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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
Most of the good ideas I’ve ever had were revised up from half-baked–or half-something (or worse).
A lot of success is due to chance, or luck. But luck eventually runs out. And that moment is the proof of the pudding. IMHO true of ideas and ideologies as well.
As can great special effects.
I’ve been thinking more about two hypotheses regarding the prevalence of bad ideas in the wealthiest, most educated societies.
The Wealth Hypothesis: Wealth gives a person a greater cushion between bad decisions and calamities. Put simply, you can get away with mistakes if you’re pretty well off, while the same mistakes would cause disaster if you’re poor.
The Victim Hypothesis: You can avoid learning from your mistakes if you have an ideology that allows you to attribute the negative consequences of your bad choices (or your inadequacies) to someone else. Race is an example. Blacks have an illegitimacy rate of around 75%, and it is well established that this is strongly correlated with low income and increased crime. But you can ignore this and claim systemic racism, perpetuating the problem. I don’t want to pick on black Americans particularly, but this is the most obvious example. A similar problem applies to underclass whites (who tend toward either a Marxist class war explanation or a reverse racism explanation).
Or as the Financial Times put it in 1988, “Embrace Crunchiness“
Free markets are only as efficient as the flawed humans that comprise it will allow. The market fluctuates as the consequences of those flaws are revealed. The market place of ideas would not be any different. As Valiuth says, over time, ideas will be accepted and rejected on their proven merits. Yet, there are constraints of corruption and ignorance that add volatility. There is a reason that the American experiment in liberty is an exception to the rule. We are flawed and anything we create will be likewise.
If there are bad ideas that help me exploit my fellow humans to my own advantage, I’m in favor of them.
Sure, that’s the plan. Nobody sees the long run where someone or multiple folks realize that you are exploiting them and that someone or those multiple folks decide that your bad ideas need to be “enlightened” a bit.
I think something else to consider with respect to the aspect of time I brought up is that the long run isn’t for individuals per say. Like it was pointed out, saying in 70 years communism will fall to people in 1917 is of limited comfort to the Kulaks murdered by it. But, then again us conservatives also acknowledge that the world does not begin and end with us. 70 years is a life time for an individual but it is not that long for a society, culture, people, or species. In the long run all of us are dead, but our countries, civilizations, cultures, institutions don’t have to be. You need a system that has long term efficiency, even if it has short term problems.
American has many short term problems, but has proven to be rather stable on the generational scale. After all while the American culture is fairly new in a sense as a political entity America is one of the oldest continuous political entity on Earth. Certainly of our size.
I wonder if the tendency of people to constantly fret about the decline and impending doom of our culture/country/civilization is actually a type of built-in immune system response that actually serves to preserve it. In other words maybe the pessimists would be right if not for the pessimists’ self-denying prophecy.
You probably need a good mixture of both. Enough worry to stay alert but enough optimism not to get bogged down and paralyzed by your fears. As a biologist you see so many amazingly resilient systems riding on the edge of a knife, but the edge is the only place you can be. That is the space between life and just random chemistry. I always get the feeling all complex systems are like this. Stuck in dynamic tension, always balancing against the increase in entropy physics demands.
I think I recall reading in Jurassic Park the description of life’s evolution as “furiously running in place”. Or something like that.
Civilization I think is much the same. Constant effort to keep things up and running that by the laws of physics should collapse into a heap. But, while we have had set backs (mass civilization extinctions) Civilization is proving resilient. Since 6000BC has there ever not been at least one functioning city in the world? And today hunter gathering has been thoroughly out competed as a survival model for humans.
It’s called the Red Queen theory, referencing the line in “Through the Looking Glass” where the Red Queen tells Alice that they have to run as fast as they can just to stay where they are.
Yeah, but how did it go between, say, 12,000 BC and 6,000 BC?
And if the right path is ideologically narrow, and the wrong path is wide, then there are a lot more options with the wrong one. Perhaps there are a lot more functionally doable paths. But it doesn’t make any of them right. And if you take the wrong path, it can take a whole lifetime for it to demonstrate its ideological failure, and for it to finally fail functionally. But even then it doesn’t necessarily lead to better choices.
Look at the Soviet Union.
Well clearly it survived, or was such a good idea that it was independently reinvented. In fact it most certainly seems to have been independently re-invented numerous times. Just thinking of the Americas which had no communication with Asia, Africa, and Europe for many millennia. Yet on nearly every continent cities arose at one point or another independently of each other. I think Australia might be the only continent that was inhabited that didn’t have cities prior to European colonization (but I don’t know to much about Australian aborigines to say that with any confidence).
They (Melanesians) were the first to colonize the Americas.