think it was his original view — that there is no objective standard by which art can be judged — but for a while he seemed to be consistent in his thinking. But yeah, in fact he’s inconsistent. I have noticed before that Scott has trouble making sense of things that are sort of — I dunno, curly. They’ve got a non-rational component.
What I think about art is that some pieces have enough novelty and richness, and are impervious enough to quick predictive processing, that they capture your attention, and paying prolonged attention to them is enjoyable and satisfying. But there is also a component of sort of giving yourself over to the work. At a certain point you stop judging, and just kind of take a ride on the music or the image or the poem. In that way it’s sort of like sex.
The priesthoods will be replaced by AI that “can never be bought/sold/biased” which is not true but thats the argument that wins
Something that comes to mind is the zealous insistence by a certain type of high school English teacher that Shakespeare absolutely must be read by every high schooler, when in fact many of the students don’t understand or even read the materials.
In regards to popularity with the public being stigmatizing within the priesthood: J.R.R. Tolkien once had this to say about what his fellow academics thought of C. S. Lewis's success in writing books:
"In Oxford, you are forgiven for writing only two kinds of books. You may write books on your own subject whatever that is, literature, or science, or history. And you may write detective stories because all dons at some time get the flu, and they have to have something to read in bed. But what you are not forgiven is writing popular works, such as Jack did on theology, and especially if they win international success as his did."
This is funny and clearly written from a place of familiarity and personal history. But if the question is why the various "priesthoods" succumbed to the excesses of the woke fad, isn't there a simpler explanation?
Political polarization by education historically leaned towards Republicans during the 20th century. It had been narrowing for decades, reached parity around 2010, and began to favor Democrats during the late Obama years. Then when Trump was elected, it accelerated to unprecedented levels of left-high education correlation. While many of the priesthoods had a politically left orientation even when education was polarized the other way, this new shift transformed the political spectrum in many priesthoods. Where they formerly ranged from a tail of moderate conservatism through the fat part of the bell curve and back down to a few hard-left sickos, the most conservative tail now constituted a few unfashionably moderate liberals, with the fat part of the curve way left of the general population.
Into this environment arrived the pandemic, followed by the racial unrest of 2020. It was an irresistible opportunity for priestly group exercises of anxiety and purification in the face of the chaotic and often disturbing cultural revanchism of the Trump era (part 1). And there was an unprecedented political center of gravity in every education-correlated institution.
Re. "1950s psychologists were not only wrong about everything, but even wronger than the average member of the public (I’m thinking mostly of psychoanalysis and behaviorism here":
LLMs prove that the objections to the most-extreme behavioristic theory (Skinner's /Verbal Behavior/) were wrong. Replace "high reward signal" with "low prediction error signal", and deep neural nets are behaviorist, I think.
(Chomsky's objections to behaviorism could have been shown to be wrong much earlier.)
I feel like this post needed a prequel post called *So, All Our Priesthoods Got Captured By Woke Last Decade*.
I mean, I'd agree that woke got a lot of universities. Also most of the journalists, though I have the sense that journalists never had great integrity. Some tech, too.
But... did we really get woke scientists? Woke economists? Woke doctors? Was it widespread, or just one or two scandals?
The American Economics Association did a distinct pivot into "wokeness" territory a few years ago.
Can you elaborate with a story or two? Woke, or crazy woke?
Scott wrote an earlier post about a very woke conference of some large American psychologist's association, possibly the APA. Link, anyone?
/Nature/ is too woke to be considered a scientific journal anymore, as its editors have argued that they must consider whether a scientific finding will advance or hinder racial justice before publishing it. /Science/ has published some editorials along the same lines, but I can't remember what they said or how far they went. /Scientific American/ is not an academic journal, and it's the wokest of them all. Check out their "obituary" for E. O. Wilson.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/22/the-apa-meeting-a-photo-essay/
>Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exaggerate this. There was still a lot of really meaty scientific discussion if you sought it out. But overall the balance was pretty striking.
I must say I'm amused by the mentioning of the large number of sessions on one particular topic in the same sentence with OCD.
"Whole fields like anthropology or sociology turned on a dime to become 100% Marxist, only to very gradually shift back or lose turf to other priesthoods with more grounded ideas (many subjects have one priesthood doing it from a Marxist theory perspective, and another - often a sub-branch of economics - doing it from a data-driven perspective)."
Is this really true? Maybe it once was , what, one-third true of sociology, but when has anthropology been 100% or even 33% Marxist (note: just being influenced by Marx as one figure among many or thinking "there are worthwhile things in that Marxian intellectual tradition" does not count)? AFAIK things like structuralism or even trends entirely within the field (e.g., evolutionary anthropology) have been more potent.
Many English Literature academic journals assume that anyone reading them is a Marxist, though there are also some that assume anyone reading them follows Foucault. I remember one issue, I forget of which journal, which was a special issue entirely about how to raise revolutionary consciousness in your students.
In 2015, professor Melissa Click got fired by the U of Missouri for getting some students to forcefully stop a journalist from filming a protest, thereby showing her ignorance of the legality of force, her authority over university land, and the purpose of protests.
The faculty circulated a letter of support for Click. 115 professors counted it. Sadly, the list of who signed it is no longer on the web; but I went thru it at the time, and checked which department each professor was in, and looked up how many professors were in each department at the time I checked. I thus got a list of what fraction of professors in each humanity department supported Click, which I take as a lower bound on what fraction were "woke" because Click's defense for attacking a journalist was that the school was racist against both blacks and whites. The fraction woke would be an upper bound on what fraction are Marxist.
Department #Signed #Faculty % signed
All sciences 7 386 1.8%
Anthropology 0 10 0%
Art 0 18 0%
Film 0 3 0%
Music 2 38 5%
Philosophy 1 9 11%
Communication 3 17 18%
Classical Studies 3 15 20%
Romance Langs & Lit 9 31 29%
History 7 23 30%
Black Studies 3 7 43%
Art Hist & Archaeol 4 8 50%
Sociology 8 13 62%
Religious Studies 10 15 67%
Gender Studies 8 10 80%
German & Russian Studies 10 11 91%
English 38 38 100%
Arts+Humanities 106 266 40%
(Click was not in the English department. She was from the Communications department. 2 professors are missing from the count bcoz they were no longer on the school's website.)
Must be a non-obvious upper bound, since I know Marxists (or people who do not consider themselves Marxist but who are seen as such by virtue of having study groups on Marx and Marxism, etc.) who are not woke. In fact I'm not sure I know anybody who is Marxist in that broad sense and also woke.
I don't know any Marxists who could be considered not woke. They may gripe about the focus on race instead of class, but they vote woke, have primarily woke friends, and cooperate with them in ganging up on the non-woke. I don't know any English Lit journals that publish anti-capitalist propaganda that don't also
The alliance between Marxists and the woke is odd, I'll grant that. Why does a movement against anti-black, anti-trans, anti-Islamic, and colonialist sentiment work in near lockstep with one focused on eliminating capitalists? There's never a note of pro-free-market sentiment among the woke, nor do I hear complaints about the overreach of the woke from Marxists.
What on earth does 'woke' mean to you, then?
I think what "woke" means is not clear by intension, but is clear by extension. We can all identify some woke people, and observe that Marxists are their fellow-travelers. I think it's safe to say that today in the US, both a Marxist and a woke person are more-likely to vote Democrat than a Democrat is.
I can think right now of 5 people I know who posted blogs of outrage when Trump won the election. 2 of them were Marxists; 3 of them were very woke.
Freddie de Boer is about as far from woke as Marxists get, and is still closer to the woke than to the median American. I don't see him voting for Trump anytime soon.
If your main definition of wokeness is not voting for Trump (or voting for the US Dems in general), the term is as vague as to be unusable, just a synonym for being a lib.
> And even though priesthoods can and do stand firm forever, if they fail to present an intelligible case then society can pass them by.
As you point out elsewhere, there is such a gap in specific knowledge between common people and the priesthood that it is difficult for the priesthood to know where to start when common people demand explanation. This frustrates both parties. Still, in many areas such as medicine, the people are at the mercy of the priesthood. This asymmetry breeds resentment in common people because we are forced to follow prescriptions for reasons we can’t explain, which makes us feel foolish.
I think I’d argue that common people, more often than not, can’t understand the case made by the priesthood but are compelled to comply with the priesthood based chiefly on the results of their prescriptions. Common people can’t intelligently object to any theory behind the process only to the process’s results.
The more complex the priesthood’s knowledge becomes, the harder it becomes for them to explain themselves. The harder it becomes for the priesthood to explain themselves, the less buy-in they get from common people and the more harshly the priesthood is judged when shit goes wrong. I think this is pretty evident right now.
My personal answers to these questions is that the priesthoods are very broken, and rather than fix them, we should try to replicate them with parallel institutions. A key way this can succeed is if the right wing gets moderates and/or libertarians on board with their parallel institutions. The problem right now is that most of the parallel institutions are right wing echo chambers. Ideally, people like Scott need to be convinced to leave the legacy institutions and join the parallel institutions, to give them greater respectability and end the echo chamber effect.
This has worked with GMUs economics and the Federalist Society in law schools. We just need this in every field.
Economics is an interesting case, because its Ur-document is a popular tract (The Wealth of Nations). Admittedly, this book was aimed at an intelligent reader, but the goal was to convert the mass of educated citizenry into intuitively "correct" economists, alert to the fallacies of mercantilism. And while the profession has strong priestly elements, from a rigid institutional status hierarchy to lots of inside esoteric technical issues, even its highest-status members (e.g. recent Nobel Memorial Prize winner Acemoglu) often put their latest ideas into books aimed at the general educated reader or the policymaker. Moreover, there has always been a tendency for agenda items generated outside the priesthood to get taken up as topics or even subfields inside the profession, e.g. environmental, urban, racial, educational concerns.
While the centuries-long project of educating the public to "think like economists" has had mixed results, popularizing (or exporting) economic insights outside the profession (if done accurately enough) has never disqualified a priest.
> Imagine a Catholic bishop declaring ex cathedra that The Da Vinci Code is 100% real.
This is pretty easy to imagine. I imagine essentially all religious schisms occur in more or less this exact manner.
Quick comment: I think viewing expert groups as "priesthoods" is misleading
No it's a beautiful insight. Have you been a member of an 'expert group'? I was in the physics priesthood. It was great going to conferences and then sitting around in some bar afterwards, and striking up a conversation with the guy next to you, and you spoke the same language... It was great.
I agree, at any rate it is a tendentious metaphor.
> Also, and it pains me to say this, many of the really good alternative sources are run by former journalists or people with journalistic experience (eg Matt Yglesias - or Jesse Singal, who recently wrote a good piece about exactly this problem).
But Matt Yglesias was a good alternative source before he was a journalist of any note. He and three other people were referred to as the Juicebox Brigade who upset the journalism status quo by publishing their own work and forcing the industry to take note of them.
Journalism was what he wanted to do, and for a decent time he was able to do it. Then he got forced out by political considerations. But we can't attribute his quality as a source to his experience as a journalist, because we know that that reverses the chronology. We want to attribute his experience as a journalist to his talent for journalism.
> we find that going from the most left-wing authored estimate of the taxable top income elasticity to the most right-wing authored estimate decreases the optimal tax rate from 77% to 60%
Um, I'm willing to guarantee that the most right-wing authored estimate of top-end income elasticity does not claim the optimal tax rate is 60% or higher.
Two points about the durability/integrity of the medical priesthood are its international scope with multiple overlapping divisions, as well as the time it's had to develop as an institution. Most developed countries, and many not so developed countries, have something like a medical system that's integrated into the international medical priesthood. So, for example, if one country's radiologists or orthopedic surgeons go off the rails, there isn't just pressure to correct from other domestic priesthoods, but also international pressure from all the other radiologist or orthopedic organizations, etc. There's also been more time to solidify and refine the core mission, ethics, boundaries, etc. of the medical priesthood compared to the priesthood of, I don't know, academic sociologists or something.
Medicine having a more tangible result than many academic disciplines also helps. There are entire fields where academics can be wrong about pretty much everything for a really really long time because their ideas don't collide with reality in the same way that a bad medical theory collides with reality when all your patients start dying because of it. Generally speaking, course correction is more difficult when you're talking about some theoretical Marxist gobbledegook than when you're talking about whether X vs Y surgical procedure causes less blood loss. (And one fundamental reason psychoanalysis turned out to be such a failure as a formal theory and as an enduring clinical enterprise was its stubborn refusal to become integrated into the mainstream medical community and have its ideas subject to scrutiny, testing, revision, etc.)
These priesthoods are very recent. The centralizing forces are very recent. They probably centralized for the purpose of capture ("corporatism").
I think there's an underestimation of how easy it is to make a building that doesn't collapses when you have concrete blocks or limit yourself to two floors.
It would have been harder without modern metal-shaping techniques and other such artifacts, but predominantly architects don't know how to not make buildings collapse and don't need to.
In the 15th century, if you were building a cathedral, you'd need to be pretty good to have it not collapse, but that's a different story.
This is f-ing great! Thank you. I'm going to have to read it again. In my previous life I was a member of the physics priesthood. This is the trifecta of my week. Dan Carlin drops audio book two on Alexander the Great. Lex Fridman does three hours with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And this... I think the short answer is keep the priesthoods and let them reform themselves... they certainly have to display their usefulness to regain our trust. But maybe burn some priesthoods down, and build anew? (Are government bureaucracies priesthoods?)
I have granular and subtle information on the extent to which various sects of the priesthood were infected, but how can I possibly convey this information? "Woke" is a discourse dirty bomb that turns data antimemetic, anyone who approaches it becomes overwhelmed by a lust for maximally sweeping generalisations: shut the fuck up about gradations, fine distinctions between faculties, different possible ethnographic breakdowns of academics as people, the web of vastly different types of actors in the funding and philanthropy space, blah blah blah, just tell me whether I should set the quad on fire or not!
How superficial was the "woke takeover" in various STEM fields? As far as I can tell, the takeover in mathematics and physics was tenuous and partial: professional organizations made statements purporting to show were on the Right Side of History, there was a lot of debate but in the end nothing much happened. (Sometimes rival professional organizations were set up - purportedly non-ideological, but not actually so for the most part, and of course they also became an obvious way for some people who were ideological *and* political ambitious in the more humdrum, banal, sordid sense of "academic politics" to gain salience, not that that was the case for all or even most people involved.)
What was most annoying, to say the least, was not the supposed takeover that never rally happened, but the normalization of behavior that broke every kind of tacit rule: young people got the idea that ad personam arguments (i"your so-called opinion is invalid because you are male" or "your so-called argument is invalid because you are sufficiently white for the purposes of this conversation" being the classic cases) were completely acceptable (and in fact good and clever) and of course the worst part was That Guy (often a guy), who cast himself as the Defender of Women, lecturing women on how to be feminists by reading websites, and giving 2000-word sermons to anybody who pointed out that a certain statistic was doubtful or had been thoroughly debunked, besides enabling the verbal abuse on the part of the motley gang that gathered on his Facebook page. In other words: not so much a takeover as an obnoxious infestation.
PS. In case it is not obvious, I am *not* looking forward to Thermidor.
>Imagine a Catholic bishop declaring *ex cathedra* that The Da Vinci Code is 100% real.
Bishops don't declare things *ex cathedra*, only the Pope can do that.
That was the point of the example, the bishop in question is being heretical.
I assumed the part about heresy was in reference to "The Da Vinci Code is 100% real", not the "bishop declaring *ex cathedra*" part.
It’s annoying: I’ve been wrestling with an idea only to watch Scott do it 10x better. I should be used to it, I guess? Also ain’t got time to blog.
I think that Scott’s diagnosis of how this happened feels off. For one, I don’t entirely trust that there was ever a golden age: rather, the politics became explicit instead of implicit. (See, e.g., the changing treatment of gays in the various DSMs.) Wokeness is just the new way in which they are broke. They are still far better than the alternative, of course.
One problem is simply that educational polarization of politics hijacks our tribal brains, as has been extensively demonstrated. But the other problem, I think, is indeed the Internet, in two different ways. The first is that, by globalizing the ways in which people in various groups communicate, the ingroup pressures got way stronger. Moreover, by democratizing the ability to find different views, mistakes are emphasized and the trust in priesthoods collapses, leading to the current epidemic crisis.
I was just discussing this with another frequent poster, who is of the opinion that “this is fine,” for reasons that seem to me to be fairly polarized themselves.
Perhaps this idea of priesthoods as self-renewing institutions is the fundamental reasons for the existence of colleges and graduate schools? Beside producing cohorts of missionaries or low-level clergy (to keep with the metaphor) who are sent out to minister to the laity or the heathen, aren't these academic institutions also (or principally) charged with replenishing the priesthood? A sort of immortal germline, where the rest of the graduating class is the throw-away soma.
It's a good subject, and worth thinking about and exploring. I do have to laugh at the gaping logical hole you created in your own premise; defining priesthoods (correctly, imo) as 1) with an enforced boundary and 2) with a drive to seek internal consensus is smart. But then you spontaneously assign a third trait - "they also want to be cool!" - in order to make your "theory" for how "woke" took them all over work, only to immediately admit that the theory still doesn't work because of demonstrable inaccuracies. It is just very funny to peddle something you know to be false in order to grind a political axe *in an article complaining about people who should know better peddling falsehoods for political purposes*.
Nicely demonstrated at least! :)
I think "wanting to be cool" (in the sense of higher-status than they currently are) is more or less a human universal, and can simply be assumed to be true of any group of people.
I think that's true, but the author of the blog went to great pains to lay out that a key component of priests within priesthoods is that they care about *in group status* at the expense of caring about out-group status, only to completely reverse course in a way that he went on to admit still didn't actually make logical sense (but still spent several paragraphs articulating). I dunno it's just very funny to me that it's so clearly him going "I need a way to work in my political hobbyhorse here, logic be damned" and it occurs in an article complaining about that very trait lol
"As with every failure of the priesthood, their best qualities served as their downfall. Their intelligence made them easy prey for bad ideas that flattered them as intellectuals."
I don't think this is true at all. I think falling for the flattery of being an intellectual is a classic midwit failure mode – a failure of the person who wants to convince himself he's intelligent simply because he knows he has nothing else going for him. If you're actually intelligent you know that "intellectual" isn't remotely the same thing as intelligent; that seems to me to be a baseline criterion for anything worth calling intelligence.
In other words, it's specifically the priesthoods' *lack* of brains that made them easy prey for this type of bad idea, and that in turn is probably related to the immense 20th-century widening of the academic priesthoods, an expansion way past the point where there was at least one genuinely intelligent person to fill each free position so that the priesthoods had to start recruiting midwit strivers.
"I don’t fully understand why wokeness succeeded at conquering the priesthoods so much more thoroughly than any previous political fad."
Same reason Communism succeeded - it appealed to their greed and vanity by promising that power and social status would accrue to the people who embraced it. That's why both ideologies were imposed top-down - the people who cared about the work cared about the work, and the people who cared about being In Change and Important embraced the ideologies that allowed them to club everyone else into line.
>Normies who try to criticize it are almost always wrong. Sometimes an outsider from another priesthood - like a statistician - can land a hit. But it’s pretty rare.
>1950s psychologists were not only wrong about everything, but even wronger than the average member of the public (I’m thinking mostly of psychoanalysis and behaviorism here, but a full list would take all day).
I'm sensing some tension here. If the whole field is corrupt, how can an outsider priest, never mind a normie, legitimately land a hit? By "a hit" you seem to mean an acknowledgement from a priest in good standing, but admit youself that this isn't necessarily correlated with truth and goodness, so the argument seems circular.
The priesthood is an excellent analogy, but I think that you overstate the stupidity of common sense. It actually pretty good for common things. I suggest checking out "Not Born Yesterday" by Mercier.
Priests need to stay in touch with the broader public not just to be cool or with it, but also to keep their esoteric knowledge grounded in a shared social reality.
I suspect that wokeness is as much a symptom of the growing sense of alienation between the priests and the public as it's cause. Wokeness explains to the priests why the public (in its unwoke slumber) no longer trusts them.
I blame it on Regan (naturally).
More seriously I blame it on the marriage of the right, the christians, and the rich centering on anti intellectualism.
It used to be you got cache from everybody by being some flavor of priest. You got to be a Big Man by getting that degree in X.
Now, nobody gives a shit except other degree in X havers and the surrounding groups. The incoming parties popular platform boils down to "hang all the Jesuits , elevate all the revivalists".
When it comes to why SJism/wokism was so successful, I do think you have hit on part of it, but a lot of it is also just the general mechanisms by which it took over so much of the Blue Tribe in the first place. I don't really want to go on about this right now, but a lot of that IMO is about its disguised illiberalism. When you first encounter it it doesn't seem to be illiberal, it seems to just be *extending* liberalism, and then, oops, eventually you find yourself in an environment where disagreeing with it is disallowed. I think this is an important mechanism by which it gained followers.
I wish the front part of the article spent less time addressing the "critics". They were not relevant to your thesis
I have a very strong sense that this essay is somehow spiritually related to the Mathic world in Neal Stephenson's 𝘈𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮.
Ivory tower intellectual priesthoods that variously cross-pollinate with the public annually, decennially, centennially, or millennially, depending on their order; with each order thus being more/less susceptible to public failure modes versus priesthood failure modes depending on the frequency with which they integrate with the public.
I think potentially a vaild reading of 𝘈𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 might be that the various academic/intellectual specialisms are undertaken by each order depending upon (amongst other factors) that specialism's susceptibility to general-public failure modes..
Well, you can still put some faith in the priests, just pick the right priesthoods.
Eg stay away from the Marxists.
There is something I think you have totally skipped over, which is the impact of gender balance. Most of these fields that have been captured are female dominated. Women as a whole have very different behavior than men regarding social acceptability of ideas and punishing unacceptable speech; and they have less tendency to pursue interests (or the truth) for their own sake and more tendency to pursue those things only for social status.
Male dominated fields (like psychiatry back in the day) had a tendency to be wrong in a different and novel way; female dominated fields have a tendency to be wrong in exactly the same way as anyone else, which of course negates the whole point of a priesthood.
It seems to me that AI provides a new means to fix or replace priesthoods. There are two modes for this I can think of: superintelligence and tool AI that facilitates better epistemology and consensus building. If superintelligence lives up to the hype, it could replace priesthoods. But if we control the rise of SI, we'll need to go through a trust building process that will likely rely on priesthoods. Decentralized, AI-facilitated fact checking and clustering allows discussions to scale bigger, faster, and with higher fidelity than ever before. This could provide a subtle, assistive third party to help priesthoods become more effective and potentially create wider, subtler boundaries between the priesthood and the public.
*Most
https://pol.is/home
600+ well-argued and literate comments at the time of posting this, so what do I have to add?
Let me test the high-decoupling of our audience and host with the elephant in the room. I should add that my own ancestry is half Ashkenazi (though I don't practice the religion), and that I am ABSOLUTELY NOT charging anyone present with any culpability in this--it's largely before our time, and most of the rationalists have served as loci of resistance to the odious trend under question. I believe under most modern forms of ethics, including Christianity, you answer only for your own sins, not those of your relatives. (And your own relatives may have fought against it.)
I think a big influence is the drop in antisemitism after WW2 thanks to the exposure of Hitler's atrocities, allowing a disproportionately leftist Jewish population to enter academia through meritocratic means. Look, we're smarter. I don't know if it's nature, nurture, or both, but count the Nobel Prizes. There's a reason the Nazis didn't get the Bomb! Once there, they shifted the culture to the left, laying the foundations for much of what we see now--cultural anthropology, Cultural Marxism, the ancestor of woke, second-wave feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, and the AMA taking a knee. Boas, Marcuse, Friedan, Steinem, (Judith) Butler, and any others I've missed. (I'll toss in Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin.)
(I'll let our buddy Zubatov at Tablet clarify that, yes, Cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory but also a real thing:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/just-because-anti-semites-talk-about-cultural-marxism-doesnt-mean-it-isnt-real)
At least in part, of course, they gained moral support by advocating for the repeal of Jim Crow, which was horribly unfair by any estimation and was hurting us geopolitically in the Cold War. But that turned into 'disparate impact' and the rest of it. There are some people who are going to say this had to do with the way the Warren court was trying to end Jim Crow, and that's definitely part of it--Hanania's covered this better than me.
I should also add this wasn't entirely Jewish by any means--the 'long march through the institution' was coined by Rudi Dutschke, who was born Christian, and the idea of the working-class socialist intellectual by Antonio Gramsci, who wasn't Jewish either. Most of the theorists of the later ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality, and standpoint theory, such as Derrick Bell, Kimberle' Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Patricia Collins, were not members of the tribe.
And it's not that there aren't any libertarian, conservative or liberal antiwoke Jews--from Ayn Rand to Milton Friedman to Norman Podhoretz to Andrew Breitbart to Edward Blum to, in some senses, our esteemed host, they certainly exist and are important. The issue is that when you have a high-verbal-IQ population with a disproportionately leftist slant, it is going to drive America to the left. It's a statistical thing.
"What am I supposed to do, jump in the oven?" you ask. NO! (I'm not a Groyper or a believer in medieval blood guilt, and besides, there's a good chance I'd have to off myself.) That's counterproductive and self-destructive. It's up to all of us, whether descended from Abraham or not, to do something about this. You fight where you can. You raise money, you intrigue with like-minded colleagues, you form alternate islands of intellectual rigor outside the university like this that can embarrass dishonest academics with graphs and convince the increasing number of smart people outside academia like those in Silicon Valley. If you enjoy playing the long game, you get a PhD in economics or engineering or some other field as-yet uncorrupted and prepare to serve as a foot soldier or landing base when the counterattack on academia comes. If you're in a position where you can act non-anonymously, you do that--assuming self-doxxing is actually useful and not just exposing another heretic to be removed. You can't win with just the intellectual battle, of course, but it becomes necessary when woke finally falls and a new infrastructure has to be built. It's a persuasive role, but if your intelligence is higher than your charisma, well, play the position you're built for and don't worry too much about your ancestry. (Though if it's there, it can be a useful defense against charges of fascism.)
Good luck, my friends, and let's make 'tikkun olam' mean something that will stick in the doxxing NYT's metaphorical throat.
I think a big part is the changing composition of the priesthood. The academia of the 60s was much smaller than today and the average academic very bright, possibly a bit autistic and cared a lot about truth.
Since then white collar jobs with interesting, complicated problems have dramatically increased in number and pay. At the same time academia has grown massively, and has increased the amount of admin and hassle.
Lots of people who would have been academics in the 60s are now working at quant funds, in tech etc. There are a limited number of these sorts of people and as they have gotten rarer in academia the norms have often changed against aggressive debate and eccentricity. The average academic is now much more conformist and agreeable.
The fields which are least impacted by the woke stuff (maths, physics, econ) are those where it is quite hard to study the subject without being smart and a bit autistic, and so have seen less change in the type of people studying it. In contrast a subject like history used to be studied by the sort of person who was completely obsessed by cuneiform tablets. Now a lot of history academics seem like they could easily have become a middle manager in an insurance firm instead.
The changing composition issue has been compounded by the internet, which both made it harder to dissent within academia (twitter pile ons etc) and also exposed a lot of these issues to the wider public (for instance I think in some fields in the 80s they believed some pretty wild stuff, but not sure that impacted public trust, as not many people knew about it).
I’m not sure whether this occurred in other priesthoods outside academia. Journalism in the US seems to have seen a slightly different shift from normal people who could write to posh rich kids, possibly with a similar impact.
The deceits of the priesthoods being more subtle seems, on anything other than aesthetic grounds, to be a bug rather than a feature. Also, aren’t they much more likely to have a wider, deeper, longer-lasting, and therefore more damaging impact?
This reads like a condensed version of a typical sociology-of-the-professions book. (That is meant as praise.) More explicitly normative, though.
...and this observation rings true in my social science-area, in particular related to highly complex economic/game theoretic papers with extensive use of mathematical formulas:
"Because priests are so focused on their reputation, even their mistruths follow certain ritual purity laws. The typical non-priest who lies to support a political cause will repeat some un-fact-checked lurid anecdote, or some utterly idiotic misinterpretation of garbled data. But the deceits of priests are subtle and elegant. They’ll publish a study that observes the forms almost perfectly, then bury something in the footnotes which reveals that it’s irrelevant to any of the real world situations that people would expect it to be relevant to."
Priesthoods are demanded by the fervent. This is where I find religion is less a theology and more a psychology. Some but out non theistic priesthoods in place.
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/religion-as-a-psychology
Not to be the nth person saying this, but:
- Seriously, Scott, lots of people genuinely enjoy Schoenberg and Berg while also enjoying Sibelius and Shostakovich and also Stravinsky. Or at least we enjoy some works by each of them. You may say "I did not mean the *first* half of the twentieth century, but then -
- What period is exactly meant? Probably something that reached its peak in the 50s-70s. Back in the late 90s, I had lots of friends in the music department, and they saw Milton Babbitt as a wizened figure from a previous epoch who would sometimes come to the department at odd times to look at the old monastery, with contempt for the heretics and pagans who had taken over written on his face.
- Composers and musicologists are two different tribes. Composers look down on musicologists just as people who see themselves as creators look down on theorists and chroniclers everywhere. Also, most musicologists study much earlier periods in music, no?
- You would have recognized the *same* phenomenon that you cogently describe in a general context ("the priesthood has already thought of that and has spent the last 30 years discussing it") in a music department if you had paid any attention to this particular. I remember someone in the local music department denigrating the 20th century in, what, 2003?
Not that you wouldn't have some easy targets for satire if you actually befriended people in music-department circles. 'I look upon extended technique with contempt. It is beneath my cool.' 'You sexist pig!'
A model of priesthoods:
Perhaps the task of preserving useful knowledge in society is actually a really hard problem for flesh-and-blood organisms. Everyone has their own ideas and they're all equally valid from those people's points of view, and people, especially smart people, are prone to manically believing their own new theories and upending everyone's beliefs every year, if anyone will listen to them and give them cult-leader status. Humanity's crystallized knowledge is perhaps actually a very tenuous thing---but for the most part we don't notice this, because we are living in the middle of a giant social-technological solution to it, which is priesthoods.
Knowledge, at some level, is generated by one mental state (something like "lateral thinking" or "manic theorizing" or "so-and-so strange recluse wrote a whole treatise dropping a paradigm-shifting knowledge bomb on the profession".) But it has to be preserved by another one, which crystallizes and disseminates and preserves it. These are people who are less of the sort to generate ideas and more the sort to learn, master, and re-teach them. These people form the bulk of the priesthood: not the prophets but the priests. Their job in society is to keep the framework of knowledge stable.
Meanwhile there are pressures against that stability. There are occasionally brilliant theorists who push on it in a way that eventually get it to buckle. But far more of the pressure comes from the other side: from crazies, imposters, people who think they have good ideas and do not, people who want to dismantle all knowledge because they don't understand it but think they're right anyway. These are all your Youtube theorists and your wackjob crackpots who think they've solved relativity with, like, time crystals.
So the priesthood has to be quite resilient to resist all that pressure. But not so resilient that it resists *all* pressure; sufficiently-good ideas need to be able to replicate and disseminate. This basically looks like there being "some, but not infinite, pressure against new ideas". Your idea has to have legs if it is to survive.
... at least that's how it's supposed to work. But I think what has gone really awry is the gradual conversion to where all college-level professors are supposed to do research foremost, and therefore they are charged to gradually invented new religion to be priesthoods of, instead of preserving existing ones. So their *job* is to change the knowledge instead of keeping it the same, and naturally things flow from there and you end up with Marxist Lit departments or whatever. Which at one level is kinda fine---I'm glad to live in a society where people are paid to think about political theory and where open-minded students are exposed to it--but there is something strange about a university program that is mostly about *new* ideas instead of *old* ones. E.g. an engineering department teaches you how to make computer chips or make bridges foremost, and maybe some cutting-edge research also happens. My impression is that it's kinda the opposite for humanities departments, basically because of this silly "school=research instead of school=training" idea.
Aside, it's not a coincidence that we call non-specialists "laypersons" which originally referred to non-priest members of the church.
Also, your cartoon is, sure, meant to be a criticism of left-wing knowledge, and I agree that it's a shame because having to find a priest is a good thing compared to random Twitter posters or whatever. But the real issue is that that cartoon is just a vibe, and it's almost certainly completely false. If you could do any kind of actual investigation on the subject, you would almost certainly find that priests are right like 99% of the time and random people are right far far less than that. The crux of the issue is really whether it's *true*: *do* priests make things up the same as random people on the internet do? I doubt it. The sensation that it's true is just a sensation, caused by the fact that the news/social media/viral internet heavily amplifies the signals of anyone who's wrong or makes a mistake. I cannot imagine that it stands up to scrutiny.
Scott chanced upon something pretty big here. It turns out that most of academia, Earth's main knowledge institution, might have this giant norm of long dry papers and nonfiction books, largely due to a culture of warding off the hoi polloi.
It could have instead been HPMOR-style or And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes-style stories that transmit knowledge, octoupling the number of people (including experts in other fields) willing to dive into topics, at the price of merely doubling the word count per concept. But the culture mandates that anything other than ultra-direct boring technical documents is seen as unserious.
It’s a more intriguing idea than I would have expected prima facie, so I think it’s worth answering.
1 and 2 explain why this is impractical, 3 and 4 are about why it’s not obvious this would work, and 5 argues that some amount of warding off is, in fact, good – but my point is that it’s downstream of the existing constraints, especially the point I sketch in 2).
(But of course, even if something happens for very good reasons, it doesn’t mean it’ll disappear when these reasons are no more. Cultural inertia is absolutely a thing.)
1) Researching new knowledge, presenting it in a clear form to an expert, and presenting it in a generally engaging way (say, à la HPMOR) are very distinct, difficult skills. All of them are extremely time-consuming and it already takes time to “stay at the top of the game”.
2) making a finding useful to a non-initiate requires giving a ton of background information (everyone systematically underestimates inferential distances, but academics still deal with them every single day). All of this in an engaging, not-dense, light-toned way. All of which takes time to write, and which your expert will not remotely care about because they know it by heart – or rather, they require only the most targeted and specific part of this context.
3) even reading HPMOR does not, in fact, impart basic rationality skills on its own. Yudkowsky reports that many readers asked him: “why not load your mental model of [hyper-competent person who has essentially been running the show, you know who] and take over the world?”.
It’s a legitimate question, but one of those you really, really should expect the writer to have thought about and rejected, especially given that he has Lucius comment about this when discussing the tragedy of Light the Slytherin with Draco.
4) Also, Yudkowsky writes that most of the subtle stuff in fiction is simply not noticed by the reader. Which is why, to convey complex information, you have to avoid being subtle about it.
5) the overwhelming majority of laymen simply aren’t interested in learning the stuff and expect us to validate their delusions (or also have no idea about the inferential distances involved).
Even people who can be assumed to be interested (such as undergrads, since they pay so much for the privilege) will make mounds of gruesome errors that will give their instructors and TAs suicidal urges.
Checking that any given person is, in fact, interested in learning is also a time and energy-consuming process (and those people heavily outnumber academics), so making barriers to entry seems eminently reasonable.
Apologies for the long answer, I don’t have time for a shorter one.
I.
I think you’re missing some obvious explanations for "why did woke took over". Note that various explanations are not mutually exclusive (non of this is substantiated, just guesses) :
1. As science progress and truth is harder and harder to reach, it means truth signals are weaker and weaker. It means that other selections pressures (ie monkey stuff like politics and status) get comparatively stronger and stronger. This is Bad News : it means that woke in no fluke and the theory that "all will be fine again once we get rid of woke" is wrong. It just means *other* memetics parasites will arise, because we haven’t fixed the root issue is "all your optimization pressure in academia now comes from monkey stuff". Note that in my model this is the plague afflicting the field of philosophy since a very long time.
2. After the abject failure of Big Ideologies like Communism and Nazism, we have gone, collectively, away from the policy of "taking ideas seriously". This has beeen substituted with being "data-driven" (as opposed to theory-driven). Before, being a Serious Person meant explaining your policy in terms of its place in the Grand Historical Dialectics and whatever. Now it’s all about the best estimate of the marginal returns on taxation. Both strategies have their advantages/issues, but one big issue with being data-driven is that it’s damn easier to build post-hoc rationalizations on non-contextualized, limited data sets than trying to fit your pet theory in the Accepted Big Picture. In the memetic/genetic analogy, it means higher rates of mutation. We know what happen when you allow viruses to mutate more.
3. The explanation that Bret Devereaux loves to hate (and given the number of times he writes the term "fascism" when he dunks of it, I suspect it’s more the memetic parasit that infests academia that is speaking when he does so, not the man himself) aka "good times create weak men, weak men create hard times". In Bryan Caplan’s mouth, it would be termed "Social Desirability Bias". I basically notice two things : when I read biographies of old academics, there’s a 50% chance that somewhere in the book there will be a passage saying something like "X was a bastard but he was brillant, so everyone respected him". The relatively more recent zeitgeist is at the polar opposite : being brillant does not entitle you to be an asshole. I call "weak mean" the kind of person who takes that zeitgeist seriously and at heart, and who are *terrified* of being called an asshole. An obvious strategy to not being called an asshole is to observe when other people are getting called assholes, and not do what they did. This strategy is obviously exploitable. The modern, refined and advanced form of that exploit is called "woke". The solution is obviously to no longer fear being called an asshole, and it seems to not be such a bad strategy. So we can link the rise of woke with the rise of "weak men" in good times. This explains why this is not limited to academia. This explains why we saw a weaker version of woke appearing earlier in the name of "politically correct" (which is an earlier, more clunky, proof-of-concepts variant of that exploit). In that version, academia is just a victim in a larger memetic warfare strategy (weaponizing the fear of being called an asshole).
II.
"But to a first approximation, there’s only one medical priesthood" : no, this is the third approximation. The second approximation is "there’s only one academic priesthood". The first approximation is "there’s only one priesthood", which encompass media, academia, lobbying, law, education, pundits, and I’m forgetting a lot. When Trump & his acolytes are attacking "The Elites", he’s not narrowly speaking about Critical Race Theory College Professors.
Which makes it such an juicier target for a memetic parasite, and makes any corruption _stronger_. If your field largely fall and rise as much as your neighbor’s field, because you are part of the same Priesthood, just from a different Diocese, it makes it much less attractive to attack the corruption of your neighbor’s field, even if your own field is genuinely less corrupted. On paper the calculus may be more complicated because of the point you’re raising ("those corrupt priests are ridiculing the whole Priesthood"), but I’m not convinced. It only matters if it ridicules the Priesthood in the eyes of someone that matters. If everyone who matters is actually is, if not in the Priesthood, at least in the same Religious Structure (your nuns and deacons), ridiculing Priesthood is not that much a big deal. I’m pretty sure it was the calculus that went with the woke: that the deplorables don’t matter anyway so getting ridiculous in their eyes is no big deal, who cares ? It may even be a plus (I mean, it’s your "Boundary with the Public").
(and yes they’re now discovering, pikachu face, that in a democracy the deplorable actually can matter. oopsies.)
III.
I have more qualms with that part of the article tho :
"But the deceits of priests are subtle and elegant": yes, and this makes them way more dangerous ? The intellectual capital to detect the bullshit in the NYT is way higher than the intellectual capital required to detect the bullshit in infowars. Therefore way more people, and more educated people, and more influential people will predictably fall for the first bullshit. It is worse. You realize it is worse, right ?
Also: it’s easier to fight back against false uncredentialed ideas than false credentialed ideas.
Also: it’s worse when the epistemic institutions of your society is compromised by a memetic parasite, than when the sport institutions of your society is compromised by a memetic parasite. NYT being compromised is worse than Andrew Tate spilling misinformation.
Also: if any epistemologically corrupted college professor can gain your support by just saying "it’s me or Alex Jones", you do realize that you can get college professors arbitrarily as close as corrupted as Alex Jones before you drop your support to them, right ?
> But I still have basic trust that something in the New York Times’ non-opinion pages is 99% likely to be factually true
First, you are a savvy reader. You do realize that when you are giving an advice of the form "I have basic trust in the NYT", you are a feral beast tamer who goes "don’t getting eaten by a feral beast is easy, just don’t show your fear", and then a random child will listen to you, go into the tigers pit saying to himself "I’m not afraid" and get eaten alive. And in this metaphor, by "a child" I mean a slightly less savvy reader than you, which is at least 99% of humankind. Or : you’re going a bit too fast from "as a feral beast tamer I can go into a pit of hungry feral beast relatively safely" to "a pit of hungry feral beasts is not _that_ dangerous".
Also, even in your position of an unusually savvy reader, how confident are you that in the counterfactual world where the NYT is libertarian-aligned and exactly as trustworthy (as in "their lies are elegantly spun") as it is now, you are not part of the crowd that shouts *FDA delenda est* on the top of rooftops ? *Really* that sure ? Are you damn sure that it generalizes to all your beliefs ?
> When should we continue to trust priesthoods, on the grounds that at least they require their mistruths to be subtle (which limits the amount of damage they can do and ensures some correlation with truth)?
I’d rather stay ignorant and be aware of the fact that I’m ignorant than be wrong and think I’m right because I have been fed sufficiently subtle lies that they pass my lie detector, thank you. I don’t see in what world the second situation is doing less damage. It’s very close to saying that "Truth doesn’t matter, because falsehoods are better than ignorance". I prefer my liars brazen rather than subtle. Therefore I want my social epistemic institutions to reward honesty first, then lightly punish obvious and brazen lies, and _heavily_ punish subtle lies. Subtle lies are the *worst* crimes in truth-seeking ; it is an aggravating circumstance, not an attenuating one.
(the difficulty of course is that obvious lies are obvious, whereas subtle lies are closer to an honest mistake ; but if you determine beyond reasonable doubt that what comes out an actor's intellectual production is a continuous stream of subtle lies rather than truth plus honest mistakes ? You should get more mad, not less mad, and punish more, not less. I don’t even see how you can arrive to the opposite conclusion. I mean, part of the difficulty is that as we get to harder and harder problems, the Truth signal is harder and harder to catch, and you’re saying, in this situation: "stealthily sabotaging this very delicate and precise experimental instrument so we arrive to the wrong conlusion but without knowing it is less problematic than openly burning the research notes of your competitor in your petty rivalry". I mean, yes, both are bad, but the first is way worse for everyone involved ?)
> How would we even begin to do either of those things?
You are, right now, doing this second thing ?
I think you mean "academic composition" rather than "academic musicology" which studies music history (and music theory in Europe). You're obviously not a member of the priesthood...
IF Man is ruled by Priests or Soldiers then clearly it’s time for Soldiers.
Not at all obvious to me that " wokeness succeeded at conquering the priesthoods so much more thoroughly than any previous political fad."
When I listen to history, universities of the 19th century seem plenty captured by the ideological fads of the day. Thinking of e.g. 1848 revolution in the German confederation here. Or lawyers just before the breakout of the French Revolution. Or the Marxist architects you brought up. That happened at a time when the US government was aggressively anti-communist! Treating approval by the Kremlin as the highest form of praise when the government is looking for communist sympathisers is a lot more extreme than talking about how diversity is great when the government is also talking about how diversity is great.
Typo:
"Still, they’ve bleeding reputation for the past few decades."
I'd love to see an analysis of the priesthood-nature of the Internet Engineering Task Force. (They're the people who make the technical standard that make the Internet work.) I was involved with the IETF for five or 10 years, and it's definitely a priesthood in some ways, there is very much an internal status structure and a considerable lack of concern for the opinions of outsiders when those opinions are seen as contrary to the principles of the IETF. OTOH, it does go out of its way to conceptualize itself as "open" and in practice anyone can join its discussion mailing lists or attend its in-person conferences. Care is taken to scatter the in-person conferences around the world. Then again, all work is done in English. But as I phrase it, "Anyone may speak; not all are listened to.", you have to build a reputation in the eyes of the other insiders to actually be inside.
IMHO this should be part of a comprehensive sociological history of the IETF. It basically came out of left field in the 1970s to build the data networking that dominates the world. Compare with the CCITT -- a club of the telephone companies -- that worked on building a data networking system, and effort that grossly failed. One interesting aspect is that while most people who are involved with the IETF are sponsored by their employers in one way or another, one is not seen as representing one's employer at the IETF, your reputation is your own, and if you shill for your employer's interests in a way that is seen as being contrary to the good of the Internet, you lose status.
So to provide context, I finished my undergrad in 1995 and my MA in 1997. Since then, I've worked in tech, but I do go to classical concerts a _lot_ and I always try to find performances of living composers.
So with that out of the way, I think what happened starting in the 70s and 80s is that composition departments became much less dogmatic about what "proper" composition should be. If you look at the new music of those time periods, you can see a lot of different approaches that became popular.
The best known of those is probably minimalism, starting with Glass and Reich. This is still popular today.
Another big one is neo-romanticism, which in my summary would be "new music designed to give you the feels". This tends to be tonal(-ish), feature recognizable melodies, and also the sort of big gestures with associate with the Romantic period. Daron Hagen, who I linked above, is a good example of this sort of music. So is Kevin Puts. I love this stuff.
We also have people like Gubaidulina and other composers who've continued the atonal-but-not-serial work of people like Ligeti, Takemitsu, etc. This work is often dense and atonal, but will still have recognizable reptition, melodies (or melodic fragments), some sort of harmony (maybe based on tone clusters instead of triads). It may also have grand gestures, large-scale development, etc. I think this stuff is tough to get into, but it can be quite rewarding. It can still hit the same emotional resonance that the neo-romantic works do, but I think it takes a bit more effort from listeners to get into the composers work. I like some of this stuff, but it can veer into the impenetrable IMO.
Another comment in the thread mentioned pastiche. This became quite popular as well. This music often combines elements of many genres, including various classical periods (Baroque, Classical, Romantic), along with popular music idioms. It often has a lot of quotations of other pieces. At its worst, I think this sort of music sounds cheesy and low-effort. But it can be great. I recently saw a performance of Michael Daugherty's Le Tombeau de Liberace. This is a great example of this style. I thought the piece was incredible. It was like Vegas meets modern music on an acid trip.
There are other styles of modern music that have flourished as well. One of my favorite modern composers is George Crumb. His works are sort of like a mix of pastiche, super-weird atonalism, and what I can only describe as a sort of ritualistic element. I think Vox Balanae is one of his most approachable works. Here's a wonderful performance of it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGPQLXPV5wE. Another composer who works in this vein is Joseph Schwantner. Check out his Aftertones of Infinity.
And yet another style I would describe as rhymic crunchy noise, like Michael Torke or Louis Andriessen. I generally find this stuff really irritating, though I don't know why. It literally makes me want to leave the room. But my wife loves it!
One more I'd note is a kind of "color-focused" composition, where the focus is on making interesting sounds and contrasting them over the course of the piece. I think Jacob Druckman's work does a lot of this. I'm not a fan, but I think it can be fairly accessible. I just find it kind of boring. I like emotion more than just sound.
And of course lots of composers mix and match many of these style. Kevin Puts wrote an opera version of The Machurian Candidate that mixes neo-romanticism and pastiche. There's a bits of jazz in there to fit with the time period in which its set. And many composers explore different styles over the course of their career. Aaron Copland, famous for his fairly tonal works, wrote some serialism-influenced music later in life! Unsurprisingly, this stuff isn't played nearly as much as his earlier work.
I feel like I'm probably missing a _lot_ of other styles, and of course any style I mention can be further subdivided into a million subthreads (just like modern metal genres).
A brief comment about the GMU economics bloggers. The academics you have spoken to are absolutely correct—there is nothing surprising that these bloggers are not all found at the very top institutions. Blogging (and other kinds of popular media) are generally not considered a core part of a professor’s job duties. I think for the most part blogging wouldn’t be discouraged, but at an R1 institution (like GMU, and the more highly rated departments), the emphasis is on published research, funded grants, etc. Look up, for example, Robin Hanson on Google Scholar, and you will see that he publishes research articles quite infrequently; this wouldn’t be enough to cut it at a top institution.
What does warrant additional explanation is not why relatively few popular econ bloggers are at the very top institutions, but rather why there is such a notable cluster at a single institution like GMU. A large part of the explanation for this is (seriously!) that the Koch Foundation has used enormous donations to GMU and affiliated centers like Tyler Cowen’s Mercatus Center to wield significant influence. The Koch Foundation quite explicitly pushes a libertarian (and conservative) agenda. While having popular and well-read blogs is not an important part of a university’s core function, it is an effective way to influence popular opinion and shape the public discourse. It is documented that the donations to GMU have included stipulations that give the Koch Foundation say over hiring decisions. This lets them select for faculty who may not excel at research contributions to the field of economics, but rather in public dissemination of what they consider friendly ideological content. As you mentioned yourself, these bloggers are not only all at GMU, but they are all (to varying degrees) libertarian in their leanings. This isn’t coincidental.
Whether this lends evidence to the claim that “only your reputation within the priesthood matters”, I’m not entirely sure. Certainly, in order to get hired, only how you are assessed by the hiring committee matters (tautologically). But I don’t think that valuing research contributions over popular outreach (like blogging) is solely about status games or reputation. It seems logical that the main criteria when hiring a doctor should be their skill at practicing medicine, and their success as a blogger should be secondary. When hiring a musician to perform at an event, they should be assessed more by their skill at performing music, and less by their skill at writing a music blog. Similarly, if the core function of a professor is to perform academic research, then blogging to a lay audience is only secondary.
Another putative example of this post's thesis:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-154275181?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
"I’ve been despairing the past few years because the priesthoods have been doing such a bad job - biasing so many pronouncements to fit their political leanings. I was looking forward to seeing what happened after they got taken down a notch. Unfortunately, it’s nothing good."
As an academic, I'd like to make a rather more positive defense, but sometimes it's worth trying other points of view.
So academia expects its (in fact groundless) dictates to be irrefutable, blindly obeyed by a subservient public, and threatens to come down like a ballistic missile on anyone who would dare and try criticize the blessing of their betters, right?
Well, I suppose this would make academia Saddam Hussein. What happened after his regime collapsed, when the US stopped imposing order?
Technological changes explain many social changes.
Washing machines, etc, freed up women to work outside of the house more ⇒ greater rights for women.
STIs became easier to treat ⇒ gay marriage legalised.
Internet allowed strangers to speak without revealing their faces or voices ⇒ gendered languages means stating your pronoun (masc/fem) is a gesture of linguistic kindness to people writing to you.
Then people started getting creative with pronouns as they could now separate their internal and external states. Once the internet got big enough this started flowing back into the offline world.
Academics got captured because there is a directional cohesiveness to various "liberation" struggles; it was an easy story to understand. And they also cared a lot about the lives of their students, who'd come up in this online world, and wanted to peacefully cohabit with them.
Priesthoods can make serious mistakes on stuff that really matters (e.g. masks and covid), but it's pretty rare and soon corrected. The more squishy the field, e.g. sociology, the longer the half-life on serious mistakes.
Art priesthoods (architecture, musicology) likely have an entirely different mechanism to explain their oddness.
Also, in the US political polarisation is unnaturally severe.
There are multiple things going on that I don't really see as related; I see a grand unifying theory of priesthoods as mistaken.
Speaking as a member of a “priesthood” (medicine), the level of consensus within the field with the prevailing politics of the past years (especially in relation to Covid) is a lot less than you may think. The key is enforcement by a handful of “high priests,” with excommunication by those who have found to violate the accepted opinion space. The health care regulatory agency in my country (Australia) has banned doctors from practicing when they said things on social media about Covid lockdowns that people in power didn’t like.
Never have I pivoted so quickly from "engaged and intrigued" to "frustrated and disappointed" with a piece of Scott's writing. The section on priesthoods and "wokeness"-written to be pretty core to the whole discussion--is badly, badly lacking.
I have long felt that Scott has something of a blind-spot around "woke" and "wokeness," but this is the first time I've felt that he's tripped over it in a big way. The trouble is that "wokeness" is this very large, vague, amorphous concept. What's "woke?" Anything vaguely left-coded that the speaker doesn't like. I'm pretty convinced that within the broader culture, this vagueness is exactly the reason the word is so popular: it's easy to decry things as "woke," and it instantly lends you an air of counterculture edginess and standing-up-against-those-people bravado. But precision and narrowness are rationalist virtues, and if you want to understand a complex cultural topic like this it is VITAL that you be more precise than simply saying "woke" and assuming that means anything coherent.
Consider a range of "woke" behaviors that doctors could display. On one end of the range, they are doing things like providing friendly, helpful care to any and all patients (yes, even those who are queer and trans) and treating them with basic courtesy (which yes, involves not deliberately using non-preferred names and pronouns). On the other end of the range lies egregious malpractice like falsifying study results when the conclusions don't match the doctor's ideology, or lying to patients about their medical care for ideological reasons. How many doctors display behaviors on which ends of the range? This seems like a really, REALLY important question to assessing both the quality of the care they're providing and how much the field has been "ideologically captured."
But it actually seems like an utterly irrelevant question to assessing how conservatives relate to doctors. It's quite clear to me that even in a world where every single doctor across the country does the respect-and-courtesy thing, and literally zero of them do the ideologically-based-malpractice thing, very large numbers of conservatives would be just as ready to conclude that "medicine has gone woke," and quickly destroy each others' trust in medicine. The vagueness of the term has been quite effective as a political weapon in other arenas, and I expect it to be equally so here. The whole point of "woke" to my ears is that people who use is as a broad-spectrum pejorative don't need to care about the details of any particular case: they know they don't like it and that's all they feel they need to know.
As far as Scott writing this article goes, I can see of two better paths that could have been followed. One would be to add back in the missing narrowness and precision: cite specific sorts of actions that fall under the umbrella of harmful doctor "wokeness" with some real data to show that yes, this is a case of mandate, this is how bad it is, this is how quickly its getting worse. Or route around the question entirely, and simply talk about how perceptions of doctors have changed over the past couple decades, without trying to say anything about how accurate those perceptions are. Unfortunately, Scott does neither of these things: he takes it as a given that doctors have been captured by wokeness, says very little about what that actually *means* in practice, and then hares off into armchair speculation about why they would do this Vague and Undefined Thing That He's Very Sure They Definitely Did.
>literally zero of them do the ideologically-based-malpractice thing, very large numbers of conservatives would be just as ready to conclude that "medicine has gone woke,"
Quite vehemently disagreed. If it was "literally zero" then they'd have no reason to think medicine has "gone woke," would they? The problem is that there is a "woke" faction, presumably small in number but *extremely* loud and seemingly influential, and seemingly no parallel faction on their side, so to speak.
How broadly do we want to define "doctor"? Literally just practicing MDs, or can we broaden that to "health professionals"?
During the pandemic there were, fairly famously, nurses that got fired for abusing their patients for wearing Trump hats or making "unwoke" comments when they came in. This does not exclude the possibility of more that performed such behaviors but crossed the minimum intelligence threshold to not brag about it on social media. It also does not exclude the possibility of nurses that cared poorly for left-coded patients and didn't brag publicly, of course.
There were multiple public health researchers at prominent institutions (I recall and loathe unrepentant monsters Mark Lipsitch at Harvard, Harald Schmidt at UPenn, I assume there were more) that argued in favor of particular vaccine distribution schedules and restrictions because they kill more white people. This would also kill more minorities because of the delays generated, but that was beside the point. "Health equity" can get you some absolutely horrifying places really fast. More than one way to skin a cat.
See also anti-mask protests kill grandma, but BLM protests are more important than stopping COVID. Et cetera and so forth. The pandemic period had a significant portion of the health field beclowning itself in a "woke" direction, a tiny portion beclowning itself in the ivermectin direction and getting excommunicated for it, and a large silent majority. But a silent majority wields no influence over how the public perceives it!
To go pre-pandemic, Scott had a post about an APA meeting with twice as many talks about global warming as they did on OCD, among other examples of "woke" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/22/the-apa-meeting-a-photo-essay/).
>The vagueness of the term has been quite effective as a political weapon in other arenas
The vagueness of the term is generated in part because the somewhat, though not entirely, coherent grouping to which it applies abjectly refuses to be named. Decentralization is an incredibly powerful force for an ideology if they can pull it off, and no one can be held responsible.
Defining wokeness is much like the Supreme Court Justice's infamous statement on pornography: "I know it when I see it." I like when Scott is more accurate too, but there are times when the defining is a distraction so that whatever definition is given can be No True Scotsmanned away. If the explicit definition is not the point, and instead is in service to some other point, then I think it's fine to be loose like this.
> Quite vehemently disagreed. If it was "literally zero" then they'd have no reason to think medicine has "gone woke," would they?
I disagree. Consider the following claims:
1) an aluminum tube or a picture of a truck is sufficient evidence that a foreign leader is building nuclear weapons and needs to be put down now,
2) there are pedo-Satanic orgies organized in the basement of a Washington pizzeria and patronized by every prominent Democratic politician,
3) Trump is a puppet of Putin conforming to his plan to destroy America, and that Putin’s hold comes from a recording of Trump with two prostitutes in a Russian hotel.
They have just about no supporting evidence whatsoever. Yet, at some point in recent history, a significant number of Americans believed each of them (probably not at once – I hope).
Think of the inevitable clichés about certain ethnic, religious or political groups.
“Unknown unknowns”, “I’m sure they’re up to no good and I’ll prove it”, “no smoke without fire”, “why do they look like they’re hiding something”, “my boss wants this, I need this job, eh, how much harm could it do” are terribly powerful forces!
A significant part of “I know it when I see it” is that, when you and I both look at “it”, our “knowledge” is strongly correlated (not in the precise statistical sense). For “hardcore pornography” as was the case in the Supreme Court judgement, I have no trouble believing this would be the case.
But is there significant agreement on whether “40% of doctors are calling trans/queer people by their preferred pronouns after making every reasonable inquiry that they are not faking and have no obvious motive for faking” [not a fact, of course, but a hypothetical] counts as “medicine went woke”?
Consider how this fact could be presented in interviews:
“Nearly half of all doctors are enabling lunatics, denying objective reality and destroying the most basic distinction underpinning human society!”
“Two thirds of all doctors will rather let a trans person kill themselves rather than give them medical advice about how to mitigate their dysphoria in the safest way”
Thank you for providing a potential explanation, and a much greater thank you for being polite while doing so.
"Quite vehemently disagreed. If it was "literally zero" then they'd have no reason to think medicine has "gone woke," would they?"
Yes, they would. You apparently completely ignored the following section, in which I attested the doctors showing basic respect and courtesy to their trans and queer patients would ALSO be considered "woke" by many people. I have heard people complaining about "wokeness" for reasons as silly and trivial as a movie having a female lead, a TV show having literally any queer people at all, or female video game characters universally being stick-thin supermodels. People I know have been yelled at and abused *in public* for dressing in entirely modest but not perfectly gender conforming clothing[1]. I don't pretend to understand it, but there are apparently *quite a lot* of people who consider entirely harmless behaviors and cultural signifiers to be hugely transgressive and threatening, and chose to express this mostly by shouting "woke" and anything and everything that qualifies. And many of them will go on to claim that anyone who doesn't actively reject the people and behaviors they hate are also "woke."
So again, I'm not claiming that literally zero doctors or healthcare workers display egregious or inappropriate politically-motivated behaviors. I'm sure there are no shortage of examples to draw on, just like there are no shortage of examples of cardiologists committing robbery, fraud or murder. Listing examples of such behaviors misses the point quite badly.
If one wants to claim that an entire sector has "gone woke" one REALLY needs to lay out clearly *what that actually means.* By what standard to we judge something woke. "I know it when I see it" is a TERRIBLE standard for anything because I AM NOT YOU. I don't CARE how convinced you are that you can identify "woke" on sight. Your private woke-o-meter isn't legible to me. And it's clear from observation that there are many, MANY people who have private woke-o-meters that output utterly ridiculous results. Probably yours does not, but as long as you and they are talking with the same word and REFUSING TO DISAMBIGUATE then your are putting whatever reputation for reasonableness you may possess to work at the project of laundering all their nonsense and making it look reasonable by association.
That is the fundamental essence of the problem here. You and many others *insist* that there is a serious problem, but when asked to elaborate, you claim to be totally incapable. Do the damn work. Figure out what it is you're actually against, and come back and tell the rest of us. Until you do, it's impossible to take any complaints about "woke" seriously.
[1] To be clear, I do NOT mean anything that anyone would recognize as cross-dressing. Just somebody dressing in a way that de-emphasized their masculine of feminine characteristics because the prefer a somewhat androgynous look.
"The vagueness of the term is generated in part because the somewhat, though not entirely, coherent grouping to which it applies abjectly refuses to be named. Decentralization is an incredibly powerful force for an ideology if they can pull it off, and no one can be held responsible."
I would kindly invite you to apply Occam's Razor to this particular scenario. It shouldn't be hard to do.
If we are to take your hypothesis at face value, then "woke" is a natural grouping for, uh, something that cuts across professions, ages, races, state and national boundaries, subcultures and interest groups, permeating a vast swath of modern society. And yet somehow, despite being a natural, "somewhat coherent" grouping, it's adherents have staunchly and *successfully* resisted being labelled, defined or pinned down in any way less vague than the word "woke" of which you can only say "I know it when I see it."
So, which of these hypothesis sounds simpler:
1. There is actually some real, natural group boundary that millions of people from all walks of life with no apparent connection or central coordination or intent have deliberately managed to obscure at keep hidden...
or
2. You are simply confused and trying to pin a singular name on something that isn't even remotely a unified concept or phenomenon.
If you're a mathy sort, I'd suggest you mind find it helpful to think of this as an exercise in drawing boundary surfaces around one or more clusters in abstract concept-space. Hypothesis 1 is that there is a relatively simple surface, but enemy action has somehow blurred out enough elements of the cluster that nobody has figured out even a good approximation of how to draw it. Hypothesis 2 is that there is no simple surface because the thing you're trying to bound is actually many different clusters that have *some* overlap, but also quite a few places where they are spread quite far apart.
Hello, is "Still, they’ve bleeding reputation for the past few decades." a typo, which is missing been?
In practice, of course, at least during the Covid debates, *both* the "right" and the "left" (insofar as these correspond to the Covid factions) argued as the bottom soyjak does, ie. referring to someone with a degree standing just behind them. The Covid heretics continuously referred to, say, John Ioannidis's credentials when claiming that Covid was much less lethal than the scientific consensus said it was (and that consensus already, of course, said it was less lethal than what Covid was in public imagination). Later, if participating in debates, one endlessly heard about Robert Malone's work on mRNA or Michael Yeadon's position at Pfizer or so on. Not an anti-priestdom but a counter-priesthood, a heretic priesthood .
In practice there's a similar counter-priesthood serving as a constant point of reference for most similar contrarian viewpoints, at least ones that still operate within the rhetorical bounds of science.
"Later, if participating in debates, one endlessly heard about Robert Malone's work on mRNA " Counter priesthood can be so small that they only have one priest. Creationists say that Intelligent Design is supported by scientists, plural, but only ever name Behe. And there is that one economist who thinks global warming will be beneficial.
There was a post by Scott dealing in detail with the possible reasons people are put in jail, and rehabilitation is just one of them. Probably not the most important, at least it's what I get from Scott's piece (and what I though before).
You have, in no order:
(1) no need for justification: (proportional) punishment for crime is good(TM), regardless of the effect on further crime.
(2) rehabilitation/education, what you speak about
(3)lowering crime by instilling fear of prison in the one incarcerated
* both (2) and (3) hope to lower recidive
(4) instilling fear of prison in others, who may be tempted to commit crime without this threat. Actual incarceration must happen for the threat to be credible
(5) removing the criminal from society for the duration of his sentence, which have a larger effect than one may think given the high percentage of recidive and the very skewed distribution of criminal activity: few people commit the majority of crimes, especially violent crimes.
(5) indeed seems to be responsible for most of prison efficiency, at least for serious crimes which have a very skewed distribution
And I would one of my own, that I do not think Scott mentioned but that is important and linked to the first point, and your "opponent" made me think of that:
(6) ensure state monopoly of violence, by lowering tentation of personal vengeance and vendetta. This is extremly dangerous for modern stable society, and it is getting dangerously tense right now.
Only considering (2) (and maybe (3)) does not seems like a typical point of view, in any country, even if the criminal is a minor...Maybe in some social circles, but not in typical one, be sure of that.
Personally I consider all valids, but the weakest are (2) and (3) (and (4), to a lesser extent) because indeed they do not work much, especially for minors. I am mixed about (1), not really morally but what is a crime and what is proportional can be tricky....Especially as it vary soooo much with culture, both in space and time.
(5) and (6) are the elephant in the room, and (1) is not tricky here, not at all: Gangrape, we are not speaking about regret-sex rape here....so imho you are dead wrong: this judgement is 100% bonker...
Wokeness is a beautiful resolution between contempt for the public and wanting to stay in touch with the public. The public (as represented by the average straight male white guy) is, themselves, out of touch."
Okay, whoa, slow down on that inversion theory, Nietzsche.
Wokeness took over because the New Atheists beat up on religion in the sour mood era of the post 9/11, post War on Terror, post GFC era but that gets old, and by around 2013 SJWs made a big push to spread a new religion of identity politics.
There's no reason to overcomplicate this.
The Priesthoods. It's right there in the name.
The Priesthoods were dominated by men of high achievement. When it became politically untenable to exclude women of high achievement (it was massively unfair, after all), women's preferences began to dominate, largely because men will do anything to have sex with women - including sell their values, morality, family, etc - and so men simply started complying with the new social regime. It seemed a small thing by comparison. A screw tightens every quarter-turn.
The reason "woke" spread so quickly and thoroughly is that women were finally embedded thoroughly across the economy.
Crime is the issue that cuts through this because women value safety and security above all else.
Hey remember when you claimed to be asexual?
Now you have a wife and child.
It's almost like men will say anything to be accepted by the group they're trying to lead or infiltrate. Our Darwinian imperative overwhelms us.
FWIW, the easiest way to unwoke a person is to drive them through a homeless encampment or into a [redacted area]. They're confronted with more reality in 30 seconds than they've experienced in 30 years.
Do you have evidence that driving a woke person through a homeless encampment works to unwoke them? In my experience woke people get more woke in that scenario, not less. Is San Francisco a hotbed of formerly woke, now unwoke, people?
> The average high-ranked economics department doesn’t care that you have a popular blog. They might even count it against you. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters.
> someone can have literally tens of thousands of fans for doing popular writing in a field, and the amount of extra status it gives them in the field is within a rounding error of zero. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters.
I am a computer science researcher and also run a semi-popular YouTube channel about algorithms. My personal experience with the system not caring is somewhat similar, but I think it’s important to point out that (at least in my case), many researchers I've met consider my work on the channel valuable. However, that work is not science itself but rather a different discipline: science communication. As Scott points out, the academic system was designed to encourage the former and doesn’t care much about the latter.
That said, the narrative that “only the priesthoods that inculcated the most powerful contempt for the public survived to have good discussions and output trustworthy recommendations” feels too grandiose to be particularly useful, at least in the context of the natural sciences as far as I understand them. I would frame it more as a combination of mundane reasons like:
- Scientists are primarily focused on science; science communication is a separate discipline that only some of them personally care about.
- Papers are easy to count, whereas judging whether someone is generally doing a good work as a scientist/mentor/communicator is subjective and hard. This makes paper counting naturally dominant in any system.
Really interesting. Just to clarify a point - when you mention this:
“because the priesthoods move as one and fall victim to ideological fads, the lies of priests are correlated”
Are you talking about the lies of priests within one discipline - eg economists - being correlated amongst tmw selves?
or that lies of distinct disciplines - e.g economists and psychiatrist - are correlated?
Thanks
Great post on a very important current topic. You very nicely argue that some seemingly unappealing characteristics of priesthoods like inward-lookingness and rituals can be epistemically useful. However, I think you miss something crucial if you want to understand where many important priesthoods went wrong recently.
Priesthoods can differ in specific norms they follow. The priesthood of science adopted as central norms like trying to disconfirm (with logic and evidence) each other’s conclusions, with a larger prestige price obtained the more widely shared those conclusions were. Jonathan Rauch in “The Constitution of Knowledge” tries to single out the norms that make epistemic communities healthy (things like falibilism, objectivity, exclusivity, disconfirmation, accountability, pluralism, civility, professionalism, institutionalism, no bullshitting/learning). When priesthoods drift away from these norms, they become pretty useless epistemically.
I think the crucial element that made wokism spread so much was its (kind of camouflaged) dogmatism. Some seemingly benign ideas were put forward, and questioning them was not only mistaken, but morally wrong. Shielded from criticism, these ideas tended to expand and overwrite even formally central norms in the community. A key failure was to consider that empirical questions (eg. differences between genders or ethnicities) can (and must) be answered by moral principles.
So, the answer to what to do now, might be to understand better the key norms of an epistemically health community, promote this understanding, and make sure that important priesthoods remember that these must remain central.
>But the deceits of priests are subtle and elegant.
Doesn't this just make them more dangerous? Depends how sophisticated the reader is, I guess.
Steve Randy Waldman is a good left-wing econblogger I follow
https://www.interfluidity.com/
https://zirk.us/@interfluidity (fediverse)
Channeling my inner Curtis Yarvin, I want to suggest that the situation might be both worse and better than your analysis claims.
Priests still have to eat. And they care about their reputation among other priests because it directly correlates with the ability to put food on the table (even for the tenured minority) (rather than being an evolutionary vestige from times past, as one might otherwise suspect) (in fact this is a huge contributing factor to the totalitarianness of priesthoods: a carpenter doesn't care about opinions of other carpenters as long as his customers are objectively satisfied, a sociologist cares about opinions of his peers entirely).
Normally this produces expected failures in truth-seeking: if most scientists studying health effects of smoking are on the bankroll of tobacco companies, they will keep discovering that nicotine helps with schizophrenia and other illnesses and soothes symptoms of lung cancer. If most scientists studying global warming are on the bankroll of the Department of Energy and other institutions that pay them for discovering that global warning is a serious problem that needs more research, of course they will keep discovering just that (note that this doesn't mean that these discoveries are necessarily *false*, just that they are not knowledge as in justified true belief).
In this framework wokeness took over priesthoods by offering them a new and fascinating array of weapons of internecine warfare, immediately legible to people writing their paychecks. No longer have you to translate your Sacred High Speech to something a clueless bureaucrat can understand as an argument that you should get this grant and not that old white guy. No longer have you wait until you get a lot of citations etc to take on that old white guy by the sheer force of quantified authority. Everyone understands that racism is bad, everyone understands when you point out that you're doing your sociology or climate science in such and such anti-racist ways, so the most anti-racist can win without ever needing to get into the actual subject matter.
On the one hand, this bad because then wokeness is not just a random fluke, a fashion fad, that people can just decide to reject once the scales fall from their eyes.
On the other hand, if it's not a random fluke and not a genuine ideological conviction, but exists downstream of money flows, then you know exactly where to hit it to make it hurt. Threaten to withdraw state funding from schools and universities that teach that white people are bad and they grumble a little then fold with surprisingly little resistance. Or see what happened and how swiftly and frictionlessly it happened when wealthy Jewish alumni of various universities became displeased with the pro-HAMAS protests. Also in the past few days Facebook announced that it will no longer employ fact-checkers, weaken various hate speech rules, and remove tampons from male bathrooms. And sure, people are upset, but in a weirdly muted, resigned way.
All this makes perfect sense in the wokeness-as-a-superweapon-for-internal-status-struggle view. Rolling it back on the orders of the *actual sovereigns* is equivalent to everyone being forced to sign the Geneva convention against the use of poisonous gases. The minority of people that actually benefitted from having those are genuinely upset, the majority performatively complains about the Trump Era but are secretly relieved and go back to playing less dangerous status games.
There are at least two more facets of priesthoods worth considering - the fact that they mediate between the people and the divine, and the fact that they're anointed. In response to this essay, I explore what that could mean for medicine here: https://familymeetingnotes.substack.com/p/the-priesthood-of-medicine
Scott writes “Aurochs in the wilderness probably got diseases only rarely. But cram ten thousand genetically-near-identical cows in a tiny warehouse, and your beef ends up 95% antibiotics by weight. In the same way, the priesthoods are a perfect environment for memetic plagues.”
Memetic plagues is a great descriptor for the periodic creedal passion periods (CPP). We are currently in one of these that began around 2013 and is projected to end around 2027.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
Behaviorists were not wrong about everything. Most of Skinner's discoveries in operant conditioning have stood the test of time. He made some mistakes, but behaviorism remains a powerful toolkit for anyone who wants to use it.
"Doctors are good at figuring out which medicines work."
Well, expert medical researchers are good at it. The doctors I have had don't even have time to figure out which medicines work. They just use standard of care according to a recipe.
I did have one doctor who also had a Ph.D. in biology. The hospital referred me to him after I basically said their typical physicians seemed to me to be incompetent. He had his own office and sat in it, unsmiling. He listened carefully to my case and explained the diagnostic procedure that should be followed. When I asked him why the hospital's physicians had not done this, he seemed briefly puzzled by the question, then said, "Because they don't know."
With great respect for Scott, not just due respect, I have to wonder if he's trying to cover himself from being shot at by the priesthood.
Nice piece, but it is screaming for a link to what Musa Al-Gharbi (and before him, Pierre Bourdieu) wrote about "symbolic capitalists" and their ways of increasing different types of capital (e.g., cultural, academic, political) in his new book "We have never been woke".
I'm not willing to be the one to discuss it publicly in depth, but a consideration of the global popularity of caste systems might have a lot of explanatory power here. Caste can be an evolutionary competitive advantage; look at bees.
I'm not sure this version of the priesthood idea, where it refers to a coterie of experts of some sort, is all that useful, it's too general.
I think it would be best to restrict the term to coteries involved in religion or religion-substitutes or secular quasi-religions - and while that needn't necessarily be pejorative, it usually is (e.g. nowadays the woke priesthood, HR departments, etc.).
Perhaps one could extend it to Burham's managerial class (insofar as scientism and the oft-related technocratic perspective are quasi-religions), but that's about as far as it should go.
I have wondered about this mostly in the field of economics, which you mention also. The debate about orthodoxy/heterodoxy (and the whole post-autistic, or real-world economic movements) is quite interesting in this respect. To me it seems that most 'schools of thought' are, in a sense, their own versions of such priesthoods, although there are clear differences in status, number of members and also in terms of quality (that is, quality in relation to some vaguely defined standard of internal coherence and general improvement upon their own knowledge base).
Clearly the 'mainstream' (broadly understood) has the highest quantity, quality and status (with macro DSGE as high priests), without saying anything about content.
But men like Amartya Sen and Daron Acemoglu were great at the neoclassical mathematical stuff, but they also made interesting non-standard contributions, allowing them to have quite a following outside of academic economics. Some of which plainly contradicting with the standard neoclassical story, yet they managed to retain their status.
Nordhaus stayed much more within the neoclassical standards, but managed to impress the political elite and the rest of the econ by introducing climate into his models (even though climate scientists, and some other economists, think he underestimated the impacts).
An interesting point in time is 2007/2008 when it's utter failure to predict the economic crash, in the context of which everybody keeps pointing out that even 'The Queen' herself wondered how no one saw this coming, finally made the priesthood look at other non-standard contributions (Minsky in particular), thereby temporarily broadening the scope of acceptability. (And handing their 'Nobel' to Elinor Ostrom a year or so later, a political scientist who was fully outside of the economic priesthood, to show the world they really are open to criticism, in an attempt to revamp their status as high priests of the social sciences. Ostrom still used the by the economic elite accepted understanding of rationality, making her relatively 'safe' for the priests).
Anyways, so now there's some kind of posthumous integration of Minsky into the annals of priesthood, or at least their intellectual foundations.
So there's this ongoing balance of inside/outside influence, and a balance between political economy/mathematical economics, etc. One in which pre 2007 Minsky was barely interesting to the 'mainstream', or the high priests, as he was a post-keynesian who focussed on debt (and the priesthood had established that money/private debt were irrelevant to the macro-economy). Yet, the priesthood was clearly wrong as worldly affairs showed them (correlated failure). And to show they weren't 'broken', as you call it, they had to internalize his work (even though the work of Minsky could also be seen as a much more fundamental critique on mainstream economics). But does that really unbreak them, or are instead the foundations wrong? I don't really know, but then one wonders how often a priesthood can be caught at being wrong before they get replaced, or people just stop listening to them? Somehow I feel like we're allowing priesthoods to retain their status until a point where their negative impact gets bigger than their positive impacts (but they also always retain some cult following, even though it's outside of mainstream, like Marx, or Mises), but that is exactly what rational thinking should try to avoid if you ask me. We just can't recognise this point on forehand.
I want to satisfy your theory: wokeness infiltrated science fiction and other fandoms *because* they too have a priesthood with psych complexes around in-touchness; perhaps you haven't been deep enough inside them to be aware. I wrote something quite similar to your thesis in those spaces circa 2015.
Great work.
Better than you think it is, if I'm right
(referring to:)
> I’m not entirely satisfied with this theory because wokeness infiltrated non-priesthoods without psychological complexes around in-touchness (eg science fiction fandom)
This is a really smart article. As usual, I think you're too easy on everybody. Get mad! Say to life, fuck these lemons, etc. (the complete Cave Johnson quote has been left as an exercise to the reader).
The best part of this article for me was that it made me realize that, for all its faults, the whole existence of organizations, institutions, priesthoods, serves an important purpose. Like, I'm the kind of person who usually overlooks the Stamp of Approval and figures that the truth will out. But part of the truth out-ing is that it's willing to get that stamp, provided the institution that grants it is not irremediably corrupt.