The Craft of Writing Effectively

“Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago’s Writing Program, led this session in an effort to communicate helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available to graduate students interested in further developing their writing style.”

Here are some excerpts from this talk:

You are writing about a subject at which you have expert knowledge.

You are operating at the most sophisticated levels. When I work with faculty on this and other campus, I am working with people who are after all, on the frontiers of knowledge. They’re thinking stuff, nobody’s thought before.

You are using your writing to help yourself think.

If you don’t do this, for most people, you cannot think at the level you need to think. Quite different say, from a journalist who’s sitting down writing.

The journalist is not using the writing process to think up new ideas about the world. You are. This means you have a very different set of writing challenges than anybody else has.

This is a course about those challenges.

You actually generate the text while you are doing your thinking, but then you’re gonna send this text out to readers and the readers are gonna look through that text and if you’ve done your job, they’re gonna change the way they see the world.

Experts use language in one set of patterns to do their thinking. But those very same experts read with a different pattern.

You have used your text as you must use it to help yourself think, but you’re gonna use writing patterns and language patterns that interfere with the way your readers read, even when those readers are also other experts. So you are interfering with their reading process when you’re writing. What happens to readers when you do that?

The last thing they’re gonna do is they’re just gonna stop. What happens before then? What leads up to that stopping?

In the last week, you’ve read stuff that is not written in the way you are seeking to read. What’s the first thing to happen to you? You slow down. Second. You don’t understand. Third, you get aggravated. Then you’re done.

If they don’t need to read it, they don’t.

Were your teachers reading your texts to think about the world? That’s not what they’re paid to do.

You’ve learned to write in a system where your readers are paid to care about you. That will stop.

In the world beyond school, they will read because it is valuable to them.

More than anything else from now on, your writing needs to be valuable.

I’m talking to social scientists. Physical scientists don’t make this mistake.

The question is whether this particular community of readers values it, which is why it’s so much about readers and not about content.

Value lies in readers, right, not in the thing. And so how people can think about their writing without thinking about readers is probably the biggest challenge you face.

Here’s a shock, you think writing is conveying your ideas.

It’s not. Let me say that again. You think that writing is communicating your ideas to your readers. It is not.

What is professional writing? It’s not conveying your ideas to your readers.

It’s changing their ideas. Nobody cares what ideas you have.

This is way more radical than it sounds. I used to make the mistake of saying to students who came in, I teach argument a lot and I say to students who make an argument, why do you think that?

Nothing will be accepted as knowledge or understanding until it has been challenged by someone competent to challenge it.

That’s the rule.

Your readers have the professional function of challenging what you say. So explaining turns out only to happen inside of these two functions, you only explain inside of value having been generated and persuasion having begun.

It is an enormous mistake of PhD level writers that they try to explain first, and I know why you try to explain first, because in school they just wanted you to explain first because the whole thing was just about seeing what you know.

Start explaining line one. Classic thing, begin with the definition. Teachers love this. Begin with the definition because it tells the teachers what? You know the definition. Don’t begin with definition.

If you think that you’re here to do new original work, if you would find the synapse in your brain that is storing those words, kill it.

You are here to do valuable work. What’s the difference?

You think you’re here to create new knowledge? Well, you know how hard it is to create new knowledge?

And they said, “That’s right, it’s new and it’s original, but it is not knowledge.”

She was living in a positivistic world, where knowledge looks like this. In a positivistic world, knowledge is just built up over time, and anytime you find out something that people didn’t know, you get to just add up to this model, and knowledge just keeps on growing and everybody’s happy. And that is dead.

There are conversations moving through time and there’s a bunch of people and they get to say what knowledge is.

Why on earth would these people get to say what knowledge is?

But the point is that’s the way it works. You may not like it, but that’s the way it works.

The good news is this thing does move through time. The other good news is this boundary is permeable. Stuff comes in and stuff goes out. Academic conversations excrete as they go.

They go along for a while and they say, whoa, we were doing that! Don’t do that anymore.

It’s not this buildup model. This buildup model assumed that everything was right. We don’t think that. We think a lot of what we think right now is wrong.

We just dunno what the wrong is and we don’t know what better is. We wanna know, we do, we wanna get better at it, but in order for us to do that, you have to be dealing with the stuff we say is knowledge.

What’s the first word you see that makes it valuable? Nonetheless. Next: Widely accepted. Next: However. Next: Although. Next: Inconsistent. Next: Reported. Next: Anomaly. Next: Reported.

Here’s my first piece of advice to you that you can do to make your writing better
starting this afternoon, is spend 15 minutes a week for the rest of this year,
taking articles in your field, print ’em out so you have a hard copy. Go through and circle every word in the writing that is creating value to the readers.

If you see an article that you think doesn’t have any of those words, send it to me. I’ll give you my email. Send me your email and say, “Larry, I found an article that doesn’t do it.”

Here’s what I bet, you will see none, I will see 10.

How come you don’t see ’em and I see five or 10? You missed them here.

I see ’em, I know the code. Every community has its own codes.

The communities you’re entering have their own codes, a set of words that communicates value.

You must know the codes of the communities you’re working in and they are particular to communities.

Some codes are shared among a bunch of communities, some aren’t. You’ve got to know.

If you spend 15 minutes a week for the rest of this year, you’ll be doing two things. One, you’ll be training yourself to look for the code of creating value. The other thing you’ll be doing if you’re smart, is you’ll be writing down each of those words and you’ll be creating an invaluable word list, so that when it’s a week before something is done and you’re doing one of your revisions, you’re gonna do what? You’re gonna do the same thing on your own work.

And if you can’t underline 10 words in the first two paragraphs, you’re gonna do what? You’re gonna go to the word list and you’re gonna jump ’em in, right? Sometimes, it’s that simple.

Sometimes we take articles that wouldn’t get published [and] in an hour we do things and they get published.

As I say to undergraduates who look at me and they say, why does it take six years or five years or even four years to get a PhD? Aren’t they just learning more stuff? No, half their time is spent learning more stuff.

The other half is learning their readers. I will say this again, if you do not know your readers, the particular people in a community, you are very unlikely to create value and you are very unlikely to be persuasive because persuasion depends on what they doubt. If you don’t know what they doubt, how on earth you’re gonna overcome those doubts? You must know them.

Which words have to do with the community? – Widely. – Widely. – Accepted. – Accepted. – Reported. – Reported. Those are words that cued that there was a community of people who want to understand this.

You don’t have those words, you’re not signaling any community.

Imagine if you go to your readers and say, hey readers, hey community, I’ve read your stuff. I’ve thought about what you think and I have something to say.

Hey readers, I’ve read your stuff. I know what you think, but you’re wrong. Which one are they gonna pay attention to?

He can name a journal. We will go to the every edition of that journal in the last 20 years and every paper will say that somebody’s wrong. Everyone.

You have to know the code. If you say to the people who are the dominant figures in your field, “You know what, I’ve read all your stuff and you’re idiots.” Not gonna go well.

The code is, wow, are you smart!

You are so smart and you’ve contributed and you’ve advanced this, you’ve advanced this community through in fabulous ways, but there’s this little thing you got here that’s wrong. And now they say, oh yeah, well thank you for appreciating that. What do you think we have wrong? And then you better have an argument, not an explanation.

Do not explain, argue. You’re talking to people who like, wrote this stuff. You don’t have to explain it to ’em.

You have to predict what they’re gonna doubt when you say they’re wrong. So you say to them, “You’re wrong about this,” and they say, “Why should I agree that I’m wrong,” and you say, “Well, here’s why.”

That’s what introductions do. They give a quick version of why these people should think that they’re wrong. And they say, “Well, okay, preliminarily. I’ve read your first two pages. Now I’ll start reading the rest of it.” Why? Because you’ve caused them to think that your work might be valuable for them.

The University of Chicago writing program is not real popular in the world of writing programs and you can see why. A lot of people think we’re fascists.

Here’s what we teach people to do. We say, identify the people with power in your community and give them what they want. Lots of people have said to us in some version or another, you’re supposed to teach people to challenge the existing community. Well, actually, I just did, right? But notice that I did it inside the terms of the community.

I get the moral and ethical pressure to teach people to have their individual voices.
But when I sit with somebody up in my office, who’s worried about their career not going anywhere, it can’t be about their individual voice. It’s about what’s gonna make it valuable to their readers.

You want me to go to this really important person, the editors of this journal and tell ’em they’re wrong? Yeah, I do. I need you to do it under the code. You wanna do it under the code. There’s polite ways to do it. There’s insulting ways to do it.

Here are some highlights from this 2022 book by Rony Guldmann – The Star Chamber of Stanford: On the Secret Trial and Invisible Persecution of a Stanford Law Fellow:

* “Intellectuals who write with vigor and clarity are as scarce as low rents in New York or San Francisco. Raised in city streets and cafes before the age of massive universities, “last” generation intellectuals wrote for the educated reader. They have been supplanted by high-tech intellectuals, consultants and professors—anonymous souls who may be competent, and more than competent, but who do not enrich public life.” (Russell Jacoby)

* The relationship between a faculty adviser and an academic job seeker is akin to that between a great power and a small client state. It is the academic job seeker who derives tangible material benefits from the alliance—a tenure-track job—since it’s the faculty adviser’s phone calls to colleagues at other schools that separate a résumé from a stack of hundreds. The faculty adviser has an interest in expending these efforts because the empowerment of the client state redounds to the prestige and prominence of the great power. The more Stanford Law graduates are teaching at law schools, and especially illustrious ones, the stronger becomes Stanford’s standing in the competition with other great powers—Yale, Harvard, Chicago, and others. When Stanford wins, so does its faculty.

* [Barbara Fried] distilled my driving intuition as the sense that “there is something indeterminate to liberalism,” meaning that what liberals presume is the only valid application of their principles may simply be a parochial cultural preference, with another equally defensible interpretation inuring to the conservative cause. The key to the project, she advised, was to explain just why conservative claims of cultural oppression amount to more than hollow ad hominems against the banal human foibles of liberals. Another crucial question, she stressed, was why liberals seem less agitated than conservatives by difference and dissent. Liberals appear unconcerned with how their next-door neighbors go about their lives, whereas conservatives can feel threatened by this, perceiving phantasmal assaults on order and decency everywhere. Is this ostensible asymmetry reality or a social illusion? Like Joe, Barbara was at once incredulous of and fascinated by conservative claims of cultural oppression. Her instinct was to discount conservatives as benighted authoritarians, but she was receptive to my still-inchoate sense that the liberal consensus was one-sided and simplistic and hoped I could explain her unease to her.

* The sociologist Alvin Gouldner observes that the cosmopolitan New Class of well-schooled, left-leaning knowledge workers is predisposed “toward an unhealthy self-consciousness, toward stilted convoluted speech, an inhibition of play, imagination and passion, and continual pressure for expressive discipline.”19 That continual pressure is most fundamentally the secularization of an age-old religious drive, an intellectualized variant of the traditional spiritual aspiration to rise above animal impulse toward a purified state of heightened self-possession and self-control.

* Hence, my claim in the introduction that scholarliness is no less a hero-system than the cruder and more transparent ideologies of the Right. The elites despise the vulgar traditionalism of social conservatives. But their own, more rarefied, traditionalism leaves them implacably hostile to the unregulated freedom of the tacit dimension, whose indeterminate and inarticulate nature occupies a place analogous to the sexual libertinism that offends the Right. The tacit dimension is a libertinism of the intellect, a realm of uninhibited personal impulse unfettered by the exogenous strictures of academic professionalism, whose renunciatory impulses are what dictate “a totally anonymous style and choice of topics as a matter of professional honor,” as Midgley says. This aspiration to impersonality harbors a religious meaning, promising redemption from the original sin of intellectual idiosyncrasy as expressed in the solitary intimations of the tacit dimension.

* [Mary] Midgely observes: “Officially, we can enquire about anything. In fact, in any academic area, current traditions ensure that only certain quite limited limited tropes and methods will be accepted. Officially, the reasons for these limitations are impersonal, rational, clearly statable, and ready to be changed at any time if good reason is given. Actually, they have all kinds of other sources as well as these acknowledged ones—a background web of obscure and complex historical causes, involving notably clashes of personality and feuds with neighbouring studies. They are very resistant to deliberate attempts to change. Much of this rigidity, too, is certainly not impersonal because it results from the individual temperaments of the people involved. … Much academic conceptual apparatus is designed to insulate specialties from outside interference.”

* My driving intuition was that the liberal culture’s official facade of outward tolerance is informally circumscribed by a subterranean background of clandestine coercions, threats, and stigmas that cumulatively enshrine certain parochial mores as bedrock reality. But giving real life to these words required deprogramming myself from that culture, as I couldn’t expose that in which I was myself implicated. The covert sectarianism of the liberal elites would be visible only from the outside, and I wasn’t yet standing there.

* Russell Jacoby: “Universities encourage a definite intellectual form. They do not shoot, they simply do not hire those who are unable or unwilling to fit in. Even Henry Luce of the Time magazine empire, often denounced as a master propagandist, employed and even liked mavericks and dissenters. Universities, on the other hand, hire by committee: one needs degrees, references, the proper deference, a pleasant demeanor. To win over a committee that recommends to a department which counsels a chairman who advises a dean who suggests to a college president takes a talent very different from gaining the assent of a single individual.”

* Colleges and universities are the “finishing schools” of the New Class.

* David Brooks wrote that intellectuals “compete to gain a monopoly over the power to consecrate”: “Certain people and institutions at the top of each specialty have the power to confer prestige and honor on favored individuals, subjects, and styles of discourse. Those who hold this power of consecration influence taste, favor certain methodologies, and define the boundary of their discipline. To be the chief consecrator is the intellectual’s dream.”

* [Alvin Goudner:] “The New Class, then, is prepared to be egalitarian so far as the privileges of the old class are concerned. That is, under certain conditions it is prepared to remove or restrict the special incomes of the old class: profits, rents, interest. The New Class is anti-egalitarian, however, in that it seeks special guild advantages—political powers and incomes—on the basis of its possession of cultural capital.”

* The elites are willing to attack existing distributions of economic and political power in the name of greater equality and general human welfare. But, as a cultural bourgeoisie, they treat unequal divisions of cultural capital as sacrosanct and will repress any who would attempt to accrue it in disregard of the distributive status quo. Discourse that respects that status quo—by acquiescing to the lingos, conceptualizations, and lines of inquiry that define “the field”—is serious. Discourse that slights it by proceeding from a different set of starting points and perplexities is not.

* [Russell] Jacoby observes: “Like any quantitative study of reputation, the [citation] index is circular. It measures not the quality of work but clout and connections. If used to evaluate careers, however, the lessons for the striving professor are clear: cast a wide net, establish as many mutual relations as possible, do not isolate yourself from the mainstream. It pays not simply to footnote but to design research to mesh smoothly with the contributions of others: they refer to you as you refer to them. Everyone prospers from the saccharine scholarship.”

* Dissecting the core values of Homo academicus, [French sociologist Pierre] Bourdieu highlights the sublimated and intellectualized conservatism of academia’s gatekeepers, the liberal elites: “There is no acknowledged master who does not recognize a master and, through him, the intellectual magistrature of the sacred collegeof masters who acknowledge him. In short, there is no master who does not recognize the value of the institution and institutional values which are all rooted in the institutionalized refusal of any non-institutional thought, in the exaltation of academic “reliability,” that instrument of normalization which has all appearances on its side, those of learning and those of morality, although it is often only the instrument of the transformation of individual and collective limits into the choice of scientific virtuousness.”

In discerning my potential to become an eminent legal scholar, Joe was holding out the prospect that I might eventually ascend to the rank of “acknowledged master.” But in insisting that my research first be tied in with that of colleagues, he was also reminding me, with Bourdieu, that “there is no acknowledged master who does not recognize a master and, through him, the intellectual magistrature of the sacred college of masters who acknowledge him.” The knockout email was the culmination of my repeated refusals to bow before this magistrature. Joe’s and Barbara’s guidance had always been advice for doing so, for exhibiting “academic ‘reliability.’” If their respect-cum-fascination had now deteriorated into suspicion and ire, this was owing to the ingratitude with which I had discounted their Janus-faced counsels. What would heeding them have required of me? Barbara’s reaction to the Overview would have been rather more sanguine had my summaries read something like this:

“Professor X has recently introduced a fascinating new framework through which to address Problem A in an effort to replace the approach that has been most famously defended by Professor Y, arguing that this not only provides fresh, multidisciplinary insight into Problem A but also sheds a new and intriguing light on Problem B, which Professor Z first brought to our attention in his rigorously argued and thoroughly researched book C. But Professor Z’s book, C, in fact anticipated, and raised serious reservations about, the approach now being defended by Professor X in response to Professor Y. This article argues that while Professor Z’s reservations have substantial merit, the force of those concerns is attenuated to the extent we (plausibly) interpret Professor X as supplementing rather than supplanting the analysis of Professor Y. Thus conceived, the questions introduced by Professor X promise not only to enrich our understanding of Problem A but also to open up new avenues of interdisciplinary research into Problem B that build on those painstakingly developed by Professor Z, because Problem B, properly understood, is just another facet of Problem A.”

In pleading with me to acknowledge the intellectual magistrature of the sacred college of masters, Joe was saying that I could eventually become Professor X but only if I first attended to him in this genteelly interstitial manner, because that was how he got to where he was.

* Moving on to campus life, we were advised that fellows should limit themselves to raising one question every three faculty luncheons. Untenured faculty should limit themselves to every other luncheon. Only tenured faculty had license to speak up weekly.

* The importance of watching one’s words was stressed repeatedly. A workshop organizer related that she had nearly lost out on a job after scorning the dog of Cass Sunstein, a famous legal scholar then at the University of Chicago. This bespoke an ingrained disdain for all canines, not a particularized antipathy for Sunstein’s pooch specifically, she explained, but the distinction was initially lost on Sunstein, who had been wounded. They’re on good terms now—I think—but perhaps not as good as they’d be if she loved dogs in general and Fido in particular.

* Pierre Bourdieu: “The whole trick of pedagogical reason lies precisely in the way it extorts the essential while seeming to demand the insignificant: in obtaining the respect for forms and forms of respect which constitute the most visible and at the same time the best-hidden (because most “natural”) manifestations of submission to the established order, the incorporation of the arbitrary abolishes what Raymond Ruyer calls “lateral possibilities,” that is, all the eccentricities and deviations which are the small changes of madness. The concessions of politeness always contain political concessions.”

* Joe and Barbara imagined they were demanding only “the concessions of politeness.” They had taken me under their wings, enabling me to pursue my passion and sparing me the travails of sweatshop hours in a big law firm. In exchange they were hoping for a modicum of deference to their superior experience, wisdom, and expertise. And I had indeed withheld that modicum. But for cause, I submit, because tendering it would have involved a “political concession” to the cultural pathologies of liberalism and academia. Penning a book review or attending a seminar weren’t necessarily all that laborious. But cumulatively such endeavors would have acculturated me to the New Class ethos and its “respect for forms,” instilling me with the “expressive discipline” and scholarly gravitas that the still-subconscious telos of my research agenda called on me to subvert. The road not taken might have yielded a cleaner and timelier job-talk paper. But the truth of conservative claims of cultural oppression would then have adhered to me only, as Schopenhauer says, “as an artificial limb, a false tooth, a wax nose does,” not as a natural appendage that could truly interface with the world.

* As Jacoby observes, “Universities encourage a definite intellectual form.” The naturally obeisant thrive, provided the other desiderata of academic flourishing—smarts, work ethic, and luck—are in place.

* I could no more internalize the New Class ethos of expressive discipline than a naturally effeminate gay man could be expected to start vocalizing like John Wayne.

* Liam Gillespie delineates the nature of this domination: The habitus therefore not only confers unfair levels of sociocultural privilege upon certain individuals (through the bestowal of cultural capital), it also invisibilises this privilege. As a result, the struggle to change the socio-cultural conditions of the habitus is inherently difficult. This is because dominant subjects are able to exercise their dominance merely by conforming to the status quo and by “being themselves,” while those who are dominated must effect a rupture of the habitus from within the habitus itself. Put differently, within the habitus, the dominance of dominant subjects appears “objective.” The dominant can just “be,” while the dominated must first “clear the way” before they can “be.”

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Brentwood Country Club Is 97% Jewish & Where Are All The Latino Golfers?

Steve Sailer writes:

The story of how the great Jewish liberal Mosk prevented the Jewish Brentwood Country Club in Los Angeles from hosting the 1961 PGA Championship is indeed an interesting one. Jewish country clubs had been the venue of a number of U.S. Opens and PGA Championships before WWII, but they then shied away from volunteering to put on more after Mosk embarrassed Brentwood.

But the sheer existence of Jewish country clubs (even in today’s highly multiethnic Los Angeles, Brentwood’s membership remains 97 percent Jewish) is evidently too thought-provoking for The New York Times’ sensitive subscribers, so May prudently doesn’t mention it.

Perhaps more interesting than that none of the top U.S. golfers is black is that nobody is Hispanic, considering that Latinos now outnumber blacks by 40 percent. But few pundits are terribly interested in Hispanic representation.

The decline of black pros was forecasted way back in the late 1960s by Joe Dey, the first commissioner of the PGA Tour, who prophesied: “By the turn of the century, there may not be one black playing the tour.” Dey had a perfectly sensible reason for his prediction: Most black pros of his time started as caddies, but motorized golf carts were replacing human bag carriers. So, fewer blacks would get introduced to golf while young.

And, unlike in Dey’s time, you now pretty much have to start early these days to succeed at golf. The winningest black golfer before Tiger, Calvin Peete, grew up poor and didn’t play golf until his 20s, yet went on to win a dozen tournaments in his late 30s and early 40s. Similarly, a white peer of Peete’s, ten-time winner Larry Nelson, didn’t try golf until he came back from Vietnam at age 21. But that kind of late start seems inconceivable these days.

Consider how many team-sport superstars like Michael Jordan dream of retiring to the golf course and playing on the over-50 tour. But only the late 49ers quarterback John Brodie ever won a senior tour event.

Moreover, American culture became extremely hostile toward the idea of a black man serving a white man, even as a caddie. Thus, in the early 1980s the Masters dropped its requirement that tour pros use Augusta National’s local black caddies and instead could bring their regular caddies, who were increasingly white.

Because, it turns out that white guys love having servile jobs…as long as they are on beautiful golf courses. The typical tour caddie these days is often a fraternity brother or a college teammate of the player. The last time I had a caddie was at the National Golf Links of America in the Hamptons, where Duke U. students fly in for the weekend to tote bags for Masters of the Universe. The enthusiastic young men who unload your golf clubs from your trunk at the upscale daily fee course are likely upper-middle-class golf fanatics.

But Tiger Woods himself also probably played a sizable role in the lessening of chances for blacks in golf. I presume that Amy Chua’s coinage of “Tiger Mother” is a reference to the famous intensity of effort that Tiger’s parents put into preparing him to be a golf champion. That a part-Asian was trained from infancy to become the best golfer in the world—and in the dozen years from 1997 through 2008, Tiger was no doubt the best ever—had a galvanizing effect on Asian and other ambitious parents.

In the 27 years since the 21-year-old Woods’ twelve-stroke victory at the 1997 Masters, the level of parental investment in youth training has soared, which hasn’t helped blacks’ chances.

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Just An Intellectual Gigolo Hits The Santa Monica Bay

Prophetic Forensics comments: “An idea gigolo” always “falling in love with new ideas.”

I can relate. My internal process is like a life-giving fountain.

Alone with my thoughts = never alone.

So interesting how you phrased “that’s not absurd” [re] (Taylor Swift music [might be] #unrelatable to black culture)? Reeled me right into the fountain. I am just considering it, from all these angles. The use of the word, [the] idea behind its structure in the sentence and how it disqualifies fluff and misunderstanding. The precision of the architecture by which it was delivered.

You get my drift..blooming..unfolding..fruit bearing..words, to me, like ideas to you.

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Where this show is better than the New York Times (4-16-24)

The New York Times and the rest of the elite media consistently put out more compelling articles than I do, but in their abundance of production, they often create more confusion than clarity.

Why is this? Does it have something to do with our different incentives? Yes. I feel driven to write what I think is true without regard to profit or popularity. There are no sacred cows here. I don’t need to make money or garner praise for these essays. I just want to share things I notice. The New York Times and The New Yorker, on the other hand, publish to fulfill the desires of their subscribers (such as why Trump and conservatives are bad and Russia hacked the 2016 election).

I read The New Yorker today about misinformation regarding misinformation, and I thought, I’ve been saying this for years on my Youtube show. I felt full of myself. I wanted to yell to the world — Hey! My trad rules for life and my principles for how the world works are sharper than the shiny new offerings of elite discourse. Tune into Fordy to get ahead of the curve!

Covid was a dramatic turning point in my intellectual journey. I was pro-mask for limiting influenza spread even before reading Zeynep Tufecki’s New York Times op-ed March 17, 2020: “Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired – To help manage the shortage, the authorities sent a message that made them untrustworthy.

In early April of 2020, I read Paul Barry’s book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History and I immediately grasped the case for social distancing (though I was opposed to the closing of parks and beaches and other outdoor spaces because in an influenza epidemic, you want to get people outside and exercising).

Because I was sympathetic to public health measures trying to slow the spread of Covid (though many went too far, such as Michigan’s ban on the sale of seeds and gardening supplies), I parted ways with right-winger talkers such as Michael Fumento, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Michael Anton, Dennis Prager and the other conservative pundits who were dangerously wrong and irresponsible.

I made my first post about the epidemic Mar. 10, 2020: “Jews, Non-Jews & The Corona Virus

Before that, Corona came up on my show with Kevin Michael Grace on Jan. 31, 2020’s #415 1-31-20 Corona Virus Update, Brexit Live, Debating JF Gariepy On Israel and on my solo show Corona Virus, JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories, Doxxing vs Pseudonyms (2-7-20).

June 4, 2020, I posted: “Lacking sufficient knowledge, I did not oppose or support the Covid-19 lockdown. I was willing to give the [Los Angeles] mayor and governor the benefit of the doubt on their Covid-19 response. Now I don’t know any positive way of looking at their Covid-19 choices given that they threw away everything they previously stood for when BLM (Black Lives Matter) came calling.”

In retrospect, I give the mayor and governor great credit for their early Covid lockdown and I wish I had been more supportive of social distancing.

June 4, 2020, I posted: “On a scale of 1-10, with 1 representing reality TV and 10 representing nuclear cataclysm, I think of Covid-19 as a 7 (I think before it is done it will likely take away millions of years of quality of life from Americans, these [BLM] riots as a 3, and Russiagate and impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump as a 1.”

Here are signposts along the way of my intellectual journey:

* What Do We Mean When We Say A Person Has ‘Good Energy’? (4-12-24)
* ‘On knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel’ (4-7-23)
* What Distinguishes Winners From Losers? (1-15-24)
* NYT: Secret Synagogue Tunnel Sets Off Altercation That Leads to 9 Arrests (1-10-24)
* Populism, Neoconservatism & Lessons in the Application of Power (12-17-23)
* New Yorker: How to Build a Better Motivational Speaker: The upstart motivator Jesse Itzler wants to reform his profession—while also rising to the top” (12-12-23)
* What Makes A Great Pundit? (10-5-23)
* Your Hero System Is Your Morality And You Get It From Your Tribe (8-21-23)
* Your brain on love (7-30-23)
* Decoding Dennis Prager (5-28-23)
* News is a stress test (3-15-23)
* What Should You Expect From The News? (1-21-23)
* How The News Differs From Reality (7-28-22)
* Rabbis & Rapists: A New Novel Exposes California Judaism (7-9-22)
* When Did Intellectuals Stop Supporting The Free Market Of Ideas? (5-29-22)
* Vouch Nationalism (5-28-22)
* Michael Anton Says He Does Not Know Who Truly Won The 2020 Election, But He’s ‘Moved On’ (2-27-21)
* Our Problems Are Not Our Problems, They’re Just Symptoms Of Deeper Problems (2-5-21)
* With or Without You (1-3-21)
* Are Our Opponents Demons? (8-24-20)
* I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help (8-23-20)
* How To Bypass Your Self-Destructive Tendencies (7-9-20)
* A Life That Works (7-8-20)
* Loneliness & Eccentricity (7-2-20)
*
Nobody Controls The Narrative (6-28-20)
* How to blow whistles for fun and profit (6-24-20)
* Looking Down From Heaven (6-21-20)
* The News (6-18-20)
* I Am My Show (6-4-20)
* Most News Is Unimportant (6-4-20)
* Be Not Afraid (6-4-20)
* Why Do People Over-Schedule? (6-3-20)
* What’s The Reward For Despair? (6-3-20)
* Bringing Souls Out Of Hiding (5-20-20)
* One man’s adventure beyond good & evil (5-15-20)
* Things I Didn’t Know 20 Years Ago (5-10-20)
* Will The Last Luke Ford Viewer Please Plug In The CPAP? (3-10-20)
* The Choice Between Life & Death On Social Media (3-9-20)
* It’s Never Too Late To Have A Good Relationship With Your Dad (5-6-19)
* Desmond Ford – 1929-2019 (3-10-19)
* The Politician’s Sex Life (11-10-17)
* Who Do You Love? (12-24-16)
* Gentile Nationalisms Are Sometimes Dangerous For Jews And Sometimes Good For Jews (9-25-16)
* What Forms Of Protest Are Allowed To The Palestinians? (9-19-16)
* Most Jews Don’t Have A Rabbi (8-16-17)
* How does the world work? (4-18-16)
* The Life Cycle Of The Blogger (3-14-16)
* Why am I here? (1-13-16)

Amidst all the mania about misinformation, I’ve said for years that we have great instincts for detecting when people are trying to manipulate us against our will. Schools and media and and Hollywood don’t turn Republicans into Democrats and religious people into atheists against their will. Propaganda doesn’t change minds. Why? Because we did not evolve to be gullible.

I got that phrase from Hugo Mercier’s 2020 book Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe, but I had the basic idea back in the 1980s when I fell in love with economics and its assumption that people make rational choices. While this sounds ridiculous, the premise encourages you to figure out why people act as they do, rather than to dismiss choices you don’t like as irrational.

Many of the arguments by the right-wing media for a Donald Trump presidency in particular and Republican politics in general fall apart under examination (such as Democrats are the real racists, government can’t help poor people, vaccine hesitancy, a rigged election in 2020, the Biden crime family, lock her up, etc). The left-wing media such as The New Yorker and The New York Times are usually more intelligent than their right-wing counterparts (The Wall Street Journal comes closest to this role) and elites often have good reason to mock conservatives. But you don’t judge a hero system by its dumbest talking points.

For the first time in decades, Republicans seem to be the party of the low IQ. For the first time in decades, eligible voters who don’t vote are more likely to choose Republicans. ABC News noted April 10, 2024: “The less you vote, the more you back Trump – A new poll suggests it’s Republicans who should be rooting for higher turnout.”

Inchoate desires drive us to make the choices that we do, and we then use our reason to defend and rationalize our inclinations, but our instincts don’t spring from reason, they spring from genetics, imprinting and social incentives. Our reason is weak when compared with the other forces that drive us.

The New Yorker reports in its 4-22-24 issue:

In January, the World Economic Forum released a report showing that fourteen hundred and ninety international experts rated “misinformation and disinformation” the leading global risk of the next two years, surpassing war, migration, and climatic catastrophe. A stack of new books echoes their concerns. In “Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It” (Columbia), Paul Thagard, a philosopher at the University of Waterloo, writes that “misinformation is threatening medicine, science, politics, social justice, and international relations, affecting problems such as vaccine hesitancy, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, claims of racial inferiority, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” In “Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity” (Norton), Sander van der Linden, a social-psychology professor at Cambridge, warns that “viruses of the mind” disseminated by false tweets and misleading headlines pose “serious threats to the integrity of elections and democracies worldwide.” Or, as the M.I.T. political scientist Adam J. Berinsky puts it in “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It” (Princeton), “a democracy where falsehoods run rampant can only result in dysfunction.”

Most Americans seem to agree with these theorists of human credulity…

In a masterly new book, “Religion as Make-Believe” (Harvard), Neil Van Leeuwen, a philosopher at Georgia State University, returns to Sperber’s ideas with notable rigor. He analyzes beliefs with a taxonomist’s care, classifying different types and identifying the properties that distinguish them. He proposes that humans represent and use factual beliefs differently from symbolic beliefs, which he terms “credences.” Factual beliefs are for modelling reality and behaving optimally within it. Because of their function in guiding action, they exhibit features like “involuntariness” (you can’t decide to adopt them) and “evidential vulnerability” (they respond to evidence). Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, largely serve social ends, not epistemic ones, so we can hold them even in the face of contradictory evidence…

Van Leeuwen’s book complements a 2020 volume by Hugo Mercier, “Not Born Yesterday.” Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the École Normale Supérieure who studied under Sperber, argues that worries about human gullibility overlook how skilled we are at acquiring factual beliefs. Our understanding of reality matters, he notes. Get it wrong, and the consequences can be disastrous. On top of that, people have a selfish interest in manipulating one another. As a result, human beings have evolved a tool kit of psychological adaptations for evaluating information—what he calls “open vigilance mechanisms.” Where a credulity theorist like Thagard insists that humans tend to believe anything, Mercier shows that we are careful when adopting factual beliefs, and instinctively assess the quality of information, especially by tracking the reliability of sources.

Van Leeuwen and Mercier agree that many beliefs are not best interpreted as factual ones, although they lay out different reasons for why this might be. For Van Leeuwen, a major driver is group identity. Beliefs often function as badges: the stranger and more unsubstantiated the better. Religions, he notes, define membership on the basis of unverifiable or even unintelligible beliefs: that there is one God; that there is reincarnation; that this or that person was a prophet; that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate yet one. Mercier, in his work, has focused more on justification. He says that we have intuitions—that vaccination is bad, for example, or that certain politicians can’t be trusted—and then collect stories that defend our positions. Still, both authors treat symbolic beliefs as socially strategic expressions.

A key part of this article points out:

That’s why thoughtful scholars—including the philosopher Daniel Williams and the experimental psychologist Sacha Altay—encourage us to see misinformation more as a symptom than as a disease. Unless we address issues of polarization and institutional trust, they say, we’ll make little headway against an endless supply of alluring fabrications.

One of my favorite lines is that our problems are rarely our problems, they are just symptoms of deeper problems. We usually prefer to think about symptoms rather than the disease because symptoms seem so fixable while the disease seems too challenging for comfort. For example, I sometimes obsess about why I am not married and I blame it on bad luck and other external factors, but inside I know my bachelorhood is just a symptom of my deeper issue with connecting with others, which in turn is just a symptom of my ultimate disease – my troubled relationship with myself and with reality (religious people might call reality “God”).

The 2021 book All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists said:

Journalism is among the most powerful cultural industries in this regard—not for nothing has it been called “the primary sense-making practice of modernity.”

In 2016, no major pundit or journalist or academic, to my knowledge, predicted a Donald Trump victory. When that happened, our elite felt anxious because they had been revealed as blind to a significant part of reality. When people feel anxious, they often try to off-load their feelings as quickly as possible, and so for many Democrats and members the MSM, the notion that Russia hacked our election became an irresistible story. That there was never any evidence that Russia put Trump in office didn’t get in the way of the story because when our desires collide with truth, we usually side with our desires.

The New Yorker published April 1, 2024:

So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit: What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis.

Sitting in Kafka’s office thinking of Dunn and Adaya, I found myself swelling with indignation on behalf of these gaslit children, taught to feel responsible for the pain their parents had caused them. But beneath that indignation lurked something else—a nagging anxiety coaxed into sharper visibility by the therapeutic aura of Kafka’s sleek analytic couch. I eventually told him that, as I worked on this piece, I had started to wonder about the ways I might be unintentionally gaslighting my daughter—telling her that she is “just fine” when she clearly isn’t, or giving her a hard time for making us late for school by demanding to wear a different pair of tights, when it is clearly my own fault for not starting our morning routine ten minutes earlier. In these interactions, I can see the distinct mechanisms of gaslighting at work, albeit in a much milder form: taking a difficult feeling—my latent sense of culpability whenever she is unhappy, or my guilt for running behind schedule—and placing it onto her. Part of me hoped that Kafka would disagree with me, but instead he started nodding vehemently. “Yes!” he said. “Within a two-block range of any elementary school, just before the bell rings, you can find countless parents gaslighting their children, off-loading their anxiety.”

We both laughed. In the moment, this jolt of recognition seemed incidental, a brief diversion into daily life as we crawled through the darker trenches of human manipulation. But, after I’d left Kafka’s office, it started to feel like a crucial acknowledgment: that gaslighting is neither as exotic nor as categorically distinct as we’d like to believe….

Ben Kafka told me that he thinks one of the key insights of psychoanalysis is that people respond to anxiety by dividing the world into good and bad, a tendency known as “splitting.” It strikes me that some version of this splitting is at play not only in gaslighting itself—taking an undesirable “bad” emotion or quality and projecting it onto someone else, so that the self can remain “good”—but also in the widespread invocation of the term, the impulse to split the world into innocent and culpable parties. If the capacity to gaslight is more widely distributed than its most extreme iterations would lead us to believe, perhaps we’ve all done more of it than we care to admit. Each of us has been the one making our way back into bed, vulnerable and naked, and each of us has been the one saying, Come back into this bed I made for you.

I remember one Saturday morning in 1983 or 1984, when my dad and I were running five minutes late for church. I stood in the driveway ready to go when my dad hastily backed the car out of the garage with his driver’s door open looking behind him. The car door then smashed into the garage door. My dad had done a stupid thing. He had the flu and he was not thinking straight. Rather than take responsibility for his mistake, my dad blamed me for the accident because I had made us late.

As The New Yorker notes, we all feel tempted to do this when our anxiety mounts and so we gaslight others about reality. Smart people in the media do this along with dumb people who dig ditches.

I started compiling in my head the principles of my worldview that I believe are superior to what is generally offered in the elite media:

* One way this show is better than elite discourse is that we recognize the hidden partisan nature of the dominant liberal-left ethos and reveal it to be just another hero system that is more adaptive in some circumstances than other hero systems and less adaptive in others. For example, the reaction by the liberal-left to the Corona Virus (have the government take away rights during the emergency to freedom of movement and worship and to gather together in large numbers and direct public policy to minimize the spread until we get vaccines, and then get people vaccinated as quickly as possible) was more effective than the herd immunity anti-government instincts of libertarians and the right. Public policy with regard to suppressing Covid is such a dramatic example of adaptive versus maladaptive responses to a challenge that I made a video January 1, 2024 titled “How Covid Explains My Worldview.” Sometimes a big government, expert-led left-wing approach enhances your odds for survival and reproduction and in other situations, a right-wing populist approach is superior (for example, imprisoning violent criminals for a long time and executing murderers deters crime more effectively than more liberal policies).

As Joel Kotkin, a scholar of urban America, wrote in 2014:

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.
The rise of today’s Clerisy stems from the growing power and influence of its three main constituent parts: the creative elite of media and entertainment, the academic community, and the high-level government bureaucracy.
The Clerisy operates on very different principles than its rival power brokers, the oligarchs of finance, technology or energy. The power of the knowledge elite does not stem primarily from money, but in persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society. Like the British Clerisy or the old church-centered French First Estate, the contemporary Clerisy increasingly promotes a single increasingly parochial ideology and, when necessary, has the power to marginalize, or excommunicate, miscreants from the public sphere.

Left and right politics are evolutionary adaptations that have different levels of reproductive success depending upon the situation. As the 2013 book Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences notes: “[T]he political left has been associated with support for equality and tolerance of departures from tradition, while the right is more supportive of authority, hierarchy, and order.”

* Democracy dominates our rhetoric, but almost all of life runs on hierarchy. Democracy and dictatorship are not mutually exclusive. All functioning democracies contains considerable elements of dictatorship, socialism, capitalism, and oligopoly. For example, the president of the United States has the same foreign policy powers as King George III. On the other hand, dictatorships such as Nikita Kruschev‘s Soviet Union often contain elements of democracy (witness the removal of Kruschev from power after the Cuban missile crisis). When dictator Joseph Stalin was fighting the second world war, he re-opened churches and allowed his people many things that they wanted in exchange for their efforts against the Germans.

Who’s the boss? The situation is the boss.

* We live in a post-modern world. There’s no one narrative that adequately explains reality.

* We’re all locked in an iron cage together and nobody is coming to save us. To survive, you want to become as strong as possible because you never know what might happen.

* We primarily know the world around us from the news, but this is a distorted prism directed not so much towards sharing important knowledge, but to meet the desires of viewers for excitement. It was exciting, for example, to create stories implying that Russia hacked our 2016 election, but there was never any evidence that Russia played a decisive role in this contest. It was exciting to portray American police as racist in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, but the boring reality is that police usually do the best they can in often difficult circumstances and many of those who die at police hands bear substantial responsibility.

* Personalities in politics are usually less powerful than situations. The news media focuses on personalities because that is a more compelling story than focusing on structure, but structure shapes the world more than individual whims. For example, as I write this in April of 2024, Bibi Netanyahu is Israel’s Prime Minister and his personality gets a lot of media coverage. If someone else were Israel’s prime minister at this time, Israel’s conduct toward its enemies wouldn’t change much. For example, if Bibi decided to support an independent Palestinian state, he would simply be removed from power because the majority of Israelis are not in a mood to give the Palestinians anything. If a Haredi Gadol came out in favor of Zionism, he would no longer be a Haredi Gadol. If Putin dies today, the next leader of Russia would follow similar policies toward Ukraine (because if the Monroe Doctrine is good for the United States, the equivalent is good for superpowers Russia and China).

A structuralist understands that what happens in Ukraine or Israel or Nigeria has nothing to do with America’s vital interests. To adopt a lesson from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, don’t confuse the urgent for the important.

What will usually determine the success of a political administration? Events, my dear boy, events.

Sometimes, however, individuals are more important than situations. If anyone but Hitler had led Germany during WWII, there would not have been a Holocaust.

Perhaps the most famous political scientist who tried to make predictions based on character was James David Barber, who wrote the book The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House. This work hasn’t aged well and is essentially ignored.

* Different people have different gifts. Different plants and animals have different gifts. Life evolves differently in different situations and those mutations that are adaptive promote survival and reproduction.

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The coalition defeated Iran’s Saturday attack on Israel (4-15-24)

Posted in America | Comments Off on The coalition defeated Iran’s Saturday attack on Israel (4-15-24)