Conformity and intellectual complacency provide a more plausible explanation for the prevalence of misguided beliefs among elites than deliberate malice.
I think it was Noam Chomsky who said your average gas station attendant's disinterest in politics is actually rational. He can't do anything about it, getting too into it may annoy his friends and family, and he has other concerns (like family and job and paying the bills) anyway.
I do wonder if this is also true for elites; they have more leisure time at the absolute top, obviously, but particularly just below that have to spend a lot of time fighting for position and playing the courtier. Very few people have the time to exhaustively investigate any ideology, and if you did it for critical race theory you couldn't do it for queer theory. Besides, it's more important for a courtier to fit in.
If critical thinking about government & societal organization - and involvement therein - is not the duty of those highest on the totem pole, whose duty is it?
We're supposed to sympathize with this shirking because the shirkers are *too busy making money* to care about the defense & improvement of the societal systems which support their high positions? Beyond ridiculous, reaching disgusting.
Where are the elites of yesteryear, who died colonels in the trenches and captains in the navy, but died? Would these captains of today go down with the ship? They disclaim responsibility for the ship while it's still smooth sailing!
To steal from Mac Dre - I've been in the back with the groupies and the stars, I've been out front with the thugs and the cars, I've been on the yard with the Mexican mafia, a nation deserves an elite that'll kill and die for her.
Elite decadence is a common feature of cyclical theories of history, from Peter Turchin through Sir John Glubb and Ibn Khaldun to Chinese historians describing their dynastic cycle hundreds of years ago. The general assumption is the people on top are bad.
Things brings up another point about elite beliefs in particular: there is often posturing to give the impression that they know more about a topic than they do. Your CRT example is a good one: who on any side of the debate has actually deeply interrogated the source literature? Instead everyone has some surface level understanding which may or may not even align to their stated belief? And given the understandings are superficial you can indeed have a large breadth of belief.
My lifelong disinterest in Noam Chomsky is even more rational, because he's a mealy-mouthed dickhead. If a gas-station attendant *enjoys* discussing politics, it is perfectly rational for him to be interested in the subject, since he, just like Noam Chomsky, has a vote, and he, just like Noam Chomsky, has a voice, with which he may persuade others by emotion and argument, regardless of his particular station in life at any particular time. And if politics, at that particular time and in that particular place, gets sharp, he also has a trigger finger.
"your average gas station attendant's disinterest in politics is actually rational. He can't do anything about it, getting too into it may annoy his friends and family, and he has other concerns (like family and job and paying the bills) anyway."
Some thoughts: What is the Purpose of Holding & Expressing Political Beliefs?
As a strong advocate for Hanlon's Razor (never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity) I'm already a convert to this viewpoint, but I think you've expressed it well. And it's pretty easy to check whether your models of others are consistent with them being well-intentioned. Just ask yourself whether given what you think they believe, they could easily see themselves as the good guys, something which nearly everyone believes they are.
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" Or for that matter, ignorance (case in point). The hypothesis of "well-intent" is itself partially based on it; I don't doubt that many people who believe various things & enact various actions have good intent - in fact, I've often argued that it's the type of people we should be suspicious of much more than we are - the issue is that their intent matters not nearly as much their actions, and the reality of their actions is much different from whatever their supposed intent (and beliefs) are.
The OP says this: "Suffice to say, I find this explanation that assumes malicious intent to not be very believable" in regards to this quote: "[they] were broadcasting the belief that such firms were evil in order to undercut their rivals."
But it's difficult to arrive as such position with more knowledge about the subject - for example, seeing how many such people engage in "cancel culture." The week had a good article on the subject titled "Cancel culture is a class issue," where they note the following:
"And if class membership is earned, it can be taken away. That is why, as Douthat writes in his seventh thesis, the threat of cancel culture 'is most effective against people who are still rising in their fields.'"
"Those in the professional-managerial class can expect their name to be googled in every job application. As Douthat muses, 'under the rule of the internet there's no leaving the village: Everywhere is the same place, and so is every time.'"
"'I don't want people like that to keep getting jobs' that let them achieve PMC membership, a teenager told the Times in defense of call-out accounts which seek to end allegedly racist peers' careers before they begin."
Cancel culture is largely inter-class conflict (or those aspiring to be), which indeed, aligns with malice & personal benefit. And if you've seen cancel culture firsthand - I have on a daily basis for years on end, endless doxxing, harassment, threats, celebrating suicides, people being fired, throwing in prison, etc - any illusion of "well-intent" being present (and being of importance) goes away. It's not every person, and many are certainly conformists - marxists had a good concept known as "false consciousness" that's fairly applicable here - but many people, especially those on the left & libs, are simply ghouls, and have been ever since they arose. And let's not forget how that happened - with revolution, massacres, cult of reason, imperialism, and indeed, infighting (E.G., Charlotte Corday).
Oh I'm not saying that this isn't an issue or that good intent absolves people of responsibility. But it's still important to point out the mechanism through which these beliefs form
Yeah, I don't disagree, though I obviously do w/ where these beliefs come from & why they persist. There's different sub-groups for sure - coping is a big one just as it's the case with conformists - but malice is present quite a bit, in as much as it being for personal benefit. Just look at those who believe in human rights. I don't mean your average person who'd say "Yes, I believe in them" then move on with their day and not think about it, but people who promote it, to whom it forms key aspect of their politics - even if they came to such beliefs with well intent, to retain it when human rights serve imperialism time and time again, backing "rebels," coups, regime-change, sanctions to starve people, etc, one must go far beyond it.
I don't think cancel culture should be understood primarily as malice, rather it's an emotional coping mechanism to remove their cognitive dissonance by fending off those who promote information that does not align with the conform beliefs to which they subscribe.
Most of those taking part in cancel culture exhibit high levels of neuroticism, and are emotionally unable to deal with contradictory information that they do not feel they are in control over. It's an attempt at controlling information to make themselves feel better.
Ehh, I'd disagree. It's true that it amounts to heresy - same with "hate speech" as a whole - but there's a difference between how it exists in relation to power/system, and how an average person operates. Often it overlaps, too; just because someone is a true believer doesn't mean they don't posses malice, if anything it makes it more likely. But even if you look at, say, Soviet Union or witch-hunts under Christianity, much of it was based around personal/religious benefit, revenge, out of animosity, etc. And just like here, most of it was top-down to begin with.
“never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity) I'm already a convert to this viewpoint,”
I basically agree with this (or at least the very similar claim that determining the difference between malice/evil and stupidity/incompetence is extremely difficult).
But you and the author are making the different mistake illustrated by the only thing I learned in my Sociology 101 class that still sticks with me:
NOT BLACK <> WHITE
Just because something is NOT malicious does *not* make it “well-intentioned”.
To lack ill-intentions is not the same as having *good* intentions.
I don't think Hanlon's Razor is true in politics. It's an adversarial field where you are always trying to get one-up on the opposition. This is particularly true in a duopoly like the USA, which makes individual interactions more zero-sum than they would otherwise be, since with three or more parties two parties could collaborate against the other(s).
“There is this pervasive idea that elites are malevolent creatures that are “out to get you” and constantly scheme in order to keep other members of society as disempowered as possible.”
In some cases, elites, especially those who are strongly ideologically-motivated and/or ambitious, are “out to get you” in the sense that they want you defeated at the polls, your influence in society greatly diminished, and, in many cases, your liberty flouted with myriad edicts and regulations.
The average kid at Harvard is likely woke, which breeds contempt for the anti-woke, i.e., mostly whites. While these lazy views may be driven by a desire to protect and/or advance the status of the “marginalized”, it produces something akin to malevolence as whites are expected to bear the brunt of the DEI regime as a form of karmic justice. Of course, if we are talking about white Harvard kids, they mean other whites, not themselves.
The only reliably visible way that I see 'elites' keeping other members out is in making sure their children go to the right schools so they stay where they were born. Oddly enough, it's a method the rest of us can attempt to use to advance, your results may vary
I think the idea that elites are malevolent creatures who are out to get you arises from the world their policy beliefs and preferences have created that have had bad results for non-elites for half a century. During all that time no course correction was made, how this has played out for non-elites has simply not been a matter of interest to elites. As to what I am talking about, here is a plot of unskilled real wages over time and how it went flat for decades after 1973.
Stagflation spelled the end of the New Deal Order. The Neoliberal Order that replaced it took working-class wage stagnation as a feature, not a bug. Democrats, who had gained the allegiance of the working class by providing a economy that gave them those wage gains before 1973 were no longer providing those gains. So, the working class gradually moved to the GOP for their culturally conservative offerings.
Over this same half century, elites have done very very well. People can see this. So we have the people who have run the country since I was born in 1959 giving us a world where those in the lower half have a more difficult time keeping their head above water while those in the top tenth have done extraordinarily well. Why run policy that way, if it is not deliberate?
Could something like this be the source of the idea of malevolent elites?
I don’t think any of that requires malice, just ignorance, as Ruxandra is pointing out.
Imagine you had a button, and if you push it, your town gets a new factory and you and all your mates get new jobs that earn you much more than you previously did. Given the option, you almost certainly push it. Maybe you push it more than once, if you can.
What you don’t know is that those factories are being relocated from some towns multiple states away, ruining peoples’ lives. But you don’t have anything against those people. You just don’t know that’s what’s happening. Why would you? You don’t know any of those people. Maybe you hear that Michigan’s economy is in trouble on the news or something, but what does that have to do with you?
(For the more introspective of you, would you still push the button if you did know that was what was happening? A lot of people would.)
If your model is that elites are extracting wealth from working class people (which I don’t think is the only model), I think the explanation that elites have hit a button that worked out great for themselves and didn’t know what else would happen is way more likely than that they are purposely trying to stick it to working class folks.
It has nothing to do with factory siting. It is about tax, monetary and other economic policy.
Those elites who make economic policy know they were screwing over working people. For Republican elites that was a feature, they have always been the capitalist party and embraced a "trickle-down" economic philosophy. Incent investment, get higher productivity, and from that high wages.
But that is not what happens. Incentives to investment work. But the investors choose what to invest in. They have the option to make financial investments as well as capital investments and as I pointed out they have increasingly choses the former. He's a post where I show how a company can use stock buybacks and accretive acquisitions to engineer a higher stock price with zero organic growth.
What makes this possible was legalizing stock buybacks in 1982. Cutting taxes on capital gains makes price rises more valuable incenting financial engineering of high stock prices. But then in 2003 the tax on dividends was cut to capital gains rates. SO now the taxes paid on income from money are much lower than the taxes paid on work. This all incents financialization and discourages production. Elites are the ones with the investment portfolios who benefit, working stiffs pay the price.
Conservative elites don't care about workers. But what about those who purport to care? How is it when Democrats get into power, they cannot repeal any of these things? How is it that Democrats passed the Republican TARP bill? How is it that Obama did not warn the Fed off from their giveaway-to the-rich QE program? That's the sort of thing you would expect from Reagan Republicans. By Democrats embracing this, Democrats get tied to anti-worker policy and Republicans can now pretend to be the party of the working class. So now we have Vance, who is a fucking finance guy, a stooge of a billionaire money man, pretending to be the avatar of the working class.
"How is it that Democrats passed the Republican TARP bill? How is it that Obama did not warn the Fed off from their giveaway-to the-rich QE program?"
Because if they didn't pass TARP and the Fed didn't do QE, the aftermath of the Crash of 2008 would have looked a lot more like the aftermath of the Crash of 1929 than it actually did.
Yes it might. But then the pandemic produced unemployment unlike any seen since the Great Depression, and yet we bounced out of that pretty well. The difference was in 2020-21 trillions of direct stimulus was applied right at the time of the employment decline, while after 1929 they waited 13 years before applying the stimulus. In both case the economy bounced out of depression inside of a year. If you read my post you will note I called for the stimulus to be applied to the *real* economy, but withheld from the financial one.
This would accomplish the necessarily deflation in assets to restore financial health, while preventing the negative effects from bleeding over into the real economy.
Interesting chart on unskilled real wages. Without picking at how it was compiled (minimum wage?), I do notice 3 things:
1, It is a logarithmic scale, so the climb on a regular scale would actually be much sharper a curve.
2, it does not really remain as flat as you indicate, but begins to climb again about 2020. This climb would be much more prominent if it were a simple numeric scale, but it is still apparent.
3, it might be that the sharp rise itself was the aberration, easily explained by the end of the great depression and the post-war industrial economic boom. Seen this way, the trend line runs up from 1875 to1935 on a pretty steady line, jumps up for the economic boom until 1972, then heads back toward the trend line by running flat. And now, by 2020, we have simply returned to the regular slow rise of this indicator.
The log scale shows constat percentage growth rate as a straight line. A linear scale would emphasize recent changes and deemphasize earlier ones.
The curve is pretty flat until a brief rise from 2016 to 2020 followed by a return to flatness. We have had very low unemployment for 2 years with weak wage growth. I have argued this is why people think the economy is bad.
War stimulus does not last 20 years. Two two years after the end of WW I we had a depression. The postwar boom reflected economic policy that was gradually undone over 1964 thru 1981. The policy took effect after the price controls established by Nixon after the gold standard ended
* It's important to understand that 'luxury beliefs' are often not even 'beliefs' in any important sense of the word....ie a coherent formulation of ideas about something. They are more in the way of an emotional signal to the peer group.
* I think the now ubiquitous 'luxury beliefs' meme in rightist discourse is a case of an excessive association of particular insights with a particular thinker. It is one thing to credit Einstein with The Theory of Relativity but socio-psychological insights are of a different, more widely diffused kind. In essence you could quite likely have heard most currently fashionable socio-psychological insights from your Granny or Grandad reflecting on what their long life has taught them about human behaviour. Or an expansive conversation with friends down the pub after a few drinks. And though Henderson is an impressive young intellectual (I subscribe to his 'stack), I first came across the essence of the 'luxury beliefs' thesis in a book written in the early 1990s.
Question: Why lazily well-intentioned rather than also actively self-interested? The latter also seems like it fits within Mounk’s definition and includes some very impactful and widespread beliefs.
“defund the police is mostly due to lazy well intention”
You can cite some of Rob’s other points as being well-intentioned, perhaps. But defund the police? Do elites live in high crime places with no security?!?
Lazy sure. Beyond lazy, imo. But in what sense are there GOOD intentions to the idea that honest poor people should have less - or no, which is literally what defund the police meant at its start, until leftists sensing the losing battle changed it to the still-terrible reducing spending - police protection?
Ok, now you are asserting that these elites are actually stupid and cannot reason.
Defund the police is a much greater step than “go soft on criminals”, “we have too many people incarcerated”, etc., etc. which fall in line with your point.
Stupid and lacking in any common sense is at least a whole step beyond merely lazy. But that’s what’s required for supporting defund the police. Where I agree mere laziness and accepting bad ideology is sufficient for support on most other soft on crime policies.
But thanks for your explanation. We will have to agree to disagree.
Yes people who actively campaign for defund the police are lacking any common sense. Defund the police is not actually a very common belief among elites and it’s lost a lot of popularity
“Defund the police is not actually a very common belief among elites and it’s lost a lot of popularity ”
I agree 100% that it is not *today* a very common belief among elites. But of course it WAS indeed a popular belief amongst elites in 2020 and 2021.
It “lost a lot of popularity” largely because leftist leaders realized this particular belief was costing them elections, and so they changed the signal and the other elites have mostly gone along, no doubt.
Not sure how your true statement re: “lost a lot of popularity” supports your case for ‘well-intentioned”, though.
Interesting essay for sure, but I think the author greatly over emphasizes malice as part of Henderson’s concept of luxury beliefs.
Status and distinction are the primary drivers of luxury beliefs. Malice might play a role for some people for certain beliefs, but it would be a secondary driver at best.
According to Henderson; “They are honest indicators of one’s social position, one’s level of wealth, where one was educated, and how much leisure time they have to adopt these fashionable beliefs.
“And just as many luxury goods often start with the rich but eventually become available to everyone, so it is with luxury beliefs.”
I think the key word here is honest. People promoting luxury beliefs are sincere in their opinions. These opinions may change over time, but for the most part, are formulated in earnest. That people who adopt luxury beliefs are almost certainly lazy in their approach is a given, because most luxury beliefs are laid bare with even minimal research.
I strongly disagree with this statement as well; “There is this pervasive idea that elites are malevolent creatures that are “out to get you” and constantly scheme in order to keep other members of society as disempowered as possible.”
The vast majority of people don’t think the govt is out to get them. They think the political class, for whatever reason, is largely incompetent, disconnected from the people they serve, and often motivated by luxury beliefs that don’t reflect the needs of the people they represent.
Like I say. malice might play a role in some luxury beliefs for some people - like in the example you cited with people trying to push out others in the job market. But I think Henderson is clear that status and destination are he prime motivators.
In your example of the classics major going into finance, he eventually “know better” but “still votes for Labour.” In other words, he has now become malicious.
So what we really have is two tiers: a lazily well intentioned tier being coached by a malicious tier.
While it may be true that those who hold elite opinions in general harbor no animus towards those who are affected by their opinions, I am not convinced that this is universally true.
Stated more plainly, at least some people who hold elite opinions hold them because of animus towards the affected class.
Without knowing the actual statistics (laziness on my part), I would assume that fewer elites than common people are avid hunters; that more elites, unlike common people, have the financial wherewithal to pay for personal security systems; that elites live within areas that have less crime and often in neighborhoods that hire private security; that elites are more likely to work in spaces that are guarded (a bank vs. a convenience store). It’s possible that gun control might have little effect on the common person’s safety or the ability to pursue hobbies that involve guns, but they certainly perceive that to be true and not entirely without reason.
Elites believe that gun control creates a better society in general and don’t consider the concerns of the common people. Now that I think about it, maybe elites just want other people to do their shooting for them.
Being against voter ID laws. But supporting photo ID for getting on airplanes.
Being for illegal immigration. But supporting Democrat mayors who complain about illegal immigrants being deposited in their cities.
Being against school choice, partly using the pretext that the money shouldn’t go to religious schools. But choosing to live in suburban areas with good school districts or sending their own children to private schools. [The Obamas famously sent their children to private schools even as they shut down the school choice program in DC.]
If your retort is that some of these are not pure animus towards the affected class but rather just examples of selfishness and so callousness to the plight of the affected class, fair enough. But now we are perilously close to a distinction without a difference, no? Especially given your thesis that the elites in question are lazily *well-intentioned*.
I think I disagree with you on the premise re: luxury beliefs, so not sure how much this resonates with you at all, but: how is the idea of being "lazily well-intentioned" with some of the more disruptive luxury beliefs, like legalizing/decriminalizing drugs, or normalizing childbirth outside of wedlock?
The laziest thing is always to stick to the status quo. If someone wants to tear down what you may well argue to be a Chesterton's fence, laziness doesn't seem sufficient as an explanation as to why one would side with them. Even among the elites, those are not openly practiced majority positions, so if you want to go with the majority, why actively oppose traditional values?
Finally, I don't find the argument that "everyone can afford any beliefs" super convincing. I think it's not unreasonable to assume that people by and large want to act and view the world in accordance with their beliefs; relatedly, Mounk observes that people hold these beliefs "perfectly sincerely". If we take YIMBYism as an example, I just don't find it credible that for a person whose retirement savings are virtually all tied up in the house they live in and own it should be *just as easy* to openly espouse a YIMBY-position than for a person with a diversified portfolio. Of course the homeowner could fake such a belief just for status gain, but that seems too cynical a perspective on how people think.
Elites didn't start opposing traditional values suddenly. For a long time they were pro then. They only started doing it once these ideas became normalised in their social milieu.
I think social liberalism just cognitively appeals to elites and often works for them, because they can apply it in a more nuanced fashion. It takes effort to understand it's not as easy for everyone
I don’t agree with your take. You have no justification for the “well intentioned” writ large.
That said, if you replaced “lazily well-intentioned” with simply “lazy”, it would be closer to the truth.
To suggest 50 years ago that wrong-headed elite leftist ideas were well-intentioned may have been fair. But as you can see with where elites have gone in the U.S., there is no longer legit justification for the claim that most of the bad/harmful beliefs that Henderson labels “luxury” beliefs are in fact well-intentioned.
Your answer above acknowledges this in citing that they are merely of their social milieu. That makes them lazy virtue signaling for personal benefit, and NOT “well-intentioned”.
I supposed if you want to be exceptionally charitable to elites here you could call them “lazily not deliberately harmful”, but that is still a far cry from “well-intentioned”.
Is that what you mean to do here, 'improve the epistemic habits of elites'?
If so, what habits do you wish to replace them with?
Also, do you consider yourself among the elites (yes, an immodesty trap in that question, but I don't mean it that way)?
If not, what are the lines of delineation that I should assume when we are discussing the elites? Is it status, position, wealth, schooling, birthright (yuck!)? Or perhaps it's like obscenity, we know it when we see it.
As per the topic, it looks to me like plain conformity effects, something the elites as a group certainly have no monopoly on. So I guess I might agree with the author who proposes to do away with the term. But then we would have to invent a new term to look down on those people with.
Well part of the problem with this discourse is it's hard to come up with a consistent definition of what is an elite. I think I am an elite according to Rob's definition, yes.
As for improving epistemic habits: basically promoting truth in an individual and institutional fashion (m trying to do that myself)
I agree with the more broad definition given by Mouck. I too don't think luxury beliefs are necessarily motivated by malice, there needs to be included in the definition a certain amount of snobbery. I personally encountered this as well as reading about it from others. The idea held by elites that life should be a certain way for them. In a word, entitlement. Work is for the little people. The wealthy businessman who tells the 25 year old waitress that hard work is the best way to live and achieve in life while he buys his own 25 year old daughter an Audi for her birthday. What's good for the working class is good for them because they need the discipline (or purification or whatever it is), but me and my family are above all that. He mentioned entitlement as a limited motivation, but I think it may have more importance. This sense of entitlement is based on the underlying belief that they are more deserving than the lower classes, and the poor are a mere abstract collective useful to the elites for appearing compassionate. Amongst themselves it seems to be just laziness or complacency, but if presented with the personal choice elites always choose what benefits them the most. Altruism quickly becomes low priority.
With respect to Effective Altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried was an ardent proponent.
From my interactions with SBF (on Twitter) I have become convinced that he wasn't too interested in EA. He saw EA as a mechanism to further his and FTX's interests, but that was about it. He is a smart and articulate guy, though, so I think he convinced no small amount of people that he was devoted to EA's message.
I'd believe that. Probably he found a convenient 'religion' he could (with his math background and elite connections) convincingly expound to cover his shenanigans and went with that.
Possibly. And there’s no doubt which was more important to him. But I find it perfectly plausible that he believed the EA stuff he expounded. That he was a narcissistic fraud is not incompatible with him genuinely supporting EA.
[For the record, I’m not that big a supporter of EA the movement in caps, but the small letters idea of earning to give I find admirable and certainly rational.]
“Most people are partly specializing but mostly affiliating” - when it comes to knowledge/beliefs.
True some affiliated beliefs are “wrong”, but if one looks at affiliated beliefs as a whole, perhaps there are important and cutting differences between affiliations - and perhaps this is what matters from a survival perspective.
I really enjoyed your conversation with Yascha Mounk and learned a lot from both of you, so thank you!
Long before I learned about Henderson's term, I was using among friends the term Vanity Virtues to describe the thing that is similar to your "lazily well-intentioned" description. I initially was intrigued by Henderson's concept and thought that he had simply dug deeper. Over time, I've come to think otherwise but, honestly, have not spent that much time to figure out why. Then, I heard your conversation, and your framing makes much more sense. The term Vanity Virtues also does not automatically assume an ill motive. Sometimes most of us behave out of self-interest and for reasons of vanity, especially on social media, and not to undermine anyone else for our gains. I'd say we do this much more often than scheming an elaborate plan.
Looking forward to reading more of your good work!
Excellent article. The idea of elaborate malice that has taken hold in the right (and areas of the left to a lesser extent) has always really disturbed me. It's also just not how people work. The worldview of someone who thinks people have what is basically a tabletop game "evil" stat is very concerning.
You refute your own argument right in the tagline: “Conformity and intellectual complacency provide a more plausible explanation for the prevalence of misguided beliefs among elites than deliberate malice.”
Asserting that elites just lazily conform to whatever belief is popular in their social circle at any given moment does not explain why the popular beliefs in elite social circles are so often misguided.
If there is no rational actor injecting misguided beliefs into elite social circles, then the beliefs of elites should have a 50/50 probability of being ‘misguided’ or ‘well informed’. But as you already conceded, they are misguided more often than not. So, there is a statistical reason to believe some force is pushing elite belief towards being misguided, even if we accept your theory that each individual elite is just lazily well-intentioned.
This assumes that a random sampling of possible beliefs will be 50/50 true and false. But that is surely false. The vast majority of possible beliefs you can hold are incorrect. There’s just way more ways the world can possibly be, but only one way it actually is.
Of course in reality there are processes we use (e.g. reason) to narrow down our sampling of beliefs so that they converge closer to the truth. We don’t just randomly select possible beliefs. And social conformism has to count for at least part of that convergence effect, although obviously it’s not as reliable as reasoning.
But I’m still not sure how you arrived to the conclusion that elites particular method of belief selection (i.e. social conformism) must have a default 50-50 likelihood of being well-justified?
Are the values of elites actually good? It seems to me that elites have adopted norms that are good for elites and at staying elite, not norms that are good in any more broad sense than that. Individualism is good for elites who have lots of money and tons of people who want to be their friends, etc., because they are wealthy and have influence, but is individualism really good for people who are ordinary and poor? As opposed to a collectivism that stresses interdependence and the value of all members of a community (and not in an abstract way, but in the manner of everyone being invited to the table, literally, not figuratively).
“There's also the fact that I don't think elites are particularly likely to hold false beliefs.”
Left Elites today overwhelmingly either hold woke beliefs or at minimum won’t denounce them.
I am talking specifically about DEI / intersectionality / woke / Critical race theory oppressor-oppressed ideology that states that evil rich male Christian (and Jewish, where applicable) white capitalists are responsible for all evil - and little good - in the world, and that the BiPoC and/or LGBTQ+++ “oppressed” are justified in using *any* means at all to overthrow their “oppressors”.
Even Richard Hanania who shares your view that on average elites hold better beliefs than non-elites acknowledges this.
Given the evidence, how can you claim they are “not particularly likely to hold false beliefs”?
If all you really mean to say is that historically elites held better beliefs than non-elites, or that even today in aggregate elites hold more true beliefs than non-elites, I’d be fine with those, and probably agree. But the idea that they are not particularly likely to hold false beliefs? Really?
Because the framework we’re projecting onto their beliefs as a measurement device is a binary one. Either the beliefs of elites are ‘misguided’, to use Ruxandra’s term, or they are not. If not, the elite’s beliefs would be said to be correctly guided, according to someone — Ruxandra, I would assume.
But either way, misguided or guided. Only two possible outcomes. 50/0.
That raises the question: If elites are lazily following the beliefs of their social group, why is their social group “misguided” more often than you’d expect any random group to be? (That’s Ruxandra’s own premise btw.)
I agree there are only two possible outcomes, but why should it follow that they are equally likely? We can classify objects as human or not human, but obviously if we randomly sampled across the universe, the likelihood of an object being human/not-human is not 50-50.
Even if we’re only sampling beliefs held by elites, over the course of enough beliefs it should shake out to 50/50 since there are only two possible outcomes. Because, remember, Ruxandra’s argument is that they’re basically just lazily following someone else’s opinion. But who would that person they’re flowing be? And why wouldn’t they also be lazily following someone else? And if everyone is randomly following everyone else, how could you not end up being right half the time and wrong half the time in this binary system we set up?
Unless everyone in the elite circle is following the same person who is guessing at worse than random odds. Or, unless Ruxandra has just decided of her own accord that Elite Belief™️ is wrong more than it’s right, which is one of her premises.
Because if there is some objective set of “guided” beliefs — not just Ruxandra calling balls and strikes based on her own personal biases — then it follows that a large enough, diverse enough sample size would produce a random outcome, which would be 50/50 in a binary situation. (Like flipping a coin and recording heads or tails 1M times.)
And the population were sampling — all the different subgroups of people in every country worldwide — is very large and very diverse. So we definitely have a randomized trial here.
This assumes that the set of guided beliefs is roughly equal in size to the size of the set of unguided beliefs though. The reason that coins tend to land 50/50 has nothing to do with the fact that there are only two possible outcomes. Compare a binary option upon selecting a lottery ticket that yields either (I won the lottery) or (I didn’t win the lottery). These possible options exhaust the logical space, so they are the only two possible options. But they are not equally likely, not even close, because the set of possible outcomes where I won the lottery (1 ticket) is vastly smaller than the set of outcomes where I didn’t win (many many tickets).
Similarly the set of unguided beliefs which are false is vastly larger than the set of guided beliefs which are true. To see this, compare the number of possible ways that a given proposition “the distance from the earth to moon is x miles” could be true or false. There are obviously many more ways to make that statement false (e.g. it is 1 mile away), but only one way to make that statement true. So randomly selected beliefs about the distance from the earth to the moon are almost certainly going to be false. Makes sense?
Sure, I understand your point. But I don’t know if I’d grant it to you.
As I’ve alluded to a couple of times now, the beliefs in question are subjective — not objective, like your example — in nature. So the universes of right and wrong answers could change depending on who is judging right from wrong, be that Ruxandra or someone else.
I mean, the vast majority of elite (and nonelite) beliefs are correct. We just stop thinking of things like “the Earth orbits the sun” or “the moon causes the tides” as part of the population of beliefs because they’re so well established, but they were radical ideas once.
Before I slam elite expertise, I think it's important to recognize that over the last 500 years, it has proven vastly superior to prior methods for selecting authority (i.e., often hereditary but also moderated by elite-like institutions such as guilds that used their power as much to prevent supply as to improve skill or decision-making). Similarly, those methods proved superior to studying goat entrails or throwing animal bones as a way to determine good policy.
That said, I think the problem is more significant than just the elites not being insulated from the costs. In the social sciences, in particular, they are insulated from most feedback. When feedback is unpleasant, they devote a disproportionate amount of their energies to "disproving" the feedback as opposed to using the new information to refine their theories.
This idea is encapsulated in Max Plank's observation that "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Granted, the insulation from the costs encourages them to pursue this course of action. But it is the actual removal of feedback that causes the harm.
Returning to the original idea, the insulation of elites from feedback is a potential cost of our current decision-making process. While it may be a significant cost, it's crucial to remember that this structure has led to centuries of unprecedented global growth. Therefore, instead of discarding the current system, it's more productive to focus on making incremental changes that enhance the feedback to experts. This balanced approach ensures that we retain the benefits of the current system while addressing its shortcomings.
It is also worth remembering that the insulation from feedback extends far beyond the original idea of luxury beliefs. Instead, it applies to nearly any area or decision. I think the focus on luxury beliefs is driven by the ability to frame the larger issues in terms of hypocrisy.
It’s also a byproduct of the standardization of education and creation of non-direct value add careers. Careers in academia or law were either sub careers or effective vows of poverty (see the founding fathers who were both military veterans and farmers to a large extent). Increasingly elite vocations have no direct connection with “where the economic value is made,” focusing increasingly on finance and consulting. It makes it exceptionally hard for feedback to penetrate their circles.
I think it was Noam Chomsky who said your average gas station attendant's disinterest in politics is actually rational. He can't do anything about it, getting too into it may annoy his friends and family, and he has other concerns (like family and job and paying the bills) anyway.
I do wonder if this is also true for elites; they have more leisure time at the absolute top, obviously, but particularly just below that have to spend a lot of time fighting for position and playing the courtier. Very few people have the time to exhaustively investigate any ideology, and if you did it for critical race theory you couldn't do it for queer theory. Besides, it's more important for a courtier to fit in.
I think this is exactly right
If critical thinking about government & societal organization - and involvement therein - is not the duty of those highest on the totem pole, whose duty is it?
We're supposed to sympathize with this shirking because the shirkers are *too busy making money* to care about the defense & improvement of the societal systems which support their high positions? Beyond ridiculous, reaching disgusting.
Where are the elites of yesteryear, who died colonels in the trenches and captains in the navy, but died? Would these captains of today go down with the ship? They disclaim responsibility for the ship while it's still smooth sailing!
To steal from Mac Dre - I've been in the back with the groupies and the stars, I've been out front with the thugs and the cars, I've been on the yard with the Mexican mafia, a nation deserves an elite that'll kill and die for her.
Who said anything about sympathy?
Elite decadence is a common feature of cyclical theories of history, from Peter Turchin through Sir John Glubb and Ibn Khaldun to Chinese historians describing their dynastic cycle hundreds of years ago. The general assumption is the people on top are bad.
Things brings up another point about elite beliefs in particular: there is often posturing to give the impression that they know more about a topic than they do. Your CRT example is a good one: who on any side of the debate has actually deeply interrogated the source literature? Instead everyone has some surface level understanding which may or may not even align to their stated belief? And given the understandings are superficial you can indeed have a large breadth of belief.
My lifelong disinterest in Noam Chomsky is even more rational, because he's a mealy-mouthed dickhead. If a gas-station attendant *enjoys* discussing politics, it is perfectly rational for him to be interested in the subject, since he, just like Noam Chomsky, has a vote, and he, just like Noam Chomsky, has a voice, with which he may persuade others by emotion and argument, regardless of his particular station in life at any particular time. And if politics, at that particular time and in that particular place, gets sharp, he also has a trigger finger.
"your average gas station attendant's disinterest in politics is actually rational. He can't do anything about it, getting too into it may annoy his friends and family, and he has other concerns (like family and job and paying the bills) anyway."
Some thoughts: What is the Purpose of Holding & Expressing Political Beliefs?
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/68576.html
But this argument - with which I agree - supports the idea that the beliefs are lazy.
And it’s reasonable support to the claim that they are not malicious.
But that’s different from the claim that they are “well-intentioned”
Fitting-in virtue-signaling is selfish and in this context lazy, but it can hardly be reasonably described as well-intentioned.
As a strong advocate for Hanlon's Razor (never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity) I'm already a convert to this viewpoint, but I think you've expressed it well. And it's pretty easy to check whether your models of others are consistent with them being well-intentioned. Just ask yourself whether given what you think they believe, they could easily see themselves as the good guys, something which nearly everyone believes they are.
Also this is kind of a tangent but the part about using trust in others on YIMBYism reminded me of a similar point made by Holden Karnofsky in this Cold Takes post: https://www.cold-takes.com/minimal-trust-investigations/
Thanks for sending this looks interesting
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" Or for that matter, ignorance (case in point). The hypothesis of "well-intent" is itself partially based on it; I don't doubt that many people who believe various things & enact various actions have good intent - in fact, I've often argued that it's the type of people we should be suspicious of much more than we are - the issue is that their intent matters not nearly as much their actions, and the reality of their actions is much different from whatever their supposed intent (and beliefs) are.
The OP says this: "Suffice to say, I find this explanation that assumes malicious intent to not be very believable" in regards to this quote: "[they] were broadcasting the belief that such firms were evil in order to undercut their rivals."
But it's difficult to arrive as such position with more knowledge about the subject - for example, seeing how many such people engage in "cancel culture." The week had a good article on the subject titled "Cancel culture is a class issue," where they note the following:
"And if class membership is earned, it can be taken away. That is why, as Douthat writes in his seventh thesis, the threat of cancel culture 'is most effective against people who are still rising in their fields.'"
"Those in the professional-managerial class can expect their name to be googled in every job application. As Douthat muses, 'under the rule of the internet there's no leaving the village: Everywhere is the same place, and so is every time.'"
"'I don't want people like that to keep getting jobs' that let them achieve PMC membership, a teenager told the Times in defense of call-out accounts which seek to end allegedly racist peers' careers before they begin."
Cancel culture is largely inter-class conflict (or those aspiring to be), which indeed, aligns with malice & personal benefit. And if you've seen cancel culture firsthand - I have on a daily basis for years on end, endless doxxing, harassment, threats, celebrating suicides, people being fired, throwing in prison, etc - any illusion of "well-intent" being present (and being of importance) goes away. It's not every person, and many are certainly conformists - marxists had a good concept known as "false consciousness" that's fairly applicable here - but many people, especially those on the left & libs, are simply ghouls, and have been ever since they arose. And let's not forget how that happened - with revolution, massacres, cult of reason, imperialism, and indeed, infighting (E.G., Charlotte Corday).
Oh I'm not saying that this isn't an issue or that good intent absolves people of responsibility. But it's still important to point out the mechanism through which these beliefs form
Yeah, I don't disagree, though I obviously do w/ where these beliefs come from & why they persist. There's different sub-groups for sure - coping is a big one just as it's the case with conformists - but malice is present quite a bit, in as much as it being for personal benefit. Just look at those who believe in human rights. I don't mean your average person who'd say "Yes, I believe in them" then move on with their day and not think about it, but people who promote it, to whom it forms key aspect of their politics - even if they came to such beliefs with well intent, to retain it when human rights serve imperialism time and time again, backing "rebels," coups, regime-change, sanctions to starve people, etc, one must go far beyond it.
I don't think cancel culture should be understood primarily as malice, rather it's an emotional coping mechanism to remove their cognitive dissonance by fending off those who promote information that does not align with the conform beliefs to which they subscribe.
Most of those taking part in cancel culture exhibit high levels of neuroticism, and are emotionally unable to deal with contradictory information that they do not feel they are in control over. It's an attempt at controlling information to make themselves feel better.
Ehh, I'd disagree. It's true that it amounts to heresy - same with "hate speech" as a whole - but there's a difference between how it exists in relation to power/system, and how an average person operates. Often it overlaps, too; just because someone is a true believer doesn't mean they don't posses malice, if anything it makes it more likely. But even if you look at, say, Soviet Union or witch-hunts under Christianity, much of it was based around personal/religious benefit, revenge, out of animosity, etc. And just like here, most of it was top-down to begin with.
“never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity) I'm already a convert to this viewpoint,”
I basically agree with this (or at least the very similar claim that determining the difference between malice/evil and stupidity/incompetence is extremely difficult).
But you and the author are making the different mistake illustrated by the only thing I learned in my Sociology 101 class that still sticks with me:
NOT BLACK <> WHITE
Just because something is NOT malicious does *not* make it “well-intentioned”.
To lack ill-intentions is not the same as having *good* intentions.
I don't think Hanlon's Razor is true in politics. It's an adversarial field where you are always trying to get one-up on the opposition. This is particularly true in a duopoly like the USA, which makes individual interactions more zero-sum than they would otherwise be, since with three or more parties two parties could collaborate against the other(s).
“There is this pervasive idea that elites are malevolent creatures that are “out to get you” and constantly scheme in order to keep other members of society as disempowered as possible.”
In some cases, elites, especially those who are strongly ideologically-motivated and/or ambitious, are “out to get you” in the sense that they want you defeated at the polls, your influence in society greatly diminished, and, in many cases, your liberty flouted with myriad edicts and regulations.
Yeah, ofc. But I'm talking here about most of them. Like the average college kid at Harvard
The average kid at Harvard is likely woke, which breeds contempt for the anti-woke, i.e., mostly whites. While these lazy views may be driven by a desire to protect and/or advance the status of the “marginalized”, it produces something akin to malevolence as whites are expected to bear the brunt of the DEI regime as a form of karmic justice. Of course, if we are talking about white Harvard kids, they mean other whites, not themselves.
The only reliably visible way that I see 'elites' keeping other members out is in making sure their children go to the right schools so they stay where they were born. Oddly enough, it's a method the rest of us can attempt to use to advance, your results may vary
I think the idea that elites are malevolent creatures who are out to get you arises from the world their policy beliefs and preferences have created that have had bad results for non-elites for half a century. During all that time no course correction was made, how this has played out for non-elites has simply not been a matter of interest to elites. As to what I am talking about, here is a plot of unskilled real wages over time and how it went flat for decades after 1973.
https://mikebert.neocities.org/Real%20Wage%201875-2022.gif
I have written about how 1960's Democrats brought this about by ignoring gold outflows and letting the inflation genie out of its bottle.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell
Stagflation spelled the end of the New Deal Order. The Neoliberal Order that replaced it took working-class wage stagnation as a feature, not a bug. Democrats, who had gained the allegiance of the working class by providing a economy that gave them those wage gains before 1973 were no longer providing those gains. So, the working class gradually moved to the GOP for their culturally conservative offerings.
Over this same half century, elites have done very very well. People can see this. So we have the people who have run the country since I was born in 1959 giving us a world where those in the lower half have a more difficult time keeping their head above water while those in the top tenth have done extraordinarily well. Why run policy that way, if it is not deliberate?
Could something like this be the source of the idea of malevolent elites?
I don’t think any of that requires malice, just ignorance, as Ruxandra is pointing out.
Imagine you had a button, and if you push it, your town gets a new factory and you and all your mates get new jobs that earn you much more than you previously did. Given the option, you almost certainly push it. Maybe you push it more than once, if you can.
What you don’t know is that those factories are being relocated from some towns multiple states away, ruining peoples’ lives. But you don’t have anything against those people. You just don’t know that’s what’s happening. Why would you? You don’t know any of those people. Maybe you hear that Michigan’s economy is in trouble on the news or something, but what does that have to do with you?
(For the more introspective of you, would you still push the button if you did know that was what was happening? A lot of people would.)
If your model is that elites are extracting wealth from working class people (which I don’t think is the only model), I think the explanation that elites have hit a button that worked out great for themselves and didn’t know what else would happen is way more likely than that they are purposely trying to stick it to working class folks.
It has nothing to do with factory siting. It is about tax, monetary and other economic policy.
Those elites who make economic policy know they were screwing over working people. For Republican elites that was a feature, they have always been the capitalist party and embraced a "trickle-down" economic philosophy. Incent investment, get higher productivity, and from that high wages.
But that is not what happens. Incentives to investment work. But the investors choose what to invest in. They have the option to make financial investments as well as capital investments and as I pointed out they have increasingly choses the former. He's a post where I show how a company can use stock buybacks and accretive acquisitions to engineer a higher stock price with zero organic growth.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/effects-of-business-cultural-evolution
What makes this possible was legalizing stock buybacks in 1982. Cutting taxes on capital gains makes price rises more valuable incenting financial engineering of high stock prices. But then in 2003 the tax on dividends was cut to capital gains rates. SO now the taxes paid on income from money are much lower than the taxes paid on work. This all incents financialization and discourages production. Elites are the ones with the investment portfolios who benefit, working stiffs pay the price.
Conservative elites don't care about workers. But what about those who purport to care? How is it when Democrats get into power, they cannot repeal any of these things? How is it that Democrats passed the Republican TARP bill? How is it that Obama did not warn the Fed off from their giveaway-to the-rich QE program? That's the sort of thing you would expect from Reagan Republicans. By Democrats embracing this, Democrats get tied to anti-worker policy and Republicans can now pretend to be the party of the working class. So now we have Vance, who is a fucking finance guy, a stooge of a billionaire money man, pretending to be the avatar of the working class.
"How is it that Democrats passed the Republican TARP bill? How is it that Obama did not warn the Fed off from their giveaway-to the-rich QE program?"
Because if they didn't pass TARP and the Fed didn't do QE, the aftermath of the Crash of 2008 would have looked a lot more like the aftermath of the Crash of 1929 than it actually did.
Yes it might. But then the pandemic produced unemployment unlike any seen since the Great Depression, and yet we bounced out of that pretty well. The difference was in 2020-21 trillions of direct stimulus was applied right at the time of the employment decline, while after 1929 they waited 13 years before applying the stimulus. In both case the economy bounced out of depression inside of a year. If you read my post you will note I called for the stimulus to be applied to the *real* economy, but withheld from the financial one.
This would accomplish the necessarily deflation in assets to restore financial health, while preventing the negative effects from bleeding over into the real economy.
Yes I think
The elite has become more caring abt the economic issues of lower class ppl
“I don’t think any of that requires malice, just ignorance,”
But absence of malice does not equal the presence of *good* intentions…
Interesting chart on unskilled real wages. Without picking at how it was compiled (minimum wage?), I do notice 3 things:
1, It is a logarithmic scale, so the climb on a regular scale would actually be much sharper a curve.
2, it does not really remain as flat as you indicate, but begins to climb again about 2020. This climb would be much more prominent if it were a simple numeric scale, but it is still apparent.
3, it might be that the sharp rise itself was the aberration, easily explained by the end of the great depression and the post-war industrial economic boom. Seen this way, the trend line runs up from 1875 to1935 on a pretty steady line, jumps up for the economic boom until 1972, then heads back toward the trend line by running flat. And now, by 2020, we have simply returned to the regular slow rise of this indicator.
The wages come from measuring worth.
The log scale shows constat percentage growth rate as a straight line. A linear scale would emphasize recent changes and deemphasize earlier ones.
The curve is pretty flat until a brief rise from 2016 to 2020 followed by a return to flatness. We have had very low unemployment for 2 years with weak wage growth. I have argued this is why people think the economy is bad.
War stimulus does not last 20 years. Two two years after the end of WW I we had a depression. The postwar boom reflected economic policy that was gradually undone over 1964 thru 1981. The policy took effect after the price controls established by Nixon after the gold standard ended
Late to this....two comments:
* It's important to understand that 'luxury beliefs' are often not even 'beliefs' in any important sense of the word....ie a coherent formulation of ideas about something. They are more in the way of an emotional signal to the peer group.
* I think the now ubiquitous 'luxury beliefs' meme in rightist discourse is a case of an excessive association of particular insights with a particular thinker. It is one thing to credit Einstein with The Theory of Relativity but socio-psychological insights are of a different, more widely diffused kind. In essence you could quite likely have heard most currently fashionable socio-psychological insights from your Granny or Grandad reflecting on what their long life has taught them about human behaviour. Or an expansive conversation with friends down the pub after a few drinks. And though Henderson is an impressive young intellectual (I subscribe to his 'stack), I first came across the essence of the 'luxury beliefs' thesis in a book written in the early 1990s.
Totally agree esp. with 1st point
Very interesting continuation of the discussion.
Question: Why lazily well-intentioned rather than also actively self-interested? The latter also seems like it fits within Mounk’s definition and includes some very impactful and widespread beliefs.
Yeah people also support things that benefit them ofc (eg lowering taxes for their salary bracket)
But the kind of stuff Rob usually mentions like defund the police is mostly due to lazy well intention vs self interest
Yep. It’s why I prefer Mounk’s definition with its wider multi-partisan applicability.
“defund the police is mostly due to lazy well intention”
You can cite some of Rob’s other points as being well-intentioned, perhaps. But defund the police? Do elites live in high crime places with no security?!?
Lazy sure. Beyond lazy, imo. But in what sense are there GOOD intentions to the idea that honest poor people should have less - or no, which is literally what defund the police meant at its start, until leftists sensing the losing battle changed it to the still-terrible reducing spending - police protection?
Yes defunding the police is that. Because many elites cannot conceive of how bad criminals are and see them as victims (of capitalism oppression etc)
Ok, now you are asserting that these elites are actually stupid and cannot reason.
Defund the police is a much greater step than “go soft on criminals”, “we have too many people incarcerated”, etc., etc. which fall in line with your point.
Stupid and lacking in any common sense is at least a whole step beyond merely lazy. But that’s what’s required for supporting defund the police. Where I agree mere laziness and accepting bad ideology is sufficient for support on most other soft on crime policies.
But thanks for your explanation. We will have to agree to disagree.
Yes people who actively campaign for defund the police are lacking any common sense. Defund the police is not actually a very common belief among elites and it’s lost a lot of popularity
“Defund the police is not actually a very common belief among elites and it’s lost a lot of popularity ”
I agree 100% that it is not *today* a very common belief among elites. But of course it WAS indeed a popular belief amongst elites in 2020 and 2021.
It “lost a lot of popularity” largely because leftist leaders realized this particular belief was costing them elections, and so they changed the signal and the other elites have mostly gone along, no doubt.
Not sure how your true statement re: “lost a lot of popularity” supports your case for ‘well-intentioned”, though.
Interesting essay for sure, but I think the author greatly over emphasizes malice as part of Henderson’s concept of luxury beliefs.
Status and distinction are the primary drivers of luxury beliefs. Malice might play a role for some people for certain beliefs, but it would be a secondary driver at best.
According to Henderson; “They are honest indicators of one’s social position, one’s level of wealth, where one was educated, and how much leisure time they have to adopt these fashionable beliefs.
“And just as many luxury goods often start with the rich but eventually become available to everyone, so it is with luxury beliefs.”
I think the key word here is honest. People promoting luxury beliefs are sincere in their opinions. These opinions may change over time, but for the most part, are formulated in earnest. That people who adopt luxury beliefs are almost certainly lazy in their approach is a given, because most luxury beliefs are laid bare with even minimal research.
I strongly disagree with this statement as well; “There is this pervasive idea that elites are malevolent creatures that are “out to get you” and constantly scheme in order to keep other members of society as disempowered as possible.”
The vast majority of people don’t think the govt is out to get them. They think the political class, for whatever reason, is largely incompetent, disconnected from the people they serve, and often motivated by luxury beliefs that don’t reflect the needs of the people they represent.
I emphasize in this essay and in my earlier one (Shut up about luxury beliefs) the parts from Rob's writing that assume malicious intent
Like I say. malice might play a role in some luxury beliefs for some people - like in the example you cited with people trying to push out others in the job market. But I think Henderson is clear that status and destination are he prime motivators.
In your example of the classics major going into finance, he eventually “know better” but “still votes for Labour.” In other words, he has now become malicious.
So what we really have is two tiers: a lazily well intentioned tier being coached by a malicious tier.
I don't think voting for Labour to feel virtuous is malicious lol
I’m not sure which part of your statement is supposed to be funny.
If you indeed “know better” that voting for Labour is actually in aggregate harmful to those you supposedly seek to help, how is that *not* malicious?
I’m genuinely curious as to your reasoning here.
While it may be true that those who hold elite opinions in general harbor no animus towards those who are affected by their opinions, I am not convinced that this is universally true.
Stated more plainly, at least some people who hold elite opinions hold them because of animus towards the affected class.
Any concrete examples?
Gun control in the U.S. is one example.
But how does gun control benefit elites vs commoners?
Without knowing the actual statistics (laziness on my part), I would assume that fewer elites than common people are avid hunters; that more elites, unlike common people, have the financial wherewithal to pay for personal security systems; that elites live within areas that have less crime and often in neighborhoods that hire private security; that elites are more likely to work in spaces that are guarded (a bank vs. a convenience store). It’s possible that gun control might have little effect on the common person’s safety or the ability to pursue hobbies that involve guns, but they certainly perceive that to be true and not entirely without reason.
Elites believe that gun control creates a better society in general and don’t consider the concerns of the common people. Now that I think about it, maybe elites just want other people to do their shooting for them.
Yup
That might be just the typical upper class rejection of hypermasculinity, adopting a more genderfluid posture.
“Any concrete examples?”
Being against voter ID laws. But supporting photo ID for getting on airplanes.
Being for illegal immigration. But supporting Democrat mayors who complain about illegal immigrants being deposited in their cities.
Being against school choice, partly using the pretext that the money shouldn’t go to religious schools. But choosing to live in suburban areas with good school districts or sending their own children to private schools. [The Obamas famously sent their children to private schools even as they shut down the school choice program in DC.]
If your retort is that some of these are not pure animus towards the affected class but rather just examples of selfishness and so callousness to the plight of the affected class, fair enough. But now we are perilously close to a distinction without a difference, no? Especially given your thesis that the elites in question are lazily *well-intentioned*.
I think I disagree with you on the premise re: luxury beliefs, so not sure how much this resonates with you at all, but: how is the idea of being "lazily well-intentioned" with some of the more disruptive luxury beliefs, like legalizing/decriminalizing drugs, or normalizing childbirth outside of wedlock?
The laziest thing is always to stick to the status quo. If someone wants to tear down what you may well argue to be a Chesterton's fence, laziness doesn't seem sufficient as an explanation as to why one would side with them. Even among the elites, those are not openly practiced majority positions, so if you want to go with the majority, why actively oppose traditional values?
Finally, I don't find the argument that "everyone can afford any beliefs" super convincing. I think it's not unreasonable to assume that people by and large want to act and view the world in accordance with their beliefs; relatedly, Mounk observes that people hold these beliefs "perfectly sincerely". If we take YIMBYism as an example, I just don't find it credible that for a person whose retirement savings are virtually all tied up in the house they live in and own it should be *just as easy* to openly espouse a YIMBY-position than for a person with a diversified portfolio. Of course the homeowner could fake such a belief just for status gain, but that seems too cynical a perspective on how people think.
Elites didn't start opposing traditional values suddenly. For a long time they were pro then. They only started doing it once these ideas became normalised in their social milieu.
I think social liberalism just cognitively appeals to elites and often works for them, because they can apply it in a more nuanced fashion. It takes effort to understand it's not as easy for everyone
I don’t agree with your take. You have no justification for the “well intentioned” writ large.
That said, if you replaced “lazily well-intentioned” with simply “lazy”, it would be closer to the truth.
To suggest 50 years ago that wrong-headed elite leftist ideas were well-intentioned may have been fair. But as you can see with where elites have gone in the U.S., there is no longer legit justification for the claim that most of the bad/harmful beliefs that Henderson labels “luxury” beliefs are in fact well-intentioned.
Your answer above acknowledges this in citing that they are merely of their social milieu. That makes them lazy virtue signaling for personal benefit, and NOT “well-intentioned”.
I supposed if you want to be exceptionally charitable to elites here you could call them “lazily not deliberately harmful”, but that is still a far cry from “well-intentioned”.
Is that what you mean to do here, 'improve the epistemic habits of elites'?
If so, what habits do you wish to replace them with?
Also, do you consider yourself among the elites (yes, an immodesty trap in that question, but I don't mean it that way)?
If not, what are the lines of delineation that I should assume when we are discussing the elites? Is it status, position, wealth, schooling, birthright (yuck!)? Or perhaps it's like obscenity, we know it when we see it.
As per the topic, it looks to me like plain conformity effects, something the elites as a group certainly have no monopoly on. So I guess I might agree with the author who proposes to do away with the term. But then we would have to invent a new term to look down on those people with.
Well part of the problem with this discourse is it's hard to come up with a consistent definition of what is an elite. I think I am an elite according to Rob's definition, yes.
As for improving epistemic habits: basically promoting truth in an individual and institutional fashion (m trying to do that myself)
I agree with the more broad definition given by Mouck. I too don't think luxury beliefs are necessarily motivated by malice, there needs to be included in the definition a certain amount of snobbery. I personally encountered this as well as reading about it from others. The idea held by elites that life should be a certain way for them. In a word, entitlement. Work is for the little people. The wealthy businessman who tells the 25 year old waitress that hard work is the best way to live and achieve in life while he buys his own 25 year old daughter an Audi for her birthday. What's good for the working class is good for them because they need the discipline (or purification or whatever it is), but me and my family are above all that. He mentioned entitlement as a limited motivation, but I think it may have more importance. This sense of entitlement is based on the underlying belief that they are more deserving than the lower classes, and the poor are a mere abstract collective useful to the elites for appearing compassionate. Amongst themselves it seems to be just laziness or complacency, but if presented with the personal choice elites always choose what benefits them the most. Altruism quickly becomes low priority.
With respect to Effective Altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried was an ardent proponent.
I mean, Bankman-Fried used EA to cover for his scams; plenty of people have used various religions to do the same thing.
I'm not involved in EA, but it seems as reasonable a way to approach charity as anything else.
From my interactions with SBF (on Twitter) I have become convinced that he wasn't too interested in EA. He saw EA as a mechanism to further his and FTX's interests, but that was about it. He is a smart and articulate guy, though, so I think he convinced no small amount of people that he was devoted to EA's message.
I yhink SBF has a pretty unique psychology ...
It’s called lying.
I'd believe that. Probably he found a convenient 'religion' he could (with his math background and elite connections) convincingly expound to cover his shenanigans and went with that.
Possibly. And there’s no doubt which was more important to him. But I find it perfectly plausible that he believed the EA stuff he expounded. That he was a narcissistic fraud is not incompatible with him genuinely supporting EA.
[For the record, I’m not that big a supporter of EA the movement in caps, but the small letters idea of earning to give I find admirable and certainly rational.]
“Most people are partly specializing but mostly affiliating” - when it comes to knowledge/beliefs.
True some affiliated beliefs are “wrong”, but if one looks at affiliated beliefs as a whole, perhaps there are important and cutting differences between affiliations - and perhaps this is what matters from a survival perspective.
I really enjoyed your conversation with Yascha Mounk and learned a lot from both of you, so thank you!
Long before I learned about Henderson's term, I was using among friends the term Vanity Virtues to describe the thing that is similar to your "lazily well-intentioned" description. I initially was intrigued by Henderson's concept and thought that he had simply dug deeper. Over time, I've come to think otherwise but, honestly, have not spent that much time to figure out why. Then, I heard your conversation, and your framing makes much more sense. The term Vanity Virtues also does not automatically assume an ill motive. Sometimes most of us behave out of self-interest and for reasons of vanity, especially on social media, and not to undermine anyone else for our gains. I'd say we do this much more often than scheming an elaborate plan.
Looking forward to reading more of your good work!
Excellent article. The idea of elaborate malice that has taken hold in the right (and areas of the left to a lesser extent) has always really disturbed me. It's also just not how people work. The worldview of someone who thinks people have what is basically a tabletop game "evil" stat is very concerning.
Thanks
You refute your own argument right in the tagline: “Conformity and intellectual complacency provide a more plausible explanation for the prevalence of misguided beliefs among elites than deliberate malice.”
Asserting that elites just lazily conform to whatever belief is popular in their social circle at any given moment does not explain why the popular beliefs in elite social circles are so often misguided.
If there is no rational actor injecting misguided beliefs into elite social circles, then the beliefs of elites should have a 50/50 probability of being ‘misguided’ or ‘well informed’. But as you already conceded, they are misguided more often than not. So, there is a statistical reason to believe some force is pushing elite belief towards being misguided, even if we accept your theory that each individual elite is just lazily well-intentioned.
This assumes that a random sampling of possible beliefs will be 50/50 true and false. But that is surely false. The vast majority of possible beliefs you can hold are incorrect. There’s just way more ways the world can possibly be, but only one way it actually is.
Of course in reality there are processes we use (e.g. reason) to narrow down our sampling of beliefs so that they converge closer to the truth. We don’t just randomly select possible beliefs. And social conformism has to count for at least part of that convergence effect, although obviously it’s not as reliable as reasoning.
But I’m still not sure how you arrived to the conclusion that elites particular method of belief selection (i.e. social conformism) must have a default 50-50 likelihood of being well-justified?
Thanks. That's a good argument: There's also the fact that I don't think elites are particularly likely to hold false beliefs.
Most norms that are good in our current society has been developed by elites
Are the values of elites actually good? It seems to me that elites have adopted norms that are good for elites and at staying elite, not norms that are good in any more broad sense than that. Individualism is good for elites who have lots of money and tons of people who want to be their friends, etc., because they are wealthy and have influence, but is individualism really good for people who are ordinary and poor? As opposed to a collectivism that stresses interdependence and the value of all members of a community (and not in an abstract way, but in the manner of everyone being invited to the table, literally, not figuratively).
“There's also the fact that I don't think elites are particularly likely to hold false beliefs.”
Left Elites today overwhelmingly either hold woke beliefs or at minimum won’t denounce them.
I am talking specifically about DEI / intersectionality / woke / Critical race theory oppressor-oppressed ideology that states that evil rich male Christian (and Jewish, where applicable) white capitalists are responsible for all evil - and little good - in the world, and that the BiPoC and/or LGBTQ+++ “oppressed” are justified in using *any* means at all to overthrow their “oppressors”.
Even Richard Hanania who shares your view that on average elites hold better beliefs than non-elites acknowledges this.
Given the evidence, how can you claim they are “not particularly likely to hold false beliefs”?
If all you really mean to say is that historically elites held better beliefs than non-elites, or that even today in aggregate elites hold more true beliefs than non-elites, I’d be fine with those, and probably agree. But the idea that they are not particularly likely to hold false beliefs? Really?
Because the framework we’re projecting onto their beliefs as a measurement device is a binary one. Either the beliefs of elites are ‘misguided’, to use Ruxandra’s term, or they are not. If not, the elite’s beliefs would be said to be correctly guided, according to someone — Ruxandra, I would assume.
But either way, misguided or guided. Only two possible outcomes. 50/0.
That raises the question: If elites are lazily following the beliefs of their social group, why is their social group “misguided” more often than you’d expect any random group to be? (That’s Ruxandra’s own premise btw.)
I agree there are only two possible outcomes, but why should it follow that they are equally likely? We can classify objects as human or not human, but obviously if we randomly sampled across the universe, the likelihood of an object being human/not-human is not 50-50.
Even if we’re only sampling beliefs held by elites, over the course of enough beliefs it should shake out to 50/50 since there are only two possible outcomes. Because, remember, Ruxandra’s argument is that they’re basically just lazily following someone else’s opinion. But who would that person they’re flowing be? And why wouldn’t they also be lazily following someone else? And if everyone is randomly following everyone else, how could you not end up being right half the time and wrong half the time in this binary system we set up?
Unless everyone in the elite circle is following the same person who is guessing at worse than random odds. Or, unless Ruxandra has just decided of her own accord that Elite Belief™️ is wrong more than it’s right, which is one of her premises.
Because if there is some objective set of “guided” beliefs — not just Ruxandra calling balls and strikes based on her own personal biases — then it follows that a large enough, diverse enough sample size would produce a random outcome, which would be 50/50 in a binary situation. (Like flipping a coin and recording heads or tails 1M times.)
And the population were sampling — all the different subgroups of people in every country worldwide — is very large and very diverse. So we definitely have a randomized trial here.
This assumes that the set of guided beliefs is roughly equal in size to the size of the set of unguided beliefs though. The reason that coins tend to land 50/50 has nothing to do with the fact that there are only two possible outcomes. Compare a binary option upon selecting a lottery ticket that yields either (I won the lottery) or (I didn’t win the lottery). These possible options exhaust the logical space, so they are the only two possible options. But they are not equally likely, not even close, because the set of possible outcomes where I won the lottery (1 ticket) is vastly smaller than the set of outcomes where I didn’t win (many many tickets).
Similarly the set of unguided beliefs which are false is vastly larger than the set of guided beliefs which are true. To see this, compare the number of possible ways that a given proposition “the distance from the earth to moon is x miles” could be true or false. There are obviously many more ways to make that statement false (e.g. it is 1 mile away), but only one way to make that statement true. So randomly selected beliefs about the distance from the earth to the moon are almost certainly going to be false. Makes sense?
Sure, I understand your point. But I don’t know if I’d grant it to you.
As I’ve alluded to a couple of times now, the beliefs in question are subjective — not objective, like your example — in nature. So the universes of right and wrong answers could change depending on who is judging right from wrong, be that Ruxandra or someone else.
I mean, the vast majority of elite (and nonelite) beliefs are correct. We just stop thinking of things like “the Earth orbits the sun” or “the moon causes the tides” as part of the population of beliefs because they’re so well established, but they were radical ideas once.
That as well. We ignore how much elites have advanced good beliefs
Are we talking about “good beliefs” or “correct beliefs”?
To me, this entire discourse seems confused by the fact that we keep treating objective beliefs and subjective beliefs as one in the same.
Before I slam elite expertise, I think it's important to recognize that over the last 500 years, it has proven vastly superior to prior methods for selecting authority (i.e., often hereditary but also moderated by elite-like institutions such as guilds that used their power as much to prevent supply as to improve skill or decision-making). Similarly, those methods proved superior to studying goat entrails or throwing animal bones as a way to determine good policy.
That said, I think the problem is more significant than just the elites not being insulated from the costs. In the social sciences, in particular, they are insulated from most feedback. When feedback is unpleasant, they devote a disproportionate amount of their energies to "disproving" the feedback as opposed to using the new information to refine their theories.
This idea is encapsulated in Max Plank's observation that "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Granted, the insulation from the costs encourages them to pursue this course of action. But it is the actual removal of feedback that causes the harm.
Returning to the original idea, the insulation of elites from feedback is a potential cost of our current decision-making process. While it may be a significant cost, it's crucial to remember that this structure has led to centuries of unprecedented global growth. Therefore, instead of discarding the current system, it's more productive to focus on making incremental changes that enhance the feedback to experts. This balanced approach ensures that we retain the benefits of the current system while addressing its shortcomings.
It is also worth remembering that the insulation from feedback extends far beyond the original idea of luxury beliefs. Instead, it applies to nearly any area or decision. I think the focus on luxury beliefs is driven by the ability to frame the larger issues in terms of hypocrisy.
It’s also a byproduct of the standardization of education and creation of non-direct value add careers. Careers in academia or law were either sub careers or effective vows of poverty (see the founding fathers who were both military veterans and farmers to a large extent). Increasingly elite vocations have no direct connection with “where the economic value is made,” focusing increasingly on finance and consulting. It makes it exceptionally hard for feedback to penetrate their circles.