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There’s an interesting staff writer at The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper, who among other things is a sort of rare left-wing Black critic of left-wing academia (a sort of “origin story” here). When interviewed about said piece, and touching also on his opinions about the Arday scandal and aftermath, he was posed this question about not playing into the hands of conservative critics of left-wing academia (and left-wingers more broadly):
This had me thinking about “emergencyism” more broadly. I’m kind of coming around to the idea that this particular brainworm is, at risk of “both-sideism”, a pretty fundamental and widespread issue. On the left we have the above position. On the right we have a parallel idea that Republicans and Trump specifically only might have this small window of time to ‘correct’ and even avenge mistakes of the past, so they need to be thorough and extreme in order to punish those who allegedly schemed against them, abused institutional trends or structure for years, or implemented anything vaguely woke-sounding. Potentially even moderates, maybe they vote in low quality but comparatively “harmless” candidates for office too much (especially in the primary phase, to count).
Emergencies of course are dangerous, historically speaking. While there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, we still note examples as classic as the Reichstag fire and associated “emergencies”, Sulla in Roman times, various military juntas; we have Japanese internment, post-9/11 AUMF abuse (especially post-Iraq), assorted Cold War surveillance abuses, etc locally. At least top of my head, IRL they are legion. Real emergencies, abused.
Yet emergencyism as depicted is actually about moral or political panics, and the lowered self-standards that can accompany them. We’re talking here about witch trials, McCarthyism, satanic panic, Iraq WMDs, super predator fears, so on.
Harper himself I think feels a bit extra jaded because in his telling, excessive and even immoral racial justice drives occurred simultaneously with him getting tenure as a university professor and also the university’s unionization drive failing (crushed in part by the same firm Amazon used to suppress their own).
Properly, emergencyism seems to be a subset of a type of blatant partisanship, which is interesting because most of the advocates likely don’t think of themselves as partisans. Potentially it’s also downstream of bad-faith politics. However I tend to think that that’s too convenient an excuse. Most people aren’t actually thinking about things in terms of game theory. And ultimately this is not about “the other side” - it’s about YOU. What are MY morals? Obviously morals are cheap until challenged, and aren’t worth much if they never survive a challenge. It takes courage for a political group to embark on a course of self-betterment even in the face of dastardly opposition. Right?
Or are we totally in a post-moral political hellscape where might makes right and morals are dead?
(And more topically - do you agree that emergencyism is a thing on the left, and do you think it’s a thing on the right two, or that’s the wrong lens to use to make sense of the Trumpist blob?)
I agree with your above point that emergencyism is a big thing on the left. I think it’s also a pretty big thing on the right. It being a pretty big thing on both sides can be seen very clearly in both the words and actions of actors on both sides.
Where I want to push back though is on the idea that it’s just “might makes right” though. While naked self interest colors the ideology and actions of all men, I can imagine very few “emergencyists” so defined solely or even mainly justifying their actions with it. I think energencyism typically is justified in two flavors, often simultaneously:
Sulla is a great example of #1: the populares were legitimately breaking the law and literally murdering large numbers of people. It was an emergency. At the same time, many Optimates were willing to break the law to support senatorial power, so they were sneakily an example of #2. Marius and the populares generally argued, and acted in accordance with, both #1 and #2.
One thing I notice rhetorically, both now and back in Sulla’s time, is that when using rhetoric people who often believe #2 cite #1 since it’s the more popular position. You’ll notice this with most revolutions too: typically the first wave cites legality and says “we recognize the general structure of society, but there is an emergency that breaks the social contract so we have to act outside the social contract to” and only later on, and especially if things radicalize like in the French and Russian cases, do you have leaders only saying 2.
In the modern US case you do have enough people who believe #2 to make a difference, and even more who believe #1 and/or a combo of the two. Once you have enough #2 and #1 actors, the rules are in whole or in part no longer in force so emergencyism is a self fulfilling prophecy.
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Suppose the democrats win the next election or two pretty decisively, and then legalize and grant voting rights to a few dozen million illegal immigrants.
Do you think this is an unlikely thing for the Democrats to do, given the statements and revealed preferences of their base, leadership and elite class?
Likely or not, Do you think that this is a valid policy option within the scope of what we ought to consider business-as-usual politics? What do you think the consequences would be on subsequent elections? What do you think the consequences would be in terms of America as a going sociopolitical concern over the next ten or twenty years?
If Trump had been killed in Butler, an event all evidence indicates was avoided by a very small margin and on pure chance, what do you think the likely consequences would have been?
If Red Tribe begins deploying lawless violence as a deliberate political strategy, what do you think the likely consequences will be?
That's certainly my position. Appeals to morality in the field of politics under current conditions are an obscenity.
That Red Tribe is crushed, violently.
By who, and how?
By the men of Red Tribe who remain in the official institutions, as directed by Blue. Police, FBI, military. Most of Red is extremely respectful of the trappings of authority, which Blue has.
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This is a very tedious line of questioning. @The_Nybbler and @CapitolRoom think Blues have an insurmountable monopoly on force, that the police and military will reliably follow orders, and that Red Tribe itself is incapable of significant lawless violence. Whenever I mention that serious violence is a potential future, one or both of them pipes up to state the above. It's annoying, but such is life.
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There's a pretty infamous StoneToss comic about "what if the shoe was on the other foot", in case the whole Flight 93 Election spiel wasn't enough of an example of emergencyism on the right. So that's a true matter.
One trouble is that it's hard to tell faux emergencyism from genuine emergencies. StoneToss's author has not, notably, been shot in the back of the head. Hillary Clinton has not driven an aircraft into a government building. Trump has not been lynching any academics.
At the same time, anti-immigration activists reasonably expect a mass amnesty and citizenship drive, since that's what immigration maximalists say that's what they want, and see 10m-40m new citizens as making their positions untenable for a generation directly, in a self-reinforcing way. Trump fans -- and even haters -- can notice that the man was nearly assassinated, had several other serious assassination attempts, and had every other available stop pulled to try and prevent him from having a fair election, including a court order to not count already-cast ballots. Japanese Internment was driven in no small part by the Ni'ihau incident and it doesn't take a paranoid schizophrenic to think about the military ramifications, super-predator theory had a burgeoning set of extremely shocking juvenile violence, there were actual paid-by-Soviet communists even if McCarthyism didn't seem to care about focusing on them, so on.
I'm probably the softer side of the anti-academics. My positive vision for the future involves shoveling the contents of academic journals through an LLM, checking responses for phrases like "The fact that nobody on a team that includes both emergency physicians and biomedical engineers raised this concern suggests nobody stopped to think about it, which is a different kind of failure than not knowing", and then rubbing both the authors and reviewers' noses in it.
But I want that because I think it is an emergency for a sizable fraction of academic researchers, and there's a lot of people who want to go quite a lot further.
And then on the gripping hand, it's very unlikely that Ni'ihau would have generalized to an entire genetic populations, super-predatory theory didn't even have a good model for what was driving juvenile violence and was directionally wrong about what the future held (even if the revisionist take is depending on statistics that are massaged to hell and back), and McCarthyism postdated actual bad acts like the Rosenbergs and instead seemed to focus on useful idiots being useful idiots. Dilulio's estimates of 30k hyperviolent inner-city youths would have been bad, but it would have been the 1980s-bad, not The Purge. An alternate universe where Trump got Kirk'd on national television is a worse one, but it's worse in the sense of civil wars rather than worse in the sense of the conservative project being over.
The failure mode for the academics is reduced funding, loyalty oaths, and Kolmogorov complicity. Ignoring for now how much the same specific people say isn't a big deal for their opponents, this isn't the end of the world.
Which, to be fair to the emergencyists, isn't their red line. And there clearly should be red lines: no matter how much 'the constitution isn't a suicide pact' turned into a really stupid applause light, both as a matter of law and morals, everyone had principles that aren't their ultimate principle, and yet still matter. I'll pick up litter, but I won't run across highway traffic to do so. I'll oppose being rude, but I won't shoot someone solely for being rude.
Meanwhile, it's easy to show how everyone else is drawing unprincipled exceptions that only cover their own or limit their enemies, or taking legal formalism to extremes, and very hard to notice when you are yourself.
I dunno. It's a category that reals, but it doesn't really illuminate.
Link?
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, here.
Uh... I can't find an original link, so on investigation it looks to have been a meme edit. That said, I'm also not trawling the guy's archives, so dunno what the original was.
There's been a prolonged effort in the aftermath of the replication crisis to attempt various semi-automated 'this paper looks scuzzy' approaches across publicly available papers. A small portion have been from people like Elisabeth Bik, where a combination of domain knowledge and an extremely precise eye have shown clear evidence of photoshopped data. Historically, though, most of these have relied on things like granularity mismatches (eg, sample of 20 with a x3% result) or other discipline-neutral tricks. Even here, there's a lot of dependence on tips and snitches, because it's still somewhat manual and requires some expertise, but in theory anyone with Excel and moderate training on simple statistics can do it. Sometimes they'll get lucky and study authors will publish their data, and that can be validated too, but often then it's only being examined to check for the shallowest level of scrutiny. It makes sense to focus on these shallow, indirect tests, since no one can be an expert in a thousand different topics at once to focus on field-specific problems.
But now there's a machine that's very good at providing an expert's knowledge in a thousand different topics, and you can ask things like 'hey, do all the numbers in this article match the tables' or 'does this conclusion follow the data' or 'what's the noise level on these sensors look like' or 'does this experimental setup make sense'. It's not a hundred percent, and you'll need human or expert review, but I think you could filter a million papers down at 95% accuracy without needing a datacenter of your own.
Some number, which I hope is pretty small, are just going to be frauds, or fakes, or such a clear math or chemistry or physics error that it's academic misconduct, no question. Abstracts that give the opposite conclusion as the data, mechanical assemblies that couldn't exist, electrical systems that wouldn't work, numbers or statistics that couldn't possibly have an honest source, or just paper mills. These are the sort of things that sometimes come to light today, and will probably be higher-visibility under this sort of scrutiny, but unless they're extraordinarily common, it's a scandal about that researcher or that paper or that university-in-name-only.
The machines aren't going to stop, there.
A lot of published, peer-reviewed, serious journal papers are, separately, junk. Bad math, bad statistics, bad experimental design, failed understandings of other papers, misunderstandings of what a sensor measures, efforts that are editorial stapled onto a physics truism or a splashing a firehose of raw data and skipping the Bonferroni correction and grabbing the first P<0.05, what Gelman calls the 'piranha problem', that sort of thing. They aren't actual academic misconduct: there's no falsified data or making up experiments that weren't run or replacing numbers on a spreadsheet or intentionally lying. It's just trash: something that only applies to this particular experimental configuration, claims to say things about the broader world, and doesn't have any robust data to support its conclusions, and gives a careful reader a half-dozen reasons to know that the data isn't strong enough to support any claim about the broader world.
My current favorite example is from a fracture trial of a bone that was prepared by completely immersing the bone in 132 degree Celsius a ten-liter vat of melted oil-based synthetic ballistics gel, until the gel cooled in a fridge, and then used the bone as a live human analog without any caveats about what the preparation might have done to the bone's collagen. I can completely believe that the experiment was done, and measured as faithfully as the instrumentation allowed. I can also tell you it's completely invalid as a comparison, in ways that the experts in the trial had been trained on, and as is well-established by literature focused on autoclaving bone. Worse, in a way that anyone who's prepared bone stock at home could explain. It's something a 27B param local model can catch if asked to think about , and six trained experts and a handful of peer reviewers didn't think about.
That doesn't mean the answer they got was wrong, which is one of the really damning things. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, after all. It's possible a properly-prepared bone would have fractured under the same conditions, or a validation bone prepared the same way might have shown close-enough properties, or imaging of the bone before the trial to validate its condition. But they didn't do any of those things.
These people are producing papers and doing experiments. They're probably very good at it! The system right now just doesn't care if the study applies to anything outside of their singular test rig, while at the same time depending on people generalizing the research to actual human lives.
I don't know how big the scale of this problem is. It's clearly not all academic research, because academia does produce outcomes like new technologies and generalizable knowledge, and even sociology or history shows some data that a novice can review and find credible. But it's big enough that I can find examples without having to dig through a hundred papers, or focus on the most marginal paper mill.
There's an old joke that if you owe someone a thousand bucks you can't pay, you have a problem; if you owe the bank 100 million you can't pay, the bank has a problem; if you owe the bank 100 billion you can't pay, the economy has a problem.
I think there's something equivalent going on in a number of academic fields. If one in a twenty researchers have a couple meaningless academic papers each, that's a wonderful lesson learned and a little embarrassing and we'll feel a little bad for the cancer patients. If one in a twenty researchers have had, as a majority of their academic output, papers that mean nothing, that's a big problem for research institutions across the planet who've been telling funders and regulators that their independence was critical to efficiency discover the nature of the world, the schools aren't going to be able to use that argument anymore, among other problems. If one in five researchers are majority-slop, it's not the researchers or the schools that have a problem; it's the world.
Even if we end up in the optimistic one-in-twenty-making-mistakes world, I'm not the only person that's going to notice it. I might hope that these people will suddenly become more fastidious about their works, but Ron DeSantis is not going to think hope is a plan. At best, that's going to involve a lot of strong-armed oversight and coercive review in Red States. More plausibly, it's going to be a drastic redirection of funding away from some fields perceived as either dishonest, particularly inaccurate, or particularly easy or impossible to review.
Pessimistically, the last thirty years of science is going to get eviscerated, possibly somewhat literally.
But it's not going to get better by ignoring it.
The original version portrays a libertarian saying:
I do find it funny that the one biggest problem with libertarianism is the paradox (though admittedly it's true for all of them) that yes, people like that are more suited to leadership (in the sense that they know better than anyone else that they need to make sure there's enough room and tolerance of risk to keep future options open, rather than other systems/leaders that are openly proud of the fact they eat their seed corn) than basically anyone else... except for the fact they don't want to (either it's not lucrative enough, since being better than everyone else usually means you get paid better too), and/or are just as worried about the inevitable revolution of the not-so-worthy as anyone else when it comes to building systems and organizations that would making space for those like them in the future.
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Ah, thanks. Think the original supports the emergencyist-exist and "stonetoss author hasn't been shot in the head yet" conclusion, too.
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The Flight 93 election thesis would support the emergencyism of the Right.
But I don't see it as the central tendency of the Trumpist blob. That's much more personalistic, and Trump himself doesn't seem to think of the political situation as an emergency. He has fits of pique and rhetorical nastiness, but to get on his good side all you need to do is be a bit friendly and he rolls over like a puppy hoping for a belly rub. That's not someone worried about the fate of the Republic. And the Right mostly follows his cues.
One thing, though: you can name emergencies identified by thinkers on both political sides, and they're all wrong. The US would muddle through those. But there is an eminent existential emergency, and neither side is seriously grappling with it: AI. Right now it's just an amorphous recognition that something big is coming, manifested by the public into complaints about data centers drinking all the world's water. But as it becomes more concrete, we are going to see a rapid shift away from our current preoccupations.
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I once read an article criticising Naomi Klein, in which the author pointed out that, in 2007, Klein published a book called The Shock Doctrine, whose central thesis was a strategy called "disaster capitalism", in which political actors exploit the chaos of natural disasters, wars, and other crises to push through unpopular policies such as deregulation and privatization. In her subsequent book, This Changes Everything, Klein argued that the climate crisis cannot be addressed in the current era of neoliberalism, and hence that the only solution is to instate Full Communism.
Huh. Political actors exploit the chaos caused by natural disasters to implement unpopular economic policies, you say?
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I find this attitude among journalists and academics - i.e. roles in society that are purported to be about seeking and publicizing truth and facts (obviously trade secrets and whatnot being exceptions) - to be infuriating. If you actually have a belief that these things are important, one of the first things that you should be willing to ignore and marginalize are your own personal partisan biases and ideological commitments, because any amount of education should make it obvious that those are some of the most powerful forces that drive one's behavior into irrational and incorrect directions. As such, if some truth or fact would "feeding into" the enemies' campaign, I should embrace it and be even more gung-ho about investigating it and publicizing it. That's the only way that I can credibly claim to care about discovering and teaching truth, rather than to care about pushing forward my ideological biases while wearing academia as a skinsuit to make people believe that I'm searching for the truth.
If revealing and spreading some scientific truth would play into my enemies' hands, then I ought to play into my enemies' hands.
The corollary to this behavior is that the roles the academics and journalists purport to be holding is not the role they are actually holding; they are not about publicizing truth and facts, but about promoting their own side's positions. (You can see this also in the suspension of Cofnas over the Arday thing, where we get the infamous "academic freedom, but..." and of course nothing before the 'but' matters)
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I would agree that, broadly defined, emergencyism is pretty common. Perhaps it would be better to call it a "war mentality." Because for the most part, the rhetoric I have seen is framed along the lines of "this is necessary in light of the circumstances" as opposed to "this is only temporary," although the two arguments are really not all that different.
In any event, here's my question: Suppose you are dealing with a political opponent which has an emergencyist or war mentality towards your group. Rightly or wrongly, they see your group as a dire threat and they feel justified in doing what would otherwise be seen as pretty bad things in order to defeat you. Would you agree that under such circumstances, the rational thing to do is to adopt a similar mentality yourself?
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You rediscovered State of Fear by Michael Crichton only 2 decades later.
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Ironic, exactly what an authoritarian would say.
True emergencies exist and probably warrant more authoritarian leadership (it’s in many constitutions, e.g. the US president is also military leader). But to succeed in a true emergency the leader must be trusted by most subjects, and defer or resolve less urgent conflicts, e.g. offering large concessions on non-emergency issues (which should be most of them), and convincing that the emergency is real.
Neither party has done either. I’ll accept we’re in some sort of emergency (crazy politicians, Gen Z apathy, climate change and TFR collapse). I’m not remotely convinced a leader of any major party can lead us out.
And of course, this guy (attacking Arday criticism)’s fear is acting against himself. How will supporting Arday do anything against Trump authoritarianism? It seems like he has too much fear, blocking rationality. Although I think it really seems like he’s doing it for ingroup brownie points (maybe a raise or promotion).
You just brushed with a specific concept that emerged from Davos crowd in 2016, the specific term is polycrisis and they are in love with it since then. Like you mentioned, we have demographic crisis, climate crisis, mental health crisis and everything in between and more. It is a feature, not a bug - some of these like climate crisis or demographic crisis are just new fact of life that will stay with us for our lifetimes.
Moreover there are micro panics, this week it is the wife that strangled her three kids, and it seems that 10% of the world knows about it. Next week it will be something else. It is just a constant barrage of various issues, sense of endless anxiety that triggers basic psychological programming.
Everything is relative. How much of a state of emergency are we in? Is the doomsday clock ten seconds to midnight? Five milliseconds? And what does that mean in real time?
Real emergency powers, like involuntary confinement for suicide, make the situation better in the short term but worse in the medium to long term, point being there will be no long term if not enacted. If the “emergency” is long, the solution better work as long, or you just wasted time, in an emergency no less.
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This may be my own semantic skill issue, but it does seem like your shortening of his "state of emergency"ism to just 'emergencyism' loses something (even if you were trying to keep the idea but make the term more usable). It sounded like this concept was actually about there not even really being any emergency at all -- just the existence of political opposition as a boogeyman, which means all times can be characterized as being in a generalized potential state of emergency such that we can't afford to police political allies [right now]. Hence the classic example "this is the most important election of our lifetime, not the time to be overly-principled" every cycle.
Certainly seems like everyone partakes in this to varying degrees, although the anti-Trump era is characterized by a particularly zealous version of it for whatever reason. To find anyone avoiding the brainworm, you'd be looking for the heterodox/heretical people willing to be disagreeable (or at least those willing to talk to them). Or I suppose you'd be looking for a legit emergency, which may subjectively reach the level of being worth piping down and falling in line.
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