Noise vs. Bias

They say that if you ask a bunch of farmers to estimate the weight of a bull, the average estimate will come pretty close to the measured weight of the bull.

But, scientists say, you should not let the farmers know about the other guys' estimates.

That's what comes out of a very useful review of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein. It's reviewed at Quillette by Rob Henderson.

You need to trick people into making individual judgments, because if people know what other people think then they will tend to agree with them. Thus juries, panels evaluating employment applications.

In other words, if you are the second person evaluating a college application and you get to read the previous evaluator's comments, you will tend to agree with him. So shouldn't a university mask the comments of early evaluators?

The school’s reply: “We used to do that, but it resulted in so many disagreements that we switched to the current system.”

In other words "many organizations consider conflict avoidance to be at least as important as optimal decision-making."

So, if you are looking for "the wisdom of crowds" you need to make sure that crowd members don't know what the other crowd members are thinking. If you want "the madness of crowds" then you need everyone to know what the other guys are thinking. And chances are they will all agree with each other.

In politics, of course, 

The book reports findings indicating that when a group of Democrats saw that a particular view was gaining initial popularity among Democrats, they too would endorse that point of view, ultimately leading most Democrats in the group to support it. However, if they saw that a specific opinion was gaining popularity among Republicans, they rejected it. Republicans behaved similarly.

Not surprising.

There is also the time-of-day factor. Usually, it is best to get a decision from a decision maker early in the day, probably after their first cup of coffee. Later in the day they might not be so thoughtful.

Still, the same person can give a whole range of opinions on the same facts. They have done this with physicians. They are more likely to prescribe opioids at the end of a long day: the quick fix.  But studies show that "simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment."

People tend to be forgiving when a human makes a mistake, and not forgiving when a machine makes a mistake.

If a human driver causes a traffic collision, we are often forgiving, depending on the circumstances. But if an autonomous vehicle causes an accident, people respond with intense suspicion. 

We expect machines to be perfect. Humans not so much. 

Collapsing Three Layers into Two

If you want to understand humans as simply as possible, but no simpler, then, in my opinion and the opinion of Curtis Yarvin, you need to divide us into three parts. Three Layers, he calls it, with his Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. Three Peoples, as I call it, with my Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.

That is what you do when you want to survey the human landscape and understand your fellow men.

But if you are playing politics, then, as per Curtis Yarvin, there is no politics without an enemy. So you have to collapse the Three Layer view of human society into the Two Sides of a conflict: "us" and "them." Where "them" is the enemy.

Once you do that then you are embarking on one of four wars.

1. Fight against a small country for a quick win.
2. Fight against a large country for a world war.
3. Fight against a large minority for a civil war.
4. Fight against a small minority for a quick win.

And Grok.

But, there is one other thing to consider: the question of the small minority. You would think that small minorities would keep their heads down, hoping that nobody would notice them. But they don't. E.g., the Jews. 

In fact, small minorities tend to be intransigent, because they feel that they need to be on their guard all the time. Just in case a mob of the majority should come down the street and take them out. Also, they need to remind the majority that nobody better mess with them. Because.

So our modern small minorities like to pretend that, really, they are all powerful and that if you mess with them then you are asking for trouble. Thus the Jews have elevated "anti-Semitism" into the worst thing in the world and if you are guilty of anti-Semitism you will find that the whole world is against you, you bigot you. The same thing seems to apply with the blacks. Anti-black racism is the worst thing is the world and you'd better not be identified as a racist, you racist you.

Our liberal friends practice the "intransigent minority" gambit with their Activism Culture. And all of their activist groups have some sort of call-to-battle slogan. I noticed that the BMW next to me on the ferry crossing from downtown Seattle to Bainbridge Island had two mini bumper stickers on the back: "Black Lives Matter" and "Stop Asian Hate." Then I went into a nice liberal bookstore and it feels like all the books are playing the activism game, making a case for some helpless minority mired in injustice that only a wise, sensitive activist class can resolve. Yes. Activism is an upper-class, educated-class thing in the modern western world.

Why does the "intransigent minority" gambit work? I think it is because most people are not up for a war, they don't like to get into a pissing match, whether on the national front or on the international front. So, if an "intransigent minority" gets in your face, particularly if it is supported by the ruling class -- and the educated and the media and the universities -- you'd better watch out, pal. 

Thus, an "intransigent minority" often boxes above its weight, particularly if it is supported by the ruling class, because people know that getting targeted by an "intransigent minority" means trouble, right here in River City.

Notice how in the modern era our politics involves collapsing the Three Layers into two. Obviously Marxism did this, by collapsing the three layers of Bourgeoisie, Proletarians, and Communists into two: Communists and Proletarians on one side and the Bourgeoisie on the other.

In the case of the modern Allyship narrative, we have Allies, Oppressed Peoples, and White Oppressors. The Allies and Oppressed Peoples stick together so the White Oppressors are on their own.

It is, of course, a conceit of Marxism and Allyship that they represent the vast majority of the people -- rather than the minority interest of an "intransigent minority" with an appetite for political power. But that conceit provides the opportunity for us ordinary mortals. When it comes to the crunch, does the activist group really represent the vast majority of helpless victims, as their ideology pretends, or not?

I think that for the first half of the 20th century the educated elite and their clients really did represent the majority. But since the 1960s this majority has been whittling away, because the majority of the population, more and more, is the ordinary middle class.

I think that, again and again since the start of the 1970s we have seen a movement of the ordinary middle class erupt in politics. But up to now the educated ruling class has managed to abort each eruption.

At some point, in my judgement, the educated class will fail to abort a middle-class eruption. And then the regime will change.

The Incompetent US Occupation of Germany:

After the glorious victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 the Allies determined to occupy Germany until we had stamped out the noxious weed of Nazism and taught the ignorant Germans about democracy.

So what actually happened in 1945 to whenever? 

Yeah. For instance, when did the US occupation of Germany end? Was it when the West Germans had an election in August 1949 and Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor? Was it in 1952 when West Germany was inducted into the European Defense Community? Was it in 1955 when "the occupation came to an official end" according to Edward N. Peterson in The American Occupation of Germany? Or does the US still occupy Germany, since it still has troops stationed in western Germany?

Of course the US occupiers were anxious to winkle out all the Nazis post 1945, so they rounded up all the usual suspects and kept a lot of them in camps where some of them suffered from malnutrition equivalent to the malnutrition in the notorious concentration camps of the Nazis. (Did you know that the Brits invented concentration camps in the Boer War? Not to be confused with the internment camps in the US during World War II.) And the War Department knew early on that all Germans were not Nazis.

[W]ell over half of the German population did not accept any of the Nazi doctrines. Only a very small percentage, ranging from 4 to 5 percent among workers to 14 percent for professionals and executives and managers were "full Nazis" on the basis of adherence to all the essential doctrines.

I wonder what the percentage of professionals and corporate managers in the US are "full Wokies." But know which side to butter their bread if they want to get promoted.

Did you know that the last thing the Germans wanted after their defeat was a continuation of Nazism? Makes sense doesn't it. I mean if some guy got elected president of the US and then led us into a world war in which we got bombed back into the stone age and just about every woman east of the Mississippi was raped by the conquering heroes of the invader, and Americans spent the next five years cadging for food just to stay alive, you think that anyone would admit to voting for the guy? Or ever want a government with anyone in it that was in the old regime?

Then the US decided it was going to teach the Germans all about Democracy. Said our Gen. Clay: "The German masses are entirely unready for self-government and ignorant of democratic responsible German government." Actually, the Germans knew all about democracy, but they didn't want to create a "constitution" but a Grundgesetz (Basic Law) to recreate what they had before Hitler (only without Hitler and Nazis). And create it they did, by running circles around the US occupiers. Said one US official:

It follows the German tradition, with adaptations to take account of contemporary conditions and political views in West Germany today.

Then there was Ludwig Erhard, who one fine day blindsided the occupiers and announced a currency reform and that "a planned and controlled economy cannot work because of human nature." There was a rocky time in the immediate aftermath of the currency reform and removal of price controls, but the economic ship righted itself and the Wirtschaftwunder was born. 

Really, how lucky were the Germans that the US occupiers had no clue and just bureaucrat-ed about for five years or so before letting the Germans govern themselves? The Soviets had a Plan, "a cadre of German communists trained to take over as Russian troops moved into German territory." And it took 44 years for the Germans to get to self-government in Eastern Germany.

You think the US ruling class has learned anything since then? So that when the ordinary middle class in the United States decides to form a new regime in the next few years the Wokies in charge will just let us go ahead and fix all the problems they have created over the decades with their stupid big government and ideological hegemony?

We can hope.

Who Will Vote Out the Dems? The Moms

Here's an interesting take on our currently "interesting times:" From Rep. Jerry Karl (R-AL):

“This is the factor that they’re missing, and that is the female vote,” he declared. “And this is Jerry’s opinion — the moms. This is what turned out in Virginia. That’s the reason we keep pointing at Virginia. This is going to happen again."

Because now the moms are going to the grocery store to buy food and running into the buzz-saw of 10 percent inflation. And they are going to the gas station to fill up the SUV and gas prices are up by a couple dollars a gallon. 

"Make it stop, Mr. President!"

I know. What did you expect, ladies, when you voted for the Democrats?

But we men really don't understand women, and what makes them tick.

But that's OK. I have been doing the studying for you.

And above all what makes women tick is the need for safety. Thus, women were on-board with the COVID lockdowns and mask mandates in a New York minute.

And that is why women are all in favor of most of the things that the welfare state delivers. It's not because women are greedy, but that women feel the need for all the support they can get. Just in case.

In the old days, all the support she could get was whatever support her husband could deliver. But in the new era all the support she can get is whatever stuff she can get from government, from education to health care to child support.

Unfortunately, of course, unlimited government help for women leads to inflation and disaster. And then women can't get the support they need.

Which is where we are right now, after two years of stupid government pedal-to-the-metal in the COVID response, compounded by the Ukraine idiocy.

Now, I listen to women; I really do. And women are really upset about the horrors in Ukraine. They are not thinking about whether it was a good idea ten years ago to muck about in Ukrainian politics, or whether it is a good idea to muck around with Vladimir Putin. They are not thinking: "Gee, I wonder what Hunter Biden and Burisma and the 'big guy' has to do with this." Or whether the US has any business mucking around in Europe. Or whether we should have troops in Germany seventy-five years after the end of World War II. They only think about the suffering of the women in Ukraine. They do worry a bit about nuclear war, of course.

Enough of inflation. How to understand women and CRT and transgenders in the schools?

My view is that, when you tell women that transgenders are horribly oppressed they will agree. Because kindness.

But when you demand that mothers have no rights in the matter of the transitioning of their children, or in the matter of non-binary sex education in schools, then you have crossed a line. Because safety.

Do you see the point? Women instinctively know they are supposed to be kind. But women instinctively want to keep their kids safe. Kids' safety comes first -- their kids'safety.

I realize that I need to update my maxims on politics and men and women. Up to now:

There is no politics without an enemy.

Women expect to be protected; men know they are expendable.

All very true. Let's add something like this:

For men, politics is defeating the enemy. For women, politics is protecting them from the enemy.

Am I right, or am I right?

Either way, I suspect, we are going to see a big shift in the women's vote this Fall.

Because women expect to be protected, and when the current protector can't or won't protect them, that's when they go get another protector.

But not, of course, among liberal educated women. They still believe everything in the #WeBelieve signs. But that is another story.

The Small Activist Group Problem

The Zman wonders how the keep the place going when "no coherent society is possible on a continent full of people with radically different cultural perspectives."

Really? I'd say there are about two cultural perspectives in America.

1. There are the people that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules.
2. And then there are small upper-class liberal activist groups that all believe they are saving the world from injustice.

A couple of days ago I was writing about Ron Unz's experience of the activist group phenomenon when he was running a voter initiative to slow down bilingual education in California. He found that bilingual education was driven by activists.

Although the bilingual advocates were relatively few in number, they were fiercely committed to their programs and intensely focused upon that sole, overriding issue, expressing the sort of fanaticism that persuaded far larger organizations to steer clear of any direct conflict.

Now we are in the middle of the "trans" age where gay and trans activist groups are, shall we say, "fiercely committed" to gay and trans normalization in schools.

So here's a piece in Quillette on the issue. Back in the day, LGBT activist groups sued under grounds of discrimination on the basis of sex for "children who’d been diagnosed as gender dysphoric." And a federal judge "proved amenable." Wrote one federal judge:

If left untreated, gender dysphoria may result in serious and debilitating psychological distress including anxiety, depression, and even self-harm or suicidal ideation.

You think, your honor? Or maybe, if nobody talked about gender dysphoria so that it wasn't a thing, nobody would know anything about it and kids would be getting all riled up about something else. Playground bullies gotta bully and Mean Girls gotta Mean Girl. And the kids that aren't bullies or Mean Girls are miserable as usual.

Or let's dive into our favorite 19th century novels. Whaddya think about the kids at Mr Creakle's school for boys in David Copperfield? You think the boys were thinking about anything except avoiding the wrath of Mr Creakle and getting in the good graces of Steerforth? Or whatabout the two teenage girls in Adam Bede? We are talking about Dinah Morris, the saint, and Hetty Sorrel the teenage twerp. So, if you put those two girls into the 21st century I bet that Dinah would have been the perfect girl volunteering at the animal shelter, and Hetty would have got into endless trouble on the gender front like her original at the Manor Farm. Trouble is: there are no Mrs Poysers around any more to straighten out the minds of empty-headed girls and put them to work in the dairy.

Here's an idea. We pass a law that says that gubmint schools cannot discuss sex or gender or discrimination or oppression at all. Or counsel students about sex. Or do anything except teach the 3 Rs.

Yeah, I know. Good luck with that. Ruling classes gotta rule. They gotta remind the peasants who is the lord around here. And one of the ways that rulers rule is by messing with other peoples' kids. Just to show they can.

See, back in the day, the ruling class of the time decided it would be a good thing to have gubmint schools here in the good old USA and teach the Protestant Bible. Because those bloody Irish spoiling the neighborhoods in New York and Boston were crazy Catholics and a cunning gubmint school system could cut the Irish off at the pass. Plus, according to Horace Mann, we could cut crime by 90 percent.

The Irish said, fuggedaboudit, and built their own schools attached to every Catholic church in the land. Indeed, they developed the deeply religious doctrine that I dare say you can find in the Vulgate bible that "first you build the school, then the church." (But you can't find it on Google Search, except on articles by Yours Truly).

See what I mean? Nothing has changed. Back in the 19th century stuck-up Yale and Harvard graduates knew what was best for the hoi polloi and so they used their political power to put a wrench, as they thought, into the primitive ways of the Irish street thug -- not to mention New York's 50,000 "nymphs of the pave."

Today, Yale and Harvard graduates want to indoctrinate kids with LGBT culture. Nothing personal, you understand. Just that activists gotta activate. Otherwise they don't get to live the creative lives that Gaia ordained for them. 

And you were put on this Earth so that activists could activate you into a proper mood of obedience.

I say to liberal activists: Go. Away.

The Problem with Nominating a Weak Candidate for President

I feel for President Biden. I really do. I feel for the Democrats. I really do.

I feel for AOC. Here's her little problem. She thinks that the senior Dems are all sitting around doing nothing but slapping each other on the back and downing some bourbon. But they need to Act Now!

“If the president does pursue and start to govern decisively using executive action and other tools at his disposal, I think we’re in the game,” she said. “But if we decide to just kind of sit back for the rest of the year and not change people’s lives — yeah, I do think we’re in trouble. So I don’t think that it’s set in stone. I think that we can determine our destiny here.”

Guess what Sandy. The reason that Biden and Democrats in general are in trouble is precisely because you chaps in one year have managed to "change people's lives." For the worse. A lot worse.

Americans are in trouble, Democrats are in trouble, lefties like you, AOC, are in trouble because in early 2021 instead of saying: wow, after all the money printing and checks-for-everyone last year with COVID we had better trim our sails and get the economy back on track before we start handing out more loot and plunder.

But no. In order to "change people's lives" dontcha know, you guys passed the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 with checks for all.

So businesses all across the land found that nobody wanted to hire on to work for them. You think that maybe that is a problem, Sandy?

And now we have inflation roaring into double digits like it did in 1980. Before you were born, Sandy, at the end of 1989.

See, the way I figure, Sandy, you were conceived just after the third GOP president in a row had been elected. Do you understand why? Because in 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected to "make it stop." Meaning inflation and crazy lefties. Then Reagan was reelected in 1984 with a resounding majority to keep that "morning in America" going. Then George Bush was elected, three in a row. That very rarely happens.

And then, on or about your 3rd birthday, Sandy, Bill Clinton was elected president as a New Democrat promising that, hey, we aren't like the spend-and-inflate Democrats of the old days. No siree. We are New. We are Moderate. We are different.

And then, in January 1993, on taking office, Bill Clinton suddenly turned around and said OMG, I just looked at the numbers and things are worse than I thought. So it's going to be pedal to the metal on tax-and-spend. I just hafta.

And do you know what happened next, Sandy? Next was the 1994 midterms when the Republicans won both Houses of Congress for the first time in over 40 years! The GOP gained 54 seats in the House! Imagine! It's easy if you try.

So now President Biden is releasing about a third of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But, but, but! I thought that fossil fuels were Over. That the future was electric cars and buses and wind and solar. 

What's the problem Joey?

Well, we know what the problem is. It is that Joe Biden didn't really "win" the Democratic nomination for president. He was handed the nomination by the wise men of the party. In part because they didn't want Bernie Sanders to be the nominee.

In other words, the wise men of the Democratic Party wanted to run with a man who could be sold as a moderate. Rather than a crazy lefty like Bernie.

Are you still listening, Sandy?

But, because Biden was handed the nomination rather than winning it in a fair fight with all the other candidates, he is weak. He can't stand up and tell the crazies to go fly a kite. And lefties have spending plans from here to eternity.

That's why we have had the budgetary train wreck of the last year, with Democrats trying to pass multi-trillion dollar spending bills when they have a 50-50 Senate and a 222-213 House. You don't get to pass pedal-to-the-metal spending with those kind of numbers. But when the lefty idiots and the Progressive Caucus are demanding action, well the old guard like Biden and Pelosi have to sound the charge and let the young enthusiasts do their Charge of the Light Brigade and learn a bloody lesson. Maybe.

AOC is all upset that the young people that voted for Biden and worked to get him elected are being pushed aside.

Could be. But let's do an Ike and make the problem bigger. Maybe the problem is with lefty ideologues like you, Sandy, and the lefty profs at all the universities, and the lefty media that censors non-lefty content. So that young people Literally Know Nothing, except what they learned from their lefty teachers and the lefty comedians and the lefty social media that censors all non-lefty content.

Maybe, Sandy, you and your pals like Saikat Chakrabarti have flown young people into a box canyon, telling them lies and fantasies about what politics can do for them.

And maybe next year all those young people are going to be wondering what hit them and how come they believed the half-baked lies of people like you, Sandy.

But I expect it will take a while longer before they really start to wonder. People don't just quit a cult the first time it disappoints them. Typically it takes years, because we humans tend to believe our priests and our shamans and our handsome political leaders. Until we are dying on the field or battle or starving in some crazy lefty famine.

Yep. Things don't look to good right now for Sandy and Joey.  But there's a reason for that. It is that Joey is too weak to do the right thing, and Sandy is too stupid.

Just What is a University For?

Stop Press: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is re-instituting consideration of SAT and ACT scores for its student applicants. Said Stu Schmill, MIT dean of admissions:

“We believe a [testing] requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy.”

So that's all right.

But really, what the Sam Blazes is university for? To learn a skill? You could get that in an apprenticeship or in on-line courses.  To build character? Yes, but that is such a guy thing. Clearly, the ladies are telling us, with all the talk of micro-aggressions and lived experience, that they don't like being challenged. They want to be baby-sat.

OK, then maybe university is to learn the wisdom of the ages. Well then, of course, there would be no right or wrong. No cancel culture or lefty professors from stem to stern. That was the idea, back in the day. Oxford and Cambridge made their young ruling-class scions study the classics because they wanted them to know about all the ups and downs and ins and outs of being a ruling class. No holds barred, because for them the name of the game was that to hold onto political power as the ruling class you needed to be smarter than the other guys.

Of course, university was also where they trained the priests in the state church. That was the idea of George Eliot's Fred Vincy of Middlemarch going to Cambridge. To become a priest in the Church of England. That would be higher status than his father Mayor Vincy's status as a businessman in Middlemarch.

Then the Germans invented the research university to make Germany strong enough to deal with France.

Today, obviously, the point of the university is to churn out good little boys and girls that all know how to be activists and get into the non-profit sector in NGOs and activism. You know, I think that would be cool if such an education were an internship. But to charge $60,000 per year? I think that the ruling class should pay for the training of its shock troops and not make the shock troops pay for their training. Of course, back in the day you had to buy commissions in the army.

But then I'm just a cranky old guy that never liked school, and got the hell out of education as soon as I got me a bachelors degree in civil engineering. And then became an autodidact by reading all the thinkers on my own.

Thing is: I think that education teaches people how to fit into the existing society in a nice little salaried slot in some bureaucracy somewhere. It might be corporate or it might be government.

But what if the future is different? What if the nice assumptions of today get turned upside down and the good little boys and girls dutifully prepare for a life that is Gone with the Wind? I suppose that's what a chap like Peter Turchin is telling us with his notion of "elite overproduction." Joel Kotkin is saying the same thing with his idea of "the coming revenge of the disappointed."

The question is: will the disappointed take their revenge on the ruling class? Or on the middle-class Commoners?

The best thing would be if they all signed up as activists in movements that attacked each other rather than ordinary middle-class deplorable America. Because, you know, when people are angry, they just want to draw blood. And don't necessarily think too clearly about who is to blame for their misery.

The other interesting thing is, of course, that the overwhelming majority of disappointed college graduates are probably women. And I don't know how women -- liberal women -- act politically when they want revenge. Like I say: women expect to be protected. When they are not they attach to a new protector. But how would that work in today's world? I just don't know.