Rad Geek People's Daily

The basic predicament for intelligent action in a crisis is that information is laborious to sort, measurements are costly to get and costly to vet, and analysis takes time. Peer review and consideration takes longer. People act under uncertainty; when they are urged to act rapidly and drastically, they necessarily act — at best — on the best information they have at hand, and they are going to seek out and to produce lots more information — tentative results, estimates, conjectures and seemingly reasonable assumptions — that are very rough, because they also happen to be ready. The more rapidly, the more urgently, and the more drastically decision-makers start to act, or try to react, the sharper the predicament becomes: the supply of information available becomes necessarily more rushed and more tentative at the same time that the demand for certainty and unanimity becomes higher; the range of possible effects grows wider and deeper; the decisions and reactions themselves change the very regularities in other people’s choices, other people’s knowledge, other people’s circumstances, and the natural world that you are trying to observe or to assume. The more drastically and rapidly you act, the more they change, both in ways that you may be able to foresee and in ways that you cannot foresee, do not intend, and cannot control.

The result is that crises often produce a vast glut of information; but a lot of that information, and often the information most critical to making urgent decisions or taking drastic measures, is relatively low-quality information at best, information which has been produced rapidly, not vetted carefully, made on multiple simplifying assumptions, with huge error bars and wild, systematic skews that may be understandable in the pragmatic context of making a decision. (The extreme worse-case scenario might be highly salient even if it’s unlikely; data sets that aren’t entirely comparable may be the best you have for two things that you really need to compare; you might need to piously hope that some things go as planned even if you can’t be sure.) The more or less necessary predicament — you need time and effort to understand intelligently, but you need speed and freedom to take action — is often made worse by a number of extremely tempting, but extremely misleading, errors. A real need bold conjectures and decisive action is often conflated with unrealistic demands for dogmatic certainty; the real benefits of coordinated action are often conflated with a punitive demand for unanimity in belief and deference or conformity to appointed authorities. The deep epistemic problem with understanding the situation intelligently becomes not only the fact that high-quality information becomes so hard to find, but that low-quality information, or misinformation, crowds around all the watering holes in the cognitive ecosystem. Anecdotes are presented as data, toy models are presented as charts, tentative results are presented as What We Know Now, large scale syntheses of poorly comparable data from disparate sources are put forward as observed facts, third-hand sloganeering reports of experts’ tentative conclusions are put forward as conclusive arguments, simplifying assumptions are put forward as obvious and incontestable dogmatic principles. Actively seeking out information and absorbing it doesn’t necessarily serve to better inform or to improve your cognitive position; it often ends up being an exhausting means to skew your own judgment towards the prevailing trends and groupthink of the info-garbage that is most readily available to you.

None of this is any reason not to rely on imperfect information if you have to make a decision — what else are you going to rely on? It is a reason to act with the awareness that you’re taking a certain number of shots in the dark. It is a reason to prominently state simplifying assumptions used in arguments or models, and to acknowledge them as assumptions, not as oracular revelations, wherever possible. It is a reason to actively seek out, and publicize, the parts of what you’re saying that you’re least certain of, or that you know will be most contested by others, and to acknowledge what would follow or what might follow if those underlying premises turned out to be false. It’s a reason to be ready for and to do whatever you can to hedge against the risks of unintended consequences. It’s a reason to state numbers with error bars and to try to figure out lowball and highball constraints on what the real figure might be, if you’re wrong.

In circumstances that lead to a high risk of groupthink and overreach, it’s a reason to explicitly employ evidential markers when reporting claims; it’s a reason to cite and link to specific sources for specific claims rather than simply repeating them or presenting them as What Experts Are Saying, and it’s a reason for readers to spend some time following links and footnotes where they have been made available, or to significantly discount stories that don’t bother to provide them. It’s also a reason to actively seek out and cultivate second guesses, minority reports and dissenting opinions, rather than ignoring, scolding or punishing them.

In a high info-garbage environment, it is often worthwhile to deliberately limit, compartmentalize or substitute the consumption of certain kinds of low-quality or risky information. In particular, to restrict your intake of information where the persuasive power of the presentation is especially likely to outrun its real evidential import. You may be better off glancing at boring charts a few times over a few days than you are looking at infographics in a newspaper article; you are almost certainly better off reading the abstract and a paragraph or two of one scientific paper than you are reading through an explainer article attempting to gloss the conclusion of that paper while weaving it together narratively with interviews from two or three other pronouncements by experts in the field. Commentary is prone to be less valuable than reporting, and reporting less valuable than sources or data. In a high info-garbage environment it’s also especially important to be sensitive to the likelihood of mistakes, to record claims in a testable and falsifiable form and to go back and check on them over time, to prepare for imperfect or piecemeal implementation of plans, and actively try to gather information on potential or actual unintended consequences and perverse incentives.

The problem here is not that people will draw conclusions that are wrong, or to make decisions that turn out to be mistakes. Of course they will. If that wasn’t a real danger, then it wouldn’t be a crisis in the first place. The problem here is that if you want to draw conclusions that are less wrong, more often, — if you want to do less damage and realize more quickly when you make the wrong decision, — if you want to lower the chance of being misled — then that may mean being more selective rather than more completist in the sources of information that you pursue. And the sources to be most selective about will often be the ones that seem the most appealing from the standpoint of your own social and ideological starting-points. Consume thoughtful discussion and information, not too much, mostly data.

Amidst the turbulence and disorder of faction, a certain spirit of system is apt to mix itself with that public spirit which is founded upon the love of humanity, upon a real fellow-feeling with the inconveniencies and distresses to which some of our fellow-citizens may be exposed. This spirit of system commonly takes the direction of that more gentle public spirit, always animates it, and often inflames it, even to the madness of fanaticism. . . . The man of system . . . ^[1] is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it: he seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board; he does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

— Adam Smith (1759) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part Sixth, Section II, Chapter 2, ¶Â¶ 15-17
Of the order in which Societies are by nature recommended to our Beneficence

1. ^[1]Smith: on the contrary, i.e., as contrasted with the man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, who (therefore) will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies into which the state is divided. –C.J.↩

Listening to: 1A (25-Jan-2020), Get In Line: What It Takes To Legally Immigrate To The United States

… But every day, millions of people contend with the U.S.’ legal immigration system. Many have been living and working in America for years, stuck in residency limbo as they contend with an alphabet soup of visas and green cards and a system congested with red tape and long wait times.

An immigrant [from India] who applies for a green card today can expect to wait in line for 50 years.

— NPR, Get In Line: What It Takes To Legally Immigrate To The United States
1A, 25 January 2020

The half-century queue for permanent legal status is, of course, the direct result of the predictable, runaway overwhelming of an insanely restrictive system of immigration caps and national quotas. In the early 1920s, the U.S. created a madly restrictive system of immigration limits organized around a nativist and racist system of national-origins quotas.^[1] This was widely understood to have been a mistake by 1965 — so in order to fix the system, they kept the insanely low caps on the total levels of authorized immigration, but they (thankfully finally) permitted Asiatic nations like India and China finally to claim their shares^[2]; then they also (for the first time) imposed the same system of insanely restrictive caps on Mexico and the rest of Latin America.^[3] Then, just to make things fair, they reallocated the national quotas so that every country, from Liechenstein to Honduras to the entire Republic of India, gets an equal sliver of the total. The completely predictable result has been that high-emigration countries have been accumulating runaway backlogs of applications. In theory there is a queue; in practice, the queue has become so mind-breakingly long that many 25 year olds seeking legal status now cannot reasonably expect to ever get a shot at naturalization unless they survive years beyond the average human life expectancy.

There is some discussion in the show about proposed ways to fix the system; mostly in the form of debates about how to reallocate the shares of the insanely low limit on total immigration so that countries with more demand for permanent-residency visas can get access to more permanent-residency visas per year. But the problem is not the allocation of shares among different nationalities of immigrants. The problem is that immigration is deliberately kept to a minuscule level that is wildly, completely out of touch with the realities of global migration, the number of people who are looking to come to the U.S. and with the level of demand and number of opportunities for immigrant workers, students and families within the U.S. The solution is not to reallocate the quotas again, according to some other rule, but to get rid of the caps and quotas entirely. There is no good or sensible way to triage something that people can and ought to have by right. There’s no fair method for rationing access to something that shouldn’t even be scarce in the first place.

1. ^[1]1921: The national-origins system was debuted in the Emergency Quota Act; 1924: The system was regularized and made even more restrictive under the Immigration Act of 1924. The idea behind the act was, explicitly, to reduce the rate of demographic change in the U.S. and to keep undesirables out of the country, notably Asians and Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and the Weimar Republic.↩
2. ^[2]Nearly all immigrants from every Asian country had been barred entirely under a pair of racist provisions of the old system — one of them forbidding immigration from China or from anywhere in the Asiatic Barred Zone, and another forbidding immigration by any alien ineligible to citizenship, which under the racial prerequisites embedded in U.S. Naturalization laws amounted to forbidding Asians on racial grounds.↩
3. ^[3]Immigrants from Western Hemisphere countries used to be non-quota immigrants under the old system. Although they were subjected to a number of other costs and restrictions, which allowed for frequent large-scale harassment, round-ups, and deportations during times of anti-immigrant backlash, they were not subject to any hard cap on numbers, in the way that Eastern Hemisphere countries were, until after the 1965 reform.↩

The Preface of Lyrical Ballads (1800) is best known and most quoted for its declaration that all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. This is often taught mistakenly as if it were a definition of poetry (it’s not intended as a definition of what poetry is, but as a description of how good poetry is supposed to be composed). It’s also usually mentioned as a sort of campaign-button slogan for literary Romanticism, and in particular for the Romantics’ tilt toward the indulgence of emotion or raw passion over thought and consideration. But re-read it in context: the Writer of the Preface^[1] really first introduces the phrase to make quite a different point, — if not exactly the 180-degree opposite point, then at least one at a very obtuse angle, — to the usual English lesson-plan take on Romanticism’s literary manifesto:

I cannot be insensible of the present outcry against the triviality and meanness both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect where it exists, is more dishonorable to the Writer’s own character than false refinement or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences. From such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy purpose. Not that I mean to say, that I always begin to write with a distinct purpose formally conceived; but I believe that my habits of meditation have so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; but though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply. . . .

— Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads, Vol. II. (Boldface mine.)

The Writer goes on to argue for a nuanced view of the interrelation of thought and feeling under the influence of long-cultivated habits:

. . . For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so by the repetition and continuance of this act feelings connected with important subjects will be nourished, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much organic sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced that by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits we shall describe objects and utter sentiments of such a nature and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, his taste exalted, and his affections ameliorated.

— Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads, Vol. II.

He believed that it was necessary to assert this view against a problem of over-stimulation and over-indulgence, and that a great deal of the problem was down to cities and down to nations (or, down to urban ways of living and down to the absorbing clamor of national politics):

I will not suffer a sense of false modesty to prevent me from asserting, that I point my Reader’s attention to this mark of distinction far less for the sake of these particular Poems than from the general importance of the subject. The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know that one is being elevated above another in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. . . .

— Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads, Vol. II.

He had some opinions on what this meant for contemporary trends in popular entertainment, but remained hopeful:

. . . The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespear and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse. — When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble effort with which I have endeavoured to counteract it; and reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I should be oppressed with no dishonorable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it which are equally inherent and indestructible; and did I not further add to this impression a belief that the time is approaching when the evil will be systematically opposed by men of greater powers and with far more distinguished success.

— Preface (1800) to Lyrical Ballads, Vol. II.

1. ^[1]William Wordsworth. The first volume of Lyrical Ballads was issued anonymously; the second was printed under Wordsworth’s name, with an acknowledgement of Coleridge’s contribution of poems.↩