What is the most effective response to Mr. Trump’s campaign against universities? For people outside higher education, this is a moment to speak publicly about why universities matter. They promote public health, economic growth and national security. They are the largest employers in some regions. They are an unmatched, if imperfect, engine of upward mobility that can alter the trajectory of entire families.
For people in higher education, this is a moment both to be bolder about trumpeting its strengths and to be more reflective about addressing its weaknesses. About those shortcomings: Too many professors and university administrators acted in recent years as liberal ideologues rather than seekers of empirical truth. Academics have tried to silence debate on legitimate questions, including about Covid lockdowns, gender transition treatments and diversity, equity and inclusion. A Harvard University survey last year found that only 33 percent of graduating seniors felt comfortable expressing their opinions about controversial topics, with moderate and conservative students being the most worried about ostracization.
“The insularity of American academia is appalling,” said Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. “It has led to massive resentment against intellectual elites.” This insularity does not justify Mr. Trump’s policies, but it does help explain the dearth of conservatives defending universities today. Universities will be in a stronger long-term position if they recommit themselves to open debate.
A place of politics, culture, and discourse
What are the legitimate questions about medical treatments?! I assume by academia, we don’t mean medicine, right? We’re talking about ‘professors and university administrators’, right?
So, um, why does non-medical academia have positions that they wish to _debate_ on any sort of medical treatment? Do they even _know_ enough to debate how specific treatments are done?
‘I, as a professor of literature, think instead of the traditional way of doing this heart surgery, you should open the incision more to the side and put drainage over here. This will allow easier access to the area you need. Also, unrelated, I think the dosage of Edoxaban should be lowered, but taken more often. No, I have no medical knowledge whatsoever, why do you ask? Let’s have a professional debate on this!’
Yeah, I can see why doctors would not be willing to debate various medical treatments with random guys who teach a class in Early American poetry! They probably do get pretty rude if you keep trying.
Also, looking at that, I just noticed they said ‘gender transition treatments’, specifically, which is weird, because almost all those treatment are used for other things. Hormone therapy is hormone therapy, and the goal of which is basically the same regardless of what it is treating. Plastics surgery is plastics surgery.
Also, that’s not the right term for that. Not to nitpick, but it’s kinda important in medicine. The term is gender-affirming treatments, not gender-transition treatments. Transition would imply you change when you do it, which…would have people flipping back and forth every time they took a pill? What?
I don’t think _this guy_ knows anything about medicine either! Why does he want to debate doctors about medical treatments?!Report
What does the president of Wesleyan know anyway? Wait, lemme google “Wesleyan”… it’s probably a Christian thing… yep. Named after John Wesley. OH! A Methodist to boot!
Yeah, he can probably be dismissed along with anybody who agrees with him or has any sympathies whatsoever to his point about insular thinking in the academy.Report
It sure is fun to write an opinion piece about something, quote someone else saying something vaguely agreeing in that general direction, and then have people pretend the quoted person actually agrees with everything said in the article.
The president of Wesleyan is not a doctor, but more important, hasn’t actually said anything about debating medical treatments whatsoever.
Indeed, he’s complaining that academia is too insular. As I pointed out, medicine and academia are not the same thing. Like, at all.
So apparently the thing you’re arguing, and the thing you’re claiming that is being argued in this op-ed, is that academia not only should start debating medical treatments, it should open the doors letting in _more_ people debate medical treatments?
Or have I misconstrued this somewhere?Report
Personally, I don’t think that medical treatments should be debated at all.
This isn’t House.Report
Thinking about this, it really is weird that an op-ed that is written about how academia is actually not behaving well and needs to talk to more people, or however you want to phrase..
… Is, at the exact same time, arguing that academia needs to start debating medical treatments?
What an oddly contradictory position to have.
If academia is full of a bunch of out-of-touch liberal elites, why do we want them debating medical treatments?! What if they decide that, I don’t know, putting shunts in people’s hearts is… Cultural appropriation or something?!Report
See? The obvious conclusion is that there shouldn’t be debates!
It makes you wonder why the New York Times is printing stuff like this in the first place. Are they trying to distract us away from… DONALD TRUMP?!?Report
“If academia is full of a bunch of out-of-touch liberal elites, why do we want them debating medical treatments?! ”
And yet if they have the Wrong Opinion regarding these treatments then that’s terribly important and we need to make sure everyone knows about it (and punishes them for it).
Although you’re right, in a sense, that this isn’t debate; it’s more of an excommunication for profession of heresy.Report
Do you have examples of academics making public statements about medical treatments and getting ‘punished’ for it?
In fact, you do have examples of academics making public statements about medical treatments at all? That’s weird thing for them to do.
My definition of medical treatment is, let me steal one from AI: Medical treatment refers to the various methods used to diagnose, manage, and cure health conditions, which can include medications, therapies, and surgical procedures.Report
Joe Rogan was mocked for talking about having been prescribed Ivermectin and taking it as prescribed.
There was also a movement to have his show taken off of Spotify entirely.
He’s not an academic, though.Report
” Transition would imply you change when you do it, which…would have people flipping back and forth every time they took a pill? What?”
So what are the pills for, then?Report
Well, I’m not a doctor, but I do know people with prescriptions for gender-affirming reasons, that’s why I was using them as an example, and they are generally prescribed them to adjust their hormone levels to within a normal range. There is testing done to start with, seeing how far things are off those ranges, and then more testing after the prescription to check the new levels, and there sometimes will be adjustments afterwards.
This is, from what I understand, the reason that they are prescribed to a lot of people… in a very broad way. I can’t say that’s always true, some of the same things can be prescribed for birth control or heart disease or even cancer treatment, and now we’re getting in medical stuff that doctors know and I don’t.
(I actually do know, but we’re pretending for the purposes of this discussion that I do not, and I’m talking absolutely everything said on this topic at face value.)Report
Yesterday evening I happened to come across this substack post by a former chancellor of UC Berkeley. I know nothing about him but it seems relevant.
https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/how-did-academia-not-see-it-coming?
The essay includes some academic terms and references to people I had to look up but does a good job articulating something that has seemed obvious to me since these debates about academia, “wokeness,” etc. emerged. The embrace of these various theories of post truth, and deconstruction, to say nothing of bordering on conspiratorial levels of cynicism about the liberal project or that truth even exists, ultimately result in a kind of unilateral disarmament. After all, if all of the institutions and values underlying small l liberalism, and the basis of Western systems of government, are nothing but shams designed to empower the usual suspects, how do you defend them when a reactionary right says ‘yes, we agree, just not about which particular suspects’?
You can’t, and nevertheless that’s exactly the point the modern university, and academically saturated organs of society like journalism have spent recent years conceding. You don’t get the credibility back over night and there’s no way to request a redo. All of which to say is that something like this from NYT is probably too little, too late.Report
“too little, too late”
And unevenly distributed. There are folks who look around and cannot even comprehend why something like this might be necessary even as others, such as the NYT, realize that they’re in the middle of a five-alarm fire.Report
A lot of theories that originated in the Ivory Tower managed to escape it thanks to the power of the Internet. Now you have people who really don’t have much background or training in those theories lecturing other normies about the inherent racism of whiteness.Report
The money quote from the essay:
“So here’s where we get to my bill of indictment, based on my own lived experience (ahem) of these debates way back in the 1990s. In those days, when I was in college and grad school at Berkeley, a standard normie liberal critique of poststructuralism was that the anti-Enlightenment epistemic radicalism of the left, while overtly trained against the complacencies of small-l liberalism, would eventually “make space” for right wing critiques of liberalism.
This was a point that Jurgen Habermas made over and over again in his many debates with the likes of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Niklas Luhmann, and others. Having been raised in Hitler’s Germany, Habermas understood very well the risks associated with abandoning discourse ethics and embracing epistemic relativism, cynicism, or even nihilism. Habermas argued that the ideas these men were promoting, allegedly “from the left,” were sapping the epistemic foundations of democratic practice, which depended on the “regulative ideal” of reasoned, good faith discourse as a mechanism for achieving a “fusion of horizons.”Report
Yea I would say there is a fundamental failure to understand that the strongest bulwark against the kind of authoritarianism experienced in the 20th century is well functioning liberal institutions.Report
The propaganda tools that the 21st century authoritarians have are a lot greater than that of the 20th century regimes. Goebbels would have loved social media and YouTube. Just an easy way to lead people down the rabbit hole.Report
::Elrond I was there.gif::
I was at the opposite end of Berkley: Notre Dame.
Here’s the weird counter-intuitive Marchmaine take: I’m ok with *Private* universities/colleges having, say, a DEI litmus test… if that’s the driving principle of your Academy, then you should screen for it as to how the faculty you hire will contribute to that understanding.
As I’ve written before, the issue with the Ivies is that they were a proxy for *Public* meritocracy… they aren’t any more, and that’s ok. If the Ivies want to reclaim a sort of public position of eminence, they will need to rebuild it according to whatever lights they want to follow. But as Private Universities, they are entitled to drive their projects off any cliff they want.
State funded universities/colleges (and k-12), however, need to be neutral institutions… ‘Mere’ Education if you will. We could call them an Enlightenment Project if helpful. In some ways, this is the real ‘fight’… as the Ivies have gone, so has much of Academia. And it’s easy to understand, Academia is firstly a giant crab-bucket of status, and gathering status is a complex networking game; understand that, and you’ve understood the fundamental alignment of incentives that drive hiring decisions and grant funding.
Back to Notre Dame and the post-modern (et al.) University… when I was there in the 80s & 90s, there was a recognition that a lot of the old ‘assumptions’ about how things worked and would continue to work were being actively undermined; deconstructed, if you will. Now, I’ve always been a reform/rebuild/renew sort of ‘conservative’ but deconstruction isn’t that. A number of reasonable folks suggested a ‘dialogue’ about — and I’m not making this up — The Catholic Character of Notre Dame. The goal was extremely mild: The University has a Catholic charter, and anyone looking to join the faculty (and staff) should be aware of that Charter, and should be able to state how they would ‘participate or contribute’ to that charter. There was no litmus test for Catholics. In fact, one of the actual issues was that too many faculty would ‘check the catholic box’ and avoid the issue; while many non-Catholics appreciated the Charter and had significant contributions to make (including prominent Non-Catholics such as Alvin Plantiga, George Marsden, and David Solomon just to name a few). The split wasn’t over Catholic vs. Non-Catholic, it was over Relevance vs. Irrelevance … and Relevance won, and won hard. But what was Relevance? Was is a better Truth? A better mission? No, it was chasing clout; academic clout being determined by the post-modern deconstructionists and the critical theory proponents. The STEM folks thought they were exempt from that debate, until they weren’t. But Liberal Arts? They gave up the ghost willingly.
Long story short? The academic game required hiring the sort of people that were vetted by the Tier 1s so that their work might be elevated via the networks. As the Tier 1s went, so went anyone with any sort of ambition… personal, scholastic, or institutional. And while that’s not 100% of academics, it’s close to 100% of the Academics and Staff who ‘matter’ in setting the direction of the Departments, the Colleges, and the University itself.Report
So you don’t agree with the idea that publicly funded institutions have a societal obligation to correct past societal wrongs?
Good to know I guess.Report
Heh, only accidentally; it’s definitely not the core mission.
Mostly because that’s a Motte/Bailey argument… for every past societal wrong that we all agree is a societal wrong and is being addressed through ordinary culture, there’s 1000 imagined societal wrongs where the imaginers are wrong and are forcing wrongness via institutional capture — that’s a form of liberal totalitarianism.Report
So once again you don’t see the righting of the past institutional wrongs that denied women, people of color and religious minorities an education as a core mission of public universities. Got it.Report
I don’t see how to justify giving Obama’s kids a helping hand because their supposed ancestors suffered institutional wrongs.Report
You get that they are the exception right?Report
What schools might Obama’s kids get into where they wouldn’t if they were white?Report
Heh, I was at UMD followed later by the ‘also ran’ state law school when these sorts of debates were in their post PCU, Clintonesque nadir. There were some traces I recognize mostly in retrospect but it was not something that loomed particularly large.
My concern about giving an alternative approach a hoity toity title is that it may well concede premises about legitimacy of the criticisms that I’m not prepared to. Which isn’t to say I disagree with your general philosophy.
However if I had to pick at it a little, it would be this question of whether there really is a hard line between private and public, at least to the extent the privates, SLACs, Ivies, whatever, receive public grants and most importantly the backdoor subsidy of federally backed student loans. That doesn’t mean the government can just come in and shut things down for no reason other than speech it doesn’t like but it does mean that all of the direct and indirect money has always been subject to the democratic process. In terms of what the Trump administration is doing it seems to fall under pulling strings everyone for reasons I will never comprehend forgot were, and always have been, attached.Report
To pick at your pick…
“That doesn’t mean the government can just come in and shut things down for no reason other than speech it doesn’t like”
There’s a very, very thin line between it working like that and it not… and that line is independent accrediting agencies. Right now there are multiple (mostly regional) accrediting agencies that give schools enough room to work with this agency rather than that agency which keeps the process somewhat solvent.
There are a handful of schools that take 0% funding from Govt for just that reason… ironically if we wanted to use the heavy hand of Govt funding to coerce the Private Schools into one direction or another, then the Ivies would drop Govt funding, but many (but not all) smaller mission driven schools would fold.
It would look a lot like suppression of speech, and probably would be…
Not surprisingly, I think the funding is to the Student and not to the Schools… and, as long as the schools meet a minimum agreed upon standard, then that funding is the Student’s to dispense. Which, via accreditation, is pretty much what we have now.Report
I want to be persuaded by that argument but am struggling as to whether I actually am. Where (I think) we’re aligned is that I do not want the government using the heavy hand. I think it is bad for all involved and society more generally.
If the institutions themselves hadn’t been so hellbent on thumbing their nose at their benefactors and the wider public it would be a lot easier for me to say it’s the students spending the money not the government. However followed to it’s logical conclusion we end up in a place where in order to fund education and research the government has no choice but to also put its thumb on the scales for deeply antisocial and illiberal ideologies with no democratic mandate, with the only alternative being to take the tax payer money and go home. That’s a terrible place to be and feels to me like a false choice.Report
I’m not sure I follow. Are we now talking about the financial impact on all of education from Student Loans? I agree that the program has had unintended consequences on the entire Higher Education cost structure, but the relationship to Private/Public institutions is not linear. That is, student loans have increased the cost of all education. We could (and should) try to ‘un-distort’ the funding for Higher Ed. But, that way leads to unpacking assumptions about how the fundings is being used. Are we funding the Student to access all education opportunities, or are we funding institutions, or are we going to create two tiers of Education: one Publicly Funded and the one where the Good Jobs ™ come from.Report
Sorry for being unclear, my gripe comes down to my belief that we’re de facto funding the institutions. Most students could not get the kind of credit on the terms they do, if at all, but for the public backing. Without students able to get that money, the economics of even wealthy private institutions change considerably.
I would much rather live in a gray area on this topic or under the fiction that we’re really funding the students.
Making that work requires a sense of propriety from the administrative leadership at these institutions that I do not detect. At a certain point if the public via elected officials decides they don’t want to support schools that operate under bizarre and backwards theories of race or sex or whatever else that’s way out of step with the values of the average tax payer I don’t think they have to or that the students as an intermediary cures the issue. The result of that would be a ‘get out of jail free’ card the universities don’t deserve and puts the taxpayer in the pickle of either funding nonsense (which is ironically highly self destructive to the universities themselves) or nothing at all.
Hopefully that clarifies.Report
…what a weird thing to say.
Yes, the Trump administration is doing that, but they are _also_ deporting people based on their speech. Which not only is itself wrong, but it makes it pretty clear what it is asking colleges to do.
There is an amazing ability of people here to pretend that Trump’s actions exist in a vacuum, and that we should judge ‘Trump administration claims to be worried about disorder on campus and doing things to reduce that’ alone, and not notice that the Trump administration is also literally grabbing all the protestors it can and secreting them across the country to stand trial, and making it extremely clear it’s about their content of their speech, and also openly saying its dispute with Columbia is about specific speech.
“Let’s pretend that we have no context for this thing and things being stated about it by the Administration do not exist. We shall, for the purposes herein, pretend it happened under a perfectly spherical government.” is getting a little old.Report
You think it’s bizarre to discuss the article that is the subject of the post?Report
While I think there are plenty of faculty at universities large and small whose own academic work is terrible, and virtually all university faculty teach from a particular perspective, some of which are better, or more flexible, than others, I genuinely believe that the general public’s view of the university as “ideologically captured,” or overrun with “postmodernism” (as a general rule, the more a person uses that word, the less they understand it), are wildly blown out of proportion. In fact, I think something very different is happening at universities, in some ways the exact opposite of what so many people ignorantly (as in, they don’t actually know what’s going on at universities) criticize for: 1) The ever-increasing size of university administration, and in particular, upper-level administration, which is both a financial burden to the universities and pretty significantly alters the way universities function; 2) The philosophy of university administration, which has increasingly dominated university administrations and boards since the 90s, of treating the university like a corporation/business generally, which has also changed the way universities function, and resulted in an increased focus on schools, departments, majors, and even individual faculty who have a good “R.O.I.”, particularly those that increase post-graduation salary numbers (STEM for the last decade or two, but also business, science, econ, and the practical majors); 3) related to both (1) and (2), the increased adjunctification of the university, so that whereas people who freak out about universities are freaking out about some tenured professor somewhere they heard about on the internet, who is teaching undergrads radical ideas, most of the professors kids will actually have, especially at state schools, will be low-paid adjuncts who have absolutely no job security or academic freedom, and generally toe whatever line the department/administration wants them to or risk losing their poorly paid, over-worked position.
If you want to fix universities differently, and have them produce better, more well-rounded educations, instead of focusing on “pomo” professors and Marxists*, you’d focus on those 3 things, which are rapidly destroying universities as they existed even when many of us were there (for me, that’s the mid-to-late 90s, when people were already lampooning them as P.C.U., but still).
*If you have never seen the Zizek-Peterson debate, I recommend not watching it, but there is a funny moment in which Zizek asks Peterson to name some Marxist professors, and of course, Peterson is unable to do so. Then Zizek says he knows of two (one of whom was David Harvey; I can’t remember the other). I know of maybe half a dozen in the U.S. (more elsewhere), and I suspect Zizek knows at least that many, but of the half a dozen I know of, none excluding Harvey actually teach Marxism or from a noticeably Marxist perspective. One of the ways that American universities have failed so many is in not teaching them what Marxism is, which means for so many of y’all, Marxism is merely a poorly seen and completely misunderstood spectre haunting academia.Report
My assumption is that people mean “critical theorist” when they say “Marxist” these days.
The folks in charge of running the university have a different set of goals (“maintain endowment”, “grow endowment”) than the people teaching the courses (“teach math”, “teach LGBTQ dance theory”), and those are different than the goals of the students themselves (“chase tail”, “get good job when I graduate, I guess”).
The problem is that there are a handful of really bad actors who have screwed everything up for everybody and the landscape of universities will look significantly different in a generation and in the bad direction. Smaller, fewer students, more emphasis on employment prep than life of the mind.
They sold their birthrights for a mess of pottage.Report
The conversation we should be having, but are not, because it’s a difficult conversation to have, is what do we want universities to be for? Should it serve a purely intellectual purpose (in which case, the “bad actors” are inevitable, and I think a feature, not a bug)? Should it prepare young people for careers (generally or specifically)? Should it be the home of the vast majority of our research, from basic to applied? Should it have a broad or narrow collection of majors? Etc.
Some of these are highly compatible purposes for a university, and some are significantly less so, or even contradictory. Currently, at least in practice, universities are trying to be all of them and more, or at least big tier 1 public schools and the bigger private universities are.
American conservatives have been increasingly hostile to the university’s intellectual purposes, either desiring to get rid of this purpose entirely, or reset it to some time in the past when, they believe, it was just teaching the important ideas of the past, and not innovating in any way (except, perhaps, in interpreting the ideas of the past). Basically, the American conservatives who think the university should have an intellectual function at all are the most rigid of the Scholastics.Report
A parallel question is “What are universities actually doing?”
How far from what we want them to be are they?
Looking at what they actually do gives us a handful of different answers… the administrators do one thing, the professors another, the TAs yet another, the librarians have their own fiefdom, and the students are as diverse as their majors.
You’ve got some of them getting hired as they walk off the stage and others who walk off the stage and walk across the street and join a protest demanding student loan relief.
The crazy thing is that out of all of the things that we want the University to be, one of the top three is “sustainable” and… well, whatever we have now, doesn’t seem to be sustainable.Report
You’ve got some of them getting hired as they walk off the stage and others who walk off the stage and walk across the street and join a protest demanding student loan relief.
I mean, good for them if they do, but I don’t think you have many students going straight into intentional unemployment unless they have enough money that student loans probably aren’t an issue.Report
We can include unintentional underemployment.Report
I think that might be another take that’s becoming dated. There’s always a conversation to be had about the ROI for the marginal student and/or the marginal school. That issue was a lot more acute with the glut of students during and in the years following the great recession. My understanding is that one upside of a full employment economy is that it was driving a correction. More jobs, even not great ones, meant fewer students of the kind most likely to fall through that sort of gap. Pity Trump seems hell bent on reversing it.
The more important questions I think revolve around whether colleges have no choice but to require the students that want to attend class to accommodate the never ending Palestine party, as it obstructs walkways and open spaces, or worse periodically paralyzes educational or administrative functions by occupying buildings or engaging in other disruptions. It can be added to long standing questions about whether it really is a good idea to have some Dean of student life equipped with the latest in feminist thinking investigate alleged felony sex crimes among the student body, run admissions departments as thinly veiled probably illegal racial balancing bureaucracies, and threaten the STEM departments with sanction if they refuse to lower their standards because someone somewhere might be upset about the demographics of the class and/or professoriate.Report
There’s a simple way to stop the “never ending Palestine party,” just as there was to end the “never ending Vietnam party” 55 years ago.Report
The thing is I doubt I’m all that far off from a policy perspective. I’d have stopped military aid and running diplomatic interference for the Israelis decades ago. However even extending maximim charity to the student and faculty activists I do not think it is fair or reasonable to ask regular tuition paying students to submit to being endlessly held hostage.Report
I don’t think they are being endlessly held hostage. I don’t think they ever were, and to the extent that they were, it was very brief and highly localized.
This feels a lot like the people saying Portland is a war zone in 2020 as though the vast majority of Portland wasn’t going about its business as though nothing was happening.Report
It’s all about give and take. I’ve always been a proponent of broad tolerance of speech and being as hands off as possible. All I can go by is the news reports and I’m open to the possibility that a lot of this is greatly exaggerated. The algorithm rewards rage and controversy not perspective.
However what isn’t lost on me is that I’m pretty sure the people out protesting are the same ones who refuse to tolerate mere discussion of contentious topics in classrooms or speakers with whom they disagree on whatever topic speaking to a group that wants to hear them in a lecture hall. And yet they would ask their audience to give them a benefit of the doubt we all know they would never in a million years extend to others. Hence why even the most fair minded people have become skeptical. The kinds of broader principles one might appeal to were purged from this type of activism long ago.Report
My assumption is that people mean “critical theorist” when they say “Marxist” these days.
You assume people mean things. The basis for that assumption is shaky.Report
I think he’s right that people broadly conflate critical theory with Marxism, and are particularly afraid of critical theory, even if I am quite certain that they know as little about critical theory as they do about Marxism, and perhaps less.
From early in its radio history through its early television days in the 1960s, Bertrand Russell was a fixture on the BBC, including doing segments in which he would talk about philosophical ideas, particularly those of the first half of the 20th century (famously lampooned here). It would be amazing if we could have someone come on TV and talk about major intellectual movements of the last century or so, including critical theory. I think more people would like it if they knew more about it.Report
If the claim is that people incorrectly call A, which they don’t understand, B, which they also don’t understand, then I don’t disagree with this. But since they would almost certainly call C, which they also don’t understand, B, if they came to think they had thoughts about C or were told by some intellectual hustler that they were supposed to have certain thoughts about C, I think it more accurate to say that they don’t mean anything rather than that they are making a discrete mistake.
Maybe there’s a connection between that and our lack of anything like Russell’s BBC talks on our mass media.
Loved the send-up.Report
Well, it’s like the difference between CRT (pure theory) and CRT by the time it goes through the telephone game and comes out the other side in the form of social media posts.
Critical Theory? It might be awesome if we limited the game to Bertrand Russell and thereabouts.
But anyone can play and, good lord, they do a better job of turning people off of it than their fiercest critics do.Report
I think this is true of virtually any serious philosophical, political, or scientific ideas, though. I don’t know what it says about them other than that they are difficult to master and most people are intellectually lazy.Report
They get used to set and develop policy, though.
“They’re difficult to master” is all well and good if it is contained in the university setting.
Once it bleeds out into management and administration, it’ll have transmogrified into a status game.
Status games are a lot easier to master. Amateurs can do it.Report
Are there any good ideas used to set and develop policy that aren’t misused and abused by people on social media? Like, man, you should read some of the sh*t I’ve seen people say about Hayek, pretty much everyone on social media has forgotten the important stuff about Smith (but so have the policy people, so…), and dear god, what the techies have done to Parfitt and others in the service of “longetermism” and “effective altruism.” I suppose you don’t see much social media perversion of Rawls, but that’s mostly because you don’t see much social media discussion of Rawls.Report
Rawls is like Nietzsche.
He won. He won so completely that we don’t even need to read him anymore.
Only crazy people still do.Report