The Tools of Reason

Chapter 3 of Pinker’s Rationality (2021) begins a 7-chapter tour through the tools of reason:

Logic and Critical Thinking

Probability and Randomness

Beliefs and Evidence (Bayesian Reasoning)

Risk and Reward (Rational Choice and Expected Utility)

Hits and False Alarms (Signal Detection and Statistical Decision Theory)

Self and Others (Game Theory)

Correlation and Causation

The final two chapters reach the conclusion that humanity has indeed entered an epistemic crisis.

Logic and critical thinking are important to avoid errors in reasoning.  This, in turn, avoids bad decisions and more importantly can sweep away bad, destructive ideas like ‘wokeism’, now dangerously prevalent in mainstream media and academia. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/woke-racialism-is-a-clear-and-present-danger-to-the-american-system/

Pinker explains formal logic but emphasizes informal fallacies – and there are a lot of them.  These fallacies have overtaken large swaths of academia and journalism, who now apply them with gusto because they wrongly perceive their mission not as seeking knowledge but instead as advancing social justice.  They should read the books we’re studying.

Logic is an important tool but rationality can never be reduced to just logic because:

1. There is a fundamental distinction between logical propositions and empirical ones;
2. Formal logic is limited to symbols, blind to the content of the propositions;
3. Knowledge that matters is not black and white – truth can be fuzzy, shades of grey –about family resemblance and categories instead of yes or no.

Pinker ends chapter 3 with a fascinating discussion of pattern association, artificial intelligence and deep machine learning.

Chapter 4 of Rationality is Probability and Randomness.  It reviews several interpretations of what probability means, then parses through probability estimation problems like the availability heuristic (the mind ranks things we see more often as more probable) and common probability errors.  The most interesting section explains public outrage and over reaction to traumatic world events from shark attacks, terrorism, plane crashes, to school and police shootings.

The 2020 killing of George Floyd by a white police officer led to violent riots, the Rittenhouse case nonsense and sudden adoption of a radical academic doctrine, Critical Race Theory, by universities, journalists and corporations.  Pinker writes:  “Yet as with terrorism and school shootings, the numbers are surprising.  A total of 65 unarmed American of all races are killed by the police in an average year, of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims”. (p.123).

Game Theory (chapter 8) is the tool of reason needed to understand what Thomas Schelling identified in the 1960s as a communal outrage event – “a flagrant, widely witnessed attack upon a member or symbol of a collective.  This inspires the mainstream victim narrative:  a moralized allegory in which a harmful act is sanctified, the damage consecrated as irreparable and unforgivable.  The goal of the narrative is not accuracy but solidarity.  Picking nits about what actually happened is seen as not just irrelevant but sacrilegious or treasonous.” (p. 124, endnote 28)

Racial and gender ideologies as well as wealth redistribution arguments are highly illogical, as Mr. Spock would say.  They only way they make sense is if you are a conflict theory (as opposed to mistake theory) person who sees the world not rationally but through a systemic oppression-victimhood narrative.

Next week, we move on to Bayesian Reasoning.  Happy Thanksgiving from the War Chest.

Shut Up, He Explained

Chapter 1 of Steven Pinker’s new book, Rationality (2021), describes why humans evolved rationality, then goes over some brain teasers and why most people get them wrong at first.  Chapter 2 explains the reason for reason (to pursue goals) and pithily smacks down anyone arguing against reason.  “When it comes to arguing against reason, as soon as you show up, you lose…rationality is the measure by which we should accept beliefs” – being against reason is, by definition, unreasonable.

People should embrace epistemic humility and objective truth.  Even though no one can ever know objective truth completely, we should pursue it – follow reason.  People who oppose reason (as a white male tool of oppression for example), cancelling those who disagree so they can impose progressive beliefs by force, are irrational and immoral.  “There can be no tradeoff between rationality and social justice or any other moral or political cause”.  ‘Shut up’ is not an explanation.

After delving into higher-order rationality, when it’s rational to be irrational or intentionally ignorant (what Scott Alexander calls circumscribed epistemic learned helplessness), Pinker discusses forbidden knowledge (thought taboos supposedly too evil to think).  He concludes the chapter with a discussion of morality and reason.  The core of morality is The Golden Rule.  If everyone agrees on not hurting others, everyone wins.  Morality is reasonable.

The final pages of chapter 2 explains that reason is recursive.  You can reason about reason and then reason about that, and then continue on, without limit.  That’s what intelligent thinking humans do.  The linguist Noam Chomsky asserts that the essence of language is recursion.  A phrase can contain an example of itself, ad infinitum.  We can talk not only of my dog but also of my mother’s friend’s husband’s aunt’s dog.  Pinker writes:  “We would not have evolved the ability to speak phrases embedded in phrases if we did not have the ability to think thoughts embedded in thoughts.”  The only way to argue against reason, is to use reason, that is, to step back, look at how it is being applied or misapplied and then reach a factual or moral conclusion.

Pinker uses comics throughout the book.  This Dilbert strip illustrates a humorous point:

Knowledge Crisis

Humanity is in the midst of a knowledge crisis – a time of difficulty, trouble and danger, in which truth and rationality are being attacked, undermined or just brushed aside.  Our institutions (academia, government, media) have let us down.  They have been infected by the mind virus of “wokeism”.  Conversations about rational truth are now primarily outside of those decaying institutions (on blogs, thinktanks and books).  These conversations are much more interesting, meaningful and oriented towards finding truth than inside our crumbling institutions, which continue to lose credibility every day.

What happened?  We needed 3 books published this year to save Meritocracy from disrepute.  We’ll need 4 books to save Rationality from being degraded by the biased and arrogant woke.   

1. Rationality – What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021) by Steven Pinker
2. The Constitution of Knowledge – A Defense of Truth (2021) by Jonathan Rauch
3. The Bias That Divides Us – The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking (2021) by Keith E. Stanovich
4. The Scout Mindset – Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t (2021) by Julia Galef

That last book was so important to the rationalist community that an outline of it was posted on their website right after it was published.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yFJ7vCjefBxnTchmG/outline-of-galef-s-scout-mindset

And the author of the third book just reviewed the first book (Pinker cites Stanovich often because Myside bias is at the core of what’s wrong with today’s cognitive elite):

https://quillette.com/2021/11/08/the-need-for-rationality-in-a-hostile-world/

We’ll start with Pinker’s new book.  That will get our rationality engines revving and drive us deeply into the ongoing knowledge storm. Chapter 10 of Rationality (2021), What’s Wrong With People?, begins:  “This is the chapter most of you have been waiting for.  I know this from conversations and correspondence.  As soon as I mention the topic of rationality, people ask me why humanity appears to be losing its mind”.  In chapter 11, Why Rationality Matters, Pinker gives a nod to Scott Alexander “For a trenchant analysis of ‘conflict versus mistake’ as drivers of human progress” (endnote 2).  Recall Scott helped us understand why so many supposedly smart people reject Meritocracy, even though it is rational, moral and how humans actually allocate scarce resources.

Let us embark on a fascinating journey through intelligent cognition and its malevolent institutional enemies.  But first, here’s an article with an explanation of why academics are unwilling to be honest and open minded (the article is more charitable than I’m going to be – it angers me that academics disregard truth in pursuit of social activism – blatantly violating their purpose and duty to society):

https://quillette.com/2021/11/05/academias-identity-crisis/

And finally, The Grumpy Economist is as fed up as I am about all this wokeness:

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/11/woke-week.html#more

Squid Game

The new Netflix smash hit Squid Game is well timed.  I’ve been researching and writing on Meritocracy for 30 weeks now, since 4/6/21, scouring hundreds of resources and delving into 3 new books on it and then bam! On 9/17/21 a violent dystopic South Korean drama captures the attention of 142 million households in its first 4 weeks, which criticizes Meritocracy.

https://theconversation.com/why-squid-game-is-actually-a-critique-of-meritocracy-170311

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/23/opinions/squid-game-netflix-why-americans-are-obsessed-lowe/index.html

There are plenty of anti-capitalism rants going on now about Squid Game but I’m more interested in serious critiques (and defenses) of Meritocracy, so we now turn to the final chapter of The Aristocracy of Talent (2021).    

Wooldridge concludes correctly that Meritocracy is undoubtedly the golden ticket to prosperity.  Countries and companies that embrace it succeed, while those that reject it fail.  The information revolution made Meritocracy’s ‘secret sauce’* even more potent.  The most salient objection to Meritocracy is that the talented don’t deserve their talents.  We have to wade into the deep murky waters of moral philosophy to understand the arguments from John Rawls, Rousseau, Michael Sandel and Freddie DeBoer regarding deservedness.  They all argue that it is unfair to reward people who are lucky enough to be born intelligent and hard-working.  But that moral reasoning is flawed – it’s a slippery slope, throw the baby out with the bathwater, all-or-nothing argument. 

Maybe people don’t deserve all the rewards for their success, talent and hard work, but they surely deserve some of them.  Few people are so naturally gifted that they don’t have to try to master a difficult subject or skill when they would rather be amusing themselves.  “Even young Mozart had to practice”.  Ignoring merit destroys incentives* and undermines the vital importance of markets.  Meritocracy is a sophisticated information gathering process, which reveals information about the most important of all economic resources:  Human capacity.

Wooldridge points out that the best argument for Meritocracy is not economic.  It’s moral.  He writes:  What distinguishes human beings from mere lumps of flesh and blood is the fact that we possess talents and abilities that can be honed through hard work and commitment.  It’s certainly true that we are all of equal moral sub specie aeternitatis and that we possess a bundle of rights…not because we are clever or useful but because we are human.  On the other hand, people are also masters of their own fate and captains of their own souls.  They fashion themselves by struggling against the fell clutch of circumstance and the bludgeoning of chance.  Treating people as mere atoms of equality or victims of circumstances infantilizes them, and perhaps dehumanizes them.

He astutely points out a paradox.  Treating people as moral equals also means treating them as moral agents, who each exercise their moral agency.  Meritocracy is the ideal way of making sense of this paradox.  By encouraging people to discover and develop their talents, it encourages them to discover and develop what makes them human.  By rewarding people on the basis of those talents, it treats them with the respect they deserve, as self-governing individuals who are capable of dreaming their dreams and willing their fates while also enriching society as a whole.

The blowback comes from two opposite directions: 1) Meritocracy is still far from reality, yet to be achieved – the privileged still preserve all kinds of advantages; or 2) Meritocracy is too much for humanity to bear.  Objection 1 is addressed with more Meritocracy.  Objection 2 is Squid Game – vicious, cruel, winner-take-all competition.  It is ameliorated, however, by a wiser, more measured Meritocracy.  Wooldridge’s final pages offer suggestions. 

Meritocracy is efficient, moral and the way things are – same triple coincidence as property rights.  It’s not going anywhere despite TV show critiques and ideological revolts.  I’m moving on from Meritocracy to my next project, but first, I’m gonna go watch that new, weird, bang-bang, shoot ‘em up Netflix series that everyone is talking about.

* See pg. 370 – The more knowledge advances, the more effort and incentives matter.   

Right Rage

So far, we’ve seen that Meritocracy is an idea from Left wing thinkers who are now revolting against the concept.  Now, we turn to the Right.  Chapter 16 of The Aristocracy of Talent (2021) is Against Meritocracy:  The Revolt on the Right. The basket of deplorables is really pissed off! – seething with rage against the meritocratic machine.  Wooldridge anatomizes conservative anger against a cognitive elite that precipitated Trump and Brexit.

Unless you’re a smug leftist academic, the revolt from the right is much more understandable than the ‘everything is forever racist’, forced egalitarianism of the batty Left.  They are blind to their own bias, having seized control of almost every institution of significance, they muscle aside anyone who does not share their world view.  The working class and average professionals have had enough of their bullshit.  The roots of rage lies in hatred of “smarty-pants”, which is now even more vitriolic than class resentment.  Wooldridge illustrates it by imagining you’re a worker waiting in line for coffee:

You are heading to Starbucks in the morning, desperate for a cup of regular coffee before you start laying bricks, when a young person in LuluLemon yoga clothes cuts in front of you and orders a skinny no-foam extra-shot latte made with almond milk – for twenty people.  Then the line-cutter turns round and starts giving you a lecture on how you’re a sexist, racist bully who needs to check your privilege before speaking.

Elites have undermined their own authority and expertise to make good sensible judgments on behalf of the masses for the “common good”.  The Iraq War and the Financial Crisis of 2008 demonstrate that experts can make decisions on things profoundly effecting people’s lives, and then get it completely wrong.

The Right’s rage is not a Marxist class struggle.  Cultural populism has trumped economic populism.  It’s a battle for status and respect, not wealth.  Their revolt is an appeal for attention:  “poorer people are grabbing meritocrats by the lapels and saying:, ‘Listen to me:  I’ve got something to say as well’.  The anger is exacerbated by the Elites’ condescension.  People have had enough of experts.  They are sick and tired of the self-satisfied snobs in government, media and academia looking down on them.  Average Joes everywhere (not just blue-collar workers but small business owners, teachers, lawyers, etc.) are saying “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Next week, we jump to the conclusion of Wooldridge’s book and to Squid Game.

Is Meritocracy Broken?

Chapter 15 of The Aristocracy of Talent (2021) is The Corruption of Meritocracy.  Kevin Williamson has an insightful piece on Meritocracy debasement, or as he puts it, the “ugly, stupid, vicious populism that has overtaken our politics”:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/what-if-there-is-no-meritocracy/

Wooldridge explains the sweeping changes in cultural attitudes towards money as a measure of merit.  After marrying each other, the rich find clever ways of securing educational privilege for their children.  The widening divide between classes is extraordinary and growing at an accelerating pace.  It drives not only an economic wedge between people but also a health and life expectancy wedge.  The deaths of despair (suicide, drugs, alcohol, poor health habits) and miserable lives documented in, for example, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016) are sad, very sad indeed.

But guess what?  It’s not my clients’ fault*, despite writers who think otherwise.  For example, here’s an article on Matthew Stewart’s new book:

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22673605/upper-middle-class-meritocracy-matthew-stewart

Stewart wrote a June 2018 article in The Atlantic on the same argument, which I discussed here defending against accusation that we (the “semi-rich”) are evil dream hoarders.  So many can’t seem to grasp that we are each independent economic and moral agents playing the cards we’re dealt.  Today’s tragedy of the commons is terrible, but it is rational and moral – allow me to explain in the coming months as we embark on a journey through the current epistemic crisis being documented in a handful of perceptive new books.

Marxist Freddie deBoer (who I enjoy reading) writes that the present order is deeply immoral and that revolutionary change is impossible under current conditions.  But Meritocracy is moral** and not going anywhere.  Meritocary is not broken, it has just been corrupted by both the political Left and the political Right.

*Whose fault is it then?  I will argue in the coming months (via authors I cite) that it is the fault of our arrogant, biased cognitive elites who have become a menace to rationality and knowledge.  “Our nation is being led into affective polarization by cognitive elites”.  p. 141, Keith Stanich, The Bias That Divides Us (2021).

**What’s not moral is Ross Douthat’s Decadence (analyzed here 4/14/20-6/30/20) and Joel Kotkin’s Neo-Feudalism (analyzed here 7/7/20-9/1/20).

Good Intentions – Bad Ideas

Leftist ideas (Socialism/Communism) are immoral – not only rationally incoherent but murderous, ruinous, heinous at every attempt to implement them.  Wooldrige makes an interesting point in Chapter 14 of The Aristocracy of Talent (2021).  Meritocracy was initially an idea from the political Left.  It started as a philosophy meant to help the working class and lift up oppressed minorities.  But then the Left turned on its intellectual offspring – revolting against Meritocracy. 

In the 1950s researchers discovered the unprecedented expansion of public education had done little or nothing to improve the life chances of disadvantaged children.  A growing number of intellectuals then began turning against Meritocracy, concluding that the problem was not in the poor implementation of a good idea but in the idea itself.  Meritocracy was deemed a false god – a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.  Wooldrige points to three books from different disciplines to illustrate the mounting a case against Meritocracy:  Sociology – The Rise of Meritocracy (1958); Investigative Journalism – The Best and the Brightest (1972); and Philosophy – A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls book, which was the most damaging.

The wrongness of it all stems from the notion that it is possible to engineer distributive justice in society – not just equality of opportunity but equality of outcomes.  The cognitive wrong turn was believing that all individual differences are rooted in nurture rather than nature.  The Blank Slate Theory of human nature led arrogant intellectuals to think that reality is socially constructed (it’s not).  Thinkers like Michel Foucault tried to reverse the Enlightenment’s reliance on reason.  They are still trying to argue that individual liberty and reason don’t matter – that there are only collective solutions.  This brought us to today’s erroneous victim/entitlement culture of affirmative action, diversity/inclusion instead of reason. 

In the next chapter, we’ll see just how counterproductive the left-wing revolt against Meritocracy proved to be.

Natural Hierarchy

People are different – some are better than others – stronger, smarter, more virtuous, more skilled, harder working, whatever – just better from a competitive/comparison standpoint.  That shouldn’t be controversial.    The controversy is how Meritocracy rewards better humans – with power, wealth, self-esteem and authority.  There is an ongoing moral dispute.  The side attacking Meritocracy is dishonest, refusing to explain what would replace Meritocracy, or disingenuously denying the fact that that is what we have right now.

Chapter 10 of The Aristocracy of Talent (2021), is The United States and the Republic of Merit.  Meritocracy was baked in, hard-coded, deeply embedded into the founding philosophy of America.  Wooldridge does a nice job of demonstrating that with quotes from our Founding Fathers.  Thomas Jefferson was the most vigorous proponent of “natural aristocracy”.  They were all very explicit about it:  Here’s John Adams:

That all men are born to equal rights is true.  Every being has a right to his own, as clear, as moral, as sacred, as any other being has.  This is as indubitable as a moral government in the universe.  But to teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages, through life, is as gross fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French Revolution.

Woolddridge’s history of Meritocracy is the most thorough I’ve seen.  Chapters 11-13 provide the history of intelligence measurements that revolutionized all fields of inquiry.  Next week, we jump to the final 4 chapters and conclusion:  The Crisis of the Meritocracy.  It is the most interesting section of the book and provides a nice transition to my next project, which will be the crisis of knowledge.  Several books published this year all make a compelling case that truth and knowledge are under siege.  However, the fact that authors are calling out this fact is comforting, reassuring and a source of hope and optimism for free thought.  The rationalist community is winning.  Reality deniers are losing.

Here’s an article articulating the causes of the epistemic crisis – wrong ideas including:  1) Marxism (you’d think millions of dead people would undermine that one but I guess not); 2) Hyper Individualism (selfishness); 3) Postmodernism (knowledge is defined by the powerful to oppress others – there is no truth); and 4) Radical Collectivism (bad, destructive ideas like critical race theory and gender ideology).

https://quillette.com/2021/10/02/in-defense-of-good-power/

Non-meritocratic distribution of power and authority is dangerous and must be opposed.

British Knowledge

Chapter 9 of The Aristocracy of Talent (2021), “Britain and the Intellectual Aristocracy”, was informative because my studies of moral philosophy have focused on American history, law and economics.  I examined the heated argument between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke here from 12/5/17 to 1/30/18 in Yuval Levin’s The Great Debate (2014); and blogged through C. Bradly Thompson’s marvelous exploration of America’s founding philosophy and the moral underpinnings of The Declaration of Independence here from 12/17/19 to 3/24/20 in America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019).  I eagerly await his next book, The Ideological Origins of the American Constitution. 

When we’re done with Wooldridge’s book, I’ll cover multiple new books on the knowledge crisis humanity now faces.  Fortunately, two things are protecting us from the epistemic war:

1. Law – The U.S. Constitution
2. Truth – The Constitution of Knowledge (as author Jonathan Rauch dubs it)

English history was foundational for Meritocracy.  The Revolution of 1640 took an axe to hereditary monarch power.  And then a meritocratic breakthrough burst forth among British intellectuals in the 1700’s.  Wooldridge explores the developments that made the case for public education in the U.K. overwhelming.  He also points out that Meritocracy in the military became a matter of life and death.  English soldiers led by “buffoons, stupid and stubborn old men who had purchased their commissions” were slaughtered.  Merit changed military command for the better.

He goes on to explore the tension between Meritocracy and the liberal principle of limited government and low taxation.  Children’s opportunities should be determined by intellectual ability, not ability to pay.  Natural talent implies a moral claim for the State to provide education.  J.S. Mill abandoned his argument for a nightwatchman state because he couldn’t bear dunces advancing while geniuses flounder.  Mill also cautioned against too much Democracy – danger from moronic masses.  The chapter concludes with an early history of British Socialism – it was surprisingly meritocratic.  While liberals embraced the State haltingly (for education), Socialists embraced it with “indecent enthusiasm”. 

Wooldridge concludes the chapter by demonstrating that open competition is an instrument of moral improvement and efficiency.  Anti-meritocratic thought promotes the moral disease of dependency, instead of the moral virtue of self-reliance.  Meritocracy is inevitable because inequality is inevitable – justified and “sanctioned either by the mysterious powers of nature or the deserving merit of volition”.  Next week, we get to the best Republic of Merit – U.S.A.

European Enlightenment

What struck me as particularly compelling in Chapter 8 of The Aristocracy of Talent (2021) was how Enlightenment liberalism dovetails so beautifully with Meritocracy.  French Revolution philosophers framed the debate about human nature (which continues to rage on) and articulated the logical contradictions of an absolutist State.  Wooldridge references the vicious nature vs. nurture feud 3 times in the chapter.  Even today, some writers still believe that nurture is the only thing that matters (tabula rasa), despite logic and copious scientific evidence to the contrary.

https://quillette.com/2021/09/08/the-genetic-lottery-why-dna-matters-for-social-equality-a-review/

EDIT – here’s an important response to Harden and deBoer – meritocracy is a rabbit hole – let’s be careful:

https://quillette.com/2021/09/30/the-culture-war-is-coming-for-your-genes/

The distinction between artificial aristocracy (feudalism) and natural aristocracy (some people are smarter than others – sorry if that offends you) is critical because sweeping away artificial inequality quickly allows natural inequality to assert itself.  Wooldridge explains that Enlightenment thinkers talked mostly about virtue and talent at first, not merit, because virtue/talent is less controversial.  Talent was thought of as a “gift of nature, natural disposition or aptitude for certain things or ability”.  But eventually inequality discussions must get to merit – hard work and intelligence.  It’s an undeniable natural quality that varies wildly among humans – it matters.

Society will always be hierarchical because we’re all different.  Leftist levelers hate this fact and want to derogate mind and property.  The chapter concludes by noting that German philosophy was heavily influenced by the French Revolution.  Nietzsche was the consummate meritocratic thinker with his notion of the Übermensch.  Kant argued that intellectual merit is a form of property.  Government has a duty to protect people’s use of their talents in the same way it has a duty to protect their ownership of physical property.  The ability to own and exercise your talents is one of things that distinguishes a citizen with political rights from a mere subject.

Next week, we look closely at two countries in which Meritocracy achieved its greatest success – the U.S. and the U.K.