Shrike
1d ago
Perhaps you're right. On the other hand, though, we should expect this to increase their competency, though, since they are going to be less distorted by that friction; instead it seems their competency has declined.
Shrike
1d ago
When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population?
I am sympathetic to the problem here, because I do think it is a real one, but "not lying" (or perhaps with unnecessary charity, "not giving confusing, contradictory, or wrong advice") is a good place to start.
Of course, given that there were geographic cleavages in a lot of the response, having a state-by-state approach to these questions is also an underrated solution. We actually got to see that in action during COVID, as a lot of COVID rules were made on a state-by-state basis, and it seems to me that was mostly ignored on both sides in favor of arguing about whatever the CDC had said most recently. Which is unfortunate!
Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.
What counts as "corrupt" is open to a lot of discussion, but I don't think the institutions have always been this incompetent. Just look at NASA.
It's nevertheless still optimal on the societal and individual level to largely trust the institutions.
I think this really depends on the institution and circumstance. Sometimes the institutions actually are hostile to you.
Shrike
2d ago
Unless you'd like to make the argument that vaccine-skeptics lack the mental capacity to be assigned agency?
I wouldn't go quite so far but it's just open-and-shut correct that many people can't properly evaluate the things that we use to establish the safety of vaccines, like randomized trials. Add in the possibility of fraud/bias (which is a legitimate concern in academia and science) and that almost certainly rises from "many" to "most." Can you sit down and read an RCT and determine if it has fraudulent data?
Thus people have to fall back on cruder heuristics such as "do I trust this institution." Keeping that trust is part of the institution. And, well, if an institution explodes its institutional trust it's pretty fair to assign at least some of the blame for the resulting fire to the institution for deceiving people.
Shrike
3d ago
An Amendment to the Constitution would also require ratification by the states. Even if two-thirds of both houses were onboard, it would require three-fourths (38) of the states to ratify - or, to put it another way, 13 states to shoot the amendment down, which would be pretty trivial.
Shrike
3d ago
people who worry about MAGA authoritarianism are behaving rationally or not
I think it's pretty much always rational to worry about government authoritarianism, it's just a question of proportionality.
What I think codes as irrational is that the people who claim to be worried about Trump Hitler don't seem interested in stopping him through normal democratic means.
Let's take the recent ICE stuff discussed in another post in this week's roundup. Democrats could sweeten the deal for Republicans by saying something like "we want to pass a bill to pare down ICE's authority. In exchange, we will delete the National Firearms Act and defund the ATF."
This would be a HUGE win for (some) righties, and might be able to pull off enough Tea Party types to pass in Congress (I haven't done a headcount). Obviously the NFA might be a good piece of legislation (it isn't, but for the sake of argument) - but if you think Trump is Hitler, removing a bunch of sworn, armed federal agents from his control is...actually a good thing? So it would be two birds with one stone for the left and something that righties could spin as a win - in other words, a good political play that would go beyond mere grandstanding. Furthermore, it could actually split the GOP coalition since there's a chance Trump would come out swinging against it and that would sour all of the pro-gun right on him.
You can repeat the thought experiment with whatever else you like - abortion, perhaps, or economic regulations.
But that's actually not what you see (or at least not what I've seen). Instead lefties seem extremely concerned about the very specific things Trump is doing that impact them right at the moment and not at all concerned about his ability to exercise federal power in ways that tribally code "left" even when those things are tools that could be used against them. If you're on the right, the left is showing basically zero interest in compromise. The message righties get from the left is whining about how Trump is mean and then how righties should lose and get nothing. That's not a palatable message.
I'm sure due to my media bubble and such there's some stuff that I am missing. Probably I am not being entirely fair. But if Trump is actually dangerously authoritarian, for crying aloud, work with Republicans to disarm as many federal law enforcement agents as you can! Be concerned about how the FBI treated him - go further and suggest they be punished by slashing their funding! Demand more investigation into how Tulsi was treated by DHS and go after their funding too! Pivot towards the IRS next. Map comprehensively every single thing the federal government does that could be turned against lefties but has been used against righties and work with them to defang that power.
By and large, I don't think that is what is happening. The left seems quite content to leave the massive (and often armed) federal bureaucracy in place, even though it would be turned against them if a right-wing authoritarian seized power. Which is why righties think that leftists (at least in power) aren't sincere in their concerns, or (alternatively) are incompetent.
Shrike
3d ago
ICE have killed 40 people
On a quick Google, this is probably a died in custody figure, not a "killed by ICE" figure. For reference, are (on a quick Google...) upwards of 70,000 people in ICE custody.
So I would say that you should assume the figure is not accurate if someone frames it to you as a homicide figure.
Shrike
4d ago
It didn't actually kill off or pacify enough of the losing demographic to affect the outcome; that requires the "old" prehistoric type of violence.
While there absolutely were cases in the past that involved wholesale slaughter, my understanding is that a lot of "old" prehistoric type violence was also "a PR move," - often very ritualized and fairly safe, with focus on glory and not necessarily lethality. For instance, the point of "counting coup" was specifically not to kill the enemy. I don't really think it's correct to suggest that the "old" way of doing things was "high lethality" and we've slumped into a newer "low lethality" culture; rather I think the type of violence that occurs depends a lot on the specifics of a culture, situation, technology level, etc.
Do you just set everything down and walk away when you're done? Of course not. You find new problems.
This I think is absolutely correct (and insightful).
Normally, the birth of a new religion has gone hand in hand with a violent struggle against whatever existing institutions it encountered.
See, I'm just not sure this hasn't happened. (I'm also not sure that's really correct of new religions but that's a different question.) The violence might involve more ritual, more PR, less violent, but I don't think it's correct to say that either the BLM-era protests or the recent anti-ICE protests were entirely nonviolent. And you can trace the violent strain in contemporary American left-wing thinking back further, at least to the extremely violent 1970s "Days of Rage" if not before.
Shrike
4d ago
Thank you! I will admit to not being very familiar with all of that.
What I do find interesting about Ireland was how relatively little violence separatists had to engage in to succeed. There were relatively few deaths - it's been a while, but I seem to recall looking up the per capita homicide rate and finding that it was lower than in a major US metro area at the same time (although the IRA favored bombs, which tend to maim many more than they kill, so one could argue that looking at deaths is understating the violence.) If the Quebecois were able to get something meaningful that seems like another data point in that direction.
Shrike
4d ago
I agree with most of this, but I think one of the primary failure modes of the "those guys are evil and want to kill me" line of reasoning is that, within a single modern day society, those other guys can't kill you.
I mean - I agree that people overfit the "those guys are evil and want to kill me" model, but I absolutely don't agree that violence is a thing of the past.
I don't know what a modern resolution to this type of schism looks like.
Well, it can look like full-scale socio-cultural domination by one side by measures short of disorganized violence, until the other side is either decisively beaten or practically driven extinct or at least underground by social pressure and/or state action ("legitimate violence.") The Civil Rights Movement achieved this sort of victory (at least for a time - perhaps not for all time, however).
But I think modern western societies are fully capable of flipping to violence to resolve the problem instead. Ireland's independence was a successful use of this; less successful attempts, such as by Puerto Rican or Quebecois separatists, didn't manage to garner enough support and critical mass and are thus not really remembered as anything besides some low level terrorist violence.
Shrike
4d ago
The inability to properly simulate the world as individual actors with different views and values even when they're allied together into groups is one major cause of this.
To extend this a little bit, though, if we're going to care about proper modeling, I think it's important to understand that there are forces pushing individuals towards tribalism besides idiocy.
I think there's this idea that tribalism is, basically, ancient grug-style lizard-brained thinking, and that in more recent and temperate times we've learned that trade and cooperation is better through the use of our ascended reasoning faculties, but due to the lizard hindbrain, or something, tribalism keeps rearing its ugly head.
However this story is mostly nonsense. About as far back as you can go in the historical record, you find that people were extremely well aware that trade and cooperation were extremely lucrative. Archeologists are continually surprised at the length and depth of ancient trade networks. The ability to model minds that have different values and priorities to search out modes of cooperation isn't a new innovation; it's a very old pattern of human behavior.
Tribalistic thinking exists because sometimes the other tribe actually does want to kill you.
And when this happens, switching over to a simplified model of "those guys are evil and want to kill me" is useful because modeling other minds requires a lot of cognitive bandwidth and your primary cognitive concern right now is to get and not get got.
Furthermore, switching back out from that model to a cooperate-trade-understand mentality as soon as you start winning and the other guys show up and say "we're not that different, you and I, don't all our mothers love us? This is all a misunderstanding, we just want to trade and live peaceably" is a profound failure to model other minds, because that's the oldest trick in the book and if you don't model the possibility that the other guy is actually evil and still wants to kill you and part of his evil murderous intent extends to "lying to you" you're a sucker.
Sometimes, tribalistic idiot types overfit the "evil and wants to kill me" explanation, dismiss the possibility that it was all a big misunderstanding, and perpetuate conflict unnecessarily. Sometimes, ascended galaxy-brained intelligent times underfit the "evil and wants to kill me" explanation, eagerly agree that it was all a big misunderstanding, and are promptly killed by their evil enemies.
The highest path of wisdom is to understand others so thoroughly that you can understand when the enemy actually wants to kill you and when they genuinely want to find the path to peace. But this means that the wise person sometimes sounds no different than the naive cooperators...and that sometimes he sounds no different than the idiotic tribalists.
Finally, I think this model suggests why sometimes really smart people seem to become tribal idiots (or naive cooperators). If you put a ton mental work into understanding the other side, it's easy to just sit on your laurels and turn your mind towards winning the war/seizing the peace. As you point out, "the other side" is almost always comprised of different groups, and it is almost always in flux. This means that an accurate understanding of the other side, or your own, if not updated, can quickly become woefully insufficient. But building and maintaining an accurate model is time-consuming work, and it's no surprise that many smart people do not have the time or inclination to do so.
I don't know enough inside NASA baseball to say exactly when there seemed to be a fall-off, but I do seem to recall some screw-ups in the 1970s with the Mars probes. None of that stuff seems as severe as the SLS slow motion dumpster fire, but perhaps that's recency bias?
I have a loosely-held mental model that the Great Depression/New Deal/Second World War/GI Bill shook loose a lot of latent American talent and channeled it into the public sphere. That talent persisted until relatively recently! If you went into, say, the Department of Energy at 25 in 1950 and retired at 75, you worked until 2000. But (for a variety of reasons) there's been a talent decline (as well as a lot of restraint on administrative action) since then, and it's manifested in a gradual way over time as competent people are, more often than not, replaced by less competent people.
I reckon that's an oversimplication at best but I do think it makes sense.
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