Kevin Drum replies
So sure, it’s kabuki. All of us who write about politics for a living understand that 90% (at least) of what we do is just shadow boxing. Controversies are invented, then debunked, then invented all over again, and debunked. Sometimes the inventors know perfectly well what they’re doing, while other times they’ve talked themselves into actually believing their own nonsense. In either case, these things are mostly just proxies for the issues that really matter.
But so what? The Reichstag fire was wholly invented too, and look what happened after that. As demeaning as it is, fighting back against bullshit is every bit as important as fighting back against the real stuff.
This is an important point but we should define a line between where the contributions of professional intellectuals end and where the contributions of professional advocates takeover.
If there is genuine misunderstanding then there is a role for intellectuals to say – well actually I think its like this.
However, once an issue simply because a proxy for which team you want to win, this is not our fight. There are good men and women who are paid to do that and they should.
However, our role is the spread of knowledge. Once people are no longer concerned with knowledge but simply scoring points, we should move on.
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Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 8:07 am
The Peak Oil Poet
shouldn’t
“However, once an issue simply because a proxy for which team you want to win, this is not our fight. There are good men and women who are paid to do that and they should.”
be
“However, once an issue becomes simply a proxy for which team you want to win, this is not our fight. There are good men and women who are paid to do that and they should.”
p
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 8:24 am
Richard Williamson
Karl, I couldn’t agree more.
http://shewingthefly.com/2012/01/19/on-civility-and-the-purpose-of-the-blogosphere/
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 8:37 am
anon
Karl, this is very insightful, couldn’t agree more.
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 9:25 am
Dave
At the same time, Karl, it seems your argument denies that there is any point in spreading knowledge to the populace, as opposed to within the academic community. If people go around making propaganda that the sun revolves around the Earth, is it not the responsibility of the astronomers to mention that, actually, it is the other way around?
The fact that the informed community may know something as common knowledge does not mean that the larger populace is not susceptible to propaganda on the issues. You argued that “perhaps five people actually believe” Fannie and Freddie caused the crisis. Perhaps that is true, of, say, economists. But I personally know several people who are economically aware (in the financial industry) who sincerely believed this until I showed them the data. This is an extremely common view, not a niche one, among those who have not reviewed the data.
This is not to say that it’s necessarily the job of the academic community to score political points on issues that are controversial. However when an incorrect view that is uncontroversial among professionals becomes prevalent in the populace I’m not sure why correcting that view in the popular press is problematic.
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 2:00 pm
ahorwitt
Dave is right. I have a friend, business guy, who is adamant that Fannie and Freddie caused the financial crisis. Why? Because he reads the Wall Street Journal editorial page and op-ed page. Karl apparently does not know that these people exist, or does not consider them relevant.
Karl’s post reminds me of Romney’s comment that income inequality should only be discussed in “quiet rooms.” The suggestion seems to me that elites should participate in one elevated realm of discourse, and leave the great unwashed to fend for themselves in a sea of propaganda.
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 7:52 pm
Jeff
I disagree that Karl’s argument “denies that there is an point in spreading knowledge to the populace”, and I think that Karl’s behavior (e.g., having this blog among other things) shows that he has expended considerable effort trying, in his small way, to inform the populace and raise the level of the dialog on economic issues. While, there is clearly a case to be made for your position, I believe there is a limit to it as well.
When opinions have hardened and minds have closed, the only thing left is shouting matches. If you aren’t sure what I’m referring to, check out the comments to the previous ‘bullshit’ post (which, I suspect, is exactly what Karl was getting at). Engaging in this simply causes someone to lose credibility. That leaves you will less social capital to use next time in a situation where you might actually be able to make a difference.
The case par excellence here is Krugman and the issue of his being ‘shrill’–a situation he does not seem to understand. People who already agree with him follow him avidly without really thinking about his points; people who don’t agree with him just dismiss whatever he says without really thinking about his points; and people who are in the middle find him distastefully partisan so they don’t really think hard about his points. Ironically, this leads to Krugman becoming more prominent and less influential simultaneously.
One could consider Karl’s apparent choice to be less prominent but possibly more influential to be admirable.
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 10:37 am
Jeffrey G. Johnson
Karl, as a professional intellectual who has made the effort to acquire authoritative knowledge, you have a role and even I would say a responsibility not to advocate, but to make clear what are accepted facts, what are common misconceptions, and what questions leave room for debate.
This serves as a standard against which people weighing the relative merits of various advocates can judge the quality of an advocate’s claims.
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 11:35 am
Lord
Isn’t the problem that some intellectuals are too vested in the outcome to draw this line? Lucas redefining fiscal policy so it doesn’t exist. Cochrane redefining stimulus to be everything he disagrees with. Or just avoiding the subject when anything they say would support the opposition. Letting their desire for the next plum position motivate their statements or impugning that as the motive against the opposition. The result of science may be objective but the process of it rarely is for we are human beings. If we can’t find anything to fight against, we haven’t been doing anything important.
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 2:58 pm
Tom Sgouros
It is exactly this point of view — intellectuals should work on persuading other intellectuals, but leave that popular stuff to the popularizers — that has left the vast bulk of academia MIA in almost all the important debates of our time. How did these views become prevalent in the face of contradictory facts? Simple: the people who knew better also felt they had better things to do than fight back. So the world declines as the crazy takes over, but your career is secure? I’m sorry, that’s an astonishingly narrow view of one’s responsibilities to one’s fellow citizens.
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 3:23 pm
Matt (@MeCampbell30)
That’s great advise for people that can tell the difference between real issues and bullshit. Unfortunately, treating everything not taken up by academia as bullshit isn’t the most logical thing to do.
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 5:21 pm
Greg Ransom
It’s absurd to pretend that academia isn’t full of advocates and the self-deluded and the partisan and the self–selected, as well as practiced bullshitters, etc.
I recommend Harry Frankfurt _On Bullshit_ for more on the general topic of bullshit and the professional intellectuals and/or academics.
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 5:23 pm
Greg Ransom
Notice that Karl did NOT do this in his origin piece on bullshit ……
“Karl, as a professional intellectual who has made the effort to acquire authoritative knowledge, you have a role and even I would say a responsibility not to advocate, but to make clear what are accepted facts, what are common misconceptions, and what questions leave room for debate.
This serves as a standard against which people weighing the relative merits of various advocates can judge the quality of an advocate’s claims.”
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 5:27 pm
Greg Ransom
Let’s end a bit of the bullshit right now. What percentage of foreclosed or upside down houses were subprime?
What percentage did Freddie and Fannie touch in any manner?
This is a very complex and messy and detailed filled story, and it’s pure bullshit to say that the left/Demo partisans haven’t set out a one-sided diet of “facts” — many of which dependent on fraudulent info from Fannie.
Ending the bullshit begins with killing the fraud that this is a simple story.
Monday ~ January 30th, 2012 at 8:21 pm
Matt (@MeCampbell30)
Cool triple post bro.
There’s already a post on Fannie and Freddie. No need to spew your ignorance everywhere.
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 5:49 pm
Lord
The question to be answered is why BS so attractive when there are so many more interesting and worthwhile discussions to be held. Is it they lack enough knowledge to be capable of discussing it, too lazy to do so, prefer truthiness to truth and persuasion to knowledge, togetherness to independent thought, more fearful of the implications of being wrong and having to change their priors or more desirous of confirming them, like the cheap, simple, and wrong over the expensive, complex, and right. It probably is best to call it BS and move directly on to the more important.
Sunday ~ January 29th, 2012 at 10:46 pm
Greg Ransom
If we compare biologists to economists, re how biologists work their asses off doing field research and full population studies as compared to economists who refuse ever to do field research and who sit in their offices waiting to download “data” provided by others, it becomes clearer how laziness is unavoidably central to the story of BS among the tenured professors of economics. And that, of course, begins only the touch on the this topic in the field of economic science.
Tuesday ~ January 31st, 2012 at 9:23 am
Gene Callahan
“However, our role is the spread of knowledge. Once people are no longer concerned with knowledge but simply scoring points, we should move on.”
Excellent!
Wednesday ~ February 1st, 2012 at 8:50 pm
Becky Hargrove
Well Karl I’m a little confused. I’m not sure that you believe knowledge is just for the intellectuals or for all of us, but I suspect you believe the preservation of knowledge is possible only by spreading it as far as humanly possible. I only know that in these years of trying to understand economists, one day out of three I understand you better than most, and have even picked up a bit of your use of language occasionally. To me that’s a pretty cool thing. (How many Karls are in there? Three? Four?)
Thursday ~ February 2nd, 2012 at 5:17 am
Xerographica
For a while now I’ve been asking people if taxpayers should be allowed to directly allocate their taxes. By far and large the general populace considers this idea to be bullshit.
Their number one objection basically boils down to coordination problems. In other words…they have no idea how the invisible hand works. In this blog entry you can read through a gazillion snippets of people’s responses…
http://pragmatarianism.blogspot.com/2012/01/unglamorous-but-important-things.html
So Karl, and anybody else, what do you think? Given that we’re in a democracy…does it matter if voters do not understand how the invisible hand works? Is asking somebody whether taxpayers should be allowed to directly allocate their taxes the most accurate and efficient way of establishing whether they truly understand how the invisible hand works?
Sunday ~ February 5th, 2012 at 1:50 pm
YK
Reblogged this on Yapping Yak and commented:
Intellectuals are doing too little of what they should be doing, and act too much like advocates.
My suspicions is that people are so easily to be carried away by the natural animal instinct, the surviving instinct perhaps. The end goal of being the stronger side and avoiding being eaten is so strong and so hard wired into our brain, so without conscious effort to suppress it, we will stick to our forte and push it, being it right or wrong.
Sunday ~ February 5th, 2012 at 3:52 pm
The Peak Oil Poet
The last few chapters of Robert Trivers book “the Folly of Fools” pretty much says the same thing.
Pretty sobering. We are pretty nasty and totally deceitful creatures. When we are powerless we preach peace and love and when we are in power we practice everything to the contrary including genocide – all the while pretending to everyone and ourselves that we are doing so from the moral high ground.
Seems to me that the best thing that might happen to us as a species would be total collapse – at least then our genocidal nature would be spread more thin and wide.
pop
ps Triver’s coverage of Israel is an eye-opener. He pulls no punches in exposing it as an example of the very worst that humans can become.
Tuesday ~ February 7th, 2012 at 12:43 am
y
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Tuesday ~ May 7th, 2013 at 8:14 am
melbournelacework
When I originally commented I clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox