For Meta-Rationality Part 2: Application to Politics and Science in Politics

An article which may break the record as far as phrases that piss off both die hard Democrats and MAGA folks

When people bring up political topics, it appears that they are always expecting a particular kind of game to be played.

Let’s take these set of questions, all of which poke at a hornet’s nest:

1. What do you think of Trump?

2. What do you think of the Harvard-Trump conflict?

3. What do you think of the tariff policies?

4. What’s your view on the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

5. What about Green policies addressing climate change?

6. And COVID restrictions and vaccines?

If someone asks one of these questions, they expect either one of the following to occur:

1. The answer is in affirmative of their particular tribal allegiance, and the two of you will bond over how righteous you are and how evil and stupid your rivals are.

2. The answer is affirmative of the position of the designated opposing tribal allegiance, and then the two of will sling off your respective set of talking points, become progressively more irate, and leave the conversation learning nothing. Then you will both proceed to be grumpy all day until you meet a friend within your tribe and you can commiserate on the evil and stupid person you met that day.

Well how about no, I don’t want to play that game.

In the words of Musa Al-Gharbi, I will not be “putting on a jersey and rooting for a team.”

I actually don’t have strong political opinions as far as many issues on which people are divided on. However, when it comes to common sense, or something with a strong preponderance of evidence with some basic understanding of economics, history, and other related subjects, I will declare statements of fact as such, which some interpret as a strong opinion. Otherwise, hot button issues are often culturally salient due to a complicated set of systemic factors as well as various powerful actors’ decisions. When something is truly dysfunctional, I am interested in the systemic causes that has led to this dysfunction, as that is both interesting and informative for understanding the world.

Moreover, in many cases it is just a complex situation. There is no clear good-bad gradient of actors, and it’s a circumstance wherein difficult choices with tradeoffs must be chosen. These choices themselves are ultimately subjective to a person’s values.

On Trump

Let’s turn to the first question: “what do you think of Trump?” Trump is a person, he has done many things…do you want a treatise? Or do you mean specifically his platform in the 2024 election and subsequent policies? Well, the answer to that is in the second half of my article here. And this doesn’t answer the question in a satisfying way, to most people, as it neither declares “Orange Man Bad” or that “Trump is the Savior of America” and indicates that both types of thinking are somewhere between stupid and just low resolution.

One general point, with respect to Meta-Rationality about the 2024 election that can be made is simply that Trump and Kamala were playing different language games. That’s why their debates made no sense to the point of being farcical. Kamala was speaking in Washington “policy wonk” language games. Whereas Trump in phenomenological language games, that is a more aesthetic description of the contours of visceral experience of daily life. So when the working class heard Kamala claim the economy is doing great because GDP per capita is up and the stock indices are all way up, the working class simply loses faith the policy wonk language in the first place, because to them their grocery bill means the month is longer than the paycheck. And when they hear about immigrants eating locals’ cats, that paints a picture of social decay and lapse of institutions’ reliability, which is what they are experiencing. So they were speaking at entirely different layers of abstraction, and the Democrats’ were obfuscating with theirs, while Trump is a good showman.

“What do you think of the Harvard-Trump conflict?”

It’s amazing how challenging it was for Steven Pinker to write an article saying the obvious thing, that

“Harvard is an institutions that has, and is capable of continuing to, perform world class research”

and

“Harvard has let a destructive ideology take over its administrative policies and it should stop doing such things”

can both be true at once!

To me it’s obvious that cutting funding in the middle of many ongoing research projects and sending international students home in the middle of their studies is a recklessly destructive thing to do. However, it’s also obvious that the fault lies not with Trump, but with DEI and the people that pushed it and let it fester.

This is because it is obvious that promoting “Equity”-coded social engineering is corrosive to any institution that depends on performance and will significantly increase social breakdown and mortality rates. Moreover, if one is not aware of this obvious fact, then that person is functionally illiterate and does not have the cognitive capacity to perform basic common sense reasoning. However, while those two descriptors could be accurate for a large chunk of MAGA’s base, educated people and especially academics should know better. And moreover, they should have the civic duty and responsibility to prevent flagrant stupidity they see around them from driving policy.

And yet, the media portrays these developments as entirely the fault of the Trump administration. Which is true only in a very low resolution sense.

But while I will call out stupidity and radical destructive ideologies when I see them, I don’t have a strong opinion with respect to left versus right. In the sense that:

1. On the one hand New Deal / Beveridge Report style Social Democracy has its set of benefits and advantages as far as general human welfare, with some arguably acceptable tradeoffs to economic dynamism

2. On the other hand technocratic paternalistic market oriented governance, as in, e.g. Singapore, has the potential to simply bring so much potential economic prosperity, if performed with the right institutions and done by the right kidns of people, that it will bring outstanding benefits to overall wealth and human wellbeing. Moreover, maintaining a welfare floor in the future can be made more easily and with less tradeoffs.

An argument could be made for either, and both of these are perfectly sensible approaches that simply prioritize different points of the Pareto front of world outcomes and moral values.

What do you think of Trump’s tariffs?

First: increasing the composition of manufacturing in the USA is a good idea for:

1. There are many more ways to increase productivity in manufacturing compared to services - think of ever more advanced machinery making more cars per day compared to a hairdresser cutting clients’ hair. And increasing total factor productivity is the only way to sustainability increase GDP per capita.

2. Geopolitical and national security concerns.

Here’s an informative economic background on the second point (mainstream, paid by The Economist).

Next, I actually do not have a strong opinion on the use of tariffs themselves as a tool to spur manufacturing. Good faith arguments based on sound Economic Theory and understanding can be made for either the position that free trade should always be a matter of policy and for the use of select tariffs as a tool to protect nascent manufacturing companies from global competition.

However, why is Trump executing the tariffs like a teenager having a tantrum?

If one were to establish tariffs for this purpose, the obvious thing to do would be to just tell the world:

“Look, I see that you’re all trying and that’s nice, but we’re still number one here. And we need to shore up some manufacturing. So here’s how it’ll be: in 6 months, we will have 10% tariffs on X, Y goods from A group countries, …., in 12 months it will rise to 20% on, ….

Now please don’t make a fuss and embarrass yourselves. There is nothing you can do about it and the matter is not up for discussion. But I’m telling you now so you have time to get economies in order and plan any counter tariffs you want. Don’t try anything funny now, you need us more than we need you.

I hope that was all clear. Glad that we have an understanding.”

Still geopolitically assertive but…more of something a mature adult would say and do.

What’s your view on the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

https://www.readingeagle.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/roge_c231012.jpg?w=600

Both can be true: a forceful response to October 7 was mandatory and “from the river to the sea” means genocide and should not be socially acceptable, and Netanyahu’s history of clandestine support for Hamas and indiscriminate use of the airforce are atrocious.

Sorry, again no jersey!

What about Green policies addressing climate change?

One can always trust that a statement that “the Science says we must do X” to not be in good faith because of the “is-ought” problem. Also called Hume’s guillotine and explored in depth in G.E.Moore’s Principia Ethica, the point is that there is no logical deduction by which a statement about how the world is can make an inference to what one should do. This can only come from additional ethical statements, possibly more general. For example: manufacturing is declining and we take as a policy prior that Mercantilism is an acceptable strategy that we can infer the use of tariffs, potentially. But manufacturing in decline itself cannot suggest specific tariffs.

This is the first problem. The second problem is Science publicists’ treatment of uncertainty.

First, the simulations themselves are extraordinarily complex: the climate is a large scale process that depends on a number of emergent behavior at a small scale. The largest supercomputers are used to simulate these multi-physics models. Given their inherent nonlinearity, they are in practice stochastic at macro-scale, and so they simulate many and create an ensemble. From this ensemble they show the long run outcomes under various scenarios.

Now, you can’t run a natural experiment with respect to climate, nor do you have more than one sample. So there is both the uncertainty in the model, and the uncertainty of the uncertainty. So there is a lot of stabbing in the dark. In practice, the models say there is both a substantial probability that nothing seriously destructive will happen, and a substantial probability that there will be apocalyptic heating.

So in listening to a Green chain of reasoning:

We did a bunch of simulations. It seems the planet is warming. That could be bad.

OK

Here is an explanation of how certain chemicals that industrial production and consumption can cause this

OK. Sure, sounds like you know what you are talking about, and it makes sense that shooting up tons of synthetic gases could do something to the atmosphere.

Look this is bad. More of these gases will cause greater warming and it should be stopped

What, I thought you said there is a chance warming will get bad? And you didn’t say anything about the dose response relationship from the gases here? I mean, to be on the careful side, we could try to think of some new technology that could, well there’s already these cleaner combined cycle gas …

It must be stopped, now! everything must be wind and solar generated!

But, there’s lots of problematic risks and side effects of suddenly trying to switch the grid to solar and wind, and, look it’s a drop in the bucket compared to Asia, why are we pushing up the costs to industry?

And wait, what about nuclear?

No nuclear! Everything must be wind and solar and hydro now!

What about debate, here’s a more middle of the road take, and another.

No! Misinformation! Do you want our children to be burned into a crisp? How dare you! Trust the Science!

And COVID restrictions and vaccines?

Is another example illustrating the two principles above: a failure to communicate uncertainty and breaking the is-ought law displayed a lack of good faith on the part of science communicators.

Epidemiological models are similar to climate models as far inability to really perform systematic experiments (for obvious ethical and political reasons) there is little data, and the dynamics are very complex and difficult to properly model.

Then, while no doubt impressive and highly competent effort went in to the biochemical and biostatistical research for vaccines. But….no it’s not possible to say with a short term clinical trial that they are completely safe with absolute certainty. That’s just biologically and statistically impossible.

Now, for a number of reasons, they are probably safe, and you shouldn’t take alternative medicines you hear of from a podcast.

But the point is: this is again a matter of probability and what was communicated was absolute certainty as well as a preference for risk aversion being the obvious necessity. And it is ultimately up to polity, e.g. by free discussion and the democratic process, to decide how much to prioritize caution in terms of public health, relative to the smooth functioning of society and the economy.

One middle of the road option could be to have had restaurants use vaccined and unvaccinated zones, and airports vaccinated and unvaccinated airports, and let people decide without quarantine risks.