Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
The decline of public intellectuals and the rise of so-called thought leaders.
Human expertise and the illusion of knowledge.
Many parents still believe a large number of myths about child psychology that have been debunked or lack evidence.
Focused on Trump’s successes, many supporters are unfazed by his reversals.
A 100-year-old “challenge” to Darwin is still making waves. Though in fact it helps the theory of evolution.
Footnotes to Plato 
Socratic
I mean of course it’s not religious in any technical sense. But if it has similar sociological & psychological implications, I think that’s more interesting in terms of relevance to the article substance….
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1) On the 1st article (“Decline of Public Intellectuals . . .”), the author is a public intellectual (Tufts University) bemoaning the decline of his ilk, contrasted w/ the rise of thought leaders. Is the thought leader category a catch-all for “non-academically trained public intellectual”? The real problem today, IMO, is the rise of partisan think tanks, which are specifically designed to dissemate disinformation in support of a particular agenda. The term “think tank” is a misnomer — a far more accurate term is “propaganda cesspool.” Academics are in fact recruited to belong on these cesspools, that is, those who already are committed to its underlying philosophy, to give credence to the “validity” of their research. As he points out, income inequality has played a role in this endeavor. E.g., anti-climate change think tanks can engage in “saturation bombing” of disinformation, and isolated public intellectuals are drowned out in the resulting melee.
2) On the 2nd article (“illusion of knowledge”), I recognize that most people are ignorant, myself included and, in light of that circumstance, I try to to expand my knowledge, whereby I reduce my areas of ignorance, but also learn to identify and rely on experts. E.g., I don’t plan to learn how to install a hot water heater, leaving that to the plumber. So what? I strive to be self-sufficient as possible, rely on experts as well. As one reviewer said in the comment sections to this article: “The rest of us are still trying to work out if the article actually told us anything we didn’t know or just encouraged us to buy a book.”
3) Not surprised by the myths of child psychology. I’m surprised at the omission of a widely-held myth (esp. south of the Mason-Dixon line): corporal punishment (AKA spankings) are good for a child (sadly believed by Adrian Peterson, Viking running back).
4) the Evangelical roots of the post-truth world — I think there is more to the story here. Her sampling of “evangelical” seems in the main confined to the Nazarene tradition, but it’s pretty much the same in the non-denominational independent bible church movement, as well as the Baptist denomination. The author, Dr. Worthen, has written a book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (https://smile.amazon.com/Apostles-Reason-Authority-American-Evangelicalism/dp/0190630515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492789750&sr=8-1&keywords=molly+worthen), which would seem to touch on the same theme to some extent. Mea culpa: I graduated from DTS (Dallas T. Seminary, located in the bible buckle), but after my Ph.D. (University of Chicago, 1987 — NW Semitic Philology), and attendant unemployment, was fortunate to have my Weltenshauung reworked by reality. I really enjoy having every Sunday morning off!
BTW, what she said about Nathaniel T. Jeanson, who has a Ph.D. in Cell & Developmental biology from Harvard, and who promotes creationism, is a problem. I saw this firsthand in biblical and near Eastern studies — evangelicals (really fundamentalists) who get academic degrees at secular universities, and then return to the fold to teach and do research. At seminaries and most Xian colleges, one has to sign doctrinal statements that undermine independent, objective research. Even if they publish only in their own network journals, this enterprise is just more information pollution, and fortifies the false worldview of their audience.
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A product of the Trump Era: “Alternative facts”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts
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I was surprised to find that none of the myths of child care were things that I believed or didn’t know were false.
Normally one falls for a few of these stories. I guess the experts I depend on (to touch on another of the articles) are worth the amount I spend on them.
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It is easy to be cynical when we are lied to so much. In the LA Times this morning, an op-ed by a Trump voter outlines all his reversals. Then again, this is nothing new when it comes to politics. In many ways, it is easier to be disappointed because more is on record and searching for flip-flops is easier. Not sure it is worse, it is just that we know more. Would politicians and business leaders in the past have acted differently if under the same amount of scrutiny – hard to say.
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Have I read the article on parenting myths correctly? Myth 5 is apparently:
‘The sex chromosomes of all girls are XX and all boys are XY’
Now I know that there can be genetic conditions that make this not strictly true, but surely they are rare enough that that statement can hardly be called a myth.
Am I missing something?
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Michael:
It’s the wrong argument. If you require politicians to be noble philosopher kings then you’ve already lost, since you are no longer talking about human beings. Political activity is about building the sort of institutions that are robust enough to protect us no matter how vulgar or odious the politicians. There can be no guarantees which is why it falls on us, the citizens, to be vigilant against the corruption of these institutions. The problem is not quasi-hitler getting into power, it’s how did the institutions designed to stop it from happening get corrupted. Unfortunately most people tend to ignore this corruption as long it’s their candidate doing it, or it just doesn’t affect them yet. That’s why it’s more meaningful to channel political discussion into how to change policies rather personalities.
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Not only does the current climate not undermine the arguments and principles of “On Liberty.” It makes them more important than ever. And especially now, at a time when the Left is as likely to try and suppress speech and ideas as the Right is.
The idea that Trump is somehow unprecedented in his lying is simply unsustainable, given any knowledge of the history of the presidency since the Second World War. What may be unprecedented is his vulgarity and brazenness, but the idea that he lies more — or in more toxic ways — than the people who sold us the Vietnam War or who participated in Watergate and its cover up is, in one I can’t accept.
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Dan:
Mahlo cardinal
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oh damn, that was supposed to have a plus sign in front of it: + mahlo cardinal. WordPress again!
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Robin: “I was surprised to find that none of the myths of child care were things that I believed or didn’t know were false.”
I was surprised that no mention was made in this article of Dr. Spock. I haven’t read him since my children were little, over 50 years ago, but it’s my impression that he dispelled many of the myths mentioned here, not categorically, but by his consistent appeal to common sense.
On the pros and cons of co-sleeping, some younger members of my family went through agonies over this a while back, mostly because of pursuing a doctrinaire approach which they finally abandoned before dying of sleep-deprivation.
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Dan: “The idea that Trump is somehow unprecedented in his lying is simply unsustainable, given any knowledge of the history of the presidency since the Second World War. What may be unprecedented is his vulgarity and brazenness, but the idea that he lies more — or in more toxic ways — than the people who sold us the Vietnam War or who participated in Watergate and its cover up is, in one I can’t accept.”
I agree completely; however, his brazenness in the face of a lot of contradictory information on the internet makes the current situation unprecedented. I think his combination of ignorance, incompetence, authoritarianism, and inconsistent pragmatism is unique in US history.
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wtc48, Daniel Kaufman
Yeah, but “his brazenness in the face of a lot of contradictory information” is easily fact checked and constantly done in all the major media. Other Presidents may have “technically” lied less in terms of how their words coincided with the facts but we are missing the points about what lies are, the point about what makes an Orwellian society. Presidents that are easily noticeable as huge liars by more than half the population makes up for a failed Orwellian society. So Bill Clinton might have lied less in the technical sense, but his lies were carefully construed. He knew how to pick only the facts that bolstered his case and preventing most of the public from knowing the truth. In that sense, Bill Clinton is a far better liar than Donald Trump. And with huge consequences on how he deceived the public, both in terms of the portion of the public he deceived and how it lead to policy implementation.
So I think the general message of what Daniel Kaufman said about how Trump’s lying isn’t unprecedented is to some extent true, if we’re actually talking about the consequences of the lying of politicians. Now one might argue that the degree to which the Right is fooled by Trump is unprecedented, and maybe that’s true. I’m not really sure though when you consider that Republicans never cared about facts long before the Trump administration so did anything fundamentally change?
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saphsin,
To better answer your question, Naked Capitalism is my go to on the left. Zero Hedge for the libertarian side.
I still think the deep corruption issue is coming to terms with the fact finance is a basic public utility, but those in control will do everything in their power to avoid this fact.
Which isn’t to say it should simply be another function of government, because they serve different functions and political control of the money supply invariably leads to loose money policies.
Having made the argument before, I won’t go into the whole argument, but it’s as true today as it was in Watergate; You want to know what’s going on, follow the money.
As Markk said, it’s the beliefs we take for granted that are the hardest to examine, because they are not defined. 500 years ago, it was as taken for granted that government was monarchy, as it is today that Wall Street is finance.
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The way Trump’s every-day falsehoods are more accepted and dismissed is unprecedented.
BTW Robin, on top-down/bottom-up causality, and compiler/decompiler computing, I was including also the molecular assembler and hardware compiler levels (not symbolic).
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Bunsen Burner
The bigger problem is that there are no such things as philosopher kings, only human beings with the same biases, self-interest, and limits to their moral character & insight as anyone else. But for argument’s sake, let’s say there are such thing as philosopher kings. Who decides? There are no Gods and Oracles to ask around so that the public can collectively act together and decide “let’s make this person lead us and make all the right decisions” In a State-Capitalist society, those who have the most influence in deciding the philosopher kings are those who have power, meaning office holding politicians and especially the wealthy. So they’re going to be inclined to use their power in creating the terms of political discourse on what type of people are considered “wise” and those people are those who support their interests, not the interest of the public.
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Philip
“The way Trump’s every-day falsehoods are more accepted and dismissed is unprecedented.”
There are at least 4 or 5 other people other than me on the comment section of this blog post that disputed otherwise with their own factual presentation. It’s not obvious that’s true, and simply stating it without evidence doesn’t make it sustainable. Massimo insists we live on a different planet, but I think it’s just shying away from engaging with arguments.
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It’s not so much a post truth world, as it is a post order world. The narrative has been lost and everyone is just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, but little does anymore.
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Setting aside the onslaught of condescending comments about my position, several people here seem not to get it. I never said that Trump lies and no other politicians ever did. Nor that his lies are (so far, at least) worse than those of previous Presidents. Nor that they are not easily checable. I said that despite his brazen laying, and the fact that what he says is more easy than ever to check, he still gets away with it, brazenly. If you don’t think this is a sufficiently novel phenomenon to be seriously concerned about it I think you have crossed the line into cynical relativism.
As for arguments and evidence, I think it’s amusing that some people here think they have provided anything other than a restatement of their initial positions. And no, I will not waste my time looking for links to back my judgment, because: a) it takes two seconds to google a counter-link, which I will then have no time to read; and b) my experience is that it pretty much doesn’t matter, that sort of strong opinions ain’t gonna change just because one provides reasons or evidence. (And yes, this is a cynical comment.)
Socratic, someone who votes for a third candidate should think thrice before accusing someone else of having built his own box.
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I can’t really think of any president who has been held accountable for lying. Breaking into offices, maybe, but lying, not so much.
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Part of the real significance of Trump isn’t his lies, nor his brazenness. It’s the fact that we have to confront the fact that there is now about a third of the population of the US that is unreachable by any fact or discourse by the other two thirds (which includes reasonable conservatives).
Here’s part of the problem: This third, we’ll call them the Trump-third, hear him speak their language; share his fundamental paranoia and belief in conspiracy theories; have no faith at all in science or in any fact based knowledge or analysis. At work the guys say ‘grab them by the pussy,’ at home the women say ‘boys will be boys.’ Nuclear war is a real option for them, because, bluntly, they have a hard time conceiving any matters in terms of large numbers. Millions dead? Might as well say ‘a lot of people.’ A million years of evolution? Might just as well be ‘a whole lot of years’ – and everyone knows that you can’t change monkeys into men in just a lot of years.
They see Trump as a guy like themselves who just got lucky to be rich enough to play with the Washington celebrities, as well as those in Hollywood and New York.; and who is clever enough to play the system to his profit. He’s their hero by default – the reality TV star who’s rubbing their mediocrity and prejudices in the noses of the politically powerful and the leadership of parties and of states they like to believe are inferior to themselves – but who they suspect look down at them.
He came close to out-right insulting Merkel, and played the fool for Xi of China – and the Trump-third loves it. A major war would be a welcome change for them, because apocalypse can only be conceived as a kind of game show.
I’m not trying to put these people down. In many ways they are decent, charitable, intelligent, dependable. They just live in a different universe than most of us. Their world is filled with religious simplifications and political pandering, re-enforced literally every hour by the media they attend to.
How do we not living in that world communicate with these people? I don’t know; for now, I don’t think we can. This world has been under construction for many decades now, and its inner structure is layered with self-defense mechanisms.
America has always been fragmented, especially by region and class; but there was always a political class that understood this, often used it, but were generally open to negotiation between the fragments.
This Trump-third split is decisive, because it has been led to distrust negotiations and compromise, and look down at those who believe in the possibility of finding common ground.
These people will need to be accounted for politically somehow in the future; but there’s no talking with them for now.
And unfortunately, the media is largely doing what was to be expected of them – normalizing Trump and the bizarre moves and utterances he makes, as though it were another day in Washington….
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“I never said that Trump lies and no other politicians ever did. Nor that his lies are (so far, at least) worse than those of previous Presidents. Nor that they are not easily checkable. I said that despite his brazen laying, and the fact that what he says is more easy than ever to check, he still gets away with it, brazenly. If you don’t think this is a sufficiently novel phenomenon to be seriously concerned about it I think you have crossed the line into cynical relativism.”
^ What you said here is very different from what you said here:
“But I think you are truly missing something if you don’t think there is something disturbingly new in a US President who can brazenly tell lies, be contradicted by evidence available to everyone, and millions of people just not giving a crap about it.”
They mean very different things. I’m more inclined to agree with the top paragraph (not completely but more so) than the bottom one.
“And no, I will not waste my time looking for links to back my judgment, because: a) it takes two seconds to google a counter-link, which I will then have no time to read; and b) my experience is that it pretty much doesn’t matter, that sort of strong opinions ain’t gonna change just because one provides reasons or evidence. (And yes, this is a cynical comment.)”
Yes in other words if someone expresses a very different opinion, they’re the ones who are ignorant and you aren’t, so there’s no point in wasting any effort. (I’m not caricaturing any of this, that’s what you’re saying explicitly) I mean it’s fine if you don’t think it’s debatable, but I don’t really see the point of sharing articles on your blog that will inevitably lead to controversial discussions, unless you want there to be internet echo chambers that you’ve criticized in your first comment.
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“If you don’t think this is a sufficiently novel phenomenon to be seriously concerned about it I think you have crossed the line into cynical relativism.”
I think there is some truth to it, but I think Michael Fugate has said correctly that there was ever a time in which a President was held accountable for his lies, especially when it came to their worst international and domestic crimes. We live in a society in which it’s very difficult to have rich and powerful people get accounted for raping women, no matter how famous they are and how well known their abuses are. (Trump, Bill Clinton, Kobe Bryant, Bill Cosby, etc.) I think there’s a degree of truth that Trump can get away with lying and not losing his influence, but it’s an extension of a problem that was already there, and compared to past Presidencies, his particular variation of lying applies most strongly to a third of the population but the opposite way for most of the other population while Past Presidents have successfully done so for fooling both sides of the spectrum, so it’s odd to say Trump created a more Orwellian or Post-Truth society.
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I think there’s a degree of truth that Trump can get away with lying and not losing his influence much more so than others***
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I live on the other side of the Atlantic, but to me Trump is unprecedented, as president of the US.
I once read an interesting article about Freud. Warning: the author thought Sigmund was a charlatan. But a charlatan of a very special kind. Normally, a liar tries to conceal that he’s lying or making things up. He will stay silent about facts that may contradict him, etc. According to this author, Freud did nothing of the kind. He didn’t mind. Quite the opposite: even when writing nonsense, Freud didn’t try to conceal it was nonsense. He just wrote it down, and for some strange reason the sheer implausibility of it all, the honesty with which Freud showed that he made thing up, made him more convincing. Almost as if his readers thought: “Nobody in his right mind would write this nonsense if it weren’t true.”
One may agree with this analysis or not, but it fits Trump, I think. Bill Clinton was a liar too, as were Bush and Blair (“weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” anyone?) but it was hard not to doubt their statements when they were lying. Trump lies so blatantly that we are in “Freud territory”, if I may say so. His lies are so transparent, his statements (or the statements of his “administration”) so obviously made up, that you almost start to admire the sheer honesty with which he lies and makes things up. He doesn’t even seem to pretend he’s telling the truth. Just as this attitude made Freud more convincing, it may make Trump more convincing.
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I don’t see how this disagreement with you on the unprecedented nature of Trump makes all of us — a quite diverse group, I should say, who don’t agree on much, normally — “cynical relativists.” But I’m happy to drop it, as it is obviously a sensitive issue.
It’s also worth noting that “cynical relativism” might very well be true, so simply calling someone a “cynical relativist” doesn’t move the ball very much.
I do understand entirely the weariness that comes with this sort of debate, though. I was struggling to decide whether to dispute a number of the alleged “myths about child psychology” in one of the links, but realized it would simply get me into an interminable argument with half the people here, so I decided against it. Life is too short and I have too much to do.
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It was supposed to be Hillary. The narrative was lost.
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couvent
I think I agree with your analysis. I think the point is that Trump often tells outrageous lies, but he does so with a grain of truth that the people he’s appealing to are looking for. Like he would make a stupid lie about the degree that premiums went up because of Obamacare and there would be all these fact checks. But the point is that people’s premiums are going up and they’re worried about it, something the mainstream media isn’t offering them. So they feel that they don’t really give a crap if Trump lies about the statistics. I’m not saying that they’re right to do that, but it’s to understand how Trump manipulates the public and what’s appealing about him.
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Nobody seems to get that next week the government has to agree to raise the debt ceiling to over 20 trillion dollars, or shut down. Yes, Trump is a completely loose cannon, but he is entirely symptomatic of the larger situation. If you think he is in any way not representative of the larger situation, you need to follow the news a little better and start adding it up yourself, not just go by the smooth, soothing voices that everything is normal.
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Money is a contract. Every asset is backed by an obligation. The fact that the government owes this amount of money, means it is obligated to those holding this debt, not necessarily the voters. People are just the stuffing.
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