Epistemic conditions have been this bad (or worse) for as long as we have had the bandwidth to think outside of physical necessity. Coordinating to implement bad epistemology has been this bad before in the US, but usually isn’t.
The salient examples, and speaking to your does-this-exist-on-the-right question, are the Red Scares. There we see many of the same mechanisms at work, in particular the influence of political affiliation on employment.
You can also consider the Satanic Panic of the 1980s the same kind of problem, and probably a better match because it too was bottom up and lacked the coordinating government interest that is usually a factor in a Red Scare.
From where I sit it looks like we are at Satanic Panic levels of intensity, but well short of McCarthyism.
I looked at the Loyalty Oaths that people were compelled to sign in the 1950s and honestly they don’t seem that bad by comparison to today’s equivalent:
Typically, a loyalty oath has wording similar to that mentioned in the U.S Supreme Court decision of Garner v. Board of Public Works:[6]
I further swear (or affirm) that I do not advise, advocate or teach, and have not within the period beginning five (5) years prior to the effective date of the ordinance requiring the making of this oath or affirmation, advised, advocated or taught, the overthrow by force, violence or other unlawful means, of the Government of the United States of America or of the State of California and that I am not now and have not, within said period, been or become a member of or affiliated with any group, society, association, organization or party which advises, advocates or teaches, or has, within said period, advised, advocated or taught, the overthrow by force, violence or other unlawful means of the Government of the United States of America, or of the State of California. I further swear (or affirm) that I will not, while I am in the service of the City of Los Angeles, advise, advocate or teach, or be or become a member of or affiliated with any group, association, society, organization or party which advises, advocates or teaches, or has within said period, advised, advocated or taught, the overthrow by force, violence or other unlawful means, of the Government of the United States of America or of the State of California . . . .
To the extent there were excesses during the Red Scares, it seems kind of understandable given that Communists literally just violently took over a number of the biggest countries on Earth. ETA: If we now have a tendency to impose similar excesses on ourselves even in the absence of such threats, that bodes ill for future epistemic conditions.
Satanic Panic, from skimming the Wikipedia page, apparently had little or no influence on academia and government. Do you really think it’s comparable in seriousness to what’s happening today? (If so I’ll take a closer look.)
Yes, I think it was comparably serious, although because the landscape was different the consequences were also different; in general I expect modern events to be higher variance.
The first similarity is the primacy of cultural products, in particular media and the arts. This was the period when there was a concerted effort to destroy the fantasy genre, and pressure was brought to bear to cancel tv shows and concerts which were deemed too occult.
The influence on academia was negligible as far as I can tell, but I suggest taking another look at government: among other things it seriously distorted a fraction of the justice system because it became common for the public to worry about whether there was a satanic cult present, which diverted resources into investigating things that weren’t there (like cults) or focused attention on suspects for nonsensical reasons like whether they owned metal albums. This was also the same period that gave us the modern system of censorship, like film ratings, adult content warning stickers on CDs, etc. While censorship wasn’t driven solely by the panic, the people swept up in it did work hard to capitalize on these mechanisms to further their aims.
I find it helps to view this kind of cultural event from the perspective of the institutions that make up its center of gravity. For example, one way to make sense of the differences between these movements is that the Red Scare was centered on the federal government and national media outlets; the Satanic Panic was centered on local churches and local government institutions like law enforcement, schools, and libraries; and the social justice movement is centered on universities and the internet.
That being said, your point about communism being a real thing that made sense to be concerned about is a good one: there never was a nation-spanning web of devil-worshipping cults that conducted ritual murder and sought to brainwash the youth of America. By contrast there is a nation-spanning network of terrorist organizations that target minorities/homosexuals/etc, so the social justice movement has more real concerns to work with. On that basis I expect its peak to be closer to Red Scare territory, though probably still short because I have a hard time seeing the federal government deciding it has an existential stake in the outcome.
By contrast there is a nation-spanning network of terrorist organizations that target minorities/homosexuals/etc, so the social justice movement has more real concerns to work with.
That’s what the KKK is, along with a handful of other neo-nazi and white supremacy groups. This article from Politico does a pretty good job of describing when when they turned into a loose network instead of a bunch of isolated groups in the wake of the Greensboro Massacre.
The KKK’s membership does not even approach five figures, even in the most generous estimates of a group little-disposed to underestimate such things (the Southern Poverty Law Center). (The Anti-Defamation League puts nationwide KKK membership at a mere 3,000.) The ADL’s list of active KKK organizations (which includes all those mentioned in the linked article) lists a half-dozen chapters, localized to a handful of Southern states.
The Politico article you link doesn’t mention this. It talks a lot about individual people and specific incidents, but doesn’t talk about the fact that none of it adds up to anything like a “nation-spanning network of terrorist organizations”. What’s more, none of these people have any power or any serious connection even to state, much less federal, authorities.
In comparison, the Soviets had spies in (among many other places) the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Department of Agriculture, the Manhattan Project—and at the highest levels of these organizations, to boot. These spies were backed by one of the world’s two great superpowers; vast sums of money and resources, and a literal army of trained personnel, supported them.
Nothing even remotely like that is true of the KKK, nor any other “white supremacist” organization. No comparison between these two cases is even slightly reasonable. The KKK is irrelevant.
The idea that almost anything that the social justice movement does is justified or even explained by concerns about the Ku Klux Klan is not defensible.
I think you have lost the thread here. We are talking about different degrees of *bad epistemics* - nowhere did we suddenly shift gears into saying this is actually secretly good epistemics.
Communists were real and a threat, but it remained bad epistemics to for Congress to form a committee whose function was blacklist people from working in television for supporting labor unions.
Devil worshippers, by contrast, were not: there were *literally zero* groups of devil worshippers undertaking child sacrifice. Censorship and police investigations were being driven by utter fiction. This was a thing happening in the 1980s that was in no epistemic sense different from the Salem Witch Trials.
Racial/sexual/religious oppression are real and were formal government policy during my parent’s childhood, but it remains bad epistemics to insist that every restaurant have 26 bathrooms to accommodate some list of sexual identities.
This then is our continuum of badness. Social justice is clearly north of Satanic Panic, but will also clearly never form a House Unawoken Activites committee to blacklist Curtis Yarvin from working in tech.
Communists were real and a threat, but it remained bad epistemics to for Congress to form a committee whose function was blacklist people from working in television for supporting labor unions.
Can you give a reference for people being blacklisted for supporting labor unions? I skimmed/searched the Wikipedia article on Hollywood Blacklist and while it’s overall quite sympathetic to those who got blacklisted, there is no mention of anyone being blacklisted because they supported unions. I think at least officially only members of the Communist Party and those who refused to cooperate with the committee were supposed to be blacklisted.
What do you think of the argument that blacklisting members of the Communist Party is actually justified on epistemic grounds, which I read from the paper Communists, McCarthy and American Universities by Sidney Hook (a prominent Marxist expert on Marxist philosophy turned anti-communist). (I can’t strongly endorse Hook’s argument as I’m not an expert on the history myself, but it seems at least plausible to me. Also, the paper is about blacklisting of Communist professors and I’m not sure how much of the argument carries over to blacklisting elsewhere.)
Basically, the American Communist Party was an extension of the Soviet Communist Party, which is strongly anti-epistemic (e.g., prefers indoctrination to rational argument, forces members to follow the party line, etc.), and by becoming Communist Party members, the professors were implicitly indicating agreement with the Party’s anti-epistemic positions and strategies, and signing on to, for example, indoctrinate their students. Furthermore, they apparently behaved as mouthpieces of the Communist Party instead of independent thinkers:
If, as Dr Schrecker assures us, these individuals had independent minds, were given to question authority, who, as she reads the available evidence, never resorted to indoctrination and who were committed in their inquiries and teaching to recognisable standards of objectivity and fairness, why should they not have been treated and tolerated as heretics, and not as conspirators against academic freedom and the academic ethic? [...]
But what about the overwhelming evidence- evidence Dr Schrecker does not contest—that the allegedly objective-minded Communist Party members in the universities followed the Party line. “True”, she admits, “but they did so in large part because it was heading in the same direction they were” (p. 62). In other words, from common premises both the political committee of the Communist Party, whether in the United States or the Soviet Union, and the members of the Communist Party in American universities, independently reached common conclusions. If true, this goes decisively to the heart of the matter. Dr Schrecker tells us that as a professional historian she “feels comfortable” with the evidence that it is true.
Here we have an assertion that is easy to check. There have been so many turns and somersaults in the direction of the Communist Party on all sorts of questions that surely there must be some sort of evidence that academic members of the Communist Party, especially the hundred whom Dr Schrecker interviewed at length , publicly proclaimed a position critical of the existing direction and programme of the Communist Party before the change took place.
(The paper goes on to show lack of such evidence.) Back to you:
This then is our continuum of badness. Social justice is clearly north of Satanic Panic,
Earlier you said “From where I sit it looks like we are at Satanic Panic levels of intensity”. Did you change your mind, and if so because of what evidence/argument?
but will also clearly never form a House Unawoken Activites committee to blacklist Curtis Yarvin from working in tech.
I’m not convinced that things are better just because the federal government is not involved in the blacklisting. Back then only the federal government (and maybe a few other entities) had the coordination ability to create/enforce such a blacklist, but today many more groups do, via social media.
The specific example I was thinking of was Dalton Trumbo. Now to be clear, he was in fact a Communist sympathizer and member of the Communist Party.
But the thing that brought him to the attention of the blacklisters and HUAC, as I understand the sequence of events, was his support of the 1945 Black Friday strike. In 1946 he was fingered as a Communist and blacklisted, and in 1947 summoned to HUAC because he was on the blacklist. Although reviewing the Wikipedia article I see that he reported Nazi sympathizers to the FBI in 1941 or 42; it is possible that this caused him to be prioritized for coming before Congress, though it isn’t mentioned specifically.
Re: Communists have bad epistemics: in general the criticism is correct, the problem is that it isn’t exclusive to communism. Political parties in general are doctrinal organizations that communicate by propaganda, communists are just more aggressive (worse) about it. I see a twofold problem with blacklisting them: one, it doesn’t follow that because the communists have terrible epistemics that the people who are blacklisting them have good epistemics (the blacklist is based on the beliefs of the MPAA or Congress); two, we have a strong meta-reason for tolerating bad epistemics, which is to ensure we allow for good epistemics. This is because the enforcement mechanisms are orthogonal to values, so the same thing that muzzles the Communists can also muzzle the Democrats and Republicans. I firmly expect all such mechanisms to be used by every group with access to them, so I want them kept to a minimum.
Re: intensity: I should have been more clear here, I apologize. The underlying intuition is that these movements are things which start, grow, peak, and then wither; the reason I was talking about the different centers of gravity and whether the concern had a real basis or not is because I think these are important variables in where the peak is. The more powerful the institutions where they are centered, and the more real the basis of their concern, the higher I expect the peak power of the movement to be. So I think we are at about Satanic Panic levels of intensity now, but I think the social justice movement has a higher potential peak because “universities and the internet” is a more powerful base, and prejudice is a more realistic concern. From the perspective of your concerns, I expect things to get worse.
Edit: I expect things to get worse before they get better, which is to say I expect we will muddle through this like we did the rest.
I think we may still disagree about this a bit but it’s not so important at this point so I’ll put it aside and focus on a more important question.
I expect things to get worse before they get better
So, how much will things get worse, and how long will it take to get better? I’m tempted to analogize to religion before separation of church and state and communism in Communist countries (i.e., we’ll see, are starting to see, an interlocking system of ideological indoctrination and enforcement, consisting of MSM=church, K-12 education=Sunday/religious school, university=seminary, social media=religious police/inquisition/witch hunts), which suggests that it’s going to get a lot worse, last for at least decades if not centuries, with occasional horrible dips below the already bad average, like the equivalent of the Cultural Revolution. (Obviously we can’t be very certain about this, but I’m having trouble seeing a scenario that breaks us out of the self-reinforcing dynamics that is moving epistemic conditions towards a negative direction. ETA: I mean a scenario that seems likely to occur by default.)
Any thoughts on this? From what you wrote before, it seems you don’t think the peak will be this bad (i.e., will be better than Red Scares), because there is not a real threat as serious as Communism to drive the movement? But religion didn’t have any real threats and still managed to impose terrible epistemic conditions on virtually everyone in the West. So it seems like “centers of gravity” is the more important factor and there the analogy with religion seems pretty tight.
which is to say I expect we will muddle through this like we did the rest.
I would add “perhaps at enormous human cost, and not taking into account new x-risks”.
The cost was bad before, too. We simply forgot, because it is our collective nature to forget. It is worth remembering that this community is at the vanguard of x-risk concern; no major cultural movement is likely to take into account new x-risks.
I agree that that centers of gravity is the more important feature; it is also what gives me confidence that it cannot get as bad as religion used to be. The most important factor is that because the center of gravity for social justice doesn’t include local or federal government they won’t control law enforcement or the military. This means that they won’t be able to deploy systematic, institutional-grade violence against their enemies, which is what was involved in the worst damage done under Communism or religion and was further core to retaining their position.
The second thing that gives me confidence it won’t get as bad as religion or Communism is that the institutional changes involved in moving away from those things remain in place. I believe in both cases the theme of the changes can be reduced to “decentralization” although it is worth pointing out this looked very different between them; but the mechanism is that their dominion failed when they weren’t able to maintain control over all centers of power.
There are two other smaller points that color my perceptions. The first and simplest is that I have a general sense that culture changes faster now than it did previously; the whole start-grow-wither cycle seems to be accelerated on the strength of cheap and ubiquitous communication ability. This weighs against any sort of movement lasting even as long as decades, never mind centuries. The second is that when we look at the circumstances of religion and Communism coming to power, what I see is that it requires the decay or collapse of the previous order. Specific examples are that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was a prerequisite for the dominion of the Catholic Church, and the decay of Russia under the Romanovs was a prerequisite for the Bolshevik Revolution.
I feel like the second point is already at work in the case of universities: a huge swath of the population no longer holds them in any esteem; even people who attend them are irritated about the cost and their failure to deliver on nominal promises; many of them are going bankrupt and closing their doors. In this model, social justice taking over the English department isn’t because social justice has a Cunning Plan to Rule the World, but because the English department had long since abandoned any pretense of doing something productive or useful; they were simply working in little corners of their academic discipline, never mind the outside world. There was no real opposition because nobody cared; few people noticed; it didn’t matter.
The cost was bad before, too. We simply forgot, because it is our collective nature to forget.
What are you referring to here? Red Scares?
It is worth remembering that this community is at the vanguard of x-risk concern; no major cultural movement is likely to take into account new x-risks.
I’m not sure what this is in response to. EDIT: I wasn’t expecting a new major cultural movement to make x-risk one of their central concerns, but was expecting epistemic conditions more like the 90s-00s to continue, i.e., large corporations like Google did not have any obvious major ideological commitments/blindspots, schools weren’t doing extensive indoctrination, and groups like us doing thing not directly related to the cultural war weren’t at serious risk of being attacked or taken over by cultural warriors. Do you agree that if the conditions of the 90s-00s had continued, the outlook on x-risks would be significantly better?
I agree that that centers of gravity is the more important feature; it is also what gives me confidence that it cannot get as bad as religion used to be. The most important factor is that because the center of gravity for social justice doesn’t include local or federal government they won’t control law enforcement or the military. This means that they won’t be able to deploy systematic, institutional-grade violence against their enemies, which is what was involved in the worst damage done under Communism or religion and was further core to retaining their position.
Why doesn’t it include local government? Also, this is why I gave the social media=religious police/inquisition analogy. It used to take institutional-grade violence to silence dissent on a large scale, but social media (with its threat of career destruction) now serves that role. For example in my local community I see policy proposals that should be very controversial and debatable face no visible opposition in any public spaces because people are afraid to speak up. On other policies there is some opposition but the most powerful arguments can’t be brought up because they would touch taboo subjects.
The second thing that gives me confidence it won’t get as bad as religion or Communism is that the institutional changes involved in moving away from those things remain in place. I believe in both cases the theme of the changes can be reduced to “decentralization” although it is worth pointing out this looked very different between them; but the mechanism is that their dominion failed when they weren’t able to maintain control over all centers of power.
I’m having trouble imagining this in concrete terms. Can you be more specific or tell a story about how you expect the “moving away” to happen?
The first and simplest is that I have a general sense that culture changes faster now than it did previously; the whole start-grow-wither cycle seems to be accelerated on the strength of cheap and ubiquitous communication ability.
The start-grow part is probably true, but I’m not sure about “wither” because I don’t think we’ve seen anything recently embed into our institutional structures in a way similar to current leftist ideology (and then wither) to compare with?
The second is that when we look at the circumstances of religion and Communism coming to power, what I see is that it requires the decay or collapse of the previous order.
Again this assumes that the new ideology needs to be enforced by force, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I feel like the second point is already at work in the case of universities: a huge swath of the population no longer holds them in any esteem; even people who attend them are irritated about the cost and their failure to deliver on nominal promises; many of them are going bankrupt and closing their doors.
(1) There is no alternative to university so the elites have to keep going to them. (2) The ideological indoctrination (which reminds me of what I received myself in Communist China) is moving wholesale into K-12 education so people can’t escape it by avoiding universities anyway.
In this model, social justice taking over the English department isn’t because social justice has a Cunning Plan to Rule the World, but because the English department had long since abandoned any pretense of doing something productive or useful; they were simply working in little corners of their academic discipline, never mind the outside world. There was no real opposition because nobody cared; few people noticed; it didn’t matter.
You seem to be way behind the times here. It has already taken over all of humanities and social sciences, and is now moving into STEM fields. ETA: See here and here for more details.
(Thanks for continuing to engage on this with me, BTW, given that you’re probably not as motivated to talk about it as I am. It’s really helpful to have someone to discuss this with.)
Certainly—you are doing a great job of pointing out areas where I have a lot of implicit assumptions, and having to articulate them is useful all by itself, so I’m getting a lot out of this too.
What are you referring to here? Red Scares?
In general any large cultural movement, so while I am including the Red Scares I am also including things like Civil Rights and the Labor Movement. Also, I implicitly count the total cost, so the cost of both the movement’s activity and also the responses to it are included. I read a review of Days of Rage, which I came to through the SlateStarCodex review of Ages of Discord; the scale of conflict there was prodigious, with hundreds of bombings and a high rate of police assassination. Rolling back earlier to the time of the first Red Scare, in 1921 the Battle of Blair Mountain was fought, with ~10,000 miners and unionists on one side and ~3,000 lawmen and strike breakers on the other, armed with machine guns and aircraft (early ones, mind you). The President had to call in the Army. These are things which we muddled through, and which also had a high human cost, which we have collectively since forgotten.
Do you agree that if the conditions of the 90s-00s had continued, the outlook on x-risks would be significantly better?
I am not sure that I do. I see that the infrastructure and community surrounding x-risks have done very will during the 2010s, and I’m not familiar with any significant setbacks driven by social justice. The most important thing of which I am aware is the sense that the Bay Area is not a friendly space for inquiry anymore, but that mostly seems to imply that expanding the x-risk institutions there will be less profitable. If we were to constrain ourselves to conditions in California, then I would probably agree.
Why doesn’t it include local government?
The short answer is because that isn’t where it originated. My model for how this works is basically imperial: the center of gravity for a cultural movement is like the core for imperial conquest; they use the strength of the core to subjugate neighboring territories (although here we are talking about infiltrating institutions). Social justice started on the internet and universities, and then got onto k-12 school boards and into city councils. The concrete implication of this is that if social justice withers on the internet and in universities, I expect it will subsequently vanish from school boards and city councils; because local government is not the base of power, they won’t be able to push further from there. It does not seem to me that education without a research component or local government have the kind of signalling incentives that social justice needs to thrive internally. I think this is insulation from results: k-12 is all about test results, and local government has to deal with water and garbage collection and other practical things.
It used to take institutional-grade violence to silence dissent on a large scale, but social media (with its threat of career destruction) now serves that role
This is a good point; in my cultural empire model it also has the effect of making virtually all institutions adjacent institutions. As a consequence, there’s lots of places we can expect social justice not to catch on, but very few insulated from it completely.
I don’t think we’ve seen anything recently embed into our institutional structures in a way similar
This is another good point. My immediate thought is that I have trouble distinguishing social justice from any other form of fad in the areas it has occupied: why would making all the boys swear oaths against hitting women during an assembly be stickier than an assembly warning them of the dangers of satanic cults? How would changing the language we use to write test questions so that it includes trans people be different from making sure we don’t refer to animals the kids might not have seen in their local environment? So far we aren’t looking at the kind of things that change how institutions have to operate, like court precedents or constitutional amendments. The test I want to use for this looks something like “have they made any changes such that if the people within the institution did not know about social justice, the aims of social justice would still be advanced.”
Of course I earlier predicted that the movement would continue to grow, so there is nothing that prohibits them from achieving such a thing in my view.
Again this assumes that the new ideology needs to be enforced by force, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I don’t need any such assumption. The question is more basic to my mind: why would anyone listen in the first place? Consider: if people were already engaged with a satisfactory ideology, what purchase could social justice gain with them? The decay of the old order here means of old ideas: politics should be separate from work; the correct way to address racism is color blindness; our institutions are effective; salvation lies in the next world, etc. If there was something people believed and were motivated by, they wouldn’t be susceptible to new ideological influences. The positive implication of this is that successfully reinforcing the old ideas or providing a different new ideology should have an immunizing effect. The negative implication of that is you can’t just gin something like that up for the purposes of memetic vaccination.
The ideological indoctrination (which reminds me of what I received myself in Communist China) is moving wholesale into K-12 education so people can’t escape it by avoiding universities anyway
I feel like an important contextual detail is the total saturation effect in Communist China. In that case the indoctrination was pretty consistent because it was reinforced via propaganda through most communication channels, like news and entertainment. The left cannot even achieve that on the internet, so while I can agree that what is happening is indoctrination, my estimation of its effectiveness is very low. There is no mechanism to prevent access to contradictory information.
It has already taken over all of humanities and social sciences, and is now moving into STEM fields
Yes, but consider the causal mechanisms. It had to start somewhere; why didn’t it fail and how did it expand elsewhere? Every new institution and department required someone getting in and then deciding to use the procedures and powers of that institution to bring in like-minded people, and discourage not-like-minded people. Where were the strong norms to prevent this?
Ours are straightforward: politics is the mindkiller; report your true concern; explain your reasoning. I put it to you the reason we have not been swept up in this is because we are continuously, positively investing in something else, and that something else pays off. Circling back to the decay-of-ideas notion, this is very different from the kind of passive acknowledgement that passes for norms in large institutions or the low-dimensional concerns of really tiny ones like knitting circles, to say nothing of places in the grip of disillusionment.
If we were to constrain ourselves to conditions in Southern California, then I would probably agree.
Expanding away from the Bay Area is very costly (in terms of lost opportunities or higher cost for coordination) and many suitable places (e.g., with high tech industry or good universities) already have similar conditions. I personally do not live in Southern [Edit: Northern] California and I’m seeing similar things here, which is what started to alarm me in the first place.
k-12 is all about test results
Look up “opt out movement” and “standardized testing is racist”. They’re gaining ground pretty quickly around here.
My immediate thought is that I have trouble distinguishing social justice from any other form of fad in the areas it has occupied
None of those achieved interlocking, mutually-reinforcing control over most of our epistemic institutions.
The decay of the old order here means of old ideas
Oh I see, I thought by “order” you meant “political order” which were the examples you gave. In terms of decay of old ideas I’d cite religion, communism, and liberalism (the last was in large part motivated by tribal opposition to communism and therefore is not as interesting to people now that communism has gone away).
There is no mechanism to prevent access to contradictory information.
Right now there are only soft mechanisms. I.e., you can’t find certain information on local news media, national mainstream media, or political discussion on social media (if you live in certain places) so it’s easy to live in an information bubble. If things keep going in the current direction I can imagine harder mechanisms coming into place. But you’re right that currently the situation is better than under Communist regimes. (ETA: And I acknowledge we have stronger constitutional protection against this dimension of the problem getting that bad in the future. But (1) this is just one, perhaps not that crucial, dimension of the problem and (2) constitutional protections do break down pretty often, and all it takes is a Supreme Court willing to interpret the language differently.)
Circling back to the decay-of-ideas notion, this is very different from the kind of passive acknowledgement that passes for norms in large institutions
The thing is that universities used to have strong norms. See this incident where professors acted on a large scale against an intrusion into their free speech/inquiry norms. We’re not seeing academia defend itself like that today. I’m not sure if the norms decayed over time, or current political forces are stronger than in the past, but neither is good news.
Earlier you said “There was no real opposition because nobody cared; few people noticed; it didn’t matter.” which I think was intended to suggest that leftist ideology would be mostly confined to academic fields that “don’t matter”. But given what’s happening in STEM fields, that’s already not the case.
To sum up, my point here is that having strong norms apparently isn’t enough (unless we figure out how to make sure such norms are strong enough and stay strong enough), having something that people care about also isn’t enough, and even a combination of the two isn’t enough.
We’re not seeing academia defend itself like that today. I’m not sure if the norms decayed over time, or current political forces are stronger than in the past, but neither is good news.
This is a crux of the issue, in my view. It’s worth considering that this isn’t happening in independently of other major developments in academia: since 1950 we saw the development of publish or perish culture, a shift towards administrative activities at the expense of instruction and research, and most recently the replication crisis. The great shock of the replication crisis to me was that there was a group of scientists who sincerely believed that replication was not important. That is such a fundamental part of the story of science that even laypeople know about it. I would be extremely surprised if that decay was not at least mirrored in things like principles of political noninterference. STEM is vulnerable to political takeover because the time STEM professors spend defending the spirit of free inquiry is time taken away from churning out the next paper and writing grant applications, just like everyone else.
(unless we figure out how to make sure such norms are strong enough and stay strong enough)
I think this is the mechanism by which movements fade. In order for a norm to work, people have to make continuous, active investments in it. This mostly means doing things that reflect them, spending money on them, or taking time to advocate for them specifically.
Out of curiosity, what do you think the specific harms are from how the left will administer universities? From the example you cited for STEM fields, it looks to me like two things: 1) systematically take a hit on the talent-level of its professors (in their areas of expertise); 2) they will redirect some fraction of research dollars in every field to diversity and inclusion. From my other exposure to the rhetoric, I suspect they will cripple genetics research, which is indeed a big deal and also reminiscent of Communism.
It’s worth considering that this isn’t happening in independently of other major developments in academia
You make good points here. Any ideas why those other shifts happened and how can we help reverse them or prevent them from happening elsewhere?
Out of curiosity, what do you think the specific harms are from how the left will administer universities?
Aside from what you mentioned, I see:
strengthening of the information bubble for students, making it harder to reverse the mutually-reinforcing ideological takeover of epistemic institutions
redirecting attention/effort of scientists and future politicians (educated under the system) away from x-risks / long-term concerns and towards near-term SJ concerns
if it takes over philosophy departments (which seems to be happening), it will hurt philosophical inquiry, reduce the number/quality of future EA leaders, affect AI alignment in so far as it depends on correctly solving philosophical problems
economics departments will output increasingly bad ideas, causing economic stagnation or collapse, and further ripple effects from that
education departments will output increasingly bad ideas, with obvious consequences
the Right will distrust academia even more than it already does and disregard or oppose even the best ideas coming out from it, making it very difficult for society to coordinate to address current and future problems
You make good points here. Any ideas why those other shifts happened and how can we help reverse them or prevent them from happening elsewhere?
Mostly it looks to me like a series of unrelated changes built up over time, and the unintended consequences were mostly adverse.
An example is the War on Cancer and the changes that came with it to funding. It had long been the case that funding was mostly handed out on a project-by-project basis, but in order to get the funding dedicated to cancer research it was necessary to explain how cancer research would benefit. The obvious first-order impact is an increase in administrative overhead for getting the money.
Alongside this science sort of professionalized. I expect that when the sense of how important something is permeates, professionalization is viewed as a natural consequence, but it seems to have misfired here. Professionalization, like other forms of labor organization, isn’t about maximizing anything but about ensuring a minimum. This means things like more metrics, which is why our civilization formally prefers a lot of crappy scientific papers to a few good ones, and doesn’t want any kind of non-paper presentation of scientific progress at all. Science jobs become subject to Goodharting, because people start thinking that the right way to get more science is just to increase the number of scientists, on account of them all being interchangeable professionals with a reliable minimum output.
The university environment also got leaned on as a lever for progress; the student loan programs all grew over this same period, which seems to have driven a long period of competition for headcount. This shifted universities’ priorities from executing their nominal mission towards signalling desirability among students/parents/etc. I am certain at least part of that came at the expense of faculty, even if only by increasing the administrative burden still further by yet more metrics.
On the fixing side, I am actually pretty optimistic. A few simple things would probably help a lot, two examples being funding and organization. Example: Bell Labs and Xerox PARC have been discussed here a lot. Both cases deviated significantly from the standard university/government system of funding individual projects case by case. Under the project/grant system being a scientist reduces to being able to successfully get funding for a series of projects over time. At Bell and at PARC, they rather made long-term investments on a person-by-person basis. I think this has wide-ranging effects, but not least among them is that there wasn’t a lot of administrative overhead to a given investigation; rather they could all be picked up, put down, or adapted as needed. Another effect, maybe intentional but seemingly happenstance, is that they built a community of researchers in the colloquial sense. This is pretty different from the formal employee relationships that dominate now. Around 7 years ago I listened to a recruiting pitch from Sandia National Laboratories for engineering students, and asked how communication was between different groups in the lab. The representative said that she knew of a case where two labs right across the hall from each other were investigating the same thing for over a year before they realized it, because nobody talks.
This suggests to me that a university that was struggling financially, or maybe just needed to take a gamble on moving up in the world, could cheaply implement what appears to be a superior research-producing apparatus, just by shifting their methods of funding and tracking results.
The great shock of the replication crisis to me was that there was a group of scientists who sincerely believed that replication was not important.
The replication crisis is about scientists finally waking up and thinking replication is important. Psychology never had a culture that valued replication.
First of all, it can’t possibly be bad epistemics for Congress to form the House Un-American Activities Committee[1]. Whatever you think was bad about this, it wasn’t epistemics, since epistemics is about having correct beliefs. Taking an ill-advised action isn’t bad epistemics (no matter how bad it may be in other ways).
In any case, I was responding to the part of your comment which I quoted in mine. There is, perhaps, some very literal and very generous interpretation of the words “nation-spanning network of terrorist organizations that target minorities/homosexuals/etc” under which the KKK (and associated groups) qualifies. But under any common-sense reading of the words, the claim just does not fit the facts.
Insofar as there is a continuum of how justified is the response to some threat, judged only on the basis of how serious the threat itself is, the justification of social justice by the alleged threat of the KKK is, indeed, more plausible than the justification of the Satanic Panic by the alleged threat of child-sacrificing devil worshippers, since, as you say, there were none at all of the latter. Yet compare both of these things to the justification of HUAC by the threat of Soviet espionage, and it’s clear that both of the former pale into utter insignificance; if one is “actually entirely unjustified” and the other is “almost entirely unjustified”, that is a distinction such as makes no difference.
It’s worth noting that “blacklist[ing] people from working in television for supporting labor unions” was not HUAC’s function; the blacklist was a measure taken by the Hollywood film studios, and had no legal force whatsoever.
In all of of the cases of silencing/canceling I’ve seen/read (with the caveat that I may have a faulty memory), including the 4 that I gave in the OP, none of the people being silenced/canceled have any remotely plausible connection to white supremacy groups or domestic terrorism, nor did those doing the silencing/canceling even accuse them of any such connections. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but this seems very different from what I’ve read about the Red Scares.
(An actually common accusation is “upholding white supremacy culture” but this “white supremacy” is very different from the “white supremacy” in “white supremacy groups”.)
Epistemic conditions have been this bad (or worse) for as long as we have had the bandwidth to think outside of physical necessity. Coordinating to implement bad epistemology has been this bad before in the US, but usually isn’t.
The salient examples, and speaking to your does-this-exist-on-the-right question, are the Red Scares. There we see many of the same mechanisms at work, in particular the influence of political affiliation on employment.
You can also consider the Satanic Panic of the 1980s the same kind of problem, and probably a better match because it too was bottom up and lacked the coordinating government interest that is usually a factor in a Red Scare.
From where I sit it looks like we are at Satanic Panic levels of intensity, but well short of McCarthyism.
I looked at the Loyalty Oaths that people were compelled to sign in the 1950s and honestly they don’t seem that bad by comparison to today’s equivalent:
To the extent there were excesses during the Red Scares, it seems kind of understandable given that Communists literally just violently took over a number of the biggest countries on Earth. ETA: If we now have a tendency to impose similar excesses on ourselves even in the absence of such threats, that bodes ill for future epistemic conditions.
Satanic Panic, from skimming the Wikipedia page, apparently had little or no influence on academia and government. Do you really think it’s comparable in seriousness to what’s happening today? (If so I’ll take a closer look.)
Yes, I think it was comparably serious, although because the landscape was different the consequences were also different; in general I expect modern events to be higher variance.
The first similarity is the primacy of cultural products, in particular media and the arts. This was the period when there was a concerted effort to destroy the fantasy genre, and pressure was brought to bear to cancel tv shows and concerts which were deemed too occult.
The influence on academia was negligible as far as I can tell, but I suggest taking another look at government: among other things it seriously distorted a fraction of the justice system because it became common for the public to worry about whether there was a satanic cult present, which diverted resources into investigating things that weren’t there (like cults) or focused attention on suspects for nonsensical reasons like whether they owned metal albums. This was also the same period that gave us the modern system of censorship, like film ratings, adult content warning stickers on CDs, etc. While censorship wasn’t driven solely by the panic, the people swept up in it did work hard to capitalize on these mechanisms to further their aims.
I find it helps to view this kind of cultural event from the perspective of the institutions that make up its center of gravity. For example, one way to make sense of the differences between these movements is that the Red Scare was centered on the federal government and national media outlets; the Satanic Panic was centered on local churches and local government institutions like law enforcement, schools, and libraries; and the social justice movement is centered on universities and the internet.
That being said, your point about communism being a real thing that made sense to be concerned about is a good one: there never was a nation-spanning web of devil-worshipping cults that conducted ritual murder and sought to brainwash the youth of America. By contrast there is a nation-spanning network of terrorist organizations that target minorities/homosexuals/etc, so the social justice movement has more real concerns to work with. On that basis I expect its peak to be closer to Red Scare territory, though probably still short because I have a hard time seeing the federal government deciding it has an existential stake in the outcome.
Wait… what?
That’s what the KKK is, along with a handful of other neo-nazi and white supremacy groups. This article from Politico does a pretty good job of describing when when they turned into a loose network instead of a bunch of isolated groups in the wake of the Greensboro Massacre.
The KKK’s membership does not even approach five figures, even in the most generous estimates of a group little-disposed to underestimate such things (the Southern Poverty Law Center). (The Anti-Defamation League puts nationwide KKK membership at a mere 3,000.) The ADL’s list of active KKK organizations (which includes all those mentioned in the linked article) lists a half-dozen chapters, localized to a handful of Southern states.
The Politico article you link doesn’t mention this. It talks a lot about individual people and specific incidents, but doesn’t talk about the fact that none of it adds up to anything like a “nation-spanning network of terrorist organizations”. What’s more, none of these people have any power or any serious connection even to state, much less federal, authorities.
In comparison, the Soviets had spies in (among many other places) the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Department of Agriculture, the Manhattan Project—and at the highest levels of these organizations, to boot. These spies were backed by one of the world’s two great superpowers; vast sums of money and resources, and a literal army of trained personnel, supported them.
Nothing even remotely like that is true of the KKK, nor any other “white supremacist” organization. No comparison between these two cases is even slightly reasonable. The KKK is irrelevant.
The idea that almost anything that the social justice movement does is justified or even explained by concerns about the Ku Klux Klan is not defensible.
I think you have lost the thread here. We are talking about different degrees of *bad epistemics* - nowhere did we suddenly shift gears into saying this is actually secretly good epistemics.
Communists were real and a threat, but it remained bad epistemics to for Congress to form a committee whose function was blacklist people from working in television for supporting labor unions.
Devil worshippers, by contrast, were not: there were *literally zero* groups of devil worshippers undertaking child sacrifice. Censorship and police investigations were being driven by utter fiction. This was a thing happening in the 1980s that was in no epistemic sense different from the Salem Witch Trials.
Racial/sexual/religious oppression are real and were formal government policy during my parent’s childhood, but it remains bad epistemics to insist that every restaurant have 26 bathrooms to accommodate some list of sexual identities.
This then is our continuum of badness. Social justice is clearly north of Satanic Panic, but will also clearly never form a House Unawoken Activites committee to blacklist Curtis Yarvin from working in tech.
Can you give a reference for people being blacklisted for supporting labor unions? I skimmed/searched the Wikipedia article on Hollywood Blacklist and while it’s overall quite sympathetic to those who got blacklisted, there is no mention of anyone being blacklisted because they supported unions. I think at least officially only members of the Communist Party and those who refused to cooperate with the committee were supposed to be blacklisted.
What do you think of the argument that blacklisting members of the Communist Party is actually justified on epistemic grounds, which I read from the paper Communists, McCarthy and American Universities by Sidney Hook (a prominent Marxist expert on Marxist philosophy turned anti-communist). (I can’t strongly endorse Hook’s argument as I’m not an expert on the history myself, but it seems at least plausible to me. Also, the paper is about blacklisting of Communist professors and I’m not sure how much of the argument carries over to blacklisting elsewhere.)
Basically, the American Communist Party was an extension of the Soviet Communist Party, which is strongly anti-epistemic (e.g., prefers indoctrination to rational argument, forces members to follow the party line, etc.), and by becoming Communist Party members, the professors were implicitly indicating agreement with the Party’s anti-epistemic positions and strategies, and signing on to, for example, indoctrinate their students. Furthermore, they apparently behaved as mouthpieces of the Communist Party instead of independent thinkers:
(The paper goes on to show lack of such evidence.) Back to you:
Earlier you said “From where I sit it looks like we are at Satanic Panic levels of intensity”. Did you change your mind, and if so because of what evidence/argument?
I’m not convinced that things are better just because the federal government is not involved in the blacklisting. Back then only the federal government (and maybe a few other entities) had the coordination ability to create/enforce such a blacklist, but today many more groups do, via social media.
I love this line. It could not have come more straight out of Moral Mazes.
The specific example I was thinking of was Dalton Trumbo. Now to be clear, he was in fact a Communist sympathizer and member of the Communist Party.
But the thing that brought him to the attention of the blacklisters and HUAC, as I understand the sequence of events, was his support of the 1945 Black Friday strike. In 1946 he was fingered as a Communist and blacklisted, and in 1947 summoned to HUAC because he was on the blacklist. Although reviewing the Wikipedia article I see that he reported Nazi sympathizers to the FBI in 1941 or 42; it is possible that this caused him to be prioritized for coming before Congress, though it isn’t mentioned specifically.
Re: Communists have bad epistemics: in general the criticism is correct, the problem is that it isn’t exclusive to communism. Political parties in general are doctrinal organizations that communicate by propaganda, communists are just more aggressive (worse) about it. I see a twofold problem with blacklisting them: one, it doesn’t follow that because the communists have terrible epistemics that the people who are blacklisting them have good epistemics (the blacklist is based on the beliefs of the MPAA or Congress); two, we have a strong meta-reason for tolerating bad epistemics, which is to ensure we allow for good epistemics. This is because the enforcement mechanisms are orthogonal to values, so the same thing that muzzles the Communists can also muzzle the Democrats and Republicans. I firmly expect all such mechanisms to be used by every group with access to them, so I want them kept to a minimum.
Re: intensity: I should have been more clear here, I apologize. The underlying intuition is that these movements are things which start, grow, peak, and then wither; the reason I was talking about the different centers of gravity and whether the concern had a real basis or not is because I think these are important variables in where the peak is. The more powerful the institutions where they are centered, and the more real the basis of their concern, the higher I expect the peak power of the movement to be. So I think we are at about Satanic Panic levels of intensity now, but I think the social justice movement has a higher potential peak because “universities and the internet” is a more powerful base, and prejudice is a more realistic concern. From the perspective of your concerns, I expect things to get worse.
Edit: I expect things to get worse before they get better, which is to say I expect we will muddle through this like we did the rest.
I think we may still disagree about this a bit but it’s not so important at this point so I’ll put it aside and focus on a more important question.
So, how much will things get worse, and how long will it take to get better? I’m tempted to analogize to religion before separation of church and state and communism in Communist countries (i.e., we’ll see, are starting to see, an interlocking system of ideological indoctrination and enforcement, consisting of MSM=church, K-12 education=Sunday/religious school, university=seminary, social media=religious police/inquisition/witch hunts), which suggests that it’s going to get a lot worse, last for at least decades if not centuries, with occasional horrible dips below the already bad average, like the equivalent of the Cultural Revolution. (Obviously we can’t be very certain about this, but I’m having trouble seeing a scenario that breaks us out of the self-reinforcing dynamics that is moving epistemic conditions towards a negative direction. ETA: I mean a scenario that seems likely to occur by default.)
Any thoughts on this? From what you wrote before, it seems you don’t think the peak will be this bad (i.e., will be better than Red Scares), because there is not a real threat as serious as Communism to drive the movement? But religion didn’t have any real threats and still managed to impose terrible epistemic conditions on virtually everyone in the West. So it seems like “centers of gravity” is the more important factor and there the analogy with religion seems pretty tight.
I would add “perhaps at enormous human cost, and not taking into account new x-risks”.
The cost was bad before, too. We simply forgot, because it is our collective nature to forget. It is worth remembering that this community is at the vanguard of x-risk concern; no major cultural movement is likely to take into account new x-risks.
I agree that that centers of gravity is the more important feature; it is also what gives me confidence that it cannot get as bad as religion used to be. The most important factor is that because the center of gravity for social justice doesn’t include local or federal government they won’t control law enforcement or the military. This means that they won’t be able to deploy systematic, institutional-grade violence against their enemies, which is what was involved in the worst damage done under Communism or religion and was further core to retaining their position.
The second thing that gives me confidence it won’t get as bad as religion or Communism is that the institutional changes involved in moving away from those things remain in place. I believe in both cases the theme of the changes can be reduced to “decentralization” although it is worth pointing out this looked very different between them; but the mechanism is that their dominion failed when they weren’t able to maintain control over all centers of power.
There are two other smaller points that color my perceptions. The first and simplest is that I have a general sense that culture changes faster now than it did previously; the whole start-grow-wither cycle seems to be accelerated on the strength of cheap and ubiquitous communication ability. This weighs against any sort of movement lasting even as long as decades, never mind centuries. The second is that when we look at the circumstances of religion and Communism coming to power, what I see is that it requires the decay or collapse of the previous order. Specific examples are that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was a prerequisite for the dominion of the Catholic Church, and the decay of Russia under the Romanovs was a prerequisite for the Bolshevik Revolution.
I feel like the second point is already at work in the case of universities: a huge swath of the population no longer holds them in any esteem; even people who attend them are irritated about the cost and their failure to deliver on nominal promises; many of them are going bankrupt and closing their doors. In this model, social justice taking over the English department isn’t because social justice has a Cunning Plan to Rule the World, but because the English department had long since abandoned any pretense of doing something productive or useful; they were simply working in little corners of their academic discipline, never mind the outside world. There was no real opposition because nobody cared; few people noticed; it didn’t matter.
What are you referring to here? Red Scares?
I’m not sure what this is in response to.EDIT: I wasn’t expecting a new major cultural movement to make x-risk one of their central concerns, but was expecting epistemic conditions more like the 90s-00s to continue, i.e., large corporations like Google did not have any obvious major ideological commitments/blindspots, schools weren’t doing extensive indoctrination, and groups like us doing thing not directly related to the cultural war weren’t at serious risk of being attacked or taken over by cultural warriors. Do you agree that if the conditions of the 90s-00s had continued, the outlook on x-risks would be significantly better?Why doesn’t it include local government? Also, this is why I gave the social media=religious police/inquisition analogy. It used to take institutional-grade violence to silence dissent on a large scale, but social media (with its threat of career destruction) now serves that role. For example in my local community I see policy proposals that should be very controversial and debatable face no visible opposition in any public spaces because people are afraid to speak up. On other policies there is some opposition but the most powerful arguments can’t be brought up because they would touch taboo subjects.
I’m having trouble imagining this in concrete terms. Can you be more specific or tell a story about how you expect the “moving away” to happen?
The start-grow part is probably true, but I’m not sure about “wither” because I don’t think we’ve seen anything recently embed into our institutional structures in a way similar to current leftist ideology (and then wither) to compare with?
Again this assumes that the new ideology needs to be enforced by force, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
(1) There is no alternative to university so the elites have to keep going to them. (2) The ideological indoctrination (which reminds me of what I received myself in Communist China) is moving wholesale into K-12 education so people can’t escape it by avoiding universities anyway.
You seem to be way behind the times here. It has already taken over all of humanities and social sciences, and is now moving into STEM fields. ETA: See here and here for more details.
(Thanks for continuing to engage on this with me, BTW, given that you’re probably not as motivated to talk about it as I am. It’s really helpful to have someone to discuss this with.)
Certainly—you are doing a great job of pointing out areas where I have a lot of implicit assumptions, and having to articulate them is useful all by itself, so I’m getting a lot out of this too.
In general any large cultural movement, so while I am including the Red Scares I am also including things like Civil Rights and the Labor Movement. Also, I implicitly count the total cost, so the cost of both the movement’s activity and also the responses to it are included. I read a review of Days of Rage, which I came to through the SlateStarCodex review of Ages of Discord; the scale of conflict there was prodigious, with hundreds of bombings and a high rate of police assassination. Rolling back earlier to the time of the first Red Scare, in 1921 the Battle of Blair Mountain was fought, with ~10,000 miners and unionists on one side and ~3,000 lawmen and strike breakers on the other, armed with machine guns and aircraft (early ones, mind you). The President had to call in the Army. These are things which we muddled through, and which also had a high human cost, which we have collectively since forgotten.
I am not sure that I do. I see that the infrastructure and community surrounding x-risks have done very will during the 2010s, and I’m not familiar with any significant setbacks driven by social justice. The most important thing of which I am aware is the sense that the Bay Area is not a friendly space for inquiry anymore, but that mostly seems to imply that expanding the x-risk institutions there will be less profitable. If we were to constrain ourselves to conditions in California, then I would probably agree.
The short answer is because that isn’t where it originated. My model for how this works is basically imperial: the center of gravity for a cultural movement is like the core for imperial conquest; they use the strength of the core to subjugate neighboring territories (although here we are talking about infiltrating institutions). Social justice started on the internet and universities, and then got onto k-12 school boards and into city councils. The concrete implication of this is that if social justice withers on the internet and in universities, I expect it will subsequently vanish from school boards and city councils; because local government is not the base of power, they won’t be able to push further from there. It does not seem to me that education without a research component or local government have the kind of signalling incentives that social justice needs to thrive internally. I think this is insulation from results: k-12 is all about test results, and local government has to deal with water and garbage collection and other practical things.
This is a good point; in my cultural empire model it also has the effect of making virtually all institutions adjacent institutions. As a consequence, there’s lots of places we can expect social justice not to catch on, but very few insulated from it completely.
This is another good point. My immediate thought is that I have trouble distinguishing social justice from any other form of fad in the areas it has occupied: why would making all the boys swear oaths against hitting women during an assembly be stickier than an assembly warning them of the dangers of satanic cults? How would changing the language we use to write test questions so that it includes trans people be different from making sure we don’t refer to animals the kids might not have seen in their local environment? So far we aren’t looking at the kind of things that change how institutions have to operate, like court precedents or constitutional amendments. The test I want to use for this looks something like “have they made any changes such that if the people within the institution did not know about social justice, the aims of social justice would still be advanced.”
Of course I earlier predicted that the movement would continue to grow, so there is nothing that prohibits them from achieving such a thing in my view.
I don’t need any such assumption. The question is more basic to my mind: why would anyone listen in the first place? Consider: if people were already engaged with a satisfactory ideology, what purchase could social justice gain with them? The decay of the old order here means of old ideas: politics should be separate from work; the correct way to address racism is color blindness; our institutions are effective; salvation lies in the next world, etc. If there was something people believed and were motivated by, they wouldn’t be susceptible to new ideological influences. The positive implication of this is that successfully reinforcing the old ideas or providing a different new ideology should have an immunizing effect. The negative implication of that is you can’t just gin something like that up for the purposes of memetic vaccination.
I feel like an important contextual detail is the total saturation effect in Communist China. In that case the indoctrination was pretty consistent because it was reinforced via propaganda through most communication channels, like news and entertainment. The left cannot even achieve that on the internet, so while I can agree that what is happening is indoctrination, my estimation of its effectiveness is very low. There is no mechanism to prevent access to contradictory information.
Yes, but consider the causal mechanisms. It had to start somewhere; why didn’t it fail and how did it expand elsewhere? Every new institution and department required someone getting in and then deciding to use the procedures and powers of that institution to bring in like-minded people, and discourage not-like-minded people. Where were the strong norms to prevent this?
Ours are straightforward: politics is the mindkiller; report your true concern; explain your reasoning. I put it to you the reason we have not been swept up in this is because we are continuously, positively investing in something else, and that something else pays off. Circling back to the decay-of-ideas notion, this is very different from the kind of passive acknowledgement that passes for norms in large institutions or the low-dimensional concerns of really tiny ones like knitting circles, to say nothing of places in the grip of disillusionment.
Expanding away from the Bay Area is very costly (in terms of lost opportunities or higher cost for coordination) and many suitable places (e.g., with high tech industry or good universities) already have similar conditions. I personally do not live in
Southern[Edit: Northern] California and I’m seeing similar things here, which is what started to alarm me in the first place.Look up “opt out movement” and “standardized testing is racist”. They’re gaining ground pretty quickly around here.
None of those achieved interlocking, mutually-reinforcing control over most of our epistemic institutions.
Oh I see, I thought by “order” you meant “political order” which were the examples you gave. In terms of decay of old ideas I’d cite religion, communism, and liberalism (the last was in large part motivated by tribal opposition to communism and therefore is not as interesting to people now that communism has gone away).
Right now there are only soft mechanisms. I.e., you can’t find certain information on local news media, national mainstream media, or political discussion on social media (if you live in certain places) so it’s easy to live in an information bubble. If things keep going in the current direction I can imagine harder mechanisms coming into place. But you’re right that currently the situation is better than under Communist regimes. (ETA: And I acknowledge we have stronger constitutional protection against this dimension of the problem getting that bad in the future. But (1) this is just one, perhaps not that crucial, dimension of the problem and (2) constitutional protections do break down pretty often, and all it takes is a Supreme Court willing to interpret the language differently.)
The thing is that universities used to have strong norms. See this incident where professors acted on a large scale against an intrusion into their free speech/inquiry norms. We’re not seeing academia defend itself like that today. I’m not sure if the norms decayed over time, or current political forces are stronger than in the past, but neither is good news.
Earlier you said “There was no real opposition because nobody cared; few people noticed; it didn’t matter.” which I think was intended to suggest that leftist ideology would be mostly confined to academic fields that “don’t matter”. But given what’s happening in STEM fields, that’s already not the case.
To sum up, my point here is that having strong norms apparently isn’t enough (unless we figure out how to make sure such norms are strong enough and stay strong enough), having something that people care about also isn’t enough, and even a combination of the two isn’t enough.
This is a crux of the issue, in my view. It’s worth considering that this isn’t happening in independently of other major developments in academia: since 1950 we saw the development of publish or perish culture, a shift towards administrative activities at the expense of instruction and research, and most recently the replication crisis. The great shock of the replication crisis to me was that there was a group of scientists who sincerely believed that replication was not important. That is such a fundamental part of the story of science that even laypeople know about it. I would be extremely surprised if that decay was not at least mirrored in things like principles of political noninterference. STEM is vulnerable to political takeover because the time STEM professors spend defending the spirit of free inquiry is time taken away from churning out the next paper and writing grant applications, just like everyone else.
I think this is the mechanism by which movements fade. In order for a norm to work, people have to make continuous, active investments in it. This mostly means doing things that reflect them, spending money on them, or taking time to advocate for them specifically.
Out of curiosity, what do you think the specific harms are from how the left will administer universities? From the example you cited for STEM fields, it looks to me like two things: 1) systematically take a hit on the talent-level of its professors (in their areas of expertise); 2) they will redirect some fraction of research dollars in every field to diversity and inclusion. From my other exposure to the rhetoric, I suspect they will cripple genetics research, which is indeed a big deal and also reminiscent of Communism.
You make good points here. Any ideas why those other shifts happened and how can we help reverse them or prevent them from happening elsewhere?
Aside from what you mentioned, I see:
strengthening of the information bubble for students, making it harder to reverse the mutually-reinforcing ideological takeover of epistemic institutions
redirecting attention/effort of scientists and future politicians (educated under the system) away from x-risks / long-term concerns and towards near-term SJ concerns
if it takes over philosophy departments (which seems to be happening), it will hurt philosophical inquiry, reduce the number/quality of future EA leaders, affect AI alignment in so far as it depends on correctly solving philosophical problems
economics departments will output increasingly bad ideas, causing economic stagnation or collapse, and further ripple effects from that
education departments will output increasingly bad ideas, with obvious consequences
the Right will distrust academia even more than it already does and disregard or oppose even the best ideas coming out from it, making it very difficult for society to coordinate to address current and future problems
Mostly it looks to me like a series of unrelated changes built up over time, and the unintended consequences were mostly adverse.
An example is the War on Cancer and the changes that came with it to funding. It had long been the case that funding was mostly handed out on a project-by-project basis, but in order to get the funding dedicated to cancer research it was necessary to explain how cancer research would benefit. The obvious first-order impact is an increase in administrative overhead for getting the money.
Alongside this science sort of professionalized. I expect that when the sense of how important something is permeates, professionalization is viewed as a natural consequence, but it seems to have misfired here. Professionalization, like other forms of labor organization, isn’t about maximizing anything but about ensuring a minimum. This means things like more metrics, which is why our civilization formally prefers a lot of crappy scientific papers to a few good ones, and doesn’t want any kind of non-paper presentation of scientific progress at all. Science jobs become subject to Goodharting, because people start thinking that the right way to get more science is just to increase the number of scientists, on account of them all being interchangeable professionals with a reliable minimum output.
The university environment also got leaned on as a lever for progress; the student loan programs all grew over this same period, which seems to have driven a long period of competition for headcount. This shifted universities’ priorities from executing their nominal mission towards signalling desirability among students/parents/etc. I am certain at least part of that came at the expense of faculty, even if only by increasing the administrative burden still further by yet more metrics.
On the fixing side, I am actually pretty optimistic. A few simple things would probably help a lot, two examples being funding and organization. Example: Bell Labs and Xerox PARC have been discussed here a lot. Both cases deviated significantly from the standard university/government system of funding individual projects case by case. Under the project/grant system being a scientist reduces to being able to successfully get funding for a series of projects over time. At Bell and at PARC, they rather made long-term investments on a person-by-person basis. I think this has wide-ranging effects, but not least among them is that there wasn’t a lot of administrative overhead to a given investigation; rather they could all be picked up, put down, or adapted as needed. Another effect, maybe intentional but seemingly happenstance, is that they built a community of researchers in the colloquial sense. This is pretty different from the formal employee relationships that dominate now. Around 7 years ago I listened to a recruiting pitch from Sandia National Laboratories for engineering students, and asked how communication was between different groups in the lab. The representative said that she knew of a case where two labs right across the hall from each other were investigating the same thing for over a year before they realized it, because nobody talks.
This suggests to me that a university that was struggling financially, or maybe just needed to take a gamble on moving up in the world, could cheaply implement what appears to be a superior research-producing apparatus, just by shifting their methods of funding and tracking results.
The replication crisis is about scientists finally waking up and thinking replication is important. Psychology never had a culture that valued replication.
FYI the SF Bay Area is in Northern California.
Oops! Fixed.
First of all, it can’t possibly be bad epistemics for Congress to form the House Un-American Activities Committee[1]. Whatever you think was bad about this, it wasn’t epistemics, since epistemics is about having correct beliefs. Taking an ill-advised action isn’t bad epistemics (no matter how bad it may be in other ways).
In any case, I was responding to the part of your comment which I quoted in mine. There is, perhaps, some very literal and very generous interpretation of the words “nation-spanning network of terrorist organizations that target minorities/homosexuals/etc” under which the KKK (and associated groups) qualifies. But under any common-sense reading of the words, the claim just does not fit the facts.
Insofar as there is a continuum of how justified is the response to some threat, judged only on the basis of how serious the threat itself is, the justification of social justice by the alleged threat of the KKK is, indeed, more plausible than the justification of the Satanic Panic by the alleged threat of child-sacrificing devil worshippers, since, as you say, there were none at all of the latter. Yet compare both of these things to the justification of HUAC by the threat of Soviet espionage, and it’s clear that both of the former pale into utter insignificance; if one is “actually entirely unjustified” and the other is “almost entirely unjustified”, that is a distinction such as makes no difference.
It’s worth noting that “blacklist[ing] people from working in television for supporting labor unions” was not HUAC’s function; the blacklist was a measure taken by the Hollywood film studios, and had no legal force whatsoever.
In all of of the cases of silencing/canceling I’ve seen/read (with the caveat that I may have a faulty memory), including the 4 that I gave in the OP, none of the people being silenced/canceled have any remotely plausible connection to white supremacy groups or domestic terrorism, nor did those doing the silencing/canceling even accuse them of any such connections. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but this seems very different from what I’ve read about the Red Scares.
(An actually common accusation is “upholding white supremacy culture” but this “white supremacy” is very different from the “white supremacy” in “white supremacy groups”.)