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Archive for 2022
February 4, 2022
WELL, FOR ONE THING THEY’VE TURNED OUT NOT TO BE VERY EXPERT: Why the experts are losing.
Rogan’s problem is quite different: The Joe Rogan Show has been subject to open threats of strike action by the employees at Spotify, which distributes his podcast. Their principal demand is to be handed editorial oversight over the podcast, with the power to veto what Rogan says or does.
This campaign was bolstered by an open letter signed by 270 “experts” concerned by his “history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the Covid-19 pandemic”. Interestingly, the list of signatories was not populated by people actually working in virology or vaccine research. Many of those who signed were nurses or students, others were general practitioners, a few were dentists, and at least one was a licensed marriage and family therapist.
It’s a bizarre situation: a call to censorship justified by the incapability of non-experts to handle a subject like vaccine research is then inundated with people who by the same metric should themselves be disqualified from having an opinion. But, ultimately, that’s the point — this was not a list of 270 of experts in the field, but rather a list of 270 of people from the expert class.
These class dynamics are hardly very subtle. Take Greta Thunberg, whose claim to fame, to put it pithily, is the fact that she refuses to go to school. While many of us can probably empathise with this desire, there is something strange about a person who hasn’t even finished high school acting like she belongs to a group of people who justify their rule through technocratic language.
But while Greta may not really have much of a formal education, she does have rich parents, and a slew of contacts in the international NGO world. It would be foolish to think that the mere act of having a PhD would allow you to countermand someone like Greta Thunberg, even though the echelon she occupies openly ridicules the vast hordes of “deplorables” for the high crime of only having a high school diploma.
Like medieval nobles claiming a right to rule based on being a superior breed, and then openly practising inbreeding, our current elites rarely live up to their own hype. Often, the experts are stupid and wrong, sometimes to an almost comical degree. And yet they persist in trying to convince us that they deserve to rule us, and get mightily upset whenever someone dares to challenge their power. Their fixation with Joe Rogan is not hard to understand through this lens.
Related: The Suicide of Expertise.
It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.
By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately. As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”
Then there’s the problem that, somehow, over the past half-century or so the educated classes that make up the “expert” demographic seem to have been doing pretty well, even as so many ordinary folks, in America and throughout the West, have seen their fortunes decaying. Is it any surprise that claims to authority in the form of “expertise” don’t carry the same weight that they once did?
If experts want to reclaim a position of authority, they need to make a few changes. First, they should make sure they know what they’re talking about, and they shouldn’t talk about things where their knowledge isn’t solid. Second, they should be appropriately modest in their claims of authority. And, third, they should check their egos. It doesn’t matter what your SAT scores were, voters are under no obligation to listen to you unless they find what you say persuasive.
And you know what makes you less persuasive? The kind of contempt displayed by Foreign Affairs. If expertise is dead, it’s because those who claimed it overplayed their hands. It’s not the death of expertise, so much as a suicide.
I’ve been flashing back to this and other items from a few years ago a lot lately, because things look to be coming to a head.
STILL POPULAR: Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. #CommissionEarned
THERE GOES ONE OF THE ONLY TWO REASONS I BOTHERED GETTING VACCINATED: Spain’s First Study on Omicron Finds Vaccinated People Spread COVID at Same Rate as Unvaccinated.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Duke mum on whether it apologized for calling Tibet a country. “If Duke University’s engineering department emailed an apology to students and faculty for calling Tibet a country separate from China, it isn’t admitting to it. On January 27, director of We the Hongkongers and pro-democracy activist Frances Hui tweeted a screenshot purportedly from the diversity department of Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. In the email, the school apologizes for a previous email announcing ‘Lunar New Year Paint Night’ that categorized Tibet as an independent country.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Perfectionism,’ having a ‘sense of urgency’ are examples of White supremacy, academics argue.
YOU WANT GREEN ENERGY, YOU GET CHAOS: Sooner or later (usually sooner), nations that decarbonize face civil tumult because the costs of reliable energy skyrocket as the supplies dwindle into scarcity, according to Chuck DeVore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, writing in The Federalist.
DeVore make the case for the proposition that the reliability and abundance of carbon-based energy is ignored in market valuations, while the absence of those same characteristics are discounted when “renewable” energy sources are considered.
“Texas’s energy-only market relies on prices alone to incentivize new investment, and subsidies for more variable energy mean that the reliability of coal, natural gas, and nuclear is not properly valued. As a result, year after year, wind and solar capacity grow while coal and natural gas generation atrophy,” he writes.
But that has some seriously negative consequences:
“As this happens, the grid becomes more and more prone to blackouts — unless backup power sources are constructed. The question is, who pays? So far, reliability costs have been borne by consumers, giving unreliable wind and solar generators a free ride to produce electricity whenever they can and not paying for the cost of backup power or other costs arising from their volatility.”
As Glenn regularly reminds us all, what cannot continue, won’t.
ON THE ONE HAND, THEY DESERVE IT. ON THE OTHER HAND, IT MAY DRAG THE WHOLE ECONOMY DOWN. Mark Zuckerberg’s Disaster Is Taking Silicon Valley With It. “Meta’s was the largest one-day loss by a U.S. company ever, and the ripple effects were closer to tsunamis throughout Silicon Valley. The list of tech losers reeling from the Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) reckoning is long and full of familiar names: Spotify was 16 percent lower; Twitter was down about 6 percent; and even companies that were relatively safe, such as Apple and Microsoft, saw hundreds of billions of dollars erased from their market value.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: AOC Stomps Her Foot and Reminds Everyone That She’s Still America’s Dumbest Bartender. “I have no problem referring to Little Miss in terms that some might feel are patriarchal and sexist. She’s a commie, so I can be as awful as I want.”
GOODER AND HARDER: Dear Young Biden Voters, Did You Really Think This Was Going to Happen?
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Truckers are starting a working-class revolution — and the left hates it. “A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, ‘modern monetary theory,’ foreign adventures and defunding police.”
BUT IT WORKED IN THEORY! Maryland County That Removed Police from Schools Asks Them To Return Indefinitely.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Russia threatens power grids if Biden moves in Ukraine. “The nation’s leading expert on protecting the electric grid from attack urges governors to take the lead because the Biden administration won’t. In a new alert, Peter Vincent Pry, the executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, said concerns are growing that Russia, North Korea, and Iran are inching closer to testing an electromagnetic attack on the U.S. grid, or parts of it.”
Ilya Shapiro spoke out against racism in a tweet, and this week the Dean at Georgetown law school placed him on administrative leave, pending further investigation. The decision is disgraceful.
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, Joe Biden was granted the endorsement of South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, in a quid pro quo exchange for Biden’s promise to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court. Many previous Supreme Court nominations have considered the political advantages of potential nominees’ home state or region, ethnicity, religion, sex, race, or other biographical elements. Never before has a President announced such a narrow rule about who would be considered.
While reasonable people can differ, an ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 76% of Americans agree that Biden “should consider all possible nominees” rather than “only nominees who are Black women.” Those who disagree with Biden’s limit include 54% of Democrats and 72% of nonwhite Americans.
Ilya Shapiro, who was slated to join Georgetown Law as a senior lecturer on Feb. 1, agrees with the American majority. This is no surprise. He headed the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. As Cato’s Executive Vice President David Boaz has long made clear, Cato hires on merit alone. Thus, all Cato’s employees—whatever their race, sex, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, or other identity—know that they were chosen because they were the best candidates for the job, and not because of favoritism. . . .
Georgetown Law’s Dean, William Treanor, issued a statement denouncing Shapiro. Treanor claimed that Shapiro had suggested that “the best Supreme Court nominee could not be a Black woman.” This is true only in the sense that Shapiro was explicitly discussing a 2022 nomination by a Democratic President, and since Shapiro thinks Sri Srinivasan is the “best” nominee for a Democratic President, then the “best” nominee could not be a black woman, a white man, a Native American, or anyone else.
In fact, Shapiro has said that the best nominee for the Supreme Court could be a black woman—namely D.C. Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown. In a 2016 event at the University of Chicago Law School, he listed Judge Brown as among several he would consider nominating, if he had the power. Judge Brown, who retired from the D.C. Circuit in 2017, is perhaps even more distinguished that Judge Srinivasan. She joined the D.C. Circuit in 2005, having served since 1996 on the California Supreme Court, and before that in several high-level legal roles in the California state government. But she is an originalist and therefore anathema to Biden, who led a filibuster against her nomination to the D.C. Circuit. When President Bush was considering nominating Brown to be the first black female Supreme Court Justice, Biden specifically threatened to filibuster her, and her alone.
On Monday, Dean Treanor placed Shapiro on administrative leave, citing the “pain and outrage” of Georgetown’s black students, professors, staff, and alumni. He added, “Ilya Shapiro’s tweets are antithetical to the work that we do here every day to build inclusion, belonging, and respect for diversity.”
The Dean’s statement is true if “inclusion, belonging, and respect for diversity” means that racial preferences may never be criticized. Some people who favor racial preferences, or perceive themselves has having benefited from such preferences, are outraged at criticism of racial discrimination. However, law schools are supposed to be places where all ideas can be debated logically. Lawyers who cannot bear to hear ideas they don’t like will be poor advocates for their clients in our adversarial legal system, and professors who can’t tolerate criticism of their own ideology are poor role models for students.
The only actual principle involved here is that Georgetown will not tolerate disagreement with the Democrat/Lefty narrative of the moment.
It’s a disgrace.
Plus: “Students considering which law school to attend might have more confidence in a school whose dean has never libeled anyone. Donors to any law school might consider the state of the school’s academic freedom.”
DNA’S ‘IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY’ CHALLENGE: As the debate between advocates of evolutionary materialism and intelligent design progresses, some basic issues are emerging as fundamental, including, to cite just one example, how to account for the irreducible complexity that requires information and that in turn requires intelligence. Or not? Be courteous to all in the comments, please.
GOODER AND HARDER: Carjackings Up 200% in DC.
HIAWATHA BRAY: Trust you? Sorry. We tried that.
LARGE PARTS OF AMERICA WERE WAY OUT IN FRONT OF EUROPE ON THIS: European Nations Are Dismantling the COVID State Before Our Eyes. Will the US Follow?
RULES FOR THEE, BUT NOT ME: Devon Archer is Hunter Biden’s long-time business partner. He was convicted in 2018 on two felony counts of securities fraud. And since his trial that led to the convictions began in 2016, Archer has roamed the world, according to Just the News.
“His travel log, enumerated in the court documents, reads like the travels of an American secretary of state: Russia, Mexico, China, Spain, Italy, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Ukraine, the money laundering capital of Latvia, Hong Kong, London, Singapore and the French Antilles, to name a few,” Just the News reports.
It’s good indeed to be one of the privileged elite.
If you are a January 6 defendant, the charges you face aren’t remotely as serious as securities fraud. Even so, don’t expect anything less than seizure of your passport, extended detention, (or regular reporting of your location to the court if you aren’t jailed pending trial), and multiple other restrictions on your goings and comings, until you are convicted and then promptly imprisoned.
I’m from out of town and all, but isn’t there something somewhere in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or the some Supreme Court opinion or presidential speech, or … somewhere, about “Equal Justice Under Law”?