D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt, “The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie” (NYT Opinion)
Real attention cannot be measured with a stopwatch or an app, and real attention—human attention—is far deeper and more complex than the ability to get stuff done. We know this, of course: The lives we long for involve going for an undisturbed walk in the park with a friend, getting lost in a book or even simply daydreaming. Life is made of these things, and they are made of attention. Armed with relentless, increasingly artificial-intelligence-driven feeds, Big Tech is conducting a successful attack on that richness, that expansiveness, that freedom. To survive it, and to build something better, we need to rethink attention itself.
Dustin Sharp, “Why Human Rights Depend on the Nation State” (American Purpose)
Dustin Sharp contends that some kind of civic cohesion is necessary to provide for a system of rights.
But order alone doesn’t deliver rights. That depends on the character of the community behind the state—its sense of “we,” its willingness to restrain itself, its capacity to act together rather than fracture into tribes. That civic cohesion is the essence of nationhood, with a shared story and reciprocal obligations strong enough to hold a diverse democracy together. Without that civic “we,” human rights—like cosmopolitanism—float in midair. If anything, the human rights establishment is part of the problem. As human rights work professionalized, it drifted into a kind of bureaucratic cosmopolitanism—organized around donors and UN processes rather than a civic ground game in actual nations. Many NGOs sound more like policy consultancies than movements. A project meant to speak for people increasingly struggles to speak to them.
American Purpose (at Persuasion)
Noah Smith, “Trapped in the hell of social comparison”
Noah conjectures that the way social media increases our awareness of the (constructed, performative) success of others doesn’t just create a sense of inadequacy in teenagers—it also contributes to generalized dissatisfaction with the economy.
Humans have always compared ourselves to others, but before social media, we compared ourselves to the people around us — our coworkers, friends, family, and neighbors. “Keeping up with the Joneses” has always been a well-known concept, and many economists have documented the effect in real life. … But comparing yourself to neighbors, coworkers, family, and friends was different than comparing yourself to social media influencers, in at least a couple of important ways.
Brink Lindsey on The Liberal Patriot Podcast: “Why rich societies are breaking down”
A related point came up in this interesting conversation between Brink Lindsey and Ruy Teixera, Lindsey notes that there are important aspects of living that can’t be supplied through economic activity:
What does capitalism offer? It offers comforts, conveniences, and diversions, entertainment. In the past, when we were poor, when the world was poor, and when the world was massively uncomfortable, incredibly inconvenient, and mind-numbingly boring, then economic growth had an obvious, clear nexus with improving well-being. It was filling in these deficits, which prevent us from having the potential to have enjoyable, challenging, fulfilling lives. But once those deficits are filled in, and you’re actually trying to realize that potential, a lot of that can’t be outsourced to the marketplace. It can’t be outsourced to the government and to the welfare state. It’s things we have to do with our own lives to realize our own potential. And capitalism can’t do it for us, and it can distract us from it a lot. And we see a lot of that distraction, I think, today, particularly. We spend the majority of our lives staring at screens rather than interacting with other people.
That isn’t to say that economic activity isn’t important, but it isn’t everything.
Matthew Yglesias, “The lost liberal center” (Slow Boring)
The conflation of “liberal” with “progressive” or “left-wing” has become a serious problem the more polarized politics has become. The confusion makes it that much more difficult to talk about current politics.
American conservatism has an unusually liberal heritage to conserve, and American liberalism is unusually conservative in terms of its relationship to the country’s history. Mainstream American political figures are endlessly combining and recombining Jefferson and Hamilton, and generally not proposing that we overthrow these figures.
It’s not that everyone in American politics is liberal or that liberals all agree about what to do all the time. But until recently, both American partisan coalitions included strong liberal elements.
…
More market liberal Republicans should have defected to the Democratic Party, and strengthened the forces of liberalism in internal Democratic Party debates. The traditional liberal center of American politics would have been destabilized by this. But MAGA would have been stuck with what it won in 2016: a minority electoral coalition with scant elite support. What happened instead was the overreach Noah Smith described.
But (and here’s where the terminological issues become important) the overreach was that Democrats became too left-wing, not that they became too liberal.
…
I think the first step to recovery is for liberals to acknowledge that we have lost most of the intra-party fights in the recent past, and we need to reconstitute ourselves—not as a non-centrist force, but as a non-establishment force.
Helen Pluckrose, “Liberalism as a higher-order value”
Relatedly:
I see liberalism less an axis different but equivalent to the left/right one and more as a higher-order value. This is because liberalism is the precondition for productive political disagreement. Because Western liberal democracies are founded on liberal principles as a governing system and (ideally) a set of well-established cultural norms and expectations, this provides the core basis for our kind of democratic societies that protect individual liberty and facilitate the free exchange of diverse viewpoints for the purposes of knowledge production and conflict resolution. It can be imagined as an umbrella that covers the majority of mainstream political thought as a default. Those extreme views on the fringes of either side which would curtail individual liberty, suppress viewpoint diversity and interfere with democratic processes and/or the constitutions of countries established to protect individual liberty and government by the consent of the governed are the views I have argued can coherently be considered extreme, radical or far. These are revolutionary or reactionary views which seek to dismantle the liberal, philosophical underpinnings of Western modernity and replace them with some Utopian vision of progress or a regression back to an imagined golden time of patriarchy, racial and religious homogeneity and persecution of sexual minorities.
Helen Pluckrose - The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain
Also from Helen Pluckrose, “Being Right For The Wrong Reasons Is Still Being Wrong.”
Too often people taking positions based on moral intuitions which they have rationalised after the fact are inclined to assume that people questioning their reasoning oppose their stance. Quite often they do and this is why they are picking holes in the argument. This is not the only reason for addressing sloppy reasoning, though. It is also important to do so when we agree with somebody else’s stance and think it matters. When somebody is arguing badly for a good cause, they are likely to undermine that cause and make it easier to dismantle and dismiss.
Being right for the wrong reasons is still being wrong.