Henry

I will be brief. Straussianism is a set of interpretative practices along the following lines, as best as I understand it. The great philosophers and thinkers may have a specific private belief – let’s call it x. But they may not be able to say exactly what they want to say, especially when times are bad, and they risk making enemies. Hence, they need to write indirectly. This means that when a thinker is saying not-x, we should sometimes understand that they really mean to say x. They are communicating ambiguously – but the Truly Wise can grasp their real meaning.

The relationship between this esoteric tradition – Straussianism – and Leo Strauss is a little complicated. I’ve seen recent arguments that Straussianism has taken on a life of its own – has become vulgar, if you like, however much of a contradiction in terms Vulgar Straussianism might seem to be.

The obvious objection to Straussianism  is the standard one. If you help yourself to the claim that when this or that Great Man is saying x, they may actually mean not-x or x, depending, you are making it harder to reach a shared understanding of the truth. If you further contend that only those who grok your particular hidden lore can distinguish sincerity from dissimulation, you can redefine the history of thought to mean whatever you want it to mean.

But there is a second – and perhaps more serious – objection. Straussianism – especially in its vulgar form – may present even more pernicious temptations to the writer than the reader.

If you conceive of yourself as a Straussian, and find yourself caught between the desires of different audiences with directly contradictory desires over what you write, you may adopt the following protocol. Write x to please Audience One, while throwing out subtle hints that actually you agree with Audience Two, and secretly believe, and are secretly arguing, not-x.

The dilemmas of this style of communication are the major theme of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Mother Night. Is Howard Campbell Jr, the American turncoat and Nazi propagandist, actually a secret anti-Nazi, who only boosts the arguments of evil people so that he can convey hidden messages that help the forces of good? Or is he a sincere Nazi, who sends coded messages as an aside or a failsafe? Nobody really knows, not even Howard Campbell Jr. He ends up in a horrible mess.

One could state the broader problem in game theoretic language. Straussianism makes it more difficult to reach a separating equilibrium in the communications game, which would allow you to clearly distinguish Nazis from anti-Nazis. And as with game theory more generally, you may also find yourself in infinite regress. Are communications about Straussianism themselves Straussian or non-Straussian? Is there any way to navigate the wilderness of beliefs, meta-beliefs and meta-meta-beliefs, except by assumption, so that expectations might actually converge on some shared truth? But since I think the problem of enacted Straussianism is practical, not abstract-theoretic, I’ll leave it at that, and say nothing further.

[Commercial announcement: My and Abraham Newman’s book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy is still available for $2.99 on Amazon Kindle. Also, it is about to come out in paperback in the UK and US. We now return you to your scheduled programming. Also: this post was first published at Programmable Mutter].

After nuzzling up against a fishing trawler’s trolling line – a fairly obvious effort by Janan Ganesh to get outrage-clicks – I’m swallowing the bait. But I have an excuse! I’ve been planning to write this post for months anyway, and Ganesh is just serving up the occasion.

Ganesh argues that we should read highbrow books and lowbrow books, but not, under any circumstances, middle-brow ones.

It is rude to name names. But if we imagine a writer called something like Elena Murakami or Patrick O’ Le Carré, someone whose prose is neither the most expeditious nor all that deep, who doesn’t trade in incident-driven high jinks or profound digression, someone who is challenging enough, doesn’t the reader lose twice over?

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“To promote open inquiry and free, market-based technological progress, you need an open society, not one founded on the enemy principle. The understandable desire to escape criticism, misunderstanding, and the frustrations of ordinary politics does not entail the radical remaking of the global geoeconomic order to confound the New York Times and its allies. The cult of progress and the technocapital singularity are Hayek’s “religion of the engineers” with the valences reversed—so that markets and AI rather than the state become the objects of worship. Over the last few years, Silicon Valley thinking has gotten drunk on its own business model, in a feedback loop in which wild premises feed into wilder assertions and then back. It’s time to sober up.”

Some critics of Silicon Valley might find the piece not critical enough, but it is not written for them. The intuition behind it, correct or incorrect, is that a better Silicon Valley right is possible – and a piece explaining why in an uncompromising but not completely inimical way, written for a journal like American Affairs, is more likely to push a few people in this direction than a jeremiad. Two minor corrections. One error crept in through editing – the Dread Pirate Roberts’ efforts to hire hitmen were not what led to the Silk Road’s demise. The other was present from the beginning – “Balaji”’s surname is Srinivasan, not Srinavasan. And if you want more on the “technocapital singularity,” this piece for the Economist and this, right here on this Substack might be helpful. You’ll find little enough in the American Affairs piece, which mostly focuses on the politics of business models.

Enough – read the article!

I’ve been doing a bunch of talks and events online, mostly not CT related, but a couple that might be interesting to readers. One that certainly is is this conversation with Francis Spufford, which is a coda to Red Plenty.

Some of my bits of the conversation build on this Long Now talk from a few months ago.

I’ll also be talking in a couple of weeks at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center, riffing on Alison Gopnik’s notion of Large Language Models as “cultural technologies.” I was deeply unhappy with HKS’s speech policy some years back, but they appear to have gotten substantially better even as other places are getting worse.

Finally, Abe Newman and I will be doing a conversation with Paul Krugman at CUNY’s Graduate Center a month from now. This will be open to the public (free tickets) as well as being videoed for broadcast. If you want to come, would love to see you! (I’m thinking about having an open coffee somewhere nearby before if people would like to say hi).

Last year, I received an email asking if I would write an introductory essay for the Tor Essentials reissue of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Icehenge. It took me approximately thirty seconds to convince myself that this was not some kind of hallucination, and another three or four to type YES! OF COURSE!!! and hit reply. It was the most delightful email I’d gotten in years. Stan is now a friend, but the request had its origins in a conversation years before I’d met him. At least a decade ago, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and I were chatting about his books, and I said that Icehenge was both (a) his best novel in my opinion, and (b) criminally under-appreciated. Patrick, who recently stepped down as editor-in-chief at Tor, somehow remembered this, and asked me to pick up on the notion many years later. So how could I do anything but seize the chance?

The book is out in June, and I’ll have more to say then. When I was writing the introduction, I talked to Stan about how he had come to write Icehenge, and what it had meant to him as a writer. There was a lot about modernism! When the British Science Fiction Association’s journal, Vector put out a call for submissions on SF and modernism, I made inquiries, and they said they’d love to publish the conversation. A cleaned up version is available in the new issue (which has a ton of other great content). It’s published under Creative Commons, as is pretty well everything that Vector publishes, so I’m republishing it here. I simply can’t say how happy I am about all of this, and how much I’m looking forward to the book itself – out in just a couple of months.

There are some spoilers in the below – so if you prefer to wait for the book, wait for the book! [click to continue…]

So Noah Smith has a quite negative review of Acemoglu and Johnson’s recent book, Power and Progress, a book that I myself liked very much. Before letting rip, Noah says nice things about Acemoglu and Johnson, and I’ll do the same here for him. There are a lot of people on the left who detest Noah, but I know him to be a genuinely decent person. What he says of Acemoglu and Johnson is what I’ll say about him – his heart is in the right place. Sometimes … he does not go out of his way to make himself lovable to lefties, but as someone who has been known to get involved in stupid and tendentious spats on the Internet myself, I’m in no position to heave rocks at glasshouses. What I do think (and I’ve said more or less this to him in person – my views won’t come as news) is that Noah represents a style of economics that has an overly Panglossian view of power, economics and progress. [click to continue…]

So Cosma Shalizi and I have an article (messy pre-print) coming out Real Soon in Communications of the ACM on democracy, polarization and social media. And Nate Matias, who I’m friends with, has forceful objections. I’ve promised him a response – which is below – but am doing it as a blogpost, since I think that the disagreement could be turned into something more broadly useful.

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If you’ve studied game theory, you’ve probably come across the mixed-motive coordination game, a simple one-shot game in which two representative actors have to figure out how to coordinate so as to find a mutually beneficial equilibrium – but have different interests over which equilibrium they choose. And if you studied it a couple of decades ago, you very likely have heard it referred to as “the battle of the sexes,” a term that has fallen out of common usage, for obvious reasons. But when I read Tyler Cowen’s short piece on the actual historical struggle between women and men for recognition, I was immediately was reminded of Jack Knight’s argument, based on mixed-motive coordination games, for why power is more important to the emergence of social rules than most economists think. [click to continue…]

Back in the day, there used to be a lot more arguments across blogs. Perhaps we’ll see more of it happening again as Twitter continues its collapse into a dwarf star composed of degenerate matter.  To get things started, this seems to me to be a quite wrongheaded claim by Tyler Cowen.

In a deal months in the making, the University of Wisconsin System has agreed to “reimagine” its diversity efforts, restructuring dozens of staff into positions serving all students and freezing the total number of diversity positions for the next three years.

In exchange, universities would receive $800 million for employee pay raises and some building projects, including a new engineering building for UW-Madison.

“This is an evolution, and this is a change moving forward,” UW System President Jay Rothman told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “But it does not in any way deviate from our core values of diversity (and) inclusion.”

Here is the full story, via HB, it is rare that the real world is actually so Coasean.

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Back in April, Johns Hopkins’ Center for Economy and Society and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences held a workshop on the political ideologies of Silicon Valley. It was a great event, in large part because it brought together a somewhat disconnected community. People had been thinking about Silicon Valley in history, in sociology, in cultural studies and political science among other disciplines. They had read across disciplines out of necessity, to keep up with the ideas – but they often hadn’t had a chance to meet the people they were reading. So this gave them an opportunity to talk. And as an unanticipated by-product of the meeting, we invited people who attended the meeting, and a couple of others, to write short pieces about their understanding of the ideology or ideologies of Silicon Valley.

If you want to read the seminar as a PDF, it is available here. If you want to remix it (it is made available under a a CC BY-NC 4.0 DEED AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 International License ), then click here to download the .tex file. If you want to link to the entire seminar, it’s all at https://crookedtimber.org/category/silicon-valley-seminar/If you want to read the individual posts online, you can find them all below.

The participants in the seminar are as follows:

• Shazeda Ahmed is a post-doctoral fellow in the Transatlantic Digital Debates at the Global Public Policy Institute at Princeton University. From Algorithmic Monoculture to Epistemic Monoculture? Understanding the Rise of AI Safety.
• Finn Brunton is a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UC Davis. The Agar Plate of Cryptocurrency.
• Henry Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. The Religion of the Engineers; And Hayek Its True Prophet.
• Maria Farrell blogs at Crooked Timber. Silicon Valley’s Worldview is Not Just an Ideology; It’s a Personality Disorder.
• Louis Hyman is the Maurice and Hinda Neufeld Founders Professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial & Labor Relations. Silicon Valley is the Detroit of the Future.
• Dave Karpf is an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. The Church of Moore’s Law.
• Tamara Kneese is a Senior Researcher and Project Director of Data & Society Research Institute’s AIMLab, and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. Observers Observed: The Ethnographer in Silicon Valley.
• Neil Malhotra is the Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Silicon Valley Liberal-tarians.
• Lana Swartz is an associate professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. If It’s a Ponzi, Get In Early”: The Ideology of Scam Futures
• Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. Silicon Valley Fairy Dust.

When Sam Altman was ousted as CEO of OpenAI, some hinted that lurid depravities lay behind his downfall. Surely, OpenAI’s board wouldn’t have toppled him if there weren’t some sordid story about to hit the headlines? But the reporting all seems to be saying that it was God, not Sex, that lay behind Altman’s downfall. And Money, that third great driver of human behavior, seems to have driven his attempted return and his new job at Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s biggest investor by far. [click to continue…]

Marc Andreessen’s recent “tech optimist manifesto” is one of the most significant statements of Silicon Valley ideology. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s actually less a political manifesto than an apostolic credo for the Religion of Progress. The words “we believe” appear no less than 113 times in the text, not counting synonyms.

The core precept of this secular religion is faith in technology. From Andreessen’s opening section: “We believe growth is progress … the only perpetual source of growth is technology … this is why we are not still living in mud huts … this is why our descendents [sic] will live in the stars.” [click to continue…]

In order of relative clout. I’ve been meaning to do some version of this for years …

Last September, Abe Newman, Jeremy Wallace and I had a piece in Foreign Affairs’ 100th anniversary issue. I can’t speak for my co-authors’ motivations, but my own reason for writing was vexation that someone on the Internet was wrong. In this case, it was Yuval Harari. His piece has been warping debate since 2018, and I have been grumpy about it for nearly as long. But also in fairness to Harari, he was usefully wrong – I’ve assigned this piece regularly to students, because it wraps up a bunch of common misperceptions in a neatly bundled package, ready to be untied and dissected. [click to continue…]