The Narrative and Its Discontents – Quillette

The whole essay may not be worth reading for most, but I wanted to call out these bits where he gives some of the more amusing and/or troubling recent excesses of the journalistic consensus given in NYT, WaPo, etc:

Consider, for example, a Washington Post story about a New York University report calling claims of conservative censorship on social media “a form of disinformation.” The report says:

The claim of anti-conservative animus is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it. No trustworthy large-scale studies have determined that conservative content is being removed for ideological reasons.

What I find troubling about that one is that it demonstrates how the term “disinformation” is being stretched lately to cover way too much.

I’m posting this next section specifically for the links:

As The Narrative gets more things wrong, the enforcement has become increasingly Kafkaesque. Today, you’ll get banned on social media for sharing statements by the WHO from a few months ago, or unedited vaccine trial results, on grounds of contradicting the WHO. This week’s front-page news was last week’s cancel-worthy conspiracy.

In the face of the public’s revolt, there is a growing inclination in the media to jettison objectivity in favor of antagonism. As a Times staffer said: “We’re at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?” According to The Narrative, there are only two sides: for or against The Narrative. Everyone on the other side is the same. When Elon Musk tweeted a meme about rejecting The Narrative, the Times responded with an article that consisted of his name and a salad of loosely connected words with negative associations like “incel,” “Trump,” and “racist.”

A number of the links are to Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter feed — she’s been great recently about calling out these sorts of developments (her Substack is also terrific).

The Narrative and Its Discontents – Quillette

The Malthusian Economy: ‘productivity produces people, not prosperity’

Max Roser of Our World In Data takes a close look at historical economies. I’m drawing attention here to the ‘Malthusian Trap’ section, not the parts after that. He makes the case that pre-industrial economies are essentially Malthusian: new technology doesn’t improve people’s lives, it just results in more very poor people. I don’t think that’s very controversial, but the charts really bring it home.

https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth

Critical Thinking isn’t Just a Process – Zeynep Tufekci

Interesting read on critical thinking in an environment of unreliable information:

One of the things I noticed throughout the past year has been that a lot of my friends who had grown up in authoritarian or poor countries had a much easier time adjusting to our new pandemic reality. My childhood was intermittently full of shortages of various things. We developed a corresponding reflex for stocking up on things when they were available, anticipating what might be gone soon. That was quite useful for the pandemic. So was trying to read between the lines of official statements—what was said and what was not, who was sitting with whom on the TV, and evaluating what the rumor networks brought in. It turns out those are really useful skills when authorities are lying at all levels…

https://zeynep.substack.com/p/critical-thinking-isnt-just-a-process

Bioethics: Tuskegee vs. COVID – Econlib

Bryan Caplan:

How come no country on Earth tried voluntary paid human experimentation?* As far as I can tell, the most important factor was the formal and informal opposition of bioethicists. In particular, bioethicists converged on absurdly (or impossibly) high standards for “truly informed consent” to deliberate infection
…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Bioethics is to ethics as astrology is to astronomy. If bioethicists had previously prevented a hundred Tuskegees from happening, COVID would still have turned the existence of their entire profession into a net negative for humanity. Verily, we would be better off if their field had never existed.

[note that we are, finally, starting a human challenge trial, in the UK]

https://www.econlib.org/bioethics-tuskegee-vs-covid/

Before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and other Republicans purged John Birch Society extremists from the GOP – The Washington Post

Although Welch had been an early donor to Buckley’s National Review in the 1950s, Buckley had come to believe that Welch’s feverish rants threatened the conservative movement’s credibility and its future.

“Buckley was beginning to worry that with the John Birch Society growing so rapidly, the right-wing upsurge in the country would take an ugly, even Fascist turn,” John B. Judis wrote in his 1988 biography, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives.” Buckley told Goldwater, according to Judis, that the John Birch Society was a “menace” to the conservative movement.

But Goldwater had a problem — much like the one that Republican leaders face today, as many of their voters embrace QAnon conspiracy theories and President Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. Goldwater wanted to distance himself from the conspiracy theories, but he feared alienating his base.

“Every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society,” Goldwater told Buckley and Kirk. “I’m not talking about commie-haunted apple pickers or cactus drunks. I’m talking about the highest cast of men of affairs.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/01/15/john-birch-society-qanon-reagan-republicans-goldwater/