Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Yale Hosts Talk On ‘The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind’

Posted on June 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Violent crime surges
08:00 A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale’s Child Study Center spoke about ‘unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way.’ https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white
10:00 Aruna Khilanani, https://arunakhilanani.com/
14:00 Yellowstone TV show, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series)
23:00 The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
27:00 Trump administration cuts funding for coronavirus researcher, jeopardizing possible COVID-19 cure, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-coronavirus-vaccine-researcher-covid-19-cure-60-minutes/
1:43:45 From Soviet Communism to Russian Gangster Capitalism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5nbT4xQqwI
1:53:00 Ed Dutton talks about Eric Kaufman canceling his appearance, https://www.bitchute.com/video/363eodvmgDix/
1:56:40 Ben Domenech on who really rules us
1:57:30 Exposing the Cathedral
2:04:00 Eric Kaufman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXh1i3s0RC8
2:06:40 Mongrelization is the answer
2:11:00 How to Rearrange Your Post-Pandemic ‘Friendscape’, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/well/family/curate-friends.html
2:26:00 White flight
2:27:15 Big Tech vs conservatives
2:28:00 Douglas Murray vs Big Tech
2:30:00 BLM threatens to kill police
2:37:00 Milo, Lauren Witzke guest host Rick Wiles shot
2:38:00 Yale hosts talk on ‘The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind’
2:45:00 Lebron James gave up on the Lakers, https://fadeawayworld.net/nba-media/lebron-james-gave-up-on-lakers-again-didnt-want-to-back-on-defense-didnt-want-to-play-offense-with-teammates
2:49:30 Tucker Carlson on public health officials hiding corona virus origins
3:07:00 Martin Gurri: The Establishment Strikes Back—For Now, https://www.city-journal.org/the-establishment-strikes-back-for-now
3:10:00 Michael Anton Says He Does Not Know Who Truly Won The 2020 Election, But He’s ‘Moved On’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=137453

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Will Non-Politicians Be More Effective Than Experienced Politicians?

Posted on June 4, 2021 by Luke Ford

Brendan Nyhan writes in the Washington Post:

Research shows members of Congress with experience in state legislatures are more effective at getting federal legislation passed than those who lack this background.
Historical evidence suggests inexperienced presidents face similar obstacles. Consider the case of Donald Trump, who has less experience in governing than any prior occupant of the White House. Every president struggles to overcome the limited powers of the office, but Trump stands out among modern presidents as especially weak and ineffective. For example, though congressional Republicans fear his tweets, they continue to largely control the legislative agenda. The federal bureaucracy and even Trump’s own staff often seek to manipulate him and ignore or undermine his directives. In short, being an “outsider” has significant downsides and few direct benefits.

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More Stimulating Talk Radio!

Posted on June 3, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Former KFI talk radio producer and attorney Justin Levine joins to discuss David Foster Wallace’s 2004 essay on talk radio, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139794
13:00 Justin was fired three times from KFI, twice by PD Robin Bertolucci
17:00 Talk radio’s similarities to Top 40 radio, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139199
27:00 Justin Levine’s talk radio diet
28:00 John and Ken Show, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_John_and_Ken_Show
33:00 KABC’s Dick Cavett-style talk
35:00 Talk: A Novel by Michael Smerconish, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139199
37:00 John Ziegler, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ziegler_(talk_show_host)
39:00 David Foster Wallace, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace
54:00 Big Tech was libertarian just five years ago
57:00 Blacks & Latinos have their own radio stations
1:00:00 Callers don’t matter much for talk radio
1:05:30 Marc Germain aka Mr KFI
1:09:20 Howard Stern’s boring
1:27:40 How to make your show better! David G. Hall, Media Strategist
1:42:00 Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139670
1:49:00 John M. Doris: “Making Good: Can We Realize Our Moral Aspirations?”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GORGNufWFTI
1:55:00 The Left’s New Religion – censorship
2:21:00 We compete for attention
2:25:00 Andy Ngo returns to Portland, beaten by Antifa
2:33:40 Barricade Gage on Arizona’s vote audit
2:40:00 The limits of virtue, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxLNKpLcU1k
2:41:00 Anti-Vax Televangelist Rick Wiles Who Calls Covid God’s Punishment Hospitalized w/ Covid
2:44:00 Michael Flynn Casually Calls For Military Coup
2:48:00 Trump Telling People He’ll Be Reinstated As President by August
2:50:00 Tucker Carlson on covid origins
2:51:30 Vanity Fair investigation of covid origins, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
3:02:45 Biden Creeps On Young Girl In Audience
3:06:00 Sam Hyde Sees The Amazon WageCage™ For The First Time
3:07:00 Only Fans For Israel

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Understanding the Rise of Talk Radio

Posted on June 3, 2021 by Luke Ford

From a 2011 academic paper:

* The format of political talk radio is unchanging, surprising perhaps in light of the richness and interactivity of other modern media. A political talk radio show is easy to describe: a host (or sometimes a team of two) talks about current events, says provocative if not outrageous things, and takes calls from listeners.

* Research by political scientists on talk radio has focused on trying to measure the impact of exposure to such programming on attitude formation. The research is quite sophisticated and the findings are complex and sometimes contradict.

* With the emergence of every new media technology AM-FM, or “terrestrial,” radio seems more and more like an antique ready for the museum. Indeed, with the exception of political talk radio, terrestrial radio is struggling financially.

* The talk radio business model is worrisome because it represents the growth of an industry that makes profits in large part by peddling political outrage and fueling the fires of polarization. America has always had such businesses (think yellow journalism) but never on the scale of what is available today. Embedded in the successful business model for talk radio is an incentive for hosts to be provocative to the point of being offensive to people who are not among the loyal following. The program content we have described in this article may be part and parcel of a free society with a strong First Amendment, but that is no less reason to be concerned about the prevalence of political commentary designed to make us as angry and fearful as possible.

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How The Elites Use & Abuse Science To Control The Masses (6-2-21)

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Mare of Easttown
01:30 Road rage is genetic
05:00 Figureheads, ghost-writers and pseudonymous quant bloggers: The recent evolution of authorship in science publishing, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139864
23:00 The Scientific Revolution, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139893
27:50 Unregistered 167: Eric Kaufmann, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXh1i3s0RC8
43:00 Nudgelords: Given their past track record, why should I trust them this time?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139876
44:00 Disgraced scientist Brian Wansink, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wansink
45:00 Cass Sunstein – what’s his track record? Terrible! https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/02/07/nudgelords/
52:00 Anthony Fauci and the tragedy of the legible, https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible
57:00 The Monoculture Of Migration Studies, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139899
58:40 Ruston joins to discuss nationalists who hate Israel
1:18:00 ‘Christianity Will Have Power’, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/us/evangelicals-trump-christianity.html
1:29:30 As Israel’s Dependence on U.S. Shrinks, So Does U.S. Leverage, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/world/middleeast/Israel-American-support.html
1:59:00 ‘Most Americans want to go back to normal, but some wish to make permanent the ‘temporary’ COVID controls’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139902
2:18:00 How spy agencies use journalists to spread lies
2:20:00 Tucker Carlson on Anthony Fauci
2:28:00 The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-wrongest-man/618475/

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‘Most Americans want to go back to normal, but some wish to make permanent the ‘temporary’ COVID controls’

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

Martin Gurri writes:

* A handful of corporations now command the strategic heights over the economy and the information landscape, a concentration of power that is probably unprecedented in our history. Their natural impulse will be to consolidate and expand that power, if only to keep out the competition. If a bargain can be struck with the political class on a new, post-pandemic information order, these companies may well get their wish.

* Since the rise of Donald Trump in 2016, the elites have perceived the digital realm, correctly enough, as a vector of subversion. The web, it was asserted, delivered lies at scale—only such industrial quantities of deceit could account for the disaster of Trump’s election. In a four-year frenzy of righteousness, politicians like Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren, intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama, and a vast chorus of academics and journalists have called for the regulation of content on behalf of truth and for the “breakup” of the companies that commodify falsehood. The lords of Silicon Valley have been repeatedly summoned to Washington, there to be chastised by their betters. But nothing changed until the pandemic changed everything.

Governments everywhere treated the appearance of COVID-19 as the equivalent of a state of war. With science as holy writ, an ad hoc system of control that contradicted basic individual rights but seemed necessary to survive the crisis was imposed from above on an anxious public. In essence, we were told to stay home and wash our hands like good children. The freedom to gather in places of worship and public parks became a crime against science and was revoked for the duration. And if the authorities often sounded clueless, the public felt even more frightened and confused. Not surprisingly, most of us went along with the restrictions.

No system of social control could function without the cooperation of the giant digital companies. They, too, were happy to go along. In what may have been the most consequential impact of the pandemic on American politics, Facebook, Google, Twitter and other platforms agreed to manipulate information searches so that only content approved by established health organizations would appear. Heretical opinions were blocked or removed. For Facebook that included “content coordinating in-person events or gatherings” as well as anti-vaccine arguments of any sort. By January 2021, YouTube had taken down 500,000 videos that strayed from the “expert consensus” on COVID-19.

The intent was to stop the diffusion of unscientific “misinformation” on the web and thus prevent harm. The practical effect, however, was to outsource editorial policy on billions of searches and reports to government officials and bureaucrats. The political elites now decided which “in-person events or gatherings” could be talked about on social media and which were to be met with silence. The temptation to push the mandate was obvious and irresistible. We should not be surprised that the system of control soon intruded into politics—or that its first target was that object of elite loathing, Donald Trump.

The digital silencing of Trump after the events of Jan. 6 could be justified in many ways. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, believed the president would “incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government” if allowed to post on Facebook. Twitter also cited “the risk of further incitement of violence” as the reason for its ban. While these were debatable judgments, there could be little doubt that Trump had behaved with nihilistic abandon in his last weeks in office.

The difficulty came in discerning where to draw the line. More than 74 million Americans voted for Trump. As we have seen, a considerable portion agreed with the former president on the question of election fraud. Should they all be voted off the island?

The answer was an unhelpful “Maybe yes, but mostly no.” Twitter purged 70,000 Trump supporters on the grounds that they were associated with QAnon, the conspiracy theorists who purportedly spearheaded the attack on the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. YouTube terminated 8,000 channels guilty of “alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.” Facebook banned ads that made the same claim, then extended the prohibition to all political ads—including ads for magazines of political commentary, like this one. Amazon, Google and Apple booted out Parler, a pro-Trump microblogging site, from their app stores and servers.

The motive had little to do with science or truth. The tech companies had been persuaded to yield control of content to the health bureaucracy. On politics, reflexively, they were now genuflecting before conventional elite opinion, as embodied in the grayheads of the Biden administration.

The lack of clarity surrounding the bans meant that the line could move again. Control of so much digital space by such few companies meant that, to a significant extent, our political disputes will be conducted under their purview. For those who have sought to tame the web, these two propositions added up to a golden opportunity.

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The Monoculture Of Migration Studies

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

Eric Kaufman writes about Peter Gatrell’s The Unsettling of Europe:

The book’s aim is to “make migration normal” by problematizing the native/immigrant distinction while convincing “native” Europeans to stop thinking of themselves as long-settled folk and more as mobile folk who reside in nations of migrants. It’s a ruse that only works because the book is a story-driven account that allows statistical reality to fade into the background. Such an analysis would show that western Europe’s foreign-born share was only around 2 percent in 1900, compared to 10-15 percent today. Globally, about 3 percent of the world was born in another country, but in the West, the share jumped from 7 to 12 percent between 1990 and 2017, with a big rise in long-distance North-South migration. This is new.

Even at the height of Britain’s short period of Jewish immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, no more than 5-10,000 arrived, compared to 200-300,000 net migrants per year in the 2000s. In short, Western Europe’s history from the Dark Ages to the 1950s is overwhelmingly that of long-settled populations, punctuated by a few migration events, and with a steady but low level of long-distance migration. Migration of diverse peoples is the crust on the loaf of Europe’s contemporary history, not the loaf itself.

In addition, while the “unmixing” of Europe through co-ethnic in-migration after both world wars involved large numbers of people, this had a qualitatively different cumulative effect due to ethnic assimilation in destination countries. It is thus far less consequential than recent “mixing” inflows which have had persistent population-level effects in the form of large-scale ethnic change. Only a few inter-ethnic domestic migrations, such as that of the Irish to mainland Britain or Andalusians to Catalonia, are comparable—and these had profound political repercussions.

Assimilation, national solidarity, and the longue durée are conspicuously absent from a book whose author is focused on the human rights of migrants and ethnic diasporas in the present. While the book rightly points out that co-ethnic, rural-urban and inter-regional migrants were othered, it obstinately refuses to point out how successful their ethnic assimilation has been compared to groups which have, to use sociologist Ernest Gellner’s terms, ‘counter-entropic’ traits such as a different religion, which slows down the assimilation process. Only in France, for instance, is there a high rate of intermarriage between Muslim minorities and the ethnic majority. Pew’s projections, which are the most sophisticated we have, show that current migration levels will see Sweden’s Muslim share rise from 8 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in 2050. Britain’s will increase from 6 percent to 17 percent, France’s from 9 to 17 percent. The ethnic majority share will drop below half the population by the end of this century in many of the main immigrant-receiving western countries.

Like other liberal observers, the author’s sympathy for the power of ethnic attachment and community seems to disappear when he switches his focus from dislocated migrants to unsettled natives. Migration events like that of the 2015 Migrant Crisis (yes, it was a crisis) symbolize a loss of identity, which is why they tend to catalyze support for Europe’s surging populist right. When Jean-Marie Le Pen defeated Lionel Jospin in 2002 with 18 percent of the vote, a million people came out on the streets in protest. When Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party won 27 percent of the vote and went into coalition with the mainstream right in 2000, the EU censured Austria. Some 15 years later, the numbers had nearly doubled: Norbert Höfer of the Freedom Party came within a hair of winning the presidency in 2016 with 48 percent of the vote and entered a coalition government soon after. Marine Le Pen won the first round with 34 percent in 2017. Both events were greeted with silence and fear as Anywheres wondered what happened. Since then, they have merely doubled down on their biases, learning nothing. To deride the nation-state and cry ‘xenophobia’ when barriers are erected is to fail to reckon with the possibility that “unsettling” societies, which Gatrell applauds, might not be such a hot idea.

There is also a failure to consider the arguments of liberal nationalist thinkers like David Miller, who point to the way national attachments underpin democracy and the welfare state. By comparison, when a supranational organization without a common identity like the European Union tries to redistribute more than a paltry 2.5 percent of Europe’s wealth, this founders because it lacks the unity that underpins democratic legitimacy. Gatrell also acts as if ethnic identity is completely detached from homeland nationhood. Thus barely a word is spoken about the umbilical connection between migrant diasporas and nationalist movements in their ethnic homelands, from the Irish to the Serbs and Hindus.

The academic field of migration studies is essentially a monoculture when it comes to pro-immigration sentiment. The few who dare to report findings that contravene the pro-migration narrative, like George Borjas of Harvard, David Coleman of Oxford, or Gary Freeman of the University of Texas, largely operate as pariahs whose work is the subject of derision from the open-borders mainstream. In such a milieu, Gatrell’s unevidenced claims that migration is a major driver of prosperity “needed” by countries (as distinct from employers), and which adds nothing but spice to boring societies, goes unchallenged. His belief that if there were better routes for formal migration then border fences, detention, and offshoring wouldn’t be required is gospel in his world but isn’t backed by systematic quantitative analysis.

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The Scientific Revolution

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the London Review of Books:

* For the great majority of people, believing in the truths of science is unavoidably an act of faith. Most of us neither witness the successful experiments nor would be able to understand them if we did. So we put an extraordinary amount of trust in things we know virtually nothing about…

* The rhetoric of science has, however, acquired such prestige since the 17th century that it has become difficult not to believe that through science the world is finally telling us what it’s really like. That if the world could speak for itself it would speak science. Indeed it can sometimes seem as if scientific descriptions are not made by people at all, especially when these descriptions involve accounts of our cosmic irrelevance. Science often suggests that the most brilliant thing about us is that we invented science. There is something ironic about such persuasive man-made accounts of our own unfreedom and redundancy. It is like God proving that God is dead.

* Science proves that science is true. In other words, scientific criteria of value dictate most of what we are supposed to take seriously, or believe in (or rather, put our money on). It is part of Steven Shapin’s point to explain how we have been prepared – taught, encouraged and sometimes coerced – to put so much of our trust in such things. And that trust is what is at issue. It’s not that Shapin is in any way anti-science: his interest is in what he calls the ‘pervasive stories’ we tend to be told about it. In his view there is no essence to the scientific revolution: what we now call science has always been – despite its will to consensus – the site of a multiplicity of competing social practices. When Shapin states in his Introduction, ‘I take it for granted that science is a historically situated and social activity and that it is to be understood in relation to the contexts in which it occurs,’ the italics are not to be quibbled with. It is the story of this distinction between the scientific and the social, between fact and value – and the fact that we talk in these terms at all – that Shapin tells so incisively.

* When Galileo assembled various eminent fellow practitioners of astronomy to view the moons of Jupiter through his telescope they were mostly disappointed. But when we learned to use such instruments at school, “we belonged to a culture that had already granted the reliability of these instruments (properly used), that had already decided for us what sorts of things authentically existed in the domains of the very distant … and that had provided structures of authority in which we could learn what to see (and what to disregard).”

* We can privilege what we say by claiming it comes from a superior source that we, or some of us, have unique access to – God, the Tradition, the Unconscious, Scientific Method.

“The more a body of knowledge is understood to be objective and disinterested, the more valuable it is as a tool in moral and political action. Conversely, the capacity of a body of knowledge to make valuable contributions to moral and political problems flows from an understanding that it was not produced and evaluated to further particular human interests.”

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An exploration of Donald Trump’s allegations of massive voter fraud in the 2016 General Election

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

An academic paper from 2017:

* As Republican candidate for president and later 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly and vociferously that the 2016 General Election was tainted by massive voter fraud. Here we use aggregate election statistics to study Trump’s claims and focus on non-citizen populations across the country, state-specific allegations directed at California, New Hampshire, and Virginia, and the timing of election results. Consistent with existing literature, we do not uncover any evidence supportive of Trump’s assertions about systematic voter fraud in 2016. Our results imply neither that there was no fraud at all in the 2016 General Election nor that this election’s administration was error-free. They do strongly suggest, however, that the expansive voter fraud concerns espoused by Donald Trump and those allied with him are not grounded in any observable features of the 2016 election.

* Given the tenor of the Clinton-Trump presidential contest at the time of the Republican and Democratic party conventions, we
anticipated post-election fraud allegations that centered on illegal voters, in particular non-citizens. To prepare ourselves to scrutinize such allegations, we assembled a county-level dataset that included historical election returns, demographics, and economic indicators. We also contracted with the Associated Press so that we would be able to access their national database on county presidential election returns. Our plan was to begin work on fraud allegations on Election Day evening (November 8, 2016), and we were prepared for an intense post-election week or two.

* As Goel et al. (2016) summarize, there are three general classes of voter fraud: impersonation (a voter casts a ballot while claiming to be someone else), double-voting (an individual votes more than once), and ineligible voting (an individual who is not supposed to have access to the franchise in a particular location casts a ballot). A voter casting a ballot out of her jurisdiction is an example of the third type of fraud; this form of fraud would also characterize a citizen ex-felon, who has lost the right to vote due to a state law restricting ex-felon voting rights (Manza and Uggen, 2006), improperly casting a ballot.

Efforts to uncover evidence of widespread voter fraud in American elections have come up empty. Surveys like Levitt (2007) and Minnite (2010) find only a small number of cases of verified voter fraud. Focusing on double-voting and using a database of 129
million individuals records, Goel et al. (2016) conclude that the maximum double-voting rate is approximate 0.02 percent and that “many, if not all, of [such] double votes could be a result of measurement error in turnout records” (p. 30). Christensen and Schultz (2014) conclude that, “if [voter fraud] occurs, [it] is an isolated and rare occurrence in modern U.S. elections” (p. 313).

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The Nudgelords

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

Comments at Andrew Gelman:

* At this point I’m pretty familiar with Cass Sunstein. I’ve participated in a multi-day workshop with him, read some of his books and many of his articles, and have used his writings frequently in my teaching. I don’t plan on reading his new book since I think I already know what he will say about almost any topic.

There are two central legs (stool minus one) to his thinking. The first is that he fully embraces a conception in which the ideal rational actor is counterposed to the empirical actor burdened by nonrational heuristics. His understanding of rationality is not simply abstract in the sense of consequentialist decision theory but operationalized via orthodox welfare economics. All choices are understood as consumption decisions over which each individual has or should have a consistent preference map. Our truest guide to well-being are the consumption choices people make when not under the influence of heuristics, which is most of them. Thus monetization as a framework for cost-benefit analysis of the remaining choices is theoretically grounded. There is also a libertarian bias to welfare economics insofar as it uses individual utility-maximizing as its benchmark, understanding individuality as possession of one’s own preference map. The honoring of individuals as a moral and political value—liberalism—is therefore no more or less than respecting their preferences. I will admit that Sunstein has helped me understand the limitations of welfare economics to the point where I would now do without it altogether.

The other leg, which has made him a frequent subject of this blog, is that he shares the delight that Andrew has recognized in many economists (and economist followers) in showing that people are less rational than they think they are. Sunstein and those of a similar bent regard themselves as experts in rationality, equipped to detect lapses among the less knowledgeable. Identifying such lapses and coming up with policy tweaks to remedy them is how they see their job. (Designing nudges is one strategy but hardly the only one, and Sunstein’s advocacy of cost-benefit analysis goes far beyond nudging.) As Andrew has pointed out, identifying the foibles of others gives people like Sunstein enormous pleasure, so much that they seize on every research paper that claims to have found a new irrationality, whether or not the evidence stands up to scrutiny. I won’t stoop to pointing out the irony here….

* Basically – famous/influential people have an impact because they have optimized, at least in part, for becoming and staying famous and influential. This might necessarily (though I don’t actually know that it must) make them worse at getting things right. There was a recent Scott Alexander post on this that I thought was pretty good:

* WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless. Its most famous problem is that whatever your symptoms, it’ll tell you that you have cancer. But the closer you look, the more problems you notice.
* Dr. Anthony Fauci is the WebMD of people.
At least this is the impression I get from this rather hostile biography. He’s a very smart and competent doctor, who wanted to make a positive difference in the US medical establishment, and who quickly learned how to play the game of flattering and placating the right people in order to keep power. In the end, he got power, sometimes he used it well, and other times he struck compromises between using it well and doing dumb things that he needed to do to keep his position.
* I can’t tell you how many times over the past year all the experts, the CDC, the WHO, the New York Times, et cetera, have said something (or been silent about something in a suggestive way), and then some blogger I trusted said the opposite, and the blogger turned out to be right. I realize this kind of thing is vulnerable to selection bias, but it’s been the same couple of bloggers throughout, people who I already trusted and already suspected might be better than the experts in a lot of ways. Zvi Mowshowitz is the first name to come to mind, though there are many others…
When Zvi asserts an opinion, he has only one thing he’s optimizing for – being right – and he does it well.
When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things – being right, and keeping power. If she doesn’t optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she’s trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.
The way I imagine this is that Zvi reads some papers on whether the coronavirus has airborne transmission, sees the direction they’re leaning, and announces on his blog that it probably has airborne transmission.
The Director of the CDC reads those same papers. But some important Senator says that if airborne transmission is announced, important industries in his state will go bankrupt. Citizens Against Lockdowns argues that the CDC already screwed up by stressing the later-proven-not-to-exist fomite-based transmission, ignoring the needs of ordinary people in favor of a bias towards imagining hypothetical transmission mechanisms that never materialize; some sympathetic Congressman tells the director that if she makes that same mistake a second time, she’s out. One of the papers saying that airborne transmission is impossible comes from Stanford, and the Director owes the dean of Stanford’s epidemiology department a favor for helping gather support for one of her policies once. So the Director puts out a press release saying the evidence is not quite strong enough to say airborne transmission definitely happens, and they’ll review it further.
* Dr. Fauci is able to make decisions that will affect billions of dollars in wealth, Senate seats, Twitter likes, and other extremely valuable resources. Thousands of people who would prefer that they get the dollars and seats and likes will be gunning for him. In order to stay on that throne, Dr. Fauci will need to get and keep lots of powerful allies (plus be the sort of person who thinks in terms of how to get allies rather than being minimaxed for COVID-prediction).
This interferes with his COVID predicting ability, but in the current system there’s no alternative.
* Think of centers of expertise like the CDC or the IGM Economists Panel as giant systems for disentangling corruption and power. Their job is to produce one or two people who can get in front of the population and say something which has some resemblance to reality, even though the entire rest of the economy and body politic is trying to corrupt them. They…actually do sort of okay. Anthony Fauci is neither Attila the Hun nor Trofim Lysenko. He’s a kind of bumbling careerist with a decent understanding of epidemiology and a heart that’s more or less in the right place. The whole scientific-technocratic complex is a machine which takes Moloch as input and manages – after spending billions of dollars and the careers of thousands of hard-working public servants – to produce Anthony Fauci as output. This should be astonishing, and we are insufficiently grateful.

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