Good Entropy

The Breakthrough Institute

Is climate change more like an asteroid or diabetes? Last month, one of us argued at Slate that climate advocates should resist calls to declare a national climate emergency because climate change was more like “diabetes for the planet” than an asteroid. The diabetes metaphor was surprisingly controversial. Climate change can’t be managed or lived with, many argued in response; it is an existential threat to human societies that demands an immediate cure.

Motivated Reasoning Is Disfiguring Social Science – Quillette

Motivated Reasoning Is Disfiguring Social Science

Right Wing Nerds vs. the New Common Sense | www.splicetoday.com

To the left, the nerd’s ungraceful and sometimes probing utterances have become a major burden.

The Motte and the Bailey: A rhetorical strategy to know | HeterodoxAcademy.org

There seems to be an increasing reliance on a number of questionable debate tactics and rhetorical devices designed to silence any opposition. Examples range from the student who hurls ad hominem attacks to the post hoc-ster, deviously “conflating” correlation and causation. However, there is one especially effective phenomenon, often unchallenged in its power to shut down balanced debate, smother viewpoint diversity and wall off homogenous dogma. It can be seen in the debate about almost every important social issue.

Some scientists respond to the controversial Google memo • AEI | Carpe Diem Blog » AEIdeas

I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate. Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately. Its key claims about sex differences are especially well-supported by large volumes of research across species, cultures, and history. Whoever the memo’s author is, he has obviously read a fair amount about these topics. Graded fairly, his memo would get at least an A- in any masters’ level psychology course.

Here, I just want to take a step back from the memo controversy, to highlight a paradox at the heart of the ‘equality and diversity’ dogma that dominates American corporate life. The memo didn’t address this paradox directly, but I think it’s implicit in the author’s critique of Google’s diversity programs. This dogma relies on two core assumptions:

• The human sexes and races have exactly the same minds, with precisely identical distributions of traits, aptitudes, interests, and motivations; therefore, any inequalities of outcome in hiring and promotion must be due to systemic sexism and racism;

• The human sexes and races have such radically different minds, backgrounds, perspectives, and insights, that companies must increase their demographic diversity in order to be competitive; any lack of demographic diversity must be due to short-sighted management that favors groupthink.

The obvious problem is that these two core assumptions are diametrically opposed. Let me explain. If different groups have minds that are precisely equivalent in every respect, then those minds are functionally interchangeable, and diversity would be irrelevant to corporate competitiveness. On the other hand, if demographic diversity gives a company any competitive advantages, it must be because there are important sex differences and race differences in how human minds work and interact. (See Venn diagram version above.)

Bottom Line: So, psychological interchangeability makes diversity meaningless. But psychological differences make equal outcomes impossible. Equality or diversity. You can’t have both. Weirdly, the same people who advocate for equality of outcome in every aspect of corporate life, also tend to advocate for diversity in every aspect of corporate life. They don’t even see the fundamentally irreconcilable assumptions behind this ‘equality and diversity’ dogma. American businesses also have to face the fact that the demographic differences that make diversity useful will not lead to equality of outcome in every hire or promotion. Equality or diversity: choose one.

As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People – Bloomberg

Seven Reasons the Left Is Losing – The Atlantic

The privilege framing, with its focus on unearned advantage rather than unjust disadvantage, doesn’t fit with situations where even the “privileged” person is still quite screwed. – Phoebe Maltz Bovy

*Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know* – Marginal REVOLUTION

That is by Ray Fisman and Miriam A. Golden, an excellent book, the subtitle says it all.  And yes it does also cover how to stop or at least limit corruption.

If reality is nothing but a ‘narrative,’ then of course it’s important to control what people say.

The ‘Postmodern’ Intellectual Roots of Today’s Campus Mobs – WSJ

We are witnessing the second great era of speech repression in academia, the first coming during the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early ’90s. One force behind the new wave is a theory of truth, or a picture of reality, developed the first time around. This theory, which we might call “linguistic constructivism,” holds that we don’t merely describe or represent the world in language; language creates the world and ourselves. A favorite slogan of our moment, “Words have power,” reflects that view.

The eclipse of classical liberalism, Alberto Mingardi | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

The ideas of limited government lost their grip on society: with nationalism on the one hand, and socialism on the other, raising to dominate the political scene. Godkin, a critic of imperialism, touches upon the demise of a peaceful and non-interventionist foreign policy.