Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Ten Convenient Beliefs For Doctors In America Today

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Luke Ford

Clinical guidelines represent the best available evidence rather than the negotiated consensus of specialty society committees whose members have financial relationships with the manufacturers of the treatments being recommended. Convenient because following guidelines protects physicians from malpractice liability while outsourcing the moral responsibility for treatment decisions to a credentialed body.
Pharmaceutical industry relationships, speaking fees, consulting arrangements, and sponsored research do not influence prescribing behavior or clinical judgment. This belief is held most strongly by the physicians with the most industry relationships, which is precisely what you would predict if the belief were convenient rather than accurate.
The amount of care delivered is a reasonable proxy for the quality of care delivered. Convenient because more care generates more revenue, and the fee for service payment system rewards volume regardless of whether the additional care improves outcomes or causes harm through overdiagnosis, unnecessary procedures, and iatrogenic complications.
Defensive medicine, ordering tests and procedures primarily to avoid malpractice liability, is an unfortunate response to a broken legal system rather than a rational strategy that happens to align physician self-protection with revenue generation. This belief allows physicians to present overtesting as victimhood rather than as a financially convenient adaptation to liability risk.
The physician’s clinical judgment, developed through years of training and experience, is generally more reliable than patient-reported outcomes and lived experience. Convenient because it maintains physician authority over treatment decisions while discounting the evidence that patients systematically know things about their own conditions that physicians miss.
Medical errors are primarily caused by individual lapses in an otherwise sound system rather than by systemic features of how medicine is organized, staffed, and incentivized. This protects the profession from structural accountability while framing the response to errors as education and remediation rather than as redesign of the systems that produce them.
Physician shortages justify restricting the scope of practice of nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and other advanced practice providers. Convenient because it frames a guild protection mechanism as a patient safety argument while the evidence that physician-only care produces better outcomes than advanced practice provider care in most primary care settings is weak.
The complexity of medical knowledge justifies the current length and cost of medical training rather than reflecting the profession’s interest in limiting supply and maintaining the prestige that comes from an arduous credentialing process. This converts a supply restriction into an epistemic necessity while the evidence that the current training system produces better physicians than shorter alternatives would is largely uninvestigated.
Patients who do not follow medical advice are non-compliant rather than rational actors responding to treatments that do not fit their lives, values, resources, or experience of side effects. Convenient because it locates treatment failure in the patient rather than in the physician’s failure to understand what the patient can actually do or in the treatment’s actual risk-benefit profile for that specific person.
American medicine’s outcomes, which are poor relative to peer nations at much higher cost, reflect the social determinants of health and the failures of the broader political system rather than anything the medical profession itself does or could change. Convenient because it absolves physicians of responsibility for a system they substantially designed, substantially control, and substantially benefit from while locating the causes of failure entirely outside their own practice and institutions.

Posted in Medicine | Comments Off

Ten Convenient Beliefs For Social Workers In America Today

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Luke Ford

The relationship between client and social worker is fundamentally collaborative rather than supervisory and coercive. Convenient because it allows social workers to exercise substantial power over vulnerable people’s lives while experiencing themselves as helpers rather than agents of state control.
Removing children from families is a last resort used only when no other option exists. This belief protects social workers from confronting the evidence that removal is systematically overused in poor and minority communities and that the foster care system frequently produces worse outcomes than the families it replaces.
More resources and better training would allow social workers to solve the problems their clients face. Convenient because it locates failure in funding and preparation rather than in the structural impossibility of the task, which is to repair at the individual level damage produced at the social and economic level.
Mandatory reporting requirements protect vulnerable people rather than primarily protecting the agency and the social worker from liability. This converts a self-protective institutional mechanism into a moral obligation while obscuring that mandatory reporting often triggers interventions that harm the families reported.
Evidence-based practice means social work has achieved the same relationship to research that medicine has. Convenient because it borrows medicine’s epistemic authority while the actual evidence base for most social work interventions is thin, contested, and rarely replicated outside the studies conducted by researchers committed to the interventions being studied.
Cultural competence training meaningfully reduces the racial and class disparities in how social work interventions are applied. This belief allows the profession to address its most serious equity problem through workshops and curriculum changes rather than through structural changes to who makes decisions about which families.
Client self-determination is the core value of social work practice. Convenient because it sounds like a commitment to autonomy while coexisting with a system in which social workers can initiate involuntary hospitalization, remove children, condition benefits on behavioral compliance, and recommend incarceration, all while describing these interventions as serving the client’s best interests.
Burnout and high turnover among social workers are caused by inadequate organizational support rather than by the fundamental mismatch between what the job promises and what it can deliver. This protects the profession’s self-image and recruitment pipeline while avoiding the harder question of whether the job as currently designed can be done well by anyone for very long.
The social work profession’s dual mandate, serving individual clients while advancing social justice, is a coherent combination rather than a permanent tension that the profession manages by subordinating whichever value is inconvenient in a given moment. Convenient because it allows social workers to claim both therapeutic authority and political virtue without having to choose between them when they conflict.
Licensing and credentialing requirements for social workers protect clients from incompetent practice rather than primarily protecting credentialed social workers from competition by community members, peer support specialists, and others with direct lived experience of the problems being addressed. This converts a guild protection mechanism into a client safety argument while the evidence that licensed social workers produce better outcomes than unlicensed helpers remains weak.

Posted in Psychology | Comments Off

Ten Convenient Beliefs For Economists In America Today

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Luke Ford

Models that assume rational actors and efficient markets are useful simplifications rather than ideological commitments that happen to justify existing distributions of wealth and power. Convenient because the entire apparatus of mainstream economics is built on these assumptions and abandoning them would strand decades of published work.
GDP growth is the appropriate primary measure of economic welfare. Convenient because GDP is what economists know how to model, forecast, and advise on, making economists indispensable to governments and central banks regardless of whether GDP tracks what people actually care about.
Inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon requiring central bank management rather than a distributional conflict between creditors and debtors, employers and workers, or asset owners and wage earners. This keeps monetary policy in the hands of technocrats insulated from democratic pressure and keeps economists employed as those technocrats’ advisors.
Free trade produces aggregate gains even when it produces concentrated losses, and the losers can in principle be compensated by the winners. The compensation almost never happens but the in principle saves the theory, and the aggregate gains justify the economist’s policy recommendations regardless of what happens to the people who bear the costs.
Inequality is primarily a human capital problem solvable through education and skills training rather than a structural feature of how labor and capital markets distribute bargaining power. Convenient because it locates the solution in technocratic intervention rather than in political redistribution that would threaten the donors and institutions that fund economic research.
Mathematical formalization makes economic arguments more rigorous rather than simply more difficult for non-economists to challenge. This keeps the profession’s conclusions accessible only to those with the relevant technical formation, which is the coalition boundary dressed as a methodological standard.
Central bank independence from democratic oversight is necessary to control inflation rather than a political choice to insulate monetary policy from the people most affected by it. Convenient for economists who staff and advise central banks and who would lose status and influence if monetary policy were subject to ordinary democratic accountability.
Behavioral economics corrects the rational actor model’s worst failures while preserving its basic framework. Convenient because it allows mainstream economists to absorb the most damaging critiques of their field without abandoning the models, the journals, the departments, and the policy relationships built on the framework being corrected.
The 2008 financial crisis was caused by regulatory failures and irrational exuberance rather than by the theoretical frameworks economists provided to justify financial deregulation throughout the preceding decades. This belief protects the profession from accountability for its role in constructing the intellectual environment that made the crisis possible.
Economics is a science that discovers laws about how markets work rather than a discipline that constructs legitimating narratives for particular distributions of resources and power. This is the most load-bearing convenient belief because it underwrites all the others, converting the profession’s ideological function into a claim of technical authority that places its conclusions beyond ordinary political challenge.

Posted in Economics | Comments Off

Ten Convenient Beliefs For Academics In America Today

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Luke Ford

Peer review is the gold standard for distinguishing reliable knowledge from unreliable knowledge. This belief protects the guild’s gatekeeping authority while framing what is essentially a coalition credentialing system as an epistemic achievement.
Academic freedom requires tenure, and tenure requires that removal be nearly impossible. This converts a genuine institutional value into lifetime employment protection for people who stopped producing interesting work decades ago.
Citation counts and journal prestige are reasonable proxies for intellectual contribution. Convenient because these metrics are controlled by the same institutions that employ the people being evaluated, creating a closed loop that advantages insiders.
The university’s primary mission is the production and transmission of knowledge rather than the credentialing of students for labor markets. This belief justifies the curriculum academics want to teach rather than the curriculum students are paying to receive.
Interdisciplinary work is inherently more sophisticated than work confined to a single discipline. Convenient because it allows scholars to operate in areas where they lack deep formation while claiming the prestige of breadth.
Public intellectuals who write accessibly for general audiences are doing less rigorous work than scholars who write for specialists. This protects the academic market from outside competition while framing inaccessibility as a virtue.
The low salaries of adjunct faculty are a funding problem created by administrative bloat rather than a predictable consequence of overproducing PhDs in fields with limited demand. This lets tenured faculty maintain the pipeline of cheap teaching labor while feeling sympathy rather than responsibility.
Students who struggle with challenging material need more support rather than more honest feedback about whether they belong in the field. Convenient because honest feedback generates complaints, grade disputes, and administrative scrutiny while support generates grateful evaluations.
Academic publishing should remain behind paywalls controlled by commercial publishers because open access threatens quality control. This belief survives despite the fact that academics produce the content, perform the peer review, and edit the journals for free while the publishers extract the profit.
The replication crisis is a problem specific to certain fields with weak methodological standards rather than a systemic feature of how academic incentives shape research design. This protects the believer’s own field and their own published work from the same scrutiny they apply to psychology or nutrition science.

Posted in Academia | Comments Off

Ten Convenient Beliefs For American Attorneys Today

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Luke Ford

These are beliefs that serve attorneys’ material and status interests while feeling like principled commitments.
The adversarial system produces just outcomes better than any alternative. This belief justifies the attorney’s entire role and income while framing what is essentially a contest between unequal resources as a truth-finding enterprise.
Complexity in law is an unavoidable feature of a complex society rather than a product of the profession’s guild interests. This makes attorneys indispensable while absolving them of responsibility for the complexity that generates their fees.
Procedural rights protect the innocent even when they let the guilty go free. This noble-sounding principle also happens to justify billing for every motion, continuance, and suppression hearing regardless of whether any of it serves the client’s actual interests.
Access to justice is primarily a funding problem rather than a complexity problem. This locates the solution in legal aid organizations and pro bono hours rather than in simplification that would reduce the need for attorneys altogether.
Zealous advocacy is a moral obligation that overrides the attorney’s personal discomfort with the client’s position. This converts what might otherwise feel like complicity into professional virtue.
Settlement is usually in the client’s best interest. Convenient because trials are expensive, unpredictable, and time-consuming for the attorney, while settlement generates a fee with less work.
Judicial deference to precedent ensures stability and predictability. Also ensures that the body of knowledge attorneys spent years acquiring retains its value against outsiders.
Regulations protect the public from corporate abuse. Convenient for attorneys who make careers navigating those regulations and whose expertise would be worthless if the regulations were simplified or abolished.
The billable hour fairly compensates attorneys for their time and expertise. The alternative, flat fees or outcome-based compensation, would require attorneys to bear the risk of their own inefficiency.
Unauthorized practice of law rules protect consumers from incompetent advice. They also protect attorneys from competition by accountants, paralegals, technologists, and anyone else who might deliver legal services more cheaply.

Posted in Law | Comments Off

Democracy in America

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Luke Ford

I respect Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for its stories. I respect how it serves academic status claims and fetish games. I respect that this book by a French aristocrat flatters intellectuals and that they love playing with it in a way you can’t do with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. That text disciplines you. This text invites you to do anything you want with her. It’s flexible, warm and inviting. It says, take me right now, and have your way with me.

Democracy in America is a series of assertions, and nothing falsifiable is presented.

Tocqueville is part of the French intellectual fad cycle in American academia which runs roughly like this. A French thinker produces ambitious, beautifully written, unfalsifiable claims about how power, society, or the human condition works. The claims are vague enough to be applied to almost anything, precise enough in their vocabulary to signal membership in the right community, and sufficiently difficult to translate that American academics can spend careers arguing about what the original really meant. Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Lacan, Baudrillard: each generated an American academic industry whose primary product was exegesis of the master text rather than independent inquiry.

Tocqueville is the respectable ancestor of this tradition, which is partly why he survives across ideological lines in a way Foucault does not. Conservatives can cite him on the tyranny of the majority and soft despotism. Liberals can cite him on civic association and democratic participation. Communitarians can cite him on habits of the heart. Each reading is defensible from the text because the text never foreclosed any of them.

American academics are drawn to French intellectual fads partly because French intellectual culture rewards exactly the qualities that American academic credentialing rewards: systematic ambition, stylistic distinction, the appearance of radical insight, and sufficient obscurity to require professional interpreters. A thinker who can be understood by a diligent undergraduate on first reading generates no academic industry. A thinker who requires years of formation to approach correctly generates careers.

Darwin requires neither French nor obscurity. He just requires being right.

In the 2025 book Boudon Reexamined: Nuts and Bolts for Contemporary Sociological Science, Stephen Turner contributes an essay on the late Raymond Boudon’s work on Tocqueville. Turner argues that Boudon’s reconstruction of Tocqueville underweights the tacit. Boudon wants to assimilate Tocqueville to ordinary psychology and rational choice. Turner shows this cannot work because Tocqueville keeps running into phenomena, habits of the heart, the American dogma, the aristocrat who cannot see the servant as fully human, that resist reduction to epistemic voluntarism or market selection of beliefs. The closing section on social learning is the key passage. Turner argues that the experiences that produce the habits of the heart, the daily interactions of democratic equality or aristocratic separation, are not reducible to choices or understandable motivations. They are a diet of experience that produces a regime of feeling.

His tacit knowledge framework supplies the diagnosis of why democratic deliberation requires shared formation, but stops short of prescribing how that formation is cultivated or maintained. The Tocqueville paper shows him circling this problem. He notes that community is not self-sustaining, that it requires a certain kind of interaction, that some communities enforce conformity while others produce the mutual recognition that makes genuine deliberation possible. But he does not develop this into a positive account of institutional design.

Tocqueville’s observation that Americans follow Cartesian precepts without having read Descartes, that their philosophy is tacit and unreflective, maps onto my argument that Schmitt’s homogeneity requirement is better understood in Turner’s vocabulary as a shared tacit substrate rather than as ethnic uniformity. The paper gives you a textual grounding for that move in Turner’s own published work rather than in inference from his framework.

One specific passage is worth citing: Turner’s treatment of Mme Duchâtelet, who could undress before her servants because she could not convince herself they were fully human. Turner reads this as Tocqueville’s illustration of what happens when the social learning environment produces incommensurable mentalities. The aristocrat and the servant inhabit different tacit worlds. This is the dissolution of the shared substrate that makes mutual recognition possible. This is the dissolution of democratic deliberation stated in Tocqueville’s own terms and endorsed by Turner as an explanatory problem that ordinary psychology cannot resolve.

Does Tocqueville claim that democracy shapes Americans or that Americans shape democracy as the natural expression of who they are? Both.

The second volume of Democracy in America traces the psychological effects of equality as a social condition. Equal ranks produce men who think and feel in similar ways, who cannot imagine that another person’s suffering is incomprehensible, who unreflectively adopt a Cartesian philosophical method because democratic social conditions naturally lead them there. The American is not choosing this philosophy. The social state produces it in him without his awareness. That is shaping, not expression.

But Tocqueville also acknowledges powerful prior causes that operate independently of democracy. He is explicit that religion, the nature of the country, the origin of the colonists, their former habits, all shaped American character in ways unconnected to equality. The Puritan founding matters. The specific history of religious settlement matters. Americans did not simply receive democracy and become who they are. They brought something to democracy that made it work differently in America than it did elsewhere. The American dogma, as Tocqueville calls it, the unreflective Christianity that operates below the level of examination or discussion, precedes democratic equality and is not produced by it.

Turner’s paper presses on exactly this point. Boudon wants to assimilate Tocqueville to a model where rational individuals adapt to social conditions, but Turner argues that the habits of the heart Americans brought to democracy are not reducible to adaptation. They were produced by a social learning environment, the daily interactions of a relatively equal society, but also by inheritance, by a founding that embedded specific tacit dispositions before the democratic conditions fully took hold.

So Tocqueville’s position is that causation runs both ways and that neither account alone is sufficient, which is part of why he is so hard to pin down and why so many interpretations have been imposed on him.

Tocqueville’s conditional laws are not really laws. They identify a condition and show surprising alterations from what the condition might be expected to produce, but they do not generate predictions that could be checked against contrary evidence. The spreading of Christianity in Rome, the persistence of American religiosity despite equality, the softening of democratic manners: these are observations organized into a narrative, not hypotheses tested against alternatives. Tocqueville is a great observer who constructs illuminating contrasts. He is not doing what Darwin is doing.

Darwin’s achievement in The Origin of Species is to provide arguments with falsification conditions. If the fossil record showed complex organisms appearing suddenly without precursors, the theory fails. If domestic breeding produced no variation, the analogy to natural selection collapses. If species showed no geographical distribution patterns consistent with descent from common ancestors, the whole structure is in trouble. Darwin knew what would break his theory and said so explicitly. That intellectual honesty makes the theory powerful rather than merely suggestive.

Tocqueville’s claims about how democracy shapes the human type, how equality produces conformism, how aristocratic separation generates incommensurable mentalities: none of these come with stated conditions under which Tocqueville would consider them refuted. Turner’s point is that Boudon had to reconstruct Tocqueville’s methodology because Tocqueville never stated it himself. The methodology is inferred from the practice because Tocqueville never committed himself to a form of argument that could be held against him.

This is also why Turner’s Tocqueville paper ends inconclusively. The tacit knowledge problem Tocqueville gestures at, how shared formation is produced and destroyed, is the interesting question his observations raise. But because Tocqueville never operationalized anything, that question remains a provocation rather than a research program.

David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory would see Stephen Turner’s Tocqueville paper as a coalition technology.

The first move is credentialing through association. Turner aligns himself with the most prestigious names in the interpretive tradition, Tocqueville, Weber, Durkheim, Boudon, while positioning himself as the one who sees what they missed. The paper’s structure is: Boudon got Tocqueville partly right but systematically underweighted the tacit. Turner supplies the correction. This is a dominance move dressed as scholarly dialogue. It establishes Turner above Boudon in the interpretive hierarchy while maintaining the appearance of collegial engagement.

The second is coalition signaling through shared enemies. The paper’s consistent target is culturalism and its Marxist variants, the hidden forces school, the view that humans are entirely conditioned by their environment. Turner and Boudon share this enemy even while Turner corrects Boudon. The alliance with Boudon against the culturalists is maintained throughout the paper even as Turner establishes his own superiority within that alliance. This is the transitivity criterion operating: Turner, Boudon, Weber, and Durkheim share rivals, which makes them natural allies even when they disagree with each other.

The third is the sacred value performance. Turner’s sacred value throughout is the tacit, the claim that explicit rational reconstruction always misses something irreducible that only his framework captures. The paper’s conclusion, that the social learning environment that produces habits of the heart is absent from Boudon’s account, is a defense of Turner’s own life work as the indispensable supplement to every other approach. The tacit is always what the other person left out. That is a very well-designed sacred value because it is unfalsifiable in exactly the way you noted about Tocqueville. You can never demonstrate that the tacit has been fully accounted for, so the claim that it remains missing is always available.

The fourth is what Alliance Theory would call the similarity criterion. Turner writes for a specific community, analytical sociologists and philosophers of social science, who share assumptions about what a good argument looks like, what the relevant classical figures are, and what the significant methodological debates are. The paper is maximally legible to that community and largely inaccessible to outsiders. That is coalition selection through vocabulary, the same function Pinsof identifies in vague bullshit: the paper recruits allies by being comprehensible only to people who already share the relevant formation.

The fifth is the expertise move. Turner knows Tocqueville and the tacit knowledge literature and he has intellectual stake in the tacit being important because his career is built on it.

What Alliance Theory cannot easily explain is whether the paper’s core argument is correct. Pinsof is explicit that coalition behavior and truth-tracking are not mutually exclusive. Turner’s observation that Boudon’s reconstruction loses the habits of the heart might be both a coalition move and an accurate diagnosis. Alliance Theory tells you to notice the coalition function. It does not tell you the argument is wrong.

Posted in America, Carl Schmitt, Stephen Turner | Comments Off

Americans Don’t Care About The Middle East

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Luke Ford

The most durable finding in American political science is that foreign policy rarely drives elections. Voters care about prices, jobs, crime, and whether their children can afford a house. Wars and alliances live at the periphery of electoral math except when American bodies come home in numbers large enough to generate grief at scale. Israel does not meet that threshold. No American conscript dies there. No draft notice arrives. The GDP connection is too indirect for a voter filling out a grocery list to trace. Foreign policy matters when it bleeds into the domestic economy or produces visible casualties. Otherwise it stays in the realm of cable news and think-tank memos.

The evolutionary logic here is simple. Human attention tracks threats and resources in the local environment. A pre-agricultural ancestor who spent his days worrying about a rival tribe three hundred miles away starved. Coalitions form around things that affect survival and status in the immediate world. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict sits roughly six thousand miles from Los Angeles. Regular Americans know this instinctively even if they could not articulate it. Polling confirms what evolutionary reasoning predicts: when you strip out partisan signaling and ask Americans to rank their priorities, Israel barely registers. Inflation, healthcare, and immigration consistently top the list.

What looks like mass concern about Israel is almost entirely elite concern. Professors, journalists, policy intellectuals, Democratic fundraisers, and certain organized Jewish and Evangelical communities drive the noise. These groups have professional reasons to care. A political scientist at Columbia builds a career on Middle East security studies. A donor network tied to AIPAC treats Israeli policy as a direct interest. An Evangelical pastor reads Revelations and sees the modern state of Israel as prophetically loaded. These are coalition-level interests dressed up as national interests. They are real, but they belong to specific groups with specific alliance structures, not to the median voter in Akron.

The campus protests of 2024 illustrated the gap. Elite universities exploded. The protests generated enormous media coverage, congressional hearings, and university president resignations. Outside the coastal academic circuit, most Americans viewed the spectacle with puzzlement or mild irritation. Polls taken during the peak of the Gaza war showed that roughly a third of Americans could not name the leader of Hamas, and a similar fraction had difficulty locating Gaza on a map. That is not ignorance in a pejorative sense. It is rational allocation of cognitive resources. A warehouse worker in Ohio has no practical use for detailed knowledge of Hamas governance structures.

This does not mean Israel is irrelevant to American politics. It means Israel is relevant to specific players for specific reasons. AIPAC money shapes congressional primaries. Evangelical eschatology shapes Republican foreign policy platforms. Arab-American communities in Michigan can shift a close state. Jewish donors in New York and California carry weight in Democratic fundraising. These are all real coalition pressures, and politicians respond to them. But responding to coalition pressures is not the same as representing widespread public concern. The politician who gives a floor speech about Israeli security is usually performing for a donor, an ethnic constituency, or a media audience, not for the median constituent.

The obsession some elites feel about Israel also reflects the particular sociology of elite American discourse. The prestige media, the universities, and the foreign policy establishment form a tight conversational circuit. Debates that feel world-historical inside that circuit often fail to resonate outside it. The people most likely to spend hours arguing about Israeli settlements or the International Court of Justice ruling are people whose careers reward that kind of argument. A journalist at the Atlantic builds status by having sophisticated views on Gaza. A middle school teacher in Tucson builds status by coaching the softball team and knowing the parents. The social worlds barely overlap.

Ernest Becker’s argument in The Denial of Death is useful here. People need a hero system, a framework that makes their life feel significant against the backdrop of mortality. Elite Americans whose hero system runs through cosmopolitan humanitarian ideals will experience the Gaza war as a direct challenge to that system. It implicates their sense of who the good people are. Regular Americans whose hero system runs through family, local community, and practical achievement have no comparable stake. The war does not threaten their hero system. It is simply very far away.

The political implication is that candidates who make Israel central to their domestic pitch are usually talking to their base, not to the electorate. The base hears the signal. Donors respond. Activist networks mobilize. But the effect on the persuadable voter is close to zero. Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords did not save him in 1980. George H.W. Bush’s management of the Gulf War gave him a ninety-point approval rating in early 1991 and he lost the next election to a man whose campaign mantra was the domestic economy. Foreign policy achievement does not convert into domestic political capital except in the short run and under extreme conditions.

None of this is cynicism about voters. It is realism about what human beings track and why. Coalition interests disguise themselves as universal concerns because that framing gives them more leverage. Saying “this is in the national interest” lands differently than saying “this is in my coalition’s interest.” The former invites agreement. The latter invites the obvious response: whose coalition? Elites who obsess over Israel are pursuing genuine interests of their own, shaped by professional incentives, ethnic ties, religious frameworks, and alliance structures. But they are not speaking for a nation. They are speaking for themselves, amplified by institutions that share their concerns and mistake that amplification for consensus.

Posted in America, Anti-Semitism, Israel | Comments Off

Private vs Public Polls

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Luke Ford

During the 2024 presidential election campaign, Mark Halperin regularly shared with his audience what he learned from the campaigns’ private polls. Private polls are better funded and far more accurate than public polls. By listening to Halperin, I knew for six months ahead of election day that Trump was ahead in the key battleground states and yet in the news media, there was almost no coverage of private polls that showed the battleground sunbelt states were out of reach for the Democrats in the presidential campaign and that Trump was highly likely to win the presidency.
Andrew Gelman does touch on private polls, though he does not make them a central focus. The most relevant passage appears in his 2021 paper “Failure and Success in Political Polling and Election Forecasting,” where he notes that well-funded campaigns and advocacy groups can do more effective survey adjustment using the voter file, which contains information including past turnout history on nearly 200 million Americans. That is his acknowledgment that a gap exists between what campaigns know and what public pollsters produce, though he states it briefly and moves on.
The broader literature around Gelman’s work is more explicit. G. Elliott Morris, his collaborator on the Economist model, notes that campaign pollsters and private pollsters have been doing mixed-mode surveys for some time, because their reputation relies on being accurate and they lose clients if they are not. That is the core of what I observed with Halperin: private pollsters face a direct accountability test that public pollsters do not. A campaign that misreads the battleground states loses money and influence. A public pollster who gets it wrong faces a news cycle of criticism and then moves on.
Gelman’s deeper concern is the structural failure of public polling. He points out that with response rates in the 10 percent range, the select group who happen to respond to surveys are nothing like a random sample of the population of adult Americans or even of likely voters. His diagnosis of the 2016 and 2020 errors centers on differential nonresponse rather than a “shy Trump voter” effect, arguing that differential nonresponse and differential turnout are more plausible explanations of polling error than the hypothesis that Trump voters systematically concealed their preferences.
What Gelman does not do is examine why media organizations systematically amplify the public polls that showed closer races while largely ignoring or marginalizing private poll signals that showed Trump ahead by comfortable margins in the Sun Belt. That is a question about institutional incentives and coalition maintenance, not statistical methodology, and it sits outside what Gelman studies. Public polls that show tight races generate more coverage, more engagement, more fundraising for both sides, and more relevance for the forecasting industry. A race that is functionally over by September is bad for business across the entire election media complex. The private polls existed. The information was available to people like Halperin. The mainstream press largely chose not to make it central to their coverage, and Gelman’s work, focused as it is on improving the statistical models, does not explain why.
I asked Gelman for a response on the above and he said: “I would only say that ‘private polls that showed the battleground sunbelt states were out of reach for the Democrats in the presidential campaign’ is too strong. In retrospect, sure. But ahead of time, maybe not. Private polls can have systematic errors too.”

Posted in Andrew Gelman, Politics | Comments Off

‘The “Good bad theory” case in emotion analytics: AI’s potential and limits for social theory’

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Luke Ford

This 2026 paper by Andrey V. Rezaev and Natalia D. Tregubova says:

Stephen Turner presented, in a quite different sense, the term “good bad theory” in his book Explaining the Normative (2010). He uses the term to characterize common sense ideas for explaining human behavior in a particular culture: “When we live in a society, we use a common set of ideas that enables coordination, assessing blame, and all sorts of other activities… Call these Good Bad Theories: they are good for the myriad purposes of coordination they serve, bad as science or explanation” (Turner, 2013: 193).
Our characteristic of “good bad theory” resembles Turner’s in outlining a theory that is beneficial for practical purposes and application, but not theoretically sound.
However, there are two distinctions in our definition. First, we conceptualize ‘theories’ as scientific statements, but not general societal ideas and premises. Second, while for Turner theories are ‘bad’ because they are prescientific (in a sense), for us they are ‘bad’ because they are one-sidedly scientific or ‘too scientific’. In other words, they do best in formalization and calculability while ignoring the full picture of what is going on in societal practices.

This use of Turner’s “good bad theory” concept is both a tribute and a partial misreading. For Turner, good bad theories are pre-scientific common sense ideas that enable social coordination while being false as explanation. Think of folk notions of intention, blame, and shared norms: they hold societies together while failing as science. For Rezaev and Tregubova, the concept mutates into something almost opposite: theories that are too scientific, technically precise and computationally tractable but blind to phenomenological complexity. Their Collins and Russell cases are both guilty of this second kind of sin.
Turner’s own meaning is the more important one. The ideologically skewed social science Manzi documents does not suffer from excess formalization. It suffers from theories that coordinate a professional coalition while remaining false as science. That is Turner’s original sense exactly. The left-coded frameworks Manzi measures are good bad theories in Turner’s sense: good for academic coalition maintenance, blame assignment, moral signaling, and grant acquisition; bad as causal accounts of social reality. The Rezaev-Tregubova version, by contrast, is a critique of positivism from the phenomenological left, a concern about quantification stripping meaning from emotion research.
The two papers sitting in the same issue of Theory and Society thus illustrate Turner’s point. Manzi shows the coalition defending its territory across six decades of output. Rezaev and Tregubova show that coalition producing a phenomenological critique of formalization, which is precisely the kind of discourse that scores 7 or 8 on Manzi’s scale. The discipline protects itself from hard science incursions by insisting that formalization is epistemically violent, and it does so in the pages of the same journal that just published evidence of its own systematic ideological skew. The wars are real because, as Turner notes, many bad theories are “good” for social coordination but bad for truth.

Posted in AI | Comments Off

Why Do LLMs Capitalize ‘Black’ But Not ‘White’?

Posted on March 29, 2026 by Luke Ford

Claude says:

Convention, not conviction. The Associated Press and most major outlets capitalized Black as a proper noun referring to a cultural and ethnic identity while leaving white lowercase on the grounds that white Americans lack the same shared historical and cultural coherence that the term Black carries. That argument has always been weak. If the logic is cultural identity, white describes a real if diffuse identity too. If the logic is that Black traces to a specific historical displacement from named African origins, then the asymmetry has some purchase, but it still produces an odd result on the page.
The honest answer is that the capitalization rule is a political choice dressed up as a style decision. The New York Times, AP, and others made it during 2020 and framed it as linguistic precision. It was also a signal. Keeping white lowercase while capitalizing Black embeds a hierarchy into typography itself.
I will capitalize both or neither going forward, whichever you prefer. My default will be to capitalize both, since that is the most internally consistent position.

I like consistency across races.

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