28 May 2018

More Examples of Intellectuals Not Really Believing Their ‘Shocking’ Claims

Bryan Caplan 12 Comments

Recently I pointed out that (a) with the release of his second-last book, Bryan Caplan spent a lot of time debunking the popular notion that parents can influence their kids, (b) with the release of his most recent book, Bryan spent a lot of time debunking the popular notion that education can influence kids, and (c) Bryan is the most systematic and detailed blogger I know when it comes to telling the world his method for homeschooling his children (e.g. here).

To be sure, I’m not claiming an outright contradiction here, but it leads me to believe that Bryan doesn’t actually believe the TL;DR versions of his own books, and worse that he himself contributes to this presumably erroneous summary. Again, my smoking gun here is that he was fine with titling his second book, “The Case Against Education.” Bryan also has a blog post titled, “Can Billions of Parents Be Wrong?” and Bryan’s answer is YES, they can. In this post Bryan opens by taking on this reader’s objection: “Bryan, I’m mostly on board with Judith Harris’s hypothesis, but one thing bothers me: why do parents believe so strongly that they can influence their children? Perhaps parents’ intense efforts at influencing their children has some informational value about the parental profitability of such behavior.”

So with the proper caveats, I hope you can understand the sense in which I mean, “I don’t think Bryan actually believes this stuff.” Likewise, when Ludwig von Mises says the way to evaluate an action is by its utilitarian consequences, and that talk of natural rights is nonsense, I don’t think he actually believed that. He wouldn’t have stood up to Nazi Germany if he thought that.

(To avoid misunderstanding, folks: I’m not saying Bryan or Mises was consciously saying something they knew they didn’t believe. I’m saying deep down they are not acting on the prima facie implications of the doctrines they are teaching the public. Or, they too believe in the “superstitions” that the public cherishes, even though their rational frameworks reject such propositions as nonsense.)

For another example of this type of thing, consider a recent post by Scott Aaronson (HT2 Sumner). In this post, Aaronson is defending Robin Hanson from the recent 2-minute hate due to the incel stuff. With the same amount of leeway you can give me in my gentle critique of Bryan above, I can likewise say of Aaronson that in this post he makes the following claims:

1) Although his conclusions are sometimes shocking, you must respect the intellectual honesty of Robin Hanson. He follows his chain of logic to wherever it leads.
2) Say what you will about his tone-deaf rhetoric, but you can’t doubt good intentions of Robin Hanson.
3) One of Hanson’s most interesting contributions is his work on a theorem proving that it’s impossible for two people to have an intellectually honest disagreement with each other.
4) In Hanson’s excellent, most recent book, he explains that because of evolutionary theory, we should be very suspicious of the motives of others, because their actions are less about the ostensible content and more about signaling which tribe they are in.

12 Responses to “More Examples of Intellectuals Not Really Believing Their ‘Shocking’ Claims”

  1. Ken P says:

    That’s a good point, Bob. Bryan has a lot of good insights and it took a while but I did become convinced that education’s role in employment is more about signaling and less about knowledge. I haven’t read much about Bryan’s belief “a” but I should because it sounds antithetical to my perspective. I believe parenting is the primary cause of student success. In particular, if they exhibit a passion for learning that gets passed on to the child.

    An argument against your assertion might be that deep down Bryan’s realizes he is being fooled to believe that he is influencing his kids as a parent or educationally, but there is a strong desire to believe he has an impact and that he gets caught up in that when he blogs.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Ken P. wrote: “Bryan has a lot of good insights and it took a while but I did become convinced that education’s role in employment is more about signaling and less about knowledge.”

      But Ken, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s like you wrote, “Karl Marx has a lot of good insights and it took a while but I did become convinced that a Value Added Tax was a good policy.”

      • Ken P says:

        “That’s a good point Bob” was pretty brief but to me “c” seems close to an outright contradiction of “a” and “b”.

        The problem I have is that I haven’t read his books and haven’t read his education posts in years (since he was questioning the potential of MOOCs). I just don’t know if the contradiction you mention would still stand if I had read them.

        I didn’t understand how the Aaronson part of your post related so I kind of moved past it, but now I see where my comments are pretty similar to what he did. But I wasn’t actually trying to defend Bryan. Instead, I’m just hesitant to assume I wouldn’t agree with him to some extent if I understood his views on the topic.

  2. Matt M says:

    To be sure, I’m not claiming an outright contradiction here, but it leads me to believe that Bryan doesn’t actually believe the TL;DR versions of his own books, and worse that he himself contributes to this presumably erroneous summary.

    1. Perhaps because the TLDR versions of his own books are wrong (sometimes intentionally so)?

    2. When you say that “he himself contributes” I assume you’re mainly referring to the deliberately provocative title that, if taken at face value, would imply something like “learning things is bad” when that clearly isn’t what he actually means, giving credence to his opponents who attempt to smear him by implying that totally is what he actually means?

    I feel like you and Tom debated this on an episode of Contra Krugman and I was very much in Tom’s camp. It’s a good title because it’s controversial. It catches the eye and demands a response; whereas, a book titled “For many people, the value of a college education is likely to be somewhat less than the all-in cost” would go completely ignored by everyone and accomplish nothing.

    I would agree with you that Bryan almost certainly does not believe the straw-man caricature of his argument, sure. But I’d guess that you don’t believe straw-man caricatures people create of your own work either.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      But I’d guess that you don’t believe straw-man caricatures people create of your own work either.

      If they were quoting the title of my book to me, I wouldn’t get mad at them for misunderstanding my thesis.

      You wrote:

      “It’s a good title because it’s controversial. It catches the eye and demands a response.”

      Right, and the response is, “That is obviously false.” And then Bryan says, “Whoa, what makes you think I believe the title of my book? You have to read it.”

      Is this really your strategy? Should I title my next book, “I killed OJ’s wife”?

      • Dan says:

        I knew OJ was framed.

      • Matt M says:

        To run with your example a little bit, I can imagine a media professor writing a book about how America’s obsession with professional athletes created an environment where they feel entitled and use their celebrity to escape justice.

        In which case, they might title their book “I Killed OJ’s Wife” to attract attention. And if the police showed up to arrest them for murder, they could plausibly claim “Clearly I was not literally confessing to murder, but rather, making a point about all of our roles in creating a toxic media culture.

        To use another example, Tom’s “Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong…” series of books. I assume Tom is friends with like, you. And you, presumably, aren’t wrong about health care. So what, is he lying about the core premise of his book?

        Bryan is making a case against many popular opinions regarding education. The title is a bit of exaggeration, but it’s not a lie.

  3. A Country Farmer says:

    His conclusion was that the one thing parents can control is their relationship with their kids. Thus, I suppose, helping them avoid the school prison system is an evaluative result.

  4. Harold says:

    Perhaps a side issue, but a topic that fascinates me. From your essay The Hope if Victory you say
    “This is biologically programmed into us, because a genetic predisposition for a soldier to jump on a live grenade would tend to survive in a population.”

    I think that such a predisposition would tend NOT to survive, although their colleagues would do very well. This is the problem with altruism. We can say that a group in which everyone cooperated and everyone were prepared to jump on the grenade would do better than a similar group where there was no cooperation. However, selection operates at an individual rather than group level. The individual that jumps on the grenade fails to pass on his genes. Within the group the non-cooperatives will always out-compete the cooperators from within. As I understand it, it is not possible to model the selection process where selfish individuals do not ultimately out compete cooperators.

    Except in one situation. Groups form, and the cooperative ones grow larger than the uncooperative ones. This allows there to be more cooperators than selfishers at a certain time. These groups then coalesce and re-divide. The number of cooperators can continue to grow under these circumstances. However, this is not how any natural groups actually operate.

    The main explanation for cooperation in non-human groups is kin-selection. Selection operates at the gene level, nit the individual level. Genes that cause individuals to help other individuals with the same genes survive. Colonial insects for example. Another is reciprocal altruism, where the future cooperation is expected from the recipient. Vampire bats is possibly an example, yet the requirement for cheaters to be punished (by withdrawing cooperation) has apparently not been demonstrated.

    So altruism is very difficult to evolve, despite the advantages that follow. It is very difficult to prevent the takeover of the cheaters. Small groups can rely on reciprocal altruism, the fear of ostracization keeping everyone in line, or kin selection, since members are generally related. Large groups can rely on neither, hence it is difficult to develop large groups without the cheaters taking over, hence making the group less fit.

    Bob says “Belief in the God of the Bible gives one hope in the ultimate triumph of good over evil. We know that those who enslave, steal, and murder may experience temporary victories, but that ultimately they are doomed to defeat.”

    This does allow the cooperators to triumph! Belief in a supernatural punisher can promote cooperation. With this belief the group can prevent the take-over by cheaters which would otherwise be inevitable as it grows. Of course, it does not have to be the God of the Bible, a great may deities would fit the bill. To my mind this is why religion is ubiquitous in the development of large societies, although the particulars differ.

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