Some Groups Of People Who May Not 100% Deserve Our Eternal Scorn

Or “Contra A Convergence Of Lefty and Far-Right Twitter Making Fun Of The Same People”. I’ll mostly be using Current Affairs articles as foils, not because they’re especially bad, but because they’re especially good and well-written expressions of what many other people are saying. Sorry if this is a little snarky and maybe not 100% fair.

1. Celebrities Who Speak Out Against Donald Trump

No, celebrities are not going to single-handedly change the world. Yes, celebrities are often annoying, and almost by definition out-of-touch. Yes, a Democratic campaign needs to have some substance beyond “look, celebrities!”

But from the celebrities’ own point of view, they’re doing the best they can. If Kim Kardashian wants to help the cause, what do you expect her to do? Write policy white papers? Go door-to-door canvassing? Or would you rather she just stayed silent and didn’t do anything?

Also, I think the “out-of-touch” critique sort of misses the point. Unemployed high school dropouts aren’t going to read Paul Krugman editorials, and they might or might not go to Bernie Sanders rallies. But I guarantee they know who Kim Kardashian is. Now, maybe you don’t develop your opinions by listening to weird-looking people who seem to be famous for no reason, and maybe you’re proud of that fact. But judging by the amount of money people will pay celebrities to endorse their products, a lot of people do develop their opinions this way. And these people are probably the less-educated working-class folks whom the Democrats most need to reach.

Or maybe I’m just being classist and nobody listens to celebrities. Fine. I still think that a celebrity who speaks out about something they think is important is more virtuous than one who doesn’t. By all means criticize tone-deaf celebrities like Lena Dunham who “help” the cause by speaking up in offensive or counterproductive ways. But criticizing celebrities’ activism in general doesn’t seem like a good political strategy.

2. People Who Compare Political Events To Harry Potter

See eg here.

Comparing politics to your favorite legends is as old as politics and legends. Herodotus used an extended metaphor between the Persian invasions of his own time and the Trojan War. When King Edward IV took the English throne in 1461, all anybody could talk about was how it reminded them of King Arthur. John Dryden’s famous poem Absalom and Achitophel is a bizarrely complicated analogy of 17th-century English politics to an obscure Biblical story. Throughout American history people have compared King George to Pharaoh, Benedict Arnold to Judas, Abraham Lincoln to Moses, et cetera.

Well, how many people know who Achitophel is these days? Even Achilles is kind of pushing it. So we stick to what we know – and more important, what we expect everyone else will know too. And so we get Harry Potter.

“But a children’s book?” Look, guys, fantasy is what the masses actually like. They liked it in Classical Greece, where they had stories like Bellerophon riding a flying horse and fighting the Chimera. They liked it in medieval Britain, where they would talk about the Knights of the Round Table slaying dragons as they searched for the Holy Grail. The cultural norm where only kids are allowed to read fantasy guilt-free and everybody else has to read James Joyce is a weird blip in the literary record which is already being corrected. Besides, James Joyce makes for a much less interesting source of political metaphors (“The 2016 election was a lot like Finnegan’s Wake: I have no idea what just happened”)

Harry Potter is not the national mythology I would have chosen. Probably I would have gone for Lord of the Rings. I’m not sure we as a nation deserve The Silmarillion, but a man can dream.

But Harry Potter is at least better than some things (we could have ended out with our national consciousness being shaped by Twilight!), and the point is that comparing your politics to those of a more interesting fantasy world is a natural human urge and probably not indicative of some sort of horrible decay.

3. People Who Like Hamilton

See eg here.

Look. Hamilton was a pretty good Broadway play. It wasn’t the best thing that ever happened. It didn’t single-handedly reinvent America.

On the other hand, it’s also not the source of all evil. It’s not some sort of giant glowing tribute to national elitism where everyone gathers together and eats arugula and talks about how much they prefer symbolic gestures involving identity to actual systemic change. It’s just a pretty good Broadway play.

4. Vox

See eg here.

I think the main complaint is that “explaining the news” is fundamentally condescending. Real Americans personally read all 9,800 pages of Obamacare regulations before forming an opinion on health policy.

Or maybe the complaint is that they’re pretending to do it from an objective point of view instead of admitting that they have a liberal bias? I will take this complaint seriously when I meet any person anywhere in the world who is not aware that Vox has a liberal bias. The aboriginal people of the North Sentinel Islands have been completely isolated from the rest of civilization for thousands of years, yet every single child in their tribe knows that Vox has a liberal bias. SETI believes that if we contact aliens, we will have to determine their language through universally known truths like prime numbers or the digits of pi, but if for some reason the aliens have different mathematics than we do, we will still be able to communicate over a shared understanding that Vox has a liberal bias.

This is fine. All attempts to explain the news are going to end up with some bias, and I’m okay with this as long as they try to minimize it, present the truth as they understand it, and give more light than heat (though see here)

And that’s where my experience with Vox has been reassuring. I’ve occasionally argued with them, or made fun of them, or SHOUTED AT THEM THAT THEY ARE SPREADING DAMNABLE LIES. And every time, I’ve been impressed by their kindness, their openness to criticism, and their willingness to pay attention to me even though I can be very annoying.

Fredrik deBoer has a theory that everybody secretly hates Ezra Klein but publicly pretends to like him because he’s powerful. And I keep wanting to protest that I like Ezra Klein, before realizing that deBoer’s theory predicts I would say that. So I’ll just add that my interactions with Klein have consisted mostly of me yelling at him for being wrong about everything, and him politely listening to me. A few times he’s admitted he was wrong and promised to do better (and has). Other times he’s stuck to his position while continuing to give me way more of his time and energy than I would expect the head of a big media company to give a random and somewhat-confrontational blogger.

This has also been more or less my experience with Dylan Matthews, German Lopez, and Sarah Kliff, the other Vox people I’ve engaged with.

A year or so ago, the media got really interested in neoreaction and published a bunch of thinkpieces, all of which parroted an error-ridden Breitbart article without checking any of its claims. Dylan Matthews wanted to write one for Vox, and he actually took the trouble to contact me, an Internationally Known Expert On Neoreaction. I corrected a few of the worst Breitbart errors and gave him the email address of a couple of neoreactionaries; Matthews actually interviewed them and included their comments in his article instead of relying on third-hand speculation about who they might be. I have heard legends that ancient times there was an arcane art called Juru-Na-Lism which allowed its practitioners to gather information from the furthest reaches of the world, and although I understand it is mostly forgotten this gives me some glimmers of what it could have been like (and for an even clearer example of the same pattern, compare this and this).

Also, Stuart Ritchie is a scientist at the University of Edinburgh who studies intelligence and who makes fun of terrible articles about intelligence in the media. Vox actually worked with Dr. Ritchie to write a series of articles, and ended up with some of the only popular explanations online that someone with a psychology background can read without laughing hysterically.

I disagree with Vox about a lot of things, but they’ve generally impressed me in ways that some other news sources haven’t. Also, let’s be honest. Their competitors are places like Salon and Vice. My standards here are dirt-low, and Vox frequently meets them.

5. Matt Yglesias

Related; see eg here:

The worst of Yglesias’ mischievous endorsements of horrendous moral stances was his column on factory safety. Immediately after the 2013 collapse of the Bangladesh garment factory that killed over 1,000 people, Yglesias took to Slate to explain why workplace safety regulations actually inhibited the operation of free markets. Yglesias explained that high-risk jobs have high compensation, and just like people might choose to be lumberjacks, they might choose to work in highly dangerous garment factories for a premium. Thus “it’s good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum.” The article was accompanied by a photograph of Bangladeshis loading dead bodies onto a truck.

The column was classic Yglesias, in managing to be both ignorant and appalling. Appalling since Yglesias published it the same day as the factory collapse, as the rubble was still being cleared. Ignorant because Yglesias adopted the most delusional Heritage Foundation economic myth, that somehow people in Bangladesh work in dangerous garment factories because working in dangerous garment factories is what they most want to do. As Mark Brendle summarized:

Yglesias champions one of the most horrifying and widespread implements of oppression and misery yet conceived—factories taking advantage of cheap labor, lack of environmental regulations, and a disregard for human life by those who profit most from having those factories in their countries—then pretends that it exists in a vacuum, where people in “those countries” are happy for these jobs, instead of acknowledging the closed system of the global economy, where those conditions are not only systemic, but inevitable and structural, in order for the wealth and prosperity of the “first world” to exist at all.

When confronted with this outrage, Yglesias simply wrote another explanation of why his original work was justified, admitting that his reaction to the criticism “as a writer and a human being” was annoyance. (It should go without saying that if one’s first reaction “as a human being” to being asked to show a little compassion for dead Bangladeshis is “annoyance,” then one is not a human being at all.) Here is Vox-ism in a nutshell: it is impossible to stop explaining and think, impossible to understand that there are more questions in heaven and earth than “What do the data say?” (Like perhaps, “Am I a good person?”)

One day soon, there’s going to be an Islamic terror attack in the United States, maybe committed by a refugee. The news is going to show pictures of mangled innocents, sobbing relatives, mothers who have lost their children. And maybe Current Affairs, as a good leftist publication, is going to want to say that this is terrible but doesn’t mean that we should ban all refugees or hate all Muslims.

And they won’t be able to, because they’ve already declared that if something tragic happens, then anyone who tries to put it in context, or say that some policies can have occasional awful results while still being beneficial on net, is a moral monster.

And if they try to protest that no, approximately 0% of refugees are terrorists, immigrant crime rates are lower than native crime rates, all of the fear-mongering you’ve heard is a lie, et cetera et cetera – then ah, that’s just worrying about “what the data say” – and how can you worry about something as bloodless as data when there are families literally sobbing over the deaths of their children right there?

Trump should be ultimate proof that the other side is better at the “my righteous indignation is more important than your puny data” game than you are. Don’t even try.

6. Pundits Who Failed To Predict Trump

See eg Michael Tracey in How Pundits Get Everything Wrong And Still Keep Their Jobs:

As the 2016 presidential campaign should have conclusively demonstrated, this pretense of expertise is a fabrication. Far from being especially prescient about matters of public affairs, members of the Pundit-Commentariat Industrial Complex are actually incredibly ill-suited to the task of accurately gauging the political sentiments of their own nation. By virtue of the various self-destructive pathologies that perpetually dull and distort their analytical acuity, it turns out that “pundits” are among the least qualified to accurately predict how far-off events will unfold. Surveying a random selection of Twitter trolls would probably yield one better information than scanning the output of the most revered professional prognosticators […]

For normal people, even the tiniest mistakes often result in drastic consequences. They don’t just get to ignore those failures and barrel forward as if nothing happened. And yet that’s how we permit the pundit class to operate. In the case of Bouie and Beutler, it wasn’t merely that they made erroneous predictions; anyone can mistakenly guess that something might pan out, when it does not. Rather, their entire analytical framework was drastically, catastrophically faulty. If any other American worker had performed his or her job so poorly, they could expect to receive severe sanction—docked pay, unfavorable scheduling, or termination. But in the world of punditry, there is no price to pay for failure. Instead, the American pundit class simply carries on as before, rattling off self-assured predictions about future events.

It would be really fun if I could dramatically reveal that (shock! horror!) Michael Tracey has himself been wrong about things. Alas, he admits it, saying in an earlier article, We Must Demand Pundit Accountability, that he’s made some predictive mistakes himself. For example, he wrote about Why Ted Cruz Could Win In 2016, how Chris Christie Isn’t Dead Yet and Why Jim Webb Poses The Biggest Threat To A Hillary Clinton Presidency. He asks to be judged not on these isolated mistakes, but based on his record as a whole. He provides a (self-curated) list of accurate predictions, which indeed seems very impressive.

Likewise, Current Affairs, which published Tracey’s article, has admitted that its article saying “good riddance” to Trump since he “will not be president” was a bit premature. But once again, they plead that instead of dismissing them the same way they recommend we dismiss other failed predictors like Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias, we take into account that they also made a bunch of much better predictions, like this one in February predicting that Trump would win unless the Democrats nominated Sanders. I think it’s a good piece and proves that good punditry is indeed important; if people had listened to that maybe we’d be in a better place right now.

But there’s still a tension between their treatment of other pundits’ mistakes (proof that they’re incompetent and that the whole system must be burned to the ground) and that of their own mistakes (worth viewing in the context of a long-term record of good predictions). Might Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias also believe they have a long-term record of good predictions? Don’t they deserve to be judged on this record instead of on a single event where they missed the mark by barely 1% of voters?

I don’t know much about Yglesias’ record, but I can speak up for Krugman. A team from Hamilton College analyzed the predictions of various pundits over sixteen months to evaluate relative performance; Krugman was judged most accurate of all twenty-six pundits studied.

The moral of the story is stop trying to draw sweeping conclusions from one data point. This also solves the problem where, having discredited everyone who predicted a Hillary victory, we determine the only trustworthy sources of political commentary to be PrisonPlanet.com, the Dilbert guy, and all 372,672 subscribers of r/the_donald.

If you’re really interested in well-founded judgments of your own accuracy relative to other people, there’s an established way to make that happen. Make specific predictions, which are clearly flagged as predictions and can’t be disavowed later. When possible, try to predict the same events as other pundits, so that you can compare accuracy. Assign a probabilistic confidence level to each. Keep track of whether each did or didn’t come true. Use some kind of scoring rule to evaluate your calibration. Then report on long-term aggregated statistics of how well you did.

I’ve been doing this for the past three years (2014, 2015, 2016). Last January, I predicted an 80% chance that Trump would lose. He didn’t. Does that mean I’m incompetent person who deserves to lose his job but won’t because he has “pundit tenure”? I don’t think so. Over the past three years I made 37 predictions that something would happen with 80% chance, and of those, thirty (81%) did happen. In other words, over the long run, the things I say have a 80% chance of happening, happen 81% of the time. I have pretty close to the exact right level of certainty in everything I say.

Of course, life would be even better if I could be 100% sure about everything and be right 100% of the time. And the great thing about this methodology is that if there’s someone else like that, they can prove that they’re better than I am. In fact, we’re trying this – over on Arbital, about a hundred people have entered predictions on the same set of sixty-one events that I did. At the end of the year we’ll check results. If other people do better than I do based on something like a Brier score, and if they can keep doing better than I do consistently, I’ll admit they’re a better “pundit” than I am and defer to their expertise.

If Robinson and Tracey want to demonstrate to the world that they are trustworthy pundits in a way that Yglesias and Krugman aren’t, I would invite all four of them to formally keep track of their predictions and see how they do relative to one another. I’m happy to help with this if they’re interested, and I bet Arbital would be too.

6.1. Pundits Who Failed To Predict Trump, Because They Are Out Of Touch With Real Americans

I think the argument is supposed to be that if they had ever left their comfortable Beltway offices and gone to talk to real people in the Midwest, they would have recognized the deep vein of anger in the American people and known that Trump was going to win.

Whoever you are, my “talking to real people in the Midwest” credentials are better than yours. I am a psychiatrist. I work in Michigan. My job is pretty much talking to former industrial workers about all the ways their lives have gone wrong, eight hours a day, every day. I am aware that these people are very angry.

But is it the level of anger where 46% of them will vote Trump? Or the level of anger where 48% of them will vote Trump? Because Hillary got about 47% of the vote in Michigan, so those two points are the difference between Trump winning the state and becoming President, versus losing the state and fading into ignominy. I do not think there is any level of deep connection to the collective consciousness of Michigan that allows you to distinguish between a 48%-Trump level of anger versus a 46%-Trump level of anger. Which means that even if you psychoanalyze Michiganders eight hours a day you still have to read the polls like everyone else. And the polls said that it was more like a 46% level of anger. And they were wrong.

But shouldn’t people who left their Beltway offices have at least realized that there was a significant amount of anger in the American people, and so Trump had a fighting chance? Yes. But all the polls also showed that there were a lot of Trump voters and that he had a fighting chance. If you were so confused that you didn’t realize that lots of people were angry and Trump had a fighting chance, I’m not sure that leaving your Beltway office would have helped much. In fact, I’m glad you didn’t. You probably would have wandered dazed into the street and gotten hit by a truck or something.

(or, if you made it to the Midwest, grain entrapment)

I guess there’s a version of this argument I endorse, which is that people who left their Beltway offices and talked to Real Americans might have realized that Trump voters were human beings with legitimate concerns and not just all alt-right Nazi KKK members. But again, if it takes a round-trip ticket to Peoria to convince our elites that people who disagree with them are not inscrutable hate-filled monsters, we have failed in a way more profound than not giving them that round-trip ticket.

7: People Who Are Worried That The Russians Hacked The Democrats To Influence The Elections

“Can you believe that the Democrats are trying to spin a narrative about foreign bogeymen out to get us?”