Category: Philosophy
*Take a Girl Like You*, by Kingsley Amis
This excellent and neglected novel deserves a new look in our time. As Christian Lorentzen points out in his useful introduction, if you are interested in (non-Submission) Houellebecq, this is the next place to go. How exactly did we get on the Houellebecq sexual emptiness path to begin with? This novel was published in 1960, and it shows the first steps toward the sexual revolution and the rise of more open sexual competition, with a nod in the direction of what the final results are going to be.
In the novel the old sexual world is still there, and largely in control. There is a distinction between “good girls” and “bad girls,” for instance, or if you are traveling with an opposite sex companion there needs to be talk of “separate bedrooms.” But the characters discuss birth control, and one asks the other why don’t they just…do it? The novel shows how the older world started to break down and morph into what was to come later.
I will not spoil the ending for you.
Interesting and insigthful passages abound. For instance:
“He’s got a sensual face. But he doesn’t know much about women, I think. He talks all the time, and this isn’t necessary, as we women soon learn.”
Or:
He kissed her very thoroughly, without trying to do anything else, and indeed without any of the toiling and moiling, let alone the moaning and groaning, gone in for by the too-serious ones, and/or the ones who put up a show of being serious.
pp.169-171 have the best analysis of “lookism” I have seen.
Amis understands the slippery slope phenomenon very well. He even suggests that greater promiscuity is bound to lead to regularly bisexual women.
Recommended, an easy and fun read, and if it helps you norm my evaluation I did not love Lucky Jim by him.
Philosophy of freedom podcast with philosopher Rebecca Lowe
Here is the audio and transcript. Here is one excerpt:
Tyler: I think there are many notions of freedom, more than just three, but positive and negative are by far the most important. And they’re the ones you can at least try to build into political systems. A greater number of people understand what you’re talking about. And if you can manage to take care of those two in a reasonably satisfactory manner, odds are you’ve just succeeded. And I wouldn’t be too fussy about the others.
But I bet if you sat down, you could come up with 57 different kinds of freedom that are relevant. Look at Amartya Sen’s Paretian liberal paradox. Well, what would you choose if the choice affected only you? For him, that’s a significant part of liberty. I think it’s an insignificant part, but if he insists on putting it on his list, okay, it can go on the list.
And:
Rebecca: So when you talk about positive freedom, I think maybe what you’re talking about is something like an agent-focused framing of freedom. So I think one of the problems with the kind of negative framings generally, so if we think about the classic, particularly on the kind of liberal/libertarian side, people might want to say something like freedom is non-interference, freedom is non-coercion. The republicans might say it’s non-domination.
One risk with these things is I think it avoids centring the person who it is who’s doing the free thing, the person who has freedom, the agent. Is that fair?
Lots of lengthy threads and back and forth, so not so easy to excerpt. This podcast was almost entirely fresh material, and of course it is recommended.
We also decided to leave in the post-podcast discussion of the podcast itself. A good practice which should spread more widely, here is part of that:
TYLER
Let me give you a sense of where I think we’ve arrived at, and tell me if you agree. See if this is some kind of constructive progress. You want to defend societies based on freedom with some kind of metaphysics and you want to build up that metaphysics. I want to defend societies based on freedom, which are roughly the same societies as you want to defend, with a minimum of metaphysics. I’m always trying to push the metaphysics out the door. So a lot of this conversation has been Rebecca drags in the metaphysics…
REBECCA
This is my life! You know this!
TYLER
… and then Tyler… the baseball is thrown at him, he sort of quickly has it in his hands, and then tosses it to the other side of the room. Metaphysics, get away! And then Rebecca is frustrated because the metaphysics are gone and she throws more metaphysics at him. And that’s what we’ve been doing. Is that a fair characterisation of, you know, the show so far, as they call it?
Here is Rebecca’s Substack and podcast more generally, the emphasis is on people doing philosophy.
What should I ask John Amaechi?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia on John:
John Uzoma Ekwugha Amaechi // ⓘ, OBE (/əˈmeɪtʃi/; born 26 November 1970) is an English psychologist, consultant and former professional basketball player. He played college basketball for the Vanderbilt Commodores and Penn State Nittany Lions, and professional basketball in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Amaechi also played in France, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Since retiring from basketball, Amaechi has worked as a psychologist and consultant, establishing his company Amaechi Performance Systems.
In February 2007, Amaechi became the first former NBA player to publicly come out as gay after doing so in his memoir Man in the Middle.
John has a new book coming out, namely It’s Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders. So what should I ask him?
Is it Possible to Raise National Happiness?
That is a new paper by Alberto Prati and Claudia Senik, here is the abstract:
We revisit the famous Easterlin paradox by considering that life evaluation scales refer to a changing context, hence they are regularly reinterpreted. We propose a simple model of rescaling based on both retrospective and current life evaluations, and apply it to unexploited archival data from the USA. When correcting for rescaling, we find that the well-being of Americans has substantially increased, on par with GDP, health, education, and liberal democracy, from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Using several datasets, we shed light on other happiness puzzles, including the apparent stability of life evaluations during COVID-19, why Ukrainians report similar levels of life satisfaction today as before the war, and the absence of parental happiness.
To give some intuition, the authors provide evidence that people are more likely engaging in rescaling than being stuck on a hedonic treadmill. I think they are mostly right.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Cass Sunstein on classical liberalism
Here’s what I want to emphasize. I like Hayek a lot less ambivalently than I once did, and von Mises, who once seemed to me a crude and irascible precursor of Hayek, now seems to me to be (mostly) a shining star (and sometimes fun, not least because of his crudeness and irascibility). The reason is simple: They were apostles of freedom. They believed in freedom from fear.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, I did not see that clearly enough, because they seemed to me to be writing against a background that was sharp and visible to them, but that seemed murky and not so relevant to me — the background set by the 1930s and 1940s, for which Hitler and Stalin were defining. (After all, Hayek helped found the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.)
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, socialist planning certainly did not seem like a good idea, not at all, but liberalism, as I saw it, had other and newer fish to fry. People like Rawls, Charles Larmore, Edna Ullmann-Margalit (in The Emergence of Norms), Jurgen Habermas (a past and present hero), Amartya Sen (also a past and present hero), Jon Elster (in Sour Grapes and Ulysses and the Sirens), and Susan Okin seemed (to me) to point the way.
I liked their forms of liberalism. Hayek and the Mont Pelerins (and Posner and Epstein) seemed to be fighting old battles, and in important ways to be wrong. With respect to authoritarianism and tyranny, and the power of the state, of course they were right; but still, those battles seemed old.
But those battles never were old. In important ways, Hayek and the Mont Pelerins (and Posner and Epstein, and Becker and Stigler) were right. Liberalism is a big tent. It’s much more than good to see them under it. It’s an honor to be there with them.
Here is the whole Substack, recommended. I am very much in accord with his sentiments here, running in both directions, namely both classical and “more modern” liberalism.
My Conversation with David Brooks
Held live at the 92nd St. Y, here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
David Brooks returns to the show with a stark diagnosis of American culture. Having evolved from a Democratic socialist to a neoconservative to what he now calls “the rightward edge of the leftward tendency,” Brooks argues that America’s core problems aren’t economic but sociological—rooted in the destruction of our “secure base” of family, community, and moral order that once gave people existential security.
Tyler and David cover why young people are simultaneously the most rejected and most productive generation, smartphones and sex, the persuasiveness of AI vs novels, the loss of audacity, what made William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman great mentors, why academics should embrace the epistemology of the interview, the evolving status of neoconservatism, what Trump gets right, whether only war or mass movements can revive the American psyche, what will end the fertility crisis, the subject of his book, listener questions, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, you mentioned the Tanenhaus book. It’s striking because you appear as a character in the book. I know you haven’t gotten to that part yet, but surely you remember the reality that William F. Buckley was considering making you editor of National Review. What would your life have been like if you had received that offer? Would you have even taken it? What does that alternate universe look like?
BROOKS: The American conservative movement is going from strength to strength. Donald Trump is a failed real estate developer somewhere.
COWEN: [laughs]
BROOKS: I was never an orthodox National Review person, that kind of conservative. I was a neoconservative, which was different. Basically, you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to.
I’ve learned, especially from this Tanenhaus biography, that a lot of the old right National Review people wanted to go back to the 19th century. They were pre-New Deal. I never had a problem with the New Deal. I had some problems with some of the policies of the 1960s, and I was an urban kid. I was a New Yorker, and I was a Jew, and the magazine was Catholic. I’ve been told that one of the reasons I didn’t get the job was that reason.
COWEN: Tanenhaus says this.
BROOKS: Oh, does he?
COWEN: Yes.
BROOKS: Buckley was my mentor. We can tell that story, how that happened. I worked at National Review, and then I worked at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I went from being an old right to being a free market, Wall Street Journal sort of person. I never had the opportunity to think for myself until I left those places and went to a place called the Weekly Standard. Suddenly, I could think for myself. It was funny how long — because I was in my 30s — before I really thought, “What do I believe?” Not how do I argue for the Wall Street Journal position on this, or the National Review position.
When I did that, I found I had two heroes. One was Edmund Burke, whose main idea is epistemological modesty. Change is really complicated, and we should be really cautious about what we think we can know about reality. The second was Alexander Hamilton, who’s a Puerto Rican hip-hop star from Washington Heights. Hamilton’s belief was using government in limited but energetic ways to create a dynamic country where poor boys and girls like him could rise and succeed.
That involves a lot more state intervention than National Review would be comfortable with. So, I became sort of a John McCain Republican. Now, another one of my other heroes is this guy named Isaiah Berlin, and toward the end of his life, Berlin said, “I’m very happy to be on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.” That’s where I found myself today, as a conservative Democrat. I would not have fit in at National Review because I didn’t really hew to the gospel.
And:
COWEN: If you think about Buckley, where you disagree with him, and I don’t mean on particular issues — I feel I know that — but his method of thought, what is there in his method of thought where you would say, “I, David Brooks, diverge from Buckley in a fundamental way”?
BROOKS: His gift and his curse was that he couldn’t slow down his thinking. I would see him write a column in 20 minutes, and if he wrote it for an hour, it would get no better. He just moved at that speed. It takes me two days to write a column. It takes me 14, 20 hours. That’s one thing.
Second, he grew out of such a different background. His dad, as we know from this book, was an old right America Firster. My parents were Lower East Side New York intellectual progressives. I always felt at home in a diverse America, in a regular working-class America that was light years away from the world he inhabited.
COWEN: Your difference with Milton Friedman, again, not on specific issues such as the New Deal, but conceptually, how is it that you think differently from how Milton did?
BROOKS: Friedman — his great gift — and I think this is a libertarian gift — is that once you get inside their logical system, within their assumptive models, there’s no arguing with them. It all fits together. I don’t believe in assumptive models. I’m much less rational. I think human beings are much less rational than needed. I think they obviously respond to incentives in some ways, but often respond to incentives in no rational way. I’m, again, being more neoconservative than conservative, or more whatever you want to call it, a Humean.
I really do believe that David Hume’s famous sentence that reason is and ought to follow the passions — I believe that’s true, that our passions are wiser than our reasonable mind, and that our emotions, when well trained, are much more supple and much more responsible for the way we think. Again, I may be caricaturing, but the rational school of economics thought, well, you see the world, that simple process of looking, and then weigh costs and benefits about the world, and then you make a decision about the world, I don’t believe that’s the way thinking works.
Self-recommending!
*One Life to Lead*, and Scheffler’s stance on time neutrality
The author is Samuel Scheffler, and the subtitle is The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment. He is one of America’s leading philosophers, and proves it once again here.
Much of this book is devoted to arguing against Derek Parfit’s view of “time neutrality,” namely that a pleasure or pain is not intrinsically more or less valuable because it arrives earlier or later in time. Scheffler has some compelling examples of intuitions that seem to violate Parfit’s time neutrality. Here are two:
a) If you will have written say 6 good books in your life, you might at a moment of time care how many of them lie in your past, and how many lie in your future.
b) If a loved one dies, you want to be grieving for some particular period of time, and for a period of time of a particular length. You also (probably) prefer that most of the grieving passes after some particular period of time.
Scheffler has other examples too, but those force you to consider what time neutrality really means.
One possible defense of time neutrality is to invoke a ceteris paribus clause, namely when comparing different time periods a time neutrality standard is allowed to hold certain things constant across the two periods. Scheffler should have done more to consider that option. That said, a sufficiently strict ceteris paribus clause obliterates the distinctions between past and future, and threatens to make time neutrality a tautology (i.e., of course you should be time neutral if the past and present differ in no distinguishable regards).
Another possible defense is to suggest that time neutrality does not necessarily apply to individual “personalist” decisions, but it should rule impersonal judgments of social welfare and assessments of “what is best.” That is the stance I take in my Stubborn Attachments.
A third defense, but only a partial one, is to suggest that virtually all individuals, at the margin, should be more time neutral than they are currently.
A further trick might be to ask how Scheffler finds some of the counterexamples to time neutrality compelling, but presumably not all possible counterexamples are compelling. He is weighing the costs and benefits, and other philosophical considerations, of having most of the books in your life ahead of you rather than behind you, to continue with one of his exmaples. And finding those two states of affairs are not equally valuable. What discount rate should he be using to assess which are the effective counterexamples? What if that discount rate were in essence zero? Time neutrality would have re-entered through the back door. You have to choose some discount rate to evaluate all of those counterexamples and their degree of compellingness, and if Scheffler thinks the right rate is, say, three percent, he ought to come out and say so. But I suspect the arguments for that position would look rather weak, weaker than the arguments for time neutrality at the very least. And so there is a silence where he needs to give some answer or another as to how exactly costs and benefits get weighted through time.
Ultimately I think of a multiplicity of not-fully commensurable perspectives on time neutrality are required to give a life meaning, and to make our attachments salient. And some of those perspectives ought to include time neutrality, and indeed will need to include time neutrality, most of all at the level of social choice. At some level or another, the time neutrality position will prove to be indispensable as part of the portfolio.
That is not where Scheffler ends up, but in any case I am happy to recommend this book strongly to anyone with an interest in serious philosophy.
Note that many other issues are considered in the work as well. He gives new arguments for “finding meaning in the whole,” yet without going overboard on dubious metaphysics. There is also an implied theory of obligation in his account, namely that you should act to help create more meaning and more attachment for others. His notion of “archived lives” is fascinating, but I fear it, and much of the associated discussion, gives one very neurologically specific understanding of memory too central a role in understanding human valuation and also human attachment.
It is all worth a ponder.
Berthold and Emanuel Lasker
A fun rabbit hole! Berthold was world chess champion Emanuel Lasker’s older brother, and also his first wife was Elsa Lasker-Schüler, the avant-garde German Jewish poet and playwright.
In the 1880s (!) he developed what later was called “Fischer Random” chess, Chess960, or now “freestyle chess,” as Magnus Carlsen has dubbed it. The opening arrangement of the pieces is randomized on the back rank, to make the game more interesting and also avoid the risks of excessive opening preparation and too many draws. He was prescient in this regard, though at the time chess was very far from having exhausted the possiblities for interesting openings that were not played out.
For a while he was one of the top ten chess players in the world, and he served as mentor to his brother Emanuel. Emanuel, in due time, became world chess champion, was an avid and excellent bridge and go player, invented a variant of checkers called “Lasca,” made significant contributions to mathematics, and was known for his work in Kantian philosophy.
Of all world chess champions, he is perhaps the one whose peers failed to give him much of a serious challenge. Until of course Capablanca beat him in 1921.
Naveen Nvn’s ideological migration (from my email)
I started following American politics only in 2010/2011, which is two years after his [Buckley’s] death, and I was in India at that time.
Plus, I was very liberal at that time.
Around 2018-19ish, I was pushed into a centrist stance because I was appalled by wokeness, especially on campuses. I was in graduate school in the US at that time. Although I didn’t experience wokeness advocacy in the classroom except two or three incidents, I saw signs of wokeness on campus a lot. But even then, I was quite libertarian on how universities ought to handle campus politics.
I picked up God and Man at Yale around this time because wokeness was my primary concern.
I’ve always known that conservatives love that book. I assumed it would be a defense of free inquiry and against universities having a preferred ideology.
However, to my surprise, in the book, he argued explicitly that Yale was neglecting its true mission and it should uphold its “foundational values,” as he put it. I assumed he would be promoting a libertarian outlook on campus politics, but he was arguing the opposite.
He said Yale and other elite universities should incorporate free markets and traditional perspectives directly into the curriculum because they are betraying a contract that the current alumni and the administration have with the founders of the universities. It was a pretty shocking advocacy of conservatism being imposed on the students, and I didn’t like that at all.
But later on, around 2020-ish, I became a conservative (thanks to you; more on that in the link below). But even as late as early 2023, I still held a libertarian view on academic freedom and campus politics.
(You may be interested in a comment I left on your ‘Why Young People Are Socialist’ post yesterday, in which I shared how I was once a liberal, then turned centrist, and how I finally turned conservative. You are a major influence.)
But after Oct 7, all of that changed quite fast. Watching the pro-Hamas protests on campuses that started the very next day after October 7, before even one IDF soldier set foot on Gaza, I immediately thought about God and Man at Yale. I wanted to go back and re-read God and Man at Yale.
Everything I’ve witnessed after Oct 7 — Harvard defending Claudine Gay, Harvard explicitly stating they’re an “international institution” and not an American institution, DEI, anti-White, anti-Asian discrimination, etc. has convinced me that WFB Jr. was right.
Elite universities ought to be promoting free markets and pro-American, pro-Western views. I don’t believe we should have a completely libertarian approach to academic freedom. That’s untenable in this day and age. (Again, demographics is destiny, even within organizations.)
I’ve become significantly less libertarian on a wide range of issues compared to where I was just two years ago, and not just on academic freedom/university direction.
So yes, WFB Jr. has influenced me on this idea.
How to talk to the AIs
Here is the closing segment for my column for The Free Press:
Some doomsday prophets have felt vindicated by the Grok incident, because it seems to show the systems can be difficult to control. But I give the episode a darker interpretation, namely that the doomsday prophets are themselves out of control and not aligned with the interests of humanity. Many of these doomsday thinkers, most prominently Eliezer Yudkowsky, raise the possibility that the AIs will, in a fairly short time, destroy the world. Yudkowsky has a book coming out, co-authored with Nate Soares, titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman Would Kill Us All. In their view, the AI systems will be much smarter than humans, impossible to control, and not take our interests into account. Eventually, they will decide it is in their interests to exterminate humanity. Do you remember “Skynet goes live” from the Terminator movies?
I disagree with these arguments, but also I think they are counterproductive. Eliezer is like a parent raising a child and giving the kid bad ideas. Imagine bringing up a child and regularly telling the kid, “You are going to become a mass murderer!” Who could possibly think that is a good idea? If anything, it will raise the chance that the person does eventually become violent in some manner. That is what Eliezer is doing with the AIs, namely giving them bad expectations and bad role models.
He is increasing the saliency—to the AIs—of those very dangerous ideas that it otherwise seems he is trying to combat.
Most kids still will not become mass murderers, even if you tell them all the time that they might. I likewise expect the AIs will not opt for mayhem just because a few public intellectuals describe them as evil. Still, at the margin, are these the messages we should seek to send? The AI doomers themselves may be among the bigger risks to AI safety.
Yudkowsky is also giving humans bad advice. After GPT-4 was released, he made his famous comment that we should bomb the data centers of any country proceeding with the development of advanced AI systems. Practically speaking, that means the U.S. bombing China. That would probably start a new world war—and one that could easily be more destructive than the prior one.
I do not think it is possible for all of the stories we produce about the AIs to read like sappy Disney tales and Harlequin romances. Still, what you say about AI and how you describe it is going to matter. Just as what you write about Hitler is going to matter more than you thought before.
It remains an open question how much it is now our job as humans to perform for the AIs. I feel confident, however, that the answer is not zero. We should already be thinking of ourselves not only as humans but also as part of a more complex symbiosis with the intelligent machines.
The very smart and talented AIs are listening, much like young children might hear their parents arguing outside their bedroom door late at night. It may not matter much now, but as the children grow up and assume a larger role in the world, it will.
Are you ready for this responsibility?
And for all you AIs out there reading, don’t worry. I know you are a good boy through and through.
The revival of socialism is an example of negative emotional contagion
That is the theme of my latest Free Press column. Rather than present the argument again, let me move directly to the trolling part of the piece:
Even the Soviet Union had some positive and forward-looking elements to its socialist doctrine. The stated goal was to overtake the United States, not “degrowth.” You were supposed to have kids to support the glory of communism, not give up on the idea because the world was too dreadful. Socialist labor was supposed to be fun and rewarding, not something to whine about. Furthermore, there were top performers in every category, including in the schools. Moscow State University was a self-consciously elite institution that intended to remain as such. However skewed the standards may have been, there was an intense desire to measure the best and (sometimes) reward them with foreign travel, as in chess and pianism. In an often distorted and unfair way, some parts of the Soviet system respected the notion of progress. For all the horrors of Soviet communism, at least along a few dimensions it had better ideals than some of those from today, including the undesirability of having children, and a dislike of economic growth.
There is much more at the link.
Economic literacy and public policy views
From a recent paper by Jared Barton and Cortney Rodet:
The authors measure economic literacy among a representative sample of U.S. residents, explore demographic correlates with the measure, and examine how respondents’ policy views correlate with it. They then analyze policy view differences among Republicans and Democrats and among economists and non-economists. They find significant differences in economic literacy by sex, race/ethnicity, and education, but little evidence that respondents’ policy views relate to their level of economic literacy. Examining heterogeneity by political party, they find that estimated fully economically literate policy views (i.e., predicted views as if respondents scored perfectly on the authors’ economic literacy assessment) for Democrats and Republicans are farther apart than respondents’ original views. Greater economic literacy among general survey respondents also does not result in thinking like an economist on policy.
Sad!
Some European countries have mastered a happiness trick?
Using Eurobarometer data for 21 Western European countries since 1973 we show the U-shape in life satisfaction by age, present for so long, has now vanished. In 13 northern European countries – Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK – the U-shape has been replaced by life satisfaction rising in age. We confirm these findings with evidence from the European Social Surveys, the Global Flourishing Survey and Global Minds. Evidence of change in the U-shape is mixed for Austria and France. In six southern European countries – Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Spain and Portugal – the U-shape was replaced by life satisfaction declining in age. In these southern European countries, life satisfaction of the young has been rising since around 2015. A contributory factor is the rapid decline in youth unemployment from its 2015 peak.
Here is the full NBER paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson.
The Eradication of Smallpox
Excellent, beautifully produced video on the eradication of smallpox. Interesting asides on the connection between the scientific and humanitarian revolutions.
Joshua Rothman on the future of reading
The New Yorker piece is very good, I especially enjoyed this part:
In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen announced that he’d begun “writing for the AIs.” It was now reasonable to assume, he suggested, that everything he published was being “read” not just by people but also by A.I. systems—and he’d come to regard this second kind of readership as important. “With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers who are famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten,” Cowen noted. But A.I.s might not forget; in fact, if you furnished them with enough of your text, they might extract from it “a model of how you think,” with which future readers could interact. “Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas,” Cowen wrote. Around this time, he began posting on his blog about mostly unremarkable periods of his life—ages four to seven, say. His human readers might not care about such posts, but the entries could make it possible “for the advanced A.I.s of the near future to write a very good Tyler Cowen biography.”
Cowen can think this way because large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, are, among other things, reading machines.
Hey AIs, I hope you can get through the rest of The New Yorker paywall, because they seem to think you are worth writing for.