I mean, you're right on the censorship, but to calling Hanania the "world's greatest living essayist" makes it hard to take anything else in the essay seriously.
Yea, I balked a quite a bit at that one, too. Unless a lot of essayists recently died, I don't see how he makes the top 10 in form, and certainly not top 100 in content. (Ok, that's hyperbole... I probably would be hard pressed to name 100 essayists in short order.)
As far as non-fiction social science analysis, who else is better to read? Scott Alexander? Eric Hoel? Who comes up with better theories to explain society in essay form?
"Who comes up with better theories to explain society in essay form?"
David Friedman, Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Erik Hoel, Lorenzo Warby, Helen Dale... hold on, let me look at my subscription list...
Now, Hanania has some good essays, but he also has some absolutely awful ones, the type that make you think he might be a psychopath, or can't tell the difference between a good idea and just picking the most socially undesirable claim and arguing badly for it. Keeps him out of my top ten, certainly.
I'll give you Caplan if you count him as an essayist (his blog posts are often short). I don't read Friedman as much as I should probably, so I can't say. Many of his blog posts don't entice me to read them, so that's probably why.
Even with his flaws, his best ideas have influenced me more than about any other thinker. The only people that have influenced me more in how I think about social issues are Michael Huemer and Caplan. I'll agree that many of his tweets and even some of his posts are rather bizarre and often come across as trolly at best. I think it partially comes from his autism.
Platforms like Substack are an existential threat to NYT, Atlantic, etc. and are speeding their demise. Hence the "reporting". Beyond continuing their partisan rooting, they don't have a Plan B.
This is unlikely, at least as applied to the NYT. What they sell is not just content, but prestige & especially credibility: on a lot of issues they do try to present the full truth, & even on political issues where they are quite biased they tell the truth in the sense of not actually lying (see https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-the-media-is-honest-and-good & https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bounded-distrust for explanation of this point), & most people know this. Substack, by contrast, is just a blogging platform that anyone can use, whether they tell the truth or not. Moreover, even if any particular blogger is credible, that won't be apparent to most people. (E.g. I trust Scott Alexander to tell the truth about psychology because I've read his blog for long enough to know how & about what he usually writes, but most people have never heard of him & wouldn't be able to satisfy themselves of that point without an impractical amount of work.) By contrast, a prestigious, generally fact-checked publication like the NYT can be trusted, within relevant limits, without having to do lots of research to confirm that they're credible. Possibly, independent publications by externally-recognized experts (e.g. professors of science, Nobel Prize or equivalent winners) could replace this sort of media in some fields, but if they haven't in all the time blogging has been a thing, the addition of one more blogging platform probably won't change things much.
You may be right about the Atlantic, though, since they mostly publish opinions rather than factual reporting.
I might give the NYT the benefit of the doubt about the weather but beyond that, any claim that it should be given deference as to veracity and credibility is undermined by the Times’ long history of unapologetic distortion and narrative creation. I would encourage people to check out the book “The Gray Lady Wrinkled” on this point.
The Times may be considered amongst the classiest of whores, but a whore she still is.
I think it was Tyler Cowen who pointed out that to the extent it's a problem, it's a demand problem not a supply problem. You can cut off a source, but if the demand is there, it will be filled.
That's a depressingly uneconomical thing for him to say. If the 'problem' is the quantity produced and consumed, the solution to reduce it is to raise the price, which is what censorship, deplatforming, and socially- imposed penalties effectively do. Even Bryan concedes that while this may not get you all the way to zero, there is plenty of evidence it can get close.
When you write that Richard H. is "possibly the world's greatest living essayist" you make me doubt your judgment on everything else.
This has nothing to do with his politics. I've read quite a few of his essays, and they're fine as far as the quality of polemical essays go. Some of them strike hime, some are quite silly. I disagree with almost all of them.
The core premise of a free society is that individuals ought to think and act for themselves. The corollary of this is that individuals are ultimately responsible for protecting themselves against lies, against appeals to emotion, etc., and that it might be a good thing to improve the thinking skills of the public to give them the capacity to do this successfully.
On the other hand, the core premise first popularized among academics by "progressive" elitists about a century ago (people like Bernays and Lippmann) is that most people are just too stupid or uninterested to think about important things for themselves, which implies that the only way to protect them against misinformation is for benevolent propagandists to manipulate public opinion and engineer consent to the elite agenda, supposedly for the public's own good. The emergence of internet channels of mass communication that elites don't control, however, has made censorship a necessary component of engineering consent too, so members of the credentialed classes who share this sort of contempt for people they view as their intellectual inferiors have increasingly embraced the idea that government censors need to clamp down on internet speech.
This "progressive" contempt for the masses is wrong on several counts. First, the ethical case for individual autonomy isn't simply a matter of optimizing knowledge; it is rooted in the fact that for adult individuals, one's happiness is a function of one being in control of relevant aspects of one's own future and of recollections of one's own past. When pursuing happiness, people certainly do make errors in their judgements of value and in their understanding of the world and how it works, and lies circulated by unscrupulous characters do contribute to such errors. However, well-meaning paternalistic attempts to prevent such errors by depriving adults of their autonomy only guarantees that they will become miserable. Benevolent censorship is a cure that is worse for the patient than whatever risks are posed by error-prone people getting fooled by liars.
Second, free societies have a powerful self-correcting mechanism that authoritarian societies lack. A society of individual liberty is also a society of individual responsibility, where people who embrace errors also directly suffer the consequences of acting on their mistakes, and are thereby incentivized by their own personal experiences to think and act differently. The utopian progressive intellectual, on the other hand, is detached from the personal experiences of other people, and is often mesmerized by their pursuit of floating abstractions that are not grounded in the innate aspects of human psychology. Not only are censors as potentially corrupt and fallible as any other human beings are; their attempts at central planning of knowledge and wisdom are made in the absence of the empirical error correction that only individual experiences can provide.
Third, the emergence of many important social institutions and of the emergence useful social norms are not the product of rational planning at all; they are a spontaneous, unforeseen consequence of a vast array of interactions among many people pursuing their own narrow and divergent intentions or are blindly following irrational traditions that arose from a process of cultural evolution in previous generations, not from anyone's conscious planning. Individual liberty and individual responsibility are essential for keeping this evolution of irrational traditions and spontaneous emergence of social institutions aligned with the pursuit of human happiness. No authoritarian is so omniscient that their attempts to design new values and new institutions need not compete against old values and old institutions to prove their worth. An attribution of authentic progress to some novel norm or institution requires much more solid evidence than just a good yarn spun by professors in their ivory towers.
The agency aspect of life - a feeling we have at least some control over our lives - is entirely overlooked by the social engineers. They know best. Yet they overlook the importance of feeling you have some autonomy, even if minimal. The devastation of learned helplessness, for example, is rarely discussed in Western nations despite being well understood and documented. Its antidote is to begin to take control of your life.
You make an interesting point. Opposing views about personal autonomy did constitute a major distinction among ancient Greek philosophers, but the pro-autonomy side of this tradition has been largely forgotten because (1) ancient Greek and Latin authors who debated these issues, especially those whose names aren't Plato and Aristotle, are no longer prominent in the educational curriculum; and (2) the philosophical roots of classical liberal/libertarian thought have been obscured by ignorance about where the important liberal Enlightenment thinkers got their ideas from, and by a post-Enlightenment pivot of liberals towards more skeptical or positivist views (and becoming less and less pro-autonomy in the process).
Libertarians interested in reviving the natural rights tradition tend to be afflicted by a narrow focus on Aristotle, which loses sight of a much more important debate that occurred between Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics in Hellenistic times (and preserved in the works of such authors as Cicero) about the relationships between psychology, virtues like justice, and duties to the state and to one's community, which in turn makes it difficult to understand the reaction against Scholasticism that informed much of the Enlightenment.
Hate to be the guy that recommends a 90min YouTube video as the canonical source of the argument, but if you think JK isn’t a TERF you’re out of the loop and I consider Contrapoints video on it the best way to get back into the loop
After having a few run-ins with the gender mafia for a few ill-fated attempts to think for oneself instead of following the party line rigidly, Contrapoints now hews to the orthodoxy with vehement strictness. I prefer the Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling podcast, on which Contrapoints appears and later regrets doing so, as a much more balanced treatment of the subject.
I found that podcast to be a sorry attempt at summarising a subject, Megan seems to have lost the thread after getting star-struck by her meeting with JK. Contrapoints felt misrepresented enough that she did a follow-up video on it:
TERF is a derogatory slur used to describe people with views critical of the demands of trans activists. Yesterday, a UK employment tribunal released the latest of several decisions finding those beliefs protected, saying: "We consider it wholly inappropriate that an individual such as the Claimant espousing one side of the debate should be labelled discriminatory, transphobic
and to pose a potential risk to vulnerable service users. That in effect equates her views as being equivalent to an employee/social worker espousing racially discriminatory or homophobic views. The opinions expressed by the Claimant could not sensibly be viewed as being transphobic when properly considered in their full context from an objective perspective, but rather her expressing an opinion contrary to the interpretation of legislation, or perhaps more accurately the amendment to existing legislation, advocated for by trans lobbying groups to include, but not limited to, Stonewall."
I don't know anything about that case and find it to be entirely beside the point.
I use TERF as a factual description of JK's expression and attitude towards trans people, clearly on display in her Twitter usage and her post social-media breakdown published works. If you find the word insulting (jury is still out in my court), replace it in your mind with "discriminatory against trans people, feeding into and signal boosting transphobic narratives". I'm not here to discuss the term, I'm here to let Caplan know that his casual support of JK is him being irrationally swept up by a side in the culture war and that he'd do better either informing himself properly or zipping it on this front.
I didn’t find it to be a valuable article. Like I said in the OP, I am that guy who recommends a 90min YouTube video. It just happens to be the most well rounded argument for JK’s backwardness on the issue. Your article’s antagonist reads like straw compared to the steel Contra delivers.
Excellent article. The fact, (remember them?) is that the ‘progressives’, ‘woke’ or whatever you want to call them, are never satisfied. You can concede every point, acquiesce to every demand and they will simply proclaim that is not enough. They will tolerate nothing but total supplication.
And what they demand today will be deemed inadequate tomorrow. Just look at how demands for tolerance for homosexuality(good), has literally turned into a demand that gay children be castrated (not so good).
I am one of the few who actually enjoys Twitter under Elon’s regime. I see so much more acknowledgment of reality there than when censorship ruled. Trying to turn Substack into the old Twitter would kill it. If someone doesn’t want to see something in either place, fucking block it yourself you lazy wuss.
Thank you for a fine post! What is this about ‘taking free speech too far’? It is impossible to ‘take free speech too far’. You either have it or you don’t. And, as Noam Chomsky used constantly to remind us, ‘Either you believe in free speech for those you despise, or you don’t believe in it at all’. It’s precisely by restricting free speech that the censors are able to conflate ‘opinions we don’t like’ with ‘Naziism’. When we are able to speak freely, the differences cannot be obscured.
These fringe people are so outside the mainstream and so discredited that they are no threat to anyone. There is no realistic situation where these opinions "catch on". I say that based on my old fashioned definitions of "Nazi" and "White supremacist". If others want a more expansive definition, all the more reason not to jump on censorship and deplatforming.
Great points. Interesting that those platforms criticizing Substack are on the hard Left, which means that nearly every Substack account on the moderate left, in the middle or anywhere on the right would be deemed Nazi sympathizers - so 95% of Substack’s creators, as well as viewpoints.
I mean, you're right on the censorship, but to calling Hanania the "world's greatest living essayist" makes it hard to take anything else in the essay seriously.
Yea, I balked a quite a bit at that one, too. Unless a lot of essayists recently died, I don't see how he makes the top 10 in form, and certainly not top 100 in content. (Ok, that's hyperbole... I probably would be hard pressed to name 100 essayists in short order.)
As far as non-fiction social science analysis, who else is better to read? Scott Alexander? Eric Hoel? Who comes up with better theories to explain society in essay form?
"Who comes up with better theories to explain society in essay form?"
David Friedman, Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Erik Hoel, Lorenzo Warby, Helen Dale... hold on, let me look at my subscription list...
Now, Hanania has some good essays, but he also has some absolutely awful ones, the type that make you think he might be a psychopath, or can't tell the difference between a good idea and just picking the most socially undesirable claim and arguing badly for it. Keeps him out of my top ten, certainly.
I'll give you Caplan if you count him as an essayist (his blog posts are often short). I don't read Friedman as much as I should probably, so I can't say. Many of his blog posts don't entice me to read them, so that's probably why.
Even with his flaws, his best ideas have influenced me more than about any other thinker. The only people that have influenced me more in how I think about social issues are Michael Huemer and Caplan. I'll agree that many of his tweets and even some of his posts are rather bizarre and often come across as trolly at best. I think it partially comes from his autism.
Also, I hope it's not embarrassing to admit that I'm not familiar with Warby or Dale.
Warby and Dale are definitely worth checking out. El Gato Malo is really good too for lighter reads.
Any specific articles you have in mind from Warby and Dale?
My top candidate here would be Morgan Housel.
He's the gayest living essayist IMHO.
Platforms like Substack are an existential threat to NYT, Atlantic, etc. and are speeding their demise. Hence the "reporting". Beyond continuing their partisan rooting, they don't have a Plan B.
This is unlikely, at least as applied to the NYT. What they sell is not just content, but prestige & especially credibility: on a lot of issues they do try to present the full truth, & even on political issues where they are quite biased they tell the truth in the sense of not actually lying (see https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-the-media-is-honest-and-good & https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bounded-distrust for explanation of this point), & most people know this. Substack, by contrast, is just a blogging platform that anyone can use, whether they tell the truth or not. Moreover, even if any particular blogger is credible, that won't be apparent to most people. (E.g. I trust Scott Alexander to tell the truth about psychology because I've read his blog for long enough to know how & about what he usually writes, but most people have never heard of him & wouldn't be able to satisfy themselves of that point without an impractical amount of work.) By contrast, a prestigious, generally fact-checked publication like the NYT can be trusted, within relevant limits, without having to do lots of research to confirm that they're credible. Possibly, independent publications by externally-recognized experts (e.g. professors of science, Nobel Prize or equivalent winners) could replace this sort of media in some fields, but if they haven't in all the time blogging has been a thing, the addition of one more blogging platform probably won't change things much.
You may be right about the Atlantic, though, since they mostly publish opinions rather than factual reporting.
I might give the NYT the benefit of the doubt about the weather but beyond that, any claim that it should be given deference as to veracity and credibility is undermined by the Times’ long history of unapologetic distortion and narrative creation. I would encourage people to check out the book “The Gray Lady Wrinkled” on this point.
The Times may be considered amongst the classiest of whores, but a whore she still is.
Good points. Another angle on the slippery slope is that appeasing zealots is impossible and every demand you give in to will just yield new demands.
It’s like fundamentalist Christianity with no theory of atonement--only judgment.
I think it was Tyler Cowen who pointed out that to the extent it's a problem, it's a demand problem not a supply problem. You can cut off a source, but if the demand is there, it will be filled.
That's a depressingly uneconomical thing for him to say. If the 'problem' is the quantity produced and consumed, the solution to reduce it is to raise the price, which is what censorship, deplatforming, and socially- imposed penalties effectively do. Even Bryan concedes that while this may not get you all the way to zero, there is plenty of evidence it can get close.
It’s also what drug prohibition does. That hasn’t worked out very well.
IBlocking information tends to _increase_ demand for it.
When you write that Richard H. is "possibly the world's greatest living essayist" you make me doubt your judgment on everything else.
This has nothing to do with his politics. I've read quite a few of his essays, and they're fine as far as the quality of polemical essays go. Some of them strike hime, some are quite silly. I disagree with almost all of them.
Very, very well said.
Censoring the Nazis wouldn't be the end for them; it would be the beginning.
"OK, we've got them on the run. Now let's get J.K. Rowling!"
Exactly. And the NYT article makes it clear they’d like to go after “anti-vaxxers” next.
https://substack.com/@tianwen/note/c-46046340
The core premise of a free society is that individuals ought to think and act for themselves. The corollary of this is that individuals are ultimately responsible for protecting themselves against lies, against appeals to emotion, etc., and that it might be a good thing to improve the thinking skills of the public to give them the capacity to do this successfully.
On the other hand, the core premise first popularized among academics by "progressive" elitists about a century ago (people like Bernays and Lippmann) is that most people are just too stupid or uninterested to think about important things for themselves, which implies that the only way to protect them against misinformation is for benevolent propagandists to manipulate public opinion and engineer consent to the elite agenda, supposedly for the public's own good. The emergence of internet channels of mass communication that elites don't control, however, has made censorship a necessary component of engineering consent too, so members of the credentialed classes who share this sort of contempt for people they view as their intellectual inferiors have increasingly embraced the idea that government censors need to clamp down on internet speech.
This "progressive" contempt for the masses is wrong on several counts. First, the ethical case for individual autonomy isn't simply a matter of optimizing knowledge; it is rooted in the fact that for adult individuals, one's happiness is a function of one being in control of relevant aspects of one's own future and of recollections of one's own past. When pursuing happiness, people certainly do make errors in their judgements of value and in their understanding of the world and how it works, and lies circulated by unscrupulous characters do contribute to such errors. However, well-meaning paternalistic attempts to prevent such errors by depriving adults of their autonomy only guarantees that they will become miserable. Benevolent censorship is a cure that is worse for the patient than whatever risks are posed by error-prone people getting fooled by liars.
Second, free societies have a powerful self-correcting mechanism that authoritarian societies lack. A society of individual liberty is also a society of individual responsibility, where people who embrace errors also directly suffer the consequences of acting on their mistakes, and are thereby incentivized by their own personal experiences to think and act differently. The utopian progressive intellectual, on the other hand, is detached from the personal experiences of other people, and is often mesmerized by their pursuit of floating abstractions that are not grounded in the innate aspects of human psychology. Not only are censors as potentially corrupt and fallible as any other human beings are; their attempts at central planning of knowledge and wisdom are made in the absence of the empirical error correction that only individual experiences can provide.
Third, the emergence of many important social institutions and of the emergence useful social norms are not the product of rational planning at all; they are a spontaneous, unforeseen consequence of a vast array of interactions among many people pursuing their own narrow and divergent intentions or are blindly following irrational traditions that arose from a process of cultural evolution in previous generations, not from anyone's conscious planning. Individual liberty and individual responsibility are essential for keeping this evolution of irrational traditions and spontaneous emergence of social institutions aligned with the pursuit of human happiness. No authoritarian is so omniscient that their attempts to design new values and new institutions need not compete against old values and old institutions to prove their worth. An attribution of authentic progress to some novel norm or institution requires much more solid evidence than just a good yarn spun by professors in their ivory towers.
Excellent comment. Thank you for posting.
The agency aspect of life - a feeling we have at least some control over our lives - is entirely overlooked by the social engineers. They know best. Yet they overlook the importance of feeling you have some autonomy, even if minimal. The devastation of learned helplessness, for example, is rarely discussed in Western nations despite being well understood and documented. Its antidote is to begin to take control of your life.
You make an interesting point. Opposing views about personal autonomy did constitute a major distinction among ancient Greek philosophers, but the pro-autonomy side of this tradition has been largely forgotten because (1) ancient Greek and Latin authors who debated these issues, especially those whose names aren't Plato and Aristotle, are no longer prominent in the educational curriculum; and (2) the philosophical roots of classical liberal/libertarian thought have been obscured by ignorance about where the important liberal Enlightenment thinkers got their ideas from, and by a post-Enlightenment pivot of liberals towards more skeptical or positivist views (and becoming less and less pro-autonomy in the process).
Libertarians interested in reviving the natural rights tradition tend to be afflicted by a narrow focus on Aristotle, which loses sight of a much more important debate that occurred between Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics in Hellenistic times (and preserved in the works of such authors as Cicero) about the relationships between psychology, virtues like justice, and duties to the state and to one's community, which in turn makes it difficult to understand the reaction against Scholasticism that informed much of the Enlightenment.
Hate to be the guy that recommends a 90min YouTube video as the canonical source of the argument, but if you think JK isn’t a TERF you’re out of the loop and I consider Contrapoints video on it the best way to get back into the loop
After having a few run-ins with the gender mafia for a few ill-fated attempts to think for oneself instead of following the party line rigidly, Contrapoints now hews to the orthodoxy with vehement strictness. I prefer the Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling podcast, on which Contrapoints appears and later regrets doing so, as a much more balanced treatment of the subject.
I found that podcast to be a sorry attempt at summarising a subject, Megan seems to have lost the thread after getting star-struck by her meeting with JK. Contrapoints felt misrepresented enough that she did a follow-up video on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmT0i0xG6zg
TERF is a derogatory slur used to describe people with views critical of the demands of trans activists. Yesterday, a UK employment tribunal released the latest of several decisions finding those beliefs protected, saying: "We consider it wholly inappropriate that an individual such as the Claimant espousing one side of the debate should be labelled discriminatory, transphobic
and to pose a potential risk to vulnerable service users. That in effect equates her views as being equivalent to an employee/social worker espousing racially discriminatory or homophobic views. The opinions expressed by the Claimant could not sensibly be viewed as being transphobic when properly considered in their full context from an objective perspective, but rather her expressing an opinion contrary to the interpretation of legislation, or perhaps more accurately the amendment to existing legislation, advocated for by trans lobbying groups to include, but not limited to, Stonewall."
I don't know anything about that case and find it to be entirely beside the point.
I use TERF as a factual description of JK's expression and attitude towards trans people, clearly on display in her Twitter usage and her post social-media breakdown published works. If you find the word insulting (jury is still out in my court), replace it in your mind with "discriminatory against trans people, feeding into and signal boosting transphobic narratives". I'm not here to discuss the term, I'm here to let Caplan know that his casual support of JK is him being irrationally swept up by a side in the culture war and that he'd do better either informing himself properly or zipping it on this front.
Criticizing the incoherent ideology of trans activists is hardly a sign of being "irrational" or poorly informed.
You keep making me that guy: watch the 90min video, and consider the arguments
Here's a good article that just came out:
https://alexmassie.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-audacity-of-jk-rowling?r=6hi6l
I didn’t find it to be a valuable article. Like I said in the OP, I am that guy who recommends a 90min YouTube video. It just happens to be the most well rounded argument for JK’s backwardness on the issue. Your article’s antagonist reads like straw compared to the steel Contra delivers.
I don't know why you're so angry. You pass better than most trans women.
Excellent article. The fact, (remember them?) is that the ‘progressives’, ‘woke’ or whatever you want to call them, are never satisfied. You can concede every point, acquiesce to every demand and they will simply proclaim that is not enough. They will tolerate nothing but total supplication.
And what they demand today will be deemed inadequate tomorrow. Just look at how demands for tolerance for homosexuality(good), has literally turned into a demand that gay children be castrated (not so good).
All great points, but its also important to note that the Nazi scare is much ado about nothing: https://public.substack.com/p/censors-are-trying-to-trick-you-into
I am one of the few who actually enjoys Twitter under Elon’s regime. I see so much more acknowledgment of reality there than when censorship ruled. Trying to turn Substack into the old Twitter would kill it. If someone doesn’t want to see something in either place, fucking block it yourself you lazy wuss.
Thank you for a fine post! What is this about ‘taking free speech too far’? It is impossible to ‘take free speech too far’. You either have it or you don’t. And, as Noam Chomsky used constantly to remind us, ‘Either you believe in free speech for those you despise, or you don’t believe in it at all’. It’s precisely by restricting free speech that the censors are able to conflate ‘opinions we don’t like’ with ‘Naziism’. When we are able to speak freely, the differences cannot be obscured.
These fringe people are so outside the mainstream and so discredited that they are no threat to anyone. There is no realistic situation where these opinions "catch on". I say that based on my old fashioned definitions of "Nazi" and "White supremacist". If others want a more expansive definition, all the more reason not to jump on censorship and deplatforming.
Great points. Interesting that those platforms criticizing Substack are on the hard Left, which means that nearly every Substack account on the moderate left, in the middle or anywhere on the right would be deemed Nazi sympathizers - so 95% of Substack’s creators, as well as viewpoints.
And before Rowling, you had the extremely nasty and ongoing campaigns against Orson Scott Card and Chick-Fil-A.