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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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New Twitter file dropped that I think touches on a few live wires of the culture war.

First, media quality. Scott, Richard H., and Bryan Caplan all somewhat recently have posts out relating to the media. Only Caplan has taken a really negative view. In the new Twitter files, it seems that media without much scrutiny amplified Hamilton68; a project that appears to without evidence slander mostly anti right political opponents as Russian agents. This was a big complaint against Scott and Richard — when the media gets something wrong, it is generally a big thing and seemingly in one direction. This was big because it was used to tar (or further tar) many political actors with links to Russia; notably the then President of the US.

Second, misinformation. The argument presented by and large by progressives is that misinformation must be caught back against aggressively by social media because it pollutes our political system. Yet this article shows how easily “misinformation” is really short hand for “political beliefs I disagree with.” Matt T. compared it to McCarthy. The biggest difference I see is that Joe was actually correct about his targets being communists (doesn’t follow that Joe’s actions were correct). Here, it seems the factual claim (Russian bots / agents) are just wrong.

Third, Robin Hanson just produced a piece discussing the difference between elite and expert. The expert focuses on details and logic; the elite looks for the trees and how to navigate social (ie political) situations. The internal Twitter debates see the expert class somewhat at war with the elite class.

Anyhow, let me know your thoughts! Link to the story. https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton

There's a pattern you'll see a lot in certain issues -- gun control and environmental issues, for instance -- where a previously little-known group is suddenly accepted as the unquestioned expert on the topic by the media. I interpret this as the Cathedral (or whatever you want to call it; I usually use "Left, Inc.") spinning up a new part of itself for the purpose of providing backing for the narrative that it has decided on. I suspect this is what was going on here; the Hamilton68 project was spun up by the same people who directed the media to pay attention to it, for the purpose of spreading the Russian collusion stories.

Not really, the central point of the Moldbuggian Cathedral concept is that it's emergent rather than coordinated:

The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.

...

So it’s not just that everyone—at least, everyone cool—is on the same page. It’s more like: everyone is reading the same book—at the same speed. No wonder all the peasants are seeing conspiracies in their motherfucking soup. If you saw a group of bright red dots move across the evening sky this way, what would you think they were? Pigeons? Remote-controlled pigeons, illuminated by lasers? Sometimes even Occam is baffled.

...

It is not hard to see why, in the lecture halls and newsrooms, dominant ideas tend to outcompete recessive ideas. A dominant idea is an idea that tends to benefit you and your friends. A dominant idea will be especially popular with your friends and former students in the civil service, because it gives them more work and more power.

And a recessive idea, of course, is the opposite of all these things. A climate scientist who holds the recessive idea of climate denialism is saying to his colleagues and the whole world: climate science is not important. Is it surprising—in the Bayesian sense— that a consensus of climate scientists would conclude that climate science matters?

Moldbug's model has no predictive power over public choice theory or some generic conspiracy, and its allure lies precisely in stripping «The Cathedral», culturally close to him and his target audience (cough cough «dark elves»), of moral culpability inherent to conscious exercise of power while being aware of its consequences. If there is no genuine malice, we can hope to resolve our differences with another round of musical chairs, «reformalizing» power so that no perverse incentives remain and hobbits can return to their bucolic farms.

Much the same can be said of the brain-addled Memetic theory of politics in general, which is buttressed by Mistake theory (because Scott, of course, is a... half-dark elf himself, despite his polite differences with neoreactionaries, and also refuses to see simple malice in blue tribe). Memes and fads very much exist, but they are fickle epiphenomena of mass culture; consequential ideologies and even rhetorical frameworks that are perpetuated by human organizations have unlimited lifespans, rely on scholarship vastly more complex and cerebral than their "memetic" payload, and follow from material interests of self-aware groups.

The practical nonexistence of memes is one of the most underrated thoughts of our friend Julius, which he regrettably had not argued for with sufficient finesse.