Electoral politicians want to be liked - and be seen to be virtous - too much

About 25 mins into this BBC profile of Machiavelli, we hear some lessons for modern politicians.

Was it a critique of princely duplicity? Or some ruthless morality? (I believe, the latter, and so does Quentin Skinner).

What we really really want

This discussion of the work of Edward Tolman is fascinating - not just for the ‘what do we want’ question, including the resolve of economists to settle on 'revealed preferences'.

"Edward Tolman was an American psychologist who worked mostly in the 1920s to 1950s, and spent most of his career at the University of Berkeley (their psychology building was named ‘Tolman Hall’ in his honour until it was demolished in 2019). He was a member of the so-called ‘neo-behaviourist’ generation, the cohort of psychologists, with figures like Clark Hull and B.F. Skinner, who took up the banner of behaviourism in the middle of the 20th century. They developed it into a robust research framework and succeeded in making it the dominant experimental paradigm – especially in the United States – for several decades."

Have the 'elites' really changed much?

 Here's a deep dive into David Brooks' Bohos/Bobos thesis - this time from Peter Levine. 

Levine is tempted to agree with Brooks but a close look at the data told him otherwise.

"It is true that elites have become somewhat more liberal since 2000, but the changes are small. Overall, elites were more liberal than non-elites in the 1970s and still are today. (To be sure, what it means to be “liberal” has changed, but this is still a reason to doubt a story of ideological realignment.)"

Protesting versus democracy

Apropos the debate around the right to protest, this is something I've written about a few times in passing and directly here.

Last week, a Jewish man - Gideon Falter - was challenged by the police near to a 'pro-Palestinian' protests. As the BBC reported, 

"On 13 April Mr Falter, who was wearing a kippah skull-cap, was threatened with arrest and told by police his presence was causing a "breach of peace". He has called for the Met's commissioner to resign."

It was interesting to read the perspective of the Community Security Trust - a charity helping UK Jews with security and antisemitism. 

Our problem is that 'protest' and activism are valorised and treated as indispensable parts of our political discourse. In my view, they are often counter-democratic.

Popperian v Bayesian

Here. the science writer Tom Chivers reviews Lee McIntyre's book "How to Talk to a Science Denier".

"I think the basic problem is that McIntyre is a Popperian. That is, in hugely oversimplified terms, he believes that no amount of evidence can confirm a theory: but evidence can falsify it. “If we find only evidence that fits our theory, then it might be true,” he writes. “But if we find any evidence that disconfirms our theory, it must be ruled out.”

I, on the other hand, am a Bayesian. I have some prior belief and I assign some level of probability to it: “climate change is real and dangerous”: 90%; “the world is flat”, 0.1%. And then each new piece of evidence shifts my belief a little: if next year NASA say “we got new photos in, looks like Earth is sitting on the back of a turtle”, then I’ll upgrade my belief in a flat earth to, I dunno, 1.5% (but also upgrade my belief in there being mad people at NASA to 95%)."

I think I agree with this conclusion:

"He recognises that beliefs are part of people’s identity, and that that makes it hard to change them – but again, applies the lesson only to the weird, wrong, other people, not to himself and people like him. The near-total lack of introspection renders the whole grand project largely meaningless. I am right, you are wrong, the only thing we need to discuss is how to make you realise how wrong you are."

In a world where politics is a legitimate - evan a valorised - hobby, introspection is a handicap. 

Law v Politics

Law is about making promises and other commitments into binding obligations

Politics is about making promises and other commitments sound as if they are binding obligations - 'triple lock', 'enshrined in law', 'manifesto commitment', 'sign the pledge', 'mandate'.

A point that is repeatedly made by David Allen Green - here, here and here for example.

Philipino citizens and their understanding of how disinformation works

This article from a few years ago - on how the Philipines ("the petri dish of the global disinformation epidemic") has responded with citizen initiatives. The full report is here [pdf] but the article itself is a good summary.

To be honest, some of the conclusions chime so uncannily close to my own, that I'm a little suspicious. It's interesting just how sophisticated the conclusions of those consulted are on the roots of disinfo.

Mancur Olson's dictum - that “the deliberation about the allocation of public goods should itself be public good” seems to be one that this citizens panel totally understands. They talk about how expensive fake news is to manufacture, how defunded journalism drives it, and how the growing distrust in the media can largely be explained by the fact that the media is allied to some political and economic interests and not others.

I would be interested to see a deep dive into how rigorously this citizens' initiative was managed - did the citizens concerned find themselves steered by the biases of the organisers or not. If this exercise was a valid one, for me (as someone who argues these points repeatedly, treats them as self-evident truths, regarding myself as some kind of voice in the wilderness on this stuff) its conclusions are huge.

Libertarianism v liberty - latest

This looks interesting, particularly for those who define ‘liberty’ in opposition to the state, and in the light of Proudhon’s objection to being “…watched, inspected, spied upon, numbered…. enrolled ….checked, estimated, valued…”

theordinalsociety.com

Is white working-class racism an overstated problem?

Political success depends upon donations from wealthy purposeful groups.

In pandering to Wall St donors, are the US Democrats determined to point to something other than the socially-useless brutality of markets as reasons why voters (many of whom are actually socially liberal) vote against them?

From here:

"....most people assume layoffs are just cold hard economic reality, the unavoidable result of market forces taking their toll on uncompetitive businesses. But it’s not always true. Healthy companies will cut jobs just to up share prices for executives, who increasingly are compensated in company equity. Leopold cites a stat saying 85% of executive compensation comes in the form of stock awards, creating massive incentives to spend on buybacks. I’ve seen both higher and lower numbers, but even the low end (Harvard Business Review put the number at 59% globally and 75% in “the Americas”) is significant.

In the end, Leopold posits that while Democratic voters believe they need to shift to more illiberal positions to win working class voters, they’d more likely need to emphasize mass layoffs as a root of rural anger, which would force them to choose between Wall Street donors and rural votes."

As a sidebar question, I wonder if there are plenty of people who actually hold socially-liberal attitudes themselves, but regard themselves as part of a tribe that ostensibly doesn't?