Viewpoint Diversity and Consensus

  • Jerry Coyne on Harvard vs the US government and the idea of “viewpoint diversity,” with a response by Steven Pinker;
  • Why do conservatives think themselves under-represented in academia? Because they promote ideas that are not true;
  • Will there ever be a new consensus? History is moving in a very different way from the standard science fiction vision.
  • Robert Reich on the two tipping points for becoming a dictatorship;
  • Short takes about federal employees being told to snitch on people with Pride flags; yet another Christian wanting to impose “don’t say gay” on every classroom in America; how “Made in America” dreams are a fantasy; and a ludicrous conservative claim that fluoridated water causes autism.
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A long-running theme here, and in American politics, is that conservatives think themselves under-represented in academia. Don’t send your kids to college, the MAGA folks especially say, or they will be become “indoctrinated” [meaning educated] and become lefties. My short explanation of this was at the end of yesterday’s post. Today, Jerry Coyne covers the recent kerfuffle between the Trump Administration and Harvard. The former wants to impose — on a private university — all sorts of ideological guidelines, or else lose government funding for research. This isn’t about the nature of the research, it’s about ideological indoctrination. Harvard must think proper thoughts, and conduct themselves in a way the government approves of, or else. Harvard responded admirably.

Jerry Coyne, 15 Apr 2025: Administration to Harvard: Fix yourself; Harvard to Administration: STFU

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Musk, History, Science, Education

  • Adam Grant on the wrong lesson to take from Elon Musk;
  • David Remnick on the conservative urge to rewrite the past in simplistic terms;
  • RFK Jr.’s contempt of science;
  • And the conservative war against education.
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Adam Grant is a university psychologist and author of THINK AGAIN (review here). This aligns with those stories about how many who claim to be Christians are now certain about their hostility to empathy.

NY Times, Adam Grant, 13 Apr 2025: America Is Learning the Wrong Lesson From Elon Musk’s Success
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Perhaps Humanity Has Hit a Conceptual Ceiling

Alternate title: America was supposed to be better than this.

  • Perhaps MAGA is about making America *simpler* again; perhaps what we’re seeing is a rejection of the complexity of the modern world;
  • Why is it Americans love watching crime shows?
  • Franklin Foer on how Trump’s class enemy is the intelligentsia;
  • How the Trump administration classifies immigrants as dead;
  • How MAGA/DOGE is not Christian, but xenophobically tribal;
  • How Trump threatens anyone who dissents;
  • More about the State Department’s witch-hunt against anti-Christian bias;
  • Yet if they have to rely on Prayer Warriors, the rest of us have nothing to worry about.
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Perhaps, I’m thinking, MAGA is really about making America *simple* again. That’s the conservative project: remove ambiguities, reduce everything to binaries, our side good everyone else bad, and so on. That’s the motive for MAGA and DOGE. The Nichols insight is (as I would put it) that our minds are wired for the danger-fraught ancestral environment, and so we feel ill-at-ease in the relatively safe modern environment. Another piece of evidence: how TV shows (in America at least) are still dominated by crime and calamity. There are far more spectacular violent events on TV shows than happen in real life. Why do people crave watching them? Because for most of us modern life is too safe, and thus boring, and that primitive mindset needs stimulation.

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“An arbitrary, corrupt, mendacious, and utterly incompetent king”

  • Andrew Sullivan on Trump;
  • How Trump supporters rationalize whatever crazy things he does, from Charlie Warzel and Molly Olmstead;
  • Trying to understand what Trump’s crackdown on science will accomplish;
  • Another item about the Christian right’s war on empathy; have I misunderstood Christianity all this time?;
  • And items about how books removed from the Naval Academy Library reveal the administration’s racism and defense of white supremacy.
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Some of us call out the emperor’s new clothes.

Andrew Sullivan on Substack, yesterday (via Carl Freedman)
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We’re Becoming an Authoritarian, Theocratic, Police State

  • Anne Applebaum on why dictatorships fail;
  • David Brooks on how Americans can’t think anymore;
  • Amanda Marcotte on Elon Musk’s and MAGA’s misogyny, via their war on empathy;
  • Morons: A GOP Rep about how climate change is a sham because God controls the sun; and the current U.S. Secretary of Education who thinks AI is pronounced “A-one”.
  • And how the State Department is now monitoring employees for “anti-Christian bias”.
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The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, 10 Apr 2025: This Is Why Dictatorships Fail, subtitled “The authors of the Constitution separated powers for a reason.”

He blinked. But we don’t really know why.

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In a Sense, It’s All About Tribal Conformity

  • Today’s deep thought about religion and conformity;
  • How US scientists have withdrawn their names from a scientific paper about evolution, for fear of reprisal — one of them coincidentally mentioned in a piece posted yesterday;
  • Short items about Trump’s lapel pins, how colleges are being forced to rewrite history, how sending education back to the states doesn’t include DEI options, how some Republicans think elections are so inconvenient, Trump’s misunderstanding of trade deficits, how Trump displaces more than he projects, Arthur C. Brooks about challenging DARVO; and Jonathan Chait on how MAGA supporters take Trump’s infallibility as a given.
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Today’s deep thought: religion isn’t about faith; it’s about conformity.

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This piece is quite a coincidence, aside from it being politically pertinent.

Washington Post, Mark Johnson, 10 Apr 2025: Fearing paper on evolution might get them deported, scientists withdrew it, subtitled “President Donald Trump’s orders haven’t targeted research involving evolution, but the authors’ unease about publishing reflects uncertainty in the science world.”

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Daughter of Dispatches from Reality

Two pieces today: about the complexity of the universe, and the current cosmological crisis.

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Quanta is one of those magazine/websites that, like Big Think and Nautilus and perhaps Noema and no doubt others, cover general concepts in current science rather than specific science news.

Here’s an essay at Quanta that summarizes a growing understanding, since at least the 1990s, that the universe has become more complex automatically, so to speak. We’ve seen this in books by Carroll and Hidalgo and others; complexity, the growth of ‘information,’ apparently in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, does not need explaining; it happens through the evolutionary growth of increasingly complex systems (and the entropy borrowed will be paid back eventually). And we’ve seen this in topics of complexity and emergence.

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Dan Ariely, MISBELIEF

Subtitled “What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things”
(Harper, September 2023, 311pp, including 21pp of acknowledgements, references, and index.)

Here’s the latest book by Dan Ariely, author of one of the earliest books I read about psychological biases and human irrationality, PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL, published back in 2008 (review here). Since then he’s become a minor celebrity with a TV show, The Irrational, based on his life and that book. (I’ve only seen it a couple times, despite its just finishing its second season; it’s not on at a convenient time.)

So how is this new book different from the older one? Continue reading

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Is There a Big Picture to Make Sense of All This?

  • Adam Lee on our current age of “stupidity” and whether or not the stupid can bring down society;
  • The commentariat: Catherine Rampell on the naked Trump; Robert Reich on Trump’s “national emergencies”; Paul Krugman on Trump’s war on American greatness;
  • Short items: JD Vance and Chinese “peasants”; censoring black history; Elon Musk calls out Peter Navarro; Vance perpetuates a discredited claim about Social Security fraud; Trump defies a law meant to rein in his first-term abuses; and how Republicans want to fool you into thinking tax cuts are free.
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Here’s a piece that might provide one. A big picture.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 7 Apr 2025: The coming dark age of stupidity, subtitled “The future is not so bright.”

He begins by setting the stage.
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How Trump and MAGA illustrate Fundamental Principles

  • How my posts about current politics, including Trump and Musk, are about illustrating fundamental principles;
  • Trump simply doesn’t understand trade;
  • David Brooks on how conservatives have changed;
  • A Christian law-maker who thinks “critical thinking” includes teaching about God;
  • Short items about cherry-picking the Bible to justify tariffs; how an expert on tariffs claims Trump got his research all wrong; how DOGE has defunded a program to boost American manufacturing; how Trump channels Lee Iacocca; and how a MAGA prophetess claims everything bad is because of Satan.
  • Music: Sibelius #1
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Virtually all of the items I post here are meant to illustrate some of the fundamental principles, or provisional conclusions, that I’ve developed over the past decade. And one of the most fundamental is this idea of a range of human perception and understanding: that some people simply aren’t very bright and/or cling to a tribal mindset, while other people can take long-term consequences into account, and appreciate a broader cosmopolitan or species perspective, and/or are smart enough to perceive the world in other than the black and white terms and/or short-term thinking. And how this has consequences as explored in science fiction, because short-term, tribal, dim-witted thinking will doom the species, as problems like climate change occur that cannot be solved without global cooperation. The oligarchs will milk the system, denying or ignoring long-term consequences, as long as they think they can get away with it until the world burns (after they die), perhaps literally. Their followers will repeat their religious reassurances back and forth amongst themselves, because that’s what their ancestors have always done, and they survived! Humans are not good at understanding change, or perceiving long-term consequences.

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