I already voted for Biden.I have several friends who have voted for Trump. I know for a fact that they are not mean people, stupid or racist. I'm am sure that they held their nose to vote for Trump; I held my nose to vote for Biden. I will remain friends with my Republican friends. I refuse to hate anyone based on how they vote. This is the context for this little experiment run by Diane Fleishman, as reported by her husband Geoffrey Miller (they are both evolutionary psychologists).
I am saddened and angered, but not surprised, by this systematic censorship of Abigail Shrier's well-researched book. Many of the most dangerous things being done by our news media Nannies consist of things you cannot see: important issues they completely refuse to discuss. You can read my original post on this topic here.
I've pasted in evidence of Abigail Shrier's claim below. The people driving the censorship know that if this issue is carefully and dispassionately discussed (as Shrier has done in her book), the jig is up. Untold damage is being done to teenage girls. We need to stop and ask ourselves (as Shrier book does) "What the hell are we doing?"
I have been in the process of writing an article that I will title, "Everything Is Becoming Religion." This morning, while writing, I noticed that Glenn Greenwald has resigned from The Intercept, a news organization he co-founded. Here is an except from Greenwald's announcement:
The pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.
Greenwald's resignation comes on the heels of his riveting three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan earlier this week. During that discussion, Greenwald (and Rogan) aimed Greenwald's criticisms at our most prominent legacy media outlets across the entire political spectrum. And now our social media overlords are actively getting into the game. Three hours is a lot of time, but I would urge you to watch every minute of this. It would be a small investment, given that this discussion offers an accurate diagnosis of America's Dys-information Pandemic and some moral clarity about what needs to happen going forward.
Our prominent legacy news outlets have become sad jokes with regard to many critical national issues. Our "news" is now pre-filtered to protect us from basic facts and it treats thinking as though it is a team sport, much like the dogma people are offered in churches. It treats us like we are babies, as though we aren't able to think for ourselves. Our prominent legacy media outlets have so thoroughly choked off meaningful non-partisan information and discussion that this has ripped open up a dangerous information chasm---many of us now inhabit only one of two mostly non-overlapping factual worlds. This has, in turn, led to two exceedingly disappointing choices for President of this Duopoly. If I needed to hire an employee for any type of job in any business, I would never hire either of these candidates and neither would you. But this is where we are, unable to talk with one another about this sad situation with nuance. In fact, too many of us have been convinced that we should hate each other for having differing opinions, even when we are mostly "on the same side of the aisle."
Somehow, there are many Americans who are still convinced that they can uncritically sit back and "turn on the news." What they will actually be exposed to, for the most part, is reporters who are afraid to ask the same basic questions on the job that they actually and instinctively do ask each other in private. Instead of informing us with a wide range of facts and opinions, they are driven to please their bosses and audience. This is not news. This is Not-News. This parallels the deep dysfunction driven by social media, an issue address in the excellent new documentary, "The Social Dilemma."
We now have a News-Industrial Complex that is driven by money and ideology instead of integrity and courage to engage with inconvenient facts. This system is designed to please you, to give you more of what your intuitive side, your System 1, craves. Once you have this epiphany about what is really going on, you will no longer be able to stop seeing it. If you continue watching the "news," you will increasingly think, "Garbage in, Garbage out." It will increasingly realize that prominent legacy news outlets are fucking with our brains to make money and steer elections. Once you have this epiphany, you will experience a greatly heightened annoyance at what passes for "news" Once a critical mass of people have this epiphany, this will be our first step in a long slow recovery.
I found this graph posted by "Number 6" on Twitter today. I haven't been able to track it down independently. If it is accurate, it painfully illustrates our growing cultural/political/partisan divide. In three colors, this is why we can't talk with each other across the aisle any longer.
In episode 205 of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris spoke with Daniel Markovits about problems with meritocracy. Markovits is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. It was an especially engaging and challenging episode that provided many statistics that I hadn't before heard or appreciated. Here's an excerpt I transcribed:
Daniel Markovits: A poor district in America spends maybe eight to $10,000 per pupil per year. Middle Class public schools spends maybe 12,000 to $15,000 per pupil per year, a really rich public school in a town like Scarsdale, New York, where the median household income is over $200,000 a year, spends about $30,000 per pupil per year. And the richest and fanciest private schools in America 80%, of whose kids come from households that make over $200,000 a year, spend maybe $75,000 per pupil per year. So that there's massive inequality in educational investment. This means that if you look at a place like Yale, where I teach, or Harvard or Princeton, or Stanford, there are more kids in those universities whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution than in the entire bottom half.
And if you took the difference between what's invested in a typical middle-class kids' education, and what's invested in a typical one-percenter kids’ education, and took that difference every year and put it into the S&P 500, to give it to the rich kid as an inheritance when her parents died--because that's the way aristocrats used to transmit privilege down through the generations--that sum would exceed $10 million per child. So why am I saying this? I'm saying this, because it gives you a sense for the enormity of the educational inequality that exists in our society, between not just or even primarily the middle class and the poor, but between the rich and the middle class. And then if you look at the jobs that pay the most money, at elite law firms, at elite investment banks, elite management jobs, to graduates of elite business schools, all these jobs, specialists, medical doctors, all these jobs, almost require people who do them to have gone through some version of this fancy education.
Sam Harris: So what we have is a system of stratification and exclusion that runs through the central elite institutions of school and work in our society, in which those institutions exclude middle and working class families and children, not excluding them by any intent, but by surely the contingent fact of what it takes to jump through all the hoops you need to jump through to land in Yale or Princeton, or Stanford or Harvard.
Daniel Markovits: Exactly. Stanford admits fewer than 5% of its applicants. That means that if you're applying to college and anything serious ever went wrong in your childhood, you know, parents lost jobs, you had to move all of a sudden, somebody died, and you had to pick up some burden to earn some income for the family, you're not going to have a record that puts you in the top 5% of the already elite pool that tries to apply. . . . There are exceptional people, there are exceptional people always. But unless you're incredibly exceptional, you won't be able to get ahead if you don't have a lot of privilege behind you. And then this privileged class . . . asserts that they've earned their advantage and that they have got there on the merits and that those who are disadvantaged deserve to be disadvantaged because they're not as hard working. They're not as skilled. They're not as virtuous and now those who are excluded get appropriately angry and resentful and turn against the institutions, the schools, the professional companies, the forms of expertise, that people on the outside correctly think are underwriting their disadvantage and exclusion.
And a populist like Trump exploits that resentment. And a lot of people on the left think, "How can class resentment go with Trump rather than against him, given that he was born to a massive inheritance?" And the answer is, yeah, he inherited a lot of money. But he is not part of this system of training, education and professional certification that people correctly see as the principal source of their exclusion. It's not his inheritance that's maybe unjust, maybe not unjust--we can disagree about it--but it's on the margins of our society. Whereas all the doctors and lawyers and bankers and CEOs and elite managers who are training their kids like nobody else can and getting them into the best schools and buying houses in the best neighborhoods and getting them into the best colleges. That's the system that is keeping most Americans down. And so the populist resentment turns against it, in some sense accurately.
Sam Harris: So what is the alternative to meritocracy?
Daniel Markovits: Well, it can't be aristocracy or a caste system based on breeding or on race or on gender. That's, I think, important to say out up front, this you know, if this is a going concern as a social and political project, it can't be backward looking. It has to be forward looking.
Hello, I invite you to subscribe to Dangerous Intersection by entering your email below. You will have the option to receive emails notifying you of new posts once per week or more often.
