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Success of Stupidity
I had never heard of Jeremy McLellan until an associate retweeted these thought-provoking comments. What do you make of them?
We’ve been told that a “free marketplace of ideas” will stamp out bad ideas and allow good ones to thrive. The opposite seems to be happening. Not surprised. Markets are good at giving people what they want at the lowest cost. What happens if we want bad information?
The incentives are completely backwards. There are no consequences for spreading hoaxes. You get page clicks, ad revenue, policy changes, millions of followers, and if it eventually gets exposed as a lie, none of that goes away. No one gets fired and no one unfollows you.
Not sure what the answer is. We’re probably doomed for the moment and it will only get worse. Some will realize the lies and switch sides only to be spoonfed the same amount of lies from the other perspective. It’s the incentives that are broken.
How does “the marketplace of ideas” fare these days? What other than the cudgel of political correctness and mere wishful thinking help errors and harmful ideas to flourish?
Published in Culture
Well, the people who control the institutions are devotees of harmful ideas (including censorship of ideas they don’t like). Basically, I don’t think we truly have a free marketplace of ideas right now. Of course, how the people who control the institutions became devotees of harmful ideas in the first place, during a period in which the relative free and tolerant exchange of ideas reigned, is another question, with circular implications.
Maybe its best to compare a free marketplace of ideas to democracy; the worst system in place, except for all the other ones…..and ultimately doomed to destruction through human weakness and venality, and then rebirth through the inevitable mass failure of competing systems. Rinse, repeat.
Sigh. I miss the perceptions of my childhood, when I thought that ‘America’, in its fundamental essence, would at least last for my lifetime, if not forever.
The marketplace of ideas has always been a fantasy, and not just in these days when the First Amendment is under attack. There is no guarantee that the best understanding will defeat the worst, and the converse is more likely to be the case.
I don’t agree that there are no consequences for spreading lies, but it’s probably true that in too many cases the liars fail to receive their just due. As for the flourishing of lies and harmful ideas, good liars and propagandists have always been adept at playing to our prejudices and other weaknesses. Even, one could argue, the biggest lies, those one is entitled to call “Orwellian,” are the most powerful in this marketplace.
Any marketplace is built on an assumption that the buyers are interested in buying what the buyers decide is good for them, which may or may not be the “best” of whatever category. But, through the cumulative effect of the marketplace, the “best” product at least comes out, even if not everyone buys it. Also, the “best” continues to get better. But still a lot of people buy inferior food, clothing, cars, etc. for various reasons (including cost), and a lot of inferior stuff gets made.
Many information consumers (“buyers” even if they aren’t trading money) seem to be interested in ideas and information other than just the “good” ideas. But that has been true forever. We perceive it more now because the spread of information occurs at such an accelerated pace. But, people were spreading hoaxes hundreds (and probably thousands) of years ago.
(By the way, I was put off by Mr. McLellan’s assertion that the marketplace will “stamp out” bad ideas, which implies some type of suppression (and provides the opening for a suggestion that there should be some all powerful arbiter of “good” and “bad” ideas). No. Bad ideas tend to fade in a free marketplace because the better ideas gain traction so that they overshadow the bad ideas. A free marketplace of cars does not “stamp out” bad cars; it just allows sellers of good cars to sell so many more cars that the sellers of bad cars either stop selling, or develop better cars.)
I would like to believe that bad ideas fade, but the opposite seems to me to be the case: they seem eternally to return. Take socialism, for instance, or infanticide. That there is nothing new under the sun is for me a more true statement of the human condition. New and better cars, maybe. Better ideas, not so much.
Mencken was right.
Or better advertising keeps bad cars going. Or political connections do. Or subsidies do, if owned either by a government (see Venezuelan oil) or by a mega-corporation with branches in many industries. The point is that strengths apart from quality of the core product or service can offset the bad.
As a game design enthusiast, I often remind developers that the success of a whole product does not equal success of all parts. It’s the same with films. Great acting and star power can save a mediocre story from obscurity. And releasing amid a string of other blockbusters might push a good product out of the limelight.
Both within and without the product or service itself, one’s place in a functional market is never certain.
Sounds like the Tragedy of the Commons. Sometimes, though, it’s the Comedy of the Commons.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit from another perspective recently. We get kicked out of Eden by not following good rules, by not knowing the basis for the rules, so throwing them aside. We get back to a higher Eden, when we understand why the rules are there and follow them willingly. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
Yes, people will probably be happy to pay to hearing their own deceptions.
People refuse to love the truth and so be saved and for this reason God sends them powerful delusions so that they will believe lies.
Everybody’s got to believe something.
The answer is time. Government however responds to fads. So the fundamental problem is the government. With time truth wins, that’s the way the world works unless we empower fads. Our system was originally designed by awareness of this, but the fads are winning as they always do unless we insist on limited government.
Maybe we have to first define “ideas”. What we have now is nothing more than entertainment. The news is a soap opera that superimposes the narrative and plot onto selected events to hold the preexisting audience.
Mainstream Tv news is losing viewers, smarter viewers especially, to alternate outlets. So I’m not sure in the long run whether even this will hold up.
We need to watch this clip again:
“We all wanna change the world.”
People who want to change the physical world become engineers and architects. People who want to change the culture become prominent in either a political or a media sense. Because that’s how you change laws and minds, respectively, and those are the levers with which we move the culture.
And people who want to change the culture tend, pretty much by definition, to be progressives. So it’s hardly surprising that the prominent forces in media lean left.
What is a little surprising is that no one has, so far as I’m aware, made a serious challenge to the “platform” status of the major, left-leaning social media giants. That seems to me to be an important step toward re-establishing some balance.
I think when considering the market place of ideas you have to look at it both long and short term. In the long term good ideas propagate because they are fundamentally true and the truth leads to tangible success. Lies are convenient for the teller but for those who believe them catastrophic failure is in the future. Failure ultimately leads to loss of the idea or at the very least marginalization. The question is can the long term survive the short term incentives?
Politically, we see that repeated failure is no barrier to bad ideas because government “industry” leaders, like bad CEOs, enjoy power and wealth during the decline. And each fool believes the last failed to execute the idea properly.
Yes. While I agree with V’s comment, there’s that “in the long run, we’ll all be dead” aspect to it, to which he alludes in his closing sentence.
And your point, Aaron, is a good one: bad ideas are sticky downward, as they say, when they involve self-perpetuating governmental institutions. That’s why it’s so important that we prevent as many bad ideas from taking root as we can — why, that is, it’s important that we have lots of energetic conservatives.
I think the problem here comes from a fundamental misunderstand of what the free market is and is not.
The free market is not a meritocracy. Products, services, and ideas don’t succeed because they are “the best” but because they capture the imagination of human beings — human beings that are shallow, fickle, selfish, and often quite stupid. As Robert Kiyosaki pointed out when he was asked for writing advice, “The book cover says ‘best-selling’ author, not ‘best-writing.'” See pet rocks as another example. A product or idea doesn’t have to be “the best” or really have much merit at all if one can convince enough other people to buy it.
Secondly, the free market exists like the ecosystem does in that there are many strategies to survival. One would think that the rabbit should be extinct by now, with so many predators to kill them, but of course, they’re not, even when introduced into a country like Australia where everything is murderously lethal. The species doesn’t continue because of the survivability of its individuals but because of fecundity.
It’s not a “marketplace” of ideas, but a forest of them. And as such, we shouldn’t be surprised when the predators of reality can’t manage to eat every single bunny of bad ideas before they create more bunnies.
I don’t believe in the inevitability of good triumphing over evil, or truth over untruth. The marketplace of ideas is most usefully defined as a free space for ideas to be exchanged, not as a filtering mechanism for purifying truth. Standing up for truth will require the constant application of effort from now until the end of time.
Andy McCarthy said it well:
Don’t we see it working out in the long run though? The USSR collapsed under its own inequities, same with Venezuela, while nations instituting free markets and rule of law grow and prosper. Obviously it is more complicated because each country is making hundreds of different choices and numerous philosophies are always at play. But I think we can see how bad philosophies have played out poorly for people who embrace them in the long term, and how nations that ostensibly were communist that have survived have actually shifted to different systems even as the nomenclature hasn’t changed for them.
We tune into CNN?
Sorry. Sitter at the net.
It is not an absolute meritocracy. The “best” frequently loses to the “good enough,” else Betamax would have beaten VHS.
It takes a little self-discipline. The first take is rarely the best one. Give it some time to mature before lending it too much credence.
This works well if there are nations that act mostly in accordance with truth. But civilization is hard to create and easy to destroy. If the best nations fall into decay, there’s no reason the world can’t fall into a new Dark Age. Other species have undergone population collapse and extinction.
Many of the quintessentially American aspects of society that we conservatives value depend on an educated and informed people. The left owns the educational establishment and in fact controls the society to the degree that every maturing mind is forced to submit to that establishment’s processing. Picture that scene from The Wall here.
We have to face the fact: our citizenry is debased. The phenomenon you describe is only one effect.
I think Amy makes a very good point. It is an environment a self organizing system into which all ideas are poured into and in which they all try to survive and flourish at different rates for various reasons. Like with biological evolution though we can see that some forms and strategies are very stable and therefore arguably successful. But as always past success is no guarantee of future performance. Still wildly freakish ideas don’t seem to have a very long half life. I think if you find some ideas to be excessively sticky that you also think are bad or disadvantageous, I would argue that perhaps they are not what they seem. Ultimately though an evolutionary process doesn’t have a goal. It isn’t building to the best thing it is simply iterating and producing different things.
But that’s my point. Venezuela had as much evidence as anyone else that such a system would fail. Yet here they are, repeating the fiasco.
Essentially, no amount of education can exclude human nature. Fools and predators will often rise to prominence. Per the Andy McCarthy quote above, one wonders how best to limit their effects.
@valiuth makes the true point that stupid ideas and bad actors are winnowed by Darwin’s daemon. I might call a reliance on that (true) argument the “Greenspan solution”, as it’s the thing that best characterizes that aging pampered lotus eater. Greenspan favored the minimum of market regulation because the market would predictably punish dishonesty. He ignored that human lifetimes are finite and travel a predictable arc through time – damage a person’s growth in his youth and you’ve compromised his entire life.
Greenspan’s position was that of the proverbial ivory tower idealist and intellectual – he was insulated from the concerns of the governed individual, and so had no real interest in them.
It is not enough that the dead hand of the network purge itself of leftist idiocies in deep time. Act now to crush every vestige of every ugly little leftist fever-dream everywhere you see one.
But the definition of hypocrite is someone who believes one thing and says he believes another. If this is so, then the hypocrite, who knows the truth and acts upon it and prospers by telling lies upon which others act and fail and can’t understand why, is a real thing too.
Ah here is a good point too. Why did Venezuela choose to do what others have failed at? Here is a potential answer. Nations aren’t rational actors. In fact only individuals can be rational actors, but societies are irrational because their decisions are actually the sum of the decisions of many people, and not all those people are actually picking the aggregate result but their own individual best seeming option. Venezuela didn’t choose to implode they stumbled into it, and likewise America didn’t choose success we sort of stumbled into it.
This is oversimplifying everything. But the point I would ponder is this. Can collective action be rational if it isnt guided by one person?
I’ve never really liked the metaphor of a marketplace of ideas -but I’ve never been able to put my finger on the objection, either.
I’d offer the following 2 stabs at it, though:
1.) Gary Schilling’s aphorism: “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” It may well be true that, long run, the marketplace of ideas will, in fact, kill bad ideas and promote good ones. In the short term, though, bad ideas can dominate. The problem is that the bad ideas can do quite a bit of damage before they ultimately collapse. It is no comfort to say in 1917 that 70 years later we’ll all realize that the USSR is a bad idea. After the purges, wars, genocides, famines, and coups.
If not related, certainly not exclusive of this is stab
2.) Highly efficient systems can work great -right until something goes wrong and the precious balance that allows them to work flies apart. The marketplace seeks efficiency. The problem is that we don’t actually want efficient ideas. “Efficiency with the truth” is usually just called lying. We want ideas to be robust against challenges. Robust truth is a good thing. Markets don’t produce robustness.
If I may play with your metaphor a bit.
The Marketplace of Ideas: Who ever says “I’m running out of ideas? I need to go to the store and buy some new ideas, to fit my taste and cravings.” Where would one go? I think, ideas are picked up at little cost at the library (or it’s modern equivalent: facebook, google, twitter, netflix and wikipedia – all of which are suspect) and the local bar, which has other benefits and mind concentrating and clarifying characteristics, like beer, billiards and boogie (for just a little bit of boodle).
The metaphor? It starts with someone actually wanting something, either through intellectual hunger or advertising that tells you what new and superior ideas are now on the market, some “new ideas”, sort of like the Greek agora.
Can you market ideas? I think so. Are they good ideas? Not the ones made in China, certainly, but you don’t really know until you open up the package and start to use it. And then, it may take you a few months or years before it unexpectedly breaks and you realize it was garbage for all the time and effort and money you put into it.
When google facebook and amazon (WaPo) are the ones selling most of the ideas you’re going to get a lot of intellectual K-Mart and Dollar Store food and furniture for your brain. Cheap but not the best.
I’m rethinking some of my earlier comments. Maybe the point of a free exchange (marketplace?) for ideas isn’t to bury the bad ideas, but to allow good ideas to be born. How would a good idea become available for consideration in any system that wasn’t open?