Pre-election mailbag

www.slowboring.com

Pre-election mailbag

Matthew Yglesias

16 - 21 minutes

This was not really something I gamed out when I was thinking about doing this U Chicago fellowship, but it’s been cool to be here at a moment when the city is having the biggest election in the country. The downside is this is the kind of city where it snows in late March and nobody is even surprised.

Meanwhile, yet another bill in the California state legislature would allow more people to enjoy some nice weather if passed. Medicaid expansion comes together in North Carolina. A Rand Paul staffer who got assaulted in D.C. looks like he’s going to make a full recovery. A cool story about the Ukrainian steel industry mobilizing to defend their country. Some people see this as a bad thing, but the news that the IRA may induce much more clean energy than forecasted by the CBO is actually good.

Ben: Who would you vote for in the upcoming Chicago mayoral election, and why?

Chicago is a big, complicated city and there are a lot of nuances to its politics and to the mayor’s race. But as a broad approximation, basically everyone I speak to here seems to agree that you can broadly characterize this as a race between the teachers union candidate (Brandon Johnson) and the police union candidate (Paul Vallas).

From the standpoint of municipal governance, that’s a pretty bleak way to organize political competition, and I think I very likely would have voted for Lori Lightfoot in the first round. That being said, in an imperfect world, you make choices among the options available. I’m definitely pulling for Vallas, but somewhat unenthusiastically. I basically agree with him on education, and while I don’t think “be the cop union guy” is the right approach to criminal justice issues, it seems probably better than Johnson’s approach. More broadly, as I think you can tell from across the broad swathe of topics I’ve written on, I think the urban left political coalition is fundamentally unsound. Vallas has hurt himself in this campaign with some stuff he’s said over the years that’s too right-wing for the Chicago electorate and I think that counts as a mark against him in terms of judgment, but I don’t think a person should actually worry in concrete terms about public policy in Chicago going off-the-rails in a rightwing direction, whereas it conceivably might in a left-wing direction.

Stepping back, every central city in America has some version of the same problem — it is accustomed to generating tax revenue off its office district and has taken a big quasi-permanent hit from the shift toward remote work.

But there are lots of cities (New York, Boston, LA, San Francisco) that had such astronomically high pre-pandemic real estate values that they can take a blow and keep on walking. There are also cities (Dallas, Nashville) that were growing so fast pre-pandemic that they can just slow down. And there are cities (St. Louis, Detroit) that were in such bad shape pre-Covid that there’s nothing particularly new or interesting to say about them. Chicago, though, was on the bubble pre-pandemic, struggling with some municipal problems but also offering a unique combination of urban amenities and affordability. The risk is that the Covid shock to municipal finances pushed the city into a downward spiral that makes it impossible to improve public safety or other city services.

This is an objectively very hard problem, and I would bet against Vallas successfully solving it. But I do think his platform at least exhibits broad awareness of the contours of the issue. Johnson, by contrast, comes from a political faction that I think is just congenitally incapable of acknowledging that the basic progressive formula is not suited to the situation.

Mike G: What do you think of subsidies for sports stadiums? Are they actually useful economically? If not can they be?

I don’t think sports stadiums have particularly high economic value, and cities shouldn’t dupe themselves into thinking that they do. That said, if you are living in Austin and think it would be more fun if Austin had an NFL franchise and would like to see your city exert some effort to make that happen, this doesn’t seem like an absurd policy preference. If we have learned anything from Austin’s growth over the past 30 years, it’s that a lack of pro sports franchises is not a crippling impediment to economic development. But you still might want the sports!

That said, in the economic development context, “subsidies” for X, Y, or Z often take the specific form of agreeing not to tax something.

Cities normally rely on property tax as their revenue workhorse, and then if they want to encourage a particular investment, they will forego taxation on a project for X years or even indefinitely. This then gets written up in the papers by looking at what the hypothetical tax revenue would have been had the project been built without a tax abatement and then saying the project receives such-and-such in tax abatements. People will then confuse this with an actual fiscal outlay when in most cases we’re talking about hypothetical foregone tax revenue.

Now as anyone who’s ever listened to cranks on the internet knows, the policymaker intuition that it’s better to have the investment than to discourage it with taxation is correct. But the right way to instantiate that intuition isn’t with weird subsidy deals, it’s by shifting the tax base from property (i.e., the value of land + structures) to a tax that falls solely on the value of land. That way no new development is ever taxed and you just get a straight question of “build this thing or build some other thing?”

Brian Moseley: Alec from the popular YouTube channel Technology Connections has been IMO a smart commentator on and general proponent of most things having to do with the transition toward greater electrification in the US. So it was interesting to me that in a recent video (on his second YouTube channel, Technology Connextras) he argued against rooftop solar. He described a few different issues that are worth thinking about, but the primary one has to do with the economics of the electrical grid: Rooftop solar, he argued, actually weakens the electrical grid because solar panel users pay less in grid fees at a time when we should be investing in the grid. In order to maintain the grid, which solar users still generally need access to, those increased costs are passed onto others that are less able to pay them. As a solar panel panel owner, I’m very interested to hear what you think of Alec’s criticisms.

To be clear, this is not a problem of rooftop solar per se, it’s a problem of bad utility regulation.

But broadly speaking, I think it’s correct. A number of jurisdictions put in place rooftop solar subsidy schemes that have this property; without it, rooftop solar would be more expensive.

The question, then, is what is the policy rationale for rooftop solar subsidies? At one point, I think the rationale was that these small-scale projects were a good way to create a photovoltaic panel industry and that learning by doing in the panel industry would create cost savings and efficiency improvements in manufacturing. That has now happened, and solar panels have become quite cheap. Mission accomplished! But precisely because panels are now cheap, the installation cost of doing these rinky-dink rooftop solar projects is basically never cost-effective as a zero-carbon energy strategy compared to doing utility-scale projects.

Thomas L Hutcheson: Granted that “cancel culture”/”wokeness” in academia is not the world’s top priority problem but is there anything productive that a good faith Republican state legislature/Governor or clever Democratic state legislature/Governor could do to promote less of an ideological bias in public universities.

I think the Ron DeSantis model of “do a hard-right takeover of one public college and really just go to town on it” actually makes a fair amount of sense. It’s totally reasonable for his progressives critics to be skeptical that his takeover of New College will work out well. But America has lots of colleges run by liberal administrators and professors. Maybe New College will deliver great results! Probably not, but it would hardly be the only college in America with mediocre-to-bad results.

More broadly, I find the scale of conservative whining about American higher education to be very off-putting. There are lots of rich conservatives out there. Go make a better college! Hire some conservatives to teach there. Come up with a curriculum that conservatives think is good. Is Princeton really so great? Is it impossible to do better? Go show me and whine less.

B Schak: How do you rate Andy Byford’s tenure with NYC Transit, and how hopeful are you about him running Amtrak’s high-speed program?

Byford did a good job in New York.

On its face, hiring him to run Amtrak’s HSR initiatives makes absolutely no sense. There are a lot of successful high-speed rail systems in the world, and in a career that’s spanned decades and continents, he has never worked for any of them. Far and away the most reasonable thing for Amtrak to do would be to hire someone with experience in French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, or Japanese high-speed rail.

That being said, relative to the standard mode of thinking at Amtrak, he is an excellent choice. The key thing is that he has experience working in the United States (which makes him acceptable to American transportation’s insular culture), but he also has extensive experience working outside the United States, so he is personally aware of how unusually insular Amtrak is. And he’s a smart, competent guy who’s done well in a number of rail roles in a number of countries. I will note that my specific recommendation was that Amtrak should bring in foreign experts, and I’m glad to see they’re doing that. But by statute, the head of Amtrak has to be an American, and Byford is the next best thing.

Mike: It's obvious by now that generative AI is a real deal transformational technology, but we went through months of dismissive “just fancy autocomplete,” and even now you still see people brushing off the technology as no big deal. Is this just a hangover from NFT-mania or emblematic of a bigger shift in how society views technology?

There are a bunch of different things at work here and, yeah, seeing the crypto world fall flat on its face is a factor.

But I actually think the main thing is that a large share of the population is walking around with incorrect ideas about human intelligence and human consciousness. They look at AI systems, which are new and surprising, and see it’s possible to give what I learned in philosophy class to call a “reductionist” account of how they work. So you can look at an interesting conversation with a chatbot and then say “well you’re not really having a conversation at all, it’s just blah blah blah.” And in my view the problem with that isn’t that it’s false, it’s that you could say the same thing about conversations with humans. Now could you say the exact same thing? No. The human mind works differently from a digital neural network. But you can absolutely give reductionist accounts of human behavior, human cognition, and human emotions. The problem is most people reject reductionist accounts of the human mind for no good reason, but then apply them to digital minds, which creates a spurious contrast between the two.

The other night, though, I had a spirited conversation with Anthropic’s chatbot Claude about neoliberalism in which it wound up arguing that outside of trade policy, Trump was probably more neoliberal than Obama. To me, this was proof that the policy-based definition of neoliberalism that Claude started out with is fundamentally flawed and I’d offered a counterexample to it. But Claude is stubborn and was willing to bite the bullet and just say that people misperceive Trump. I agreed to disagree and found the whole exchange enlightening. You can say Claude isn’t “real” and it’s “just” whatever, but the fact is it does what it does, your interactions are what they are, and everything is reducible to something.

kc77: I recently finished Tim Urban’s Book “What’s Our Problem” after I saw you say you enjoyed the beginning of the book on Twitter. Assuming you finished it, What did you think of the book as a whole? I felt like it worked much better as a defense of reason and liberalism pitched to a bright high school student than it did as an intellectual history of a decade of increasing political polarization.

I agree with this. I don’t think it’s super persuasive as a specific history of the current moment, but it’s excellent as an introduction to rationalist ideas and as a broad defense of a culture of liberalism.

Jeff: Kevin Drum recently argued thst the neocons had no influence in W's administration--that the war was drven by Cheney, etc, & the neocons were only used to give the push for war respectability. It certainly never seemed that way to me. I was following the news about it reasonably closely at the time, but I also have no access to inside players or off the record comments. Are you aware of whether they had real influence?

This turns on definitional issues and factional splits that nobody remembers anymore, but I think Drum sort of has this wrong.

He’s assuming a clearer and more consistent split between sincere idealistic believers in democracy promotion and hawkish realpolitikers than genuinely existed. The key thing about the war is that the people in charge had, I think, really convinced themselves that there were fewer tradeoffs and difficulties than there actually were. So they had all these overlapping objectives and none of them was more “real” than the others. How did they convince themselves of this? Who knows. But it’s my experience that policy entrepreneurs convince themselves of dopey things all the time, especially dopey things that conveniently let them avoid worrying about tradeoffs or intra-coalition hassles.

What really stands out to me about the George W. Bush administration is not that they were unusually stupid or unusually evil but that they wielded an unusual level of power due to the nature of the 9/11 crisis and the temporary surge it induced in both Bush’s popularity and confidence in institutions in general.

Contrast Iraq with a Biden-era screwup where Democratic leaders put a very expensive one-year refundable Child Tax Credit into the American Rescue Plan. The only point of doing this was to lay the groundwork for it to become a permanent program. But it never became a permanent program because Joe Manchin had a fundamental conceptual objection to its design. But somehow Manchin failed to properly convey this to the White House when ARP was being drawn up and then failed to get it removed before Congress voted on the package. So this expensive and inflationary provision was enacted, generated lots of takes, and then ultimately never amounted to anything. It’s a serious screwup of policy design and legislative strategy, and as with Iraq, it came about due to an unusual crisis atmosphere. But it’s just a massively smaller screwup in scale than Iraq, because Biden never had anything remotely resembling a Bush-level of freedom of action.

Dan Diamond: The Chronicle of Higher Education had an interesting article on the Stanford professor helping shape California's approach to math education.

The professor, Jo Boaler, has been mocked on Tucker Carlson and elsewhere for her focus on "woke math." Her defenders say she's been unfairly targeted because she's an outspoken woman and a trailblazer. But the full story seems complicated; there are experts who say that Boeler is misrepresenting their research, for instance. I know Matt's written about math education before, and I'm curious what he makes of it.

I’ve written about Boaler, and I think she’s really off-base. The Chronicle piece goes deeper than I did into her research, and I think further confirms that it’s bad.

But a point from my article that I wish the Chronicle and California policymakers would take more seriously is that California public school performance is really quite bad. Black and Hispanic students, in particular, do considerably worse in California than in Texas or in Massachusetts. So if you’re wondering how California can improve the performance of its Black and Hispanic math students, the natural thing to do would be to take a state that is doing better and copy that state. If I were a California Republican, I would say “we should copy Texas!” If I were a California Democrat who didn’t want to copy Texas, I would say “we should copy Massachusetts!” Copy them how? I don’t know enough in detail. But I would look at a state that is doing better and try to learn from them. The idea that you should call up a controversial Stanford professor and try out new ideas based on her dubious research doesn’t make sense. New ideas are for people who are at the top of the pile — under-performers should just copy.

Matthew Edwards: Now we're a few months into the AI-pocalypse, how are you using new AI tools for work? Are you querying them, using them for writing, for new ideas? Or are you just using them to goof off?

Strictly goofing. I’m at a point where I find the bots impressive but not actually useful. That’s not to say there are no uses for them, but I’m a fast writer and at this point, the time spent on prompt engineering isn’t worth it.

Opinion | Trump Is Indicted, as America’s Justice System Holds Him Accountable

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | Trump Is Indicted, as America’s Justice System Holds Him Accountable

The Editorial Board

8 - 10 minutes

The Editorial Board

Even Donald Trump Should Be Held Accountable

A photograph of Donald Trump.

Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

A photograph of Donald Trump.

The Editorial Board

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For the first time in American history, a grand jury has indicted a former president of the United States, The Times reported on Thursday. Donald Trump spent years as a candidate, in office and out of office, ignoring democratic and legal norms and precedents, trying to bend the Justice Department and the judiciary to his whims and behaving as if rules didn’t apply to him.

As the news of the indictment shows, they do.

A pattern of disregard for the law often leads to a criminal indictment, and that is the outcome Mr. Trump now faces. Federal and state prosecutors were right to set aside concerns about political fallout, or reverence for the presidency, and initiate thorough criminal investigations of Mr. Trump’s conduct in at least four instances. The investigation by the Manhattan district attorney is the first known to result in an indictment.

Mr. Trump completely transformed the relationship between the presidency and the rule of law, often asserting that a president was above the law. So it is appropriate that his actions as president and as a candidate should now be formally weighed by judges and juries, with the possibility of criminal penalties on the line. Mr. Trump badly damaged America’s political and legal institutions and threatened them again with calls for widespread protests once he is indicted. But those institutions have proved to be strong enough to hold him accountable for that harm.

A healthy respect for the legal system also requires Americans to set aside their politics when forming judgments on these cases. While Mr. Trump routinely called for his enemies to be investigated by the F.B.I., to be indicted or to face the death penalty, his indifference to due process for others shouldn’t deny him the system’s benefits, including a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. At the same time, no jury should extend to him any special privileges as a former president. He should have to follow the same procedures as any other citizen.

The indictment remains sealed, and the exact charges against Mr. Trump may not be known for several days. But Alvin Bragg, the district attorney, has been pursuing a case of possible fraud and campaign finance violations by Mr. Trump for concealing payments he made to the porn-film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. His actions — using money to silence critics and hide politically damaging information — were wrong. The question that will face a jury is whether that behavior meets the threshold for conviction as a felony.

If those are the charges, conviction will hinge on proving that Mr. Trump participated in falsifying business records while violating campaign finance law, a somewhat novel legal strategy. Falsifying records can be charged as a misdemeanor in New York; to make it a more serious felony requires proof that he combined it with a second crime, in this case, a potential campaign finance violation. The former president, who is seeking a second term in 2024, has denied the allegations and has said that the case against him brought by Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, is politically motivated.

While some legal experts have questioned the theory behind Mr. Bragg’s case, there is no basis for the accusation that it is politically motivated — a claim that Mr. Trump has made, for many years, about every investigation into his conduct. Just as jurors are routinely instructed to ignore evidence that is improperly introduced in a trial, they will also have to ignore the unsubstantiated implications raised by Trump supporters and attorneys in these cases and judge them strictly on the merits.

Three of the other investigations that may result in indictments are more serious, because they involve allegations not just that Mr. Trump violated the law but also that he abused his presidential office.

Among the most egregious are the accusations against him in Georgia. The Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, is weighing criminal charges against several people, including Mr. Trump, for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in that state, which President Biden won by 11,779 votes. Mr. Trump repeatedly pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” additional votes that would change the results of the state’s election, part of a scheme to undermine the will of the voters.

A special grand jury impaneled by Ms. Willis recommended in February that charges be brought in the case; it’s not yet known which people or allegations were included in the grand jury’s recommendations or whom, if anyone, Ms. Willis may seek to indict.

A federal Justice Department inquiry led by a special counsel, Jack Smith, could also result in charges against Mr. Trump. Mr. Smith is investigating the former president’s efforts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021, when Mr. Trump roused an armed mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol, threatening lawmakers who were gathered to certify the results of the presidential election. A bipartisan Senate report last year found that seven deaths were related to the attack.

Mr. Smith’s team is also investigating the former president over his mishandling of classified documents that were removed from the White House and taken to Mar-a-Lago, his private residence in Florida. Some 300 classified documents have been recovered in the case. Prosecutors are also examining whether Mr. Trump, his attorneys or staff members misled government officials seeking the return of the documents.

In addition to criminal charges, Mr. Trump faces several civil lawsuits. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, is suing the former president for “grossly” and fraudulently inflating the value of his real estate assets. Three of Mr. Trump’s adult children are named in the suit as well. A group of Capitol Police officers and Democratic legislators are suing the former president, arguing that his actions on Jan. 6 incited the mob that caused them physical and emotional harm. E. Jean Carroll, a writer who accused Mr. Trump of raping her, is suing the former president for defamation. Mr. Trump denies the charges.

Prosecuting the former president will no doubt widen the existing political divisions that have so damaged the country in recent years. Mr. Trump has already stoked that divisiveness, calling prosecutors behind the probes — several of whom are Black — “racist.” He claimed in a social media post that he would be arrested and called on his supporters to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!” The language echoed his rallying cry that preceded the Capitol riot. Officials in New York City, taking no chances on a repeat performance by Mr. Trump’s supporters, have been preparing for unrest.

Those accusations are clearly aimed at undermining the allegations against him, inoculating himself from the consequences of his misconduct and using the cases to his political advantage. The two district attorneys in these cases are elected Democrats, but their race and political affiliations are not relevant to the legal proceedings. (Mr. Smith is not registered with either party.) Nevertheless, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy immediately demonstrated his party’s intent to politicize the indictment by calling Mr. Bragg “a radical DA” pursuing “political vengeance” against Mr. Trump. Mr. McCarthy has no jurisdiction over the Manhattan district attorney and no business interfering in a criminal prosecution, and yet he vowed to have the House of Representatives determine whether Mr. Bragg’s office is receiving federal funds.

The decision to prosecute a former president is a solemn task, particularly given the deep national fissures that Mr. Trump will inevitably exacerbate as the 2024 campaign grows closer. But the cost of failing to seek justice against a leader who may have committed these crimes would be higher still.

The biggest problem in media is the audience

www.slowboring.com

The biggest problem in media is the audience

Matthew Yglesias

11 - 14 minutes

As part of a thread about trends he thinks deserve more attention, George Mack posted a chart from the Financial Times showing the alarming increase in drug overdoses in the United States, a topic he alleged has been ignored by the media.

The Financial Times, of course, is part of the media. Often when people claim the media isn’t covering something, it turns out they’ve learned about that particular issue from the media.

Still, I do think it’s true that the rise in drug overdoses does not receive the volume of coverage that it deserves. I’m writing this article in a hotel lobby where a nearby television is playing CNN’s non-stop coverage of the school shooting in Tennessee. That doesn’t surprise me; school shootings are always huge national news stories, even though they account for a relatively small share of America’s overall homicide rate. And homicides in general attract a lot more coverage than drug overdoses, even though many more people now die of drug overdoses than homicides.

So why do school shootings get more coverage than drug overdoses? The gap is driven by a number of specific differences between the two topics, but they all essentially amount to audience interest. CNN is in wall-to-wall coverage mode for the Nashville shooting because their past experience covering school shootings has shown that there is a lot of audience interest in this subject.

“The problem with journalism is the audience” is, in my view, one of the most under-discussed features of modern society, largely because going negative on the audience is not something the audience enjoys.

But this particular opioids take set me off because I think that if you follow journalism closely and talk to journalists, it’s really clear that many of them have been trying quite hard to drum up more public interest in this issue. CNN at one point had an America’s Opioid Epidemic landing page on their website. It looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2018, even though the epidemic has gotten dramatically worse since then. I think it’s pretty obvious that if those stories had been doing numbers, CNN would have kept the feature going — they put in the work, they ran the experiment, and it just wasn’t delivering.

Which, again, doesn’t mean that they don’t cover the story. Here are some March 2023 headlines:

    Chronic pain patients struggle to get opioid prescriptions filled, even as CDC eases guidelines

    US sues Rite Aid for missing opioid red flags

    What makes fentanyl so dangerous and how can people prevent overdoses? Our expert explains

    Young children are increasingly victims of opioid epidemic, study finds

    Naloxone nasal spray may soon be in your pharmacy. Our medical analyst explains what it is and who can use it

    DEA issues alert about widespread threat of xylazine

    Tranq has become a bigger part of Philly's street fentanyl supply. The wounds left behind are killing people

Journalists are aware that opioid addiction and drug abuse are a big deal — working professionals in this field keep seeing the numbers and the charts and thinking “this is a huge story, I should find a way to get a piece of it.” The problem is that even though people keep taking runs at the opioid story, it’s challenging to find a huge audience for it. And in defense of the audience, I think a big part of the reason for that is it’s hard to find any plausible remedies for the problem that would attract interest. It’s not that there isn’t a proposed solution that everyone agrees with (though that would be nice) — there isn’t even a proposed solution that a large and vocal minority of the population is enthusiastic about. You can always get a good YIMBY/NIMBY fight going because whether you agree with us are not, it’s factually true that there is a fired-up YIMBY faction that strongly believes we can solve the housing crisis in America.

By the same token, some people are really passionate about banning assault rifles and others are really passionate about saying they’re wrong.

With opioids, the only reliable way to gain traction is to rhetorically link the problem to something else entirely — J.D. Vance got attention for saying the opioid epidemic has something to do with investor-owned single-family homes. If you can make the opioid epidemic about NAFTA, or immigration, or anything that people are emotionally invested in fighting about, you have a winner on your hands. But the issue mostly doesn’t link up well with our ongoing domestic disputes, so it’s hard to get people invested.

By the same token, I was talking yesterday to a right-of-center person who’s very interested in foreign policy and who’s bothered by the lack of coverage of what he sees as AMLO’s attacks on independent electoral institutions in Mexico.

He pitched this as an ideological bias story, where journalists who would find similar actions from Bibi Netanyahu or Jair Bolsonaro newsworthy and upsetting are willing to give AMLO a pass because he’s on the left. I think that’s only half-right. It’s absolutely true that if AMLO were a Trump-aligned rightist like Bolsonaro, he’d get a different kind of coverage. But I think AMLO would also be getting more attention if he were a Trump-critical leftist. The problem with getting attention for any kind of Mexico-related news is that as far as audiences are concerned, there’s only one story in global politics right now — the Trump-aligned populist right versus its enemies.

The issue with covering Mexican politics is that AMLO has stubbornly insisted on pursuing a style of politics that has an autonomous, Mexico-specific logic.

He’s not a Trumpian right-populist, but he’s not an anti-Trump leftist either. He actually seemed to have a decent relationship with Trump and arguably has a more tense one with Joe Biden. You can’t easily slot him into the Trump/Bolsonaro mode or paint him as an ideological comrade of Biden and Justin Trudeau. To understand his politics or the politics of his opponents in Mexico, you’d need to actually know and care a lot about Mexico. And while there certainly are journalists working in the United States of America who are capable of giving you an informed take on Mexican affairs (not me), there is not much of an audience for this.

A very smart woman I worked with at Vox once explained to us editors something fundamental about social media virality: sharing an article isn’t about what the article says, it’s about what sharing the article says about you. Sharing an article about Netanyahu, whether it’s positive or negative, would say a lot about you, if you’re an American discourse participant. An article about Israeli politics connects to larger American identities and American debates, and the Mexican political situation just doesn’t. So even though on a practical level, the situation in Mexico is much more important to Americans and Mexico is a dramatically larger country than Israel, the coverage doesn’t sell.

I like to follow Wesley Yang’s cranky anti-leftist Twitter account because he frequently shares stories I otherwise wouldn’t see. But the other day he offered a pointer to a story I was already quite familiar with, Kelsey Piper’s excellent June 2022 article “Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world.” Yang characterized it as an antidote to the climate doomerism that he says is being spread by “the Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus,” which is his slang term for media he doesn’t like.

But of course Kelsey writes for Vox, which is surely part of the VIMA if anything is. And she’s been spreading the anti-doom gospel over there for years. Here’s a great story she did back in 2019, and just last week Vox ran an anti-doomer story by Hannah Ritchie. I think you could say this is actually an institutional commitment of Vox’s. Ex-Voxer Ezra Klein is now at the New York Times, the very tentpole on which the whole VIMA is constructed, and he wrote a piece last year called “Your Kids Are Not Doomed.” Last fall, the Times ran a big climate feature titled “Beyond Catastrophe.”

Kyle Paoletta recently published a big Harper’s feature on climate complaining about the volume of anti-doomer content that’s recently come out. His argument, roughly, is that the case for doom was always overstated, but now climate optimists are being excessively rosy in their forecasts. I’m not sure I agree with his overall assessment, but one thing he gets right is that if anything, the concerted institutional push is currently against doomerism and in favor of positivity and solutions.

The reason the doomer stuff is so widespread anyway is that, as a recent study shows, “Negativity drives online news consumption.” Because people are paranoid, they tend to read negativity bias as partisan or ideological bias, but studies that look at it rigorously find that’s not the case — the bias really is toward negativity.

Eco-doomer messages are so prominent because they perform well, even when people in charge of messaging try to put forward something that’s more feel-good and more accurate. And the non-doomer climate message that does best is to flip all the way in the other direction and say the whole climate movement is a scam and a fraud perpetrated by power-mad leftists. Trying to tell people that fossil fuels are extremely useful but also have unpriced climate externalities that lead to overconsumption, that this is bad, and that we should try to take cost-effective steps to reduce emissions does terribly. Not because nobody thinks it and not because nobody says it, but because it’s just not that snappy. The real dynamic is close to the opposite of vertical integration. We have an extremely chaotic, extremely competitive information space in which demagogic takes tend to outperform sane ones.

The fix for all of this, of course, is to subscribe to Slow Boring, the only news outlet that offers a cure for what ails the media.

Just kidding. But I will say that as a writer, it’s a great pleasure to be able to write for a relatively small audience of paying customers. Given the very low price of web display ads, a piece needs to obtain a simply staggering quantity of clicks to be deemed successful out there on the free web. And that puts you at the mercy of these perverse distribution dynamics. People sometimes get in a bad mood and accuse journalists of only caring about traffic or writing for clicks, but honestly, nobody in the business wants to work that way. It’s just that, by definition, stuff that generates a lot of eyeballs ends up proliferating.

I don’t know that there’s necessarily any solution to this.

But I do think you’ll be a happier, better-informed, and less-aggrieved person if you accept that most of the flaws of journalism are flaws of the business model that have a lot to do with the audience. There is a specific and important exception, namely that the labor pool of journalists is younger, better-educated, and more urban than the general population. Given the current partisan alignment, that means it’s also to the left of the general population. Even so, you’ll be much more enlightened if you see this as an economic phenomenon rather than giving in to the standard conspiratorial reading. There is plenty of conservative media content and it’s very popular and financially successful, and conservative journalists are in-demand and well-remunerated. But if you’re just out there hiring some generic content producers to do recaps of popular television shows, you’re going to end up with a very progressive bunch.

To get something different, you’d have to overbid the market to deliberately seek out a more ideologically balanced pool of talent. And if you as a reader want something different than whatever is most viral, you also need to seek that out and pay what it costs.

Timnit Gebru Is Building a Slow AI Movement

spectrum.ieee.org

Timnit Gebru Is Building a Slow AI Movement

Eliza Strickland

12 - 15 minutes

Timnit Gebru was a well-known scholar in the AI-ethics community long before she got fired by Google in December 2020—but that messy and dramatic incident brought a new level of attention to her work. Google apparently exiled Gebru from its AI ethics team (and subsequently fired the other leader of the team) in response to a paper about the dangers of the large language models that have become so important to the world’s biggest technology companies. The episode created a firestorm in the AI field.

But Gebru has made the most of the jarring opportunity. In December 2021, she announced the founding of a new organization, the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), which is billed as “a space for independent, community-rooted AI research free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence.” Since then, Gebru has been staffing up. In February, AI and sociology researcher Alex Hanna joined as research director, departing from her Google job with a blistering resignation letter. Gebru and Hanna spoke with IEEE Spectrum about their plans for DAIR.

Timnit Gebru and Alex Hanna on...

    A better model for AI research

    DAIR’s mission

    Data sets and their discontents

Timnit, did you decide to found a new organization because you think that the current model of AI research is broken?

Timnit Gebru: Yes. For instance, I was looking at what our incentives were at Google and what happened to us—we don’t need to rehash that—and what the incentives are in academia. We want to do interdisciplinary research. We don’t want to drive people to the publishing rat race. We want to take very seriously communicating our research results to people, beyond just writing papers. And we want [researchers] to live a livable life! We don’t want them to work 24/7. And that means we plan to put out less work, so each work will take more money. I was thinking about what kind of work I wanted to do and what kind of environment I wanted to create, and it seemed like it was better to start something from scratch and figure out how to sustain that.

Your press release about the founding of DAIR mentioned that AI is often presented as inevitable, and that you want to combat that idea. Are you trying to apply the precautionary principle to AI?

Smiling woman in a blue and orange head scarf and large rectangular earrings.Alex HannaBrittany Hosea-Small

Alex Hanna: I’m not necessarily thinking about it from the perspective of the precautionary principle. I’m thinking of it more from the perspective of developing technology that works for people. A lot of the AI research that happens right now is AI for the value of AI itself. A lot of people are thinking about this body of tools known as AI and saying, “Well, everything looks like a nail, and we have this big hammer.”

We already know that deep learning has problems. These modes of research require organizations that can gather a lot of data, data that is often collected via ethically or legally questionable technologies, like surveilling people in nonconsensual ways. If we want to build technology that has meaningful community input, then we need to really think about what’s best. Maybe AI is not the answer for what some particular community needs.

If AI is not inevitable, if it’s a choice to use it, are there any application areas right now where you think we should definitely choose not to use AI?

Gebru: I wonder about AI for social good. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t happen, but why start with the AI? Why not think about the good you want to do, and then see if AI can be helpful? Sometimes people talk about AI for climate change, but if you really do the analysis of climate change, isn’t a lot of AI being used to make the oil and gas industries more efficient? I’m not saying AI for social good shouldn’t exist. But I think that’s an example of what Alex was saying, where AI is the hammer. And of course, the technology should not be used for risk assessment, criminalizing people, predictive policing, and remotely killing people and making it easier to enter warfare.

Hanna: Even if you exclude areas like war-making, policing, and incarceration, we should think about areas in which AI is used for things that are necessary, like social welfare and education. [In schools,] there have been all these surveillance systems to “make teachers jobs’ easier” by monitoring students online. We know that student surveillance systems are applied unequally across school systems. If you have a predominately white private school, they are not going to be surveilling the same way that prominently black and brown public schools are. There was an article that was recently published in Slate that showed these school surveillance systems will flag LGBT keywords, which could unintentionally be outing students. If you’re in a place like Texas or Florida, that can be potential for reporting the student to child welfare services. And those get filed as child abuse, according to the antitrans executive order that the governor of Texas signed. The promise of those tools is that you’re going to be able to do more with less. AI is bringing brought in to reduce inefficiencies, but maybe these schools really need many more teachers.

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What do you see your mission at DAIR? Will you be calling attention to the current problems in AI, or doing algorithmic audits, or building new types of AI?

Gebru: We have projects that are basically audits, but I’m wary of being a third-party auditor that people can point to as a green light: “Well, they said it’s okay.” But we’re basically doing all of those things. For instance, we have a project on using satellite imagery and computer vision to analyze the effects of spatial apartheid [in South Africa]—so that’s using AI for something that we think will help.

Right now, we’re also focused on the process by which we do this research. What are some of the principles we should be following? How do we not exploit people? How do we make sure that when we extract knowledge from people, we appropriately compensate them? There are lots of people in communities who are not writing papers, but they have other forms of knowledge that are very important for our projects. How do we collaborate with those people in a way that’s respectful and values what they bring to the table?

Hanna: Also, what would it mean to use AI to hold power to account? We’re having lots of discussions with NGOs that are focused on accountability and human rights.

Maybe you can tell me more about the satellite imagery project to make this more concrete. What are the goals of that project and what have you figured out so far?

Gebru: This project is about analyzing spatial satellite imagery. One of our research fellows, Raesetje Sefala, is based in South Africa and grew up in a township. She does work in computer vision, but her knowledge of that history is just as important as her work in computer vision. Spatial apartheid is legally over. But when you look at these images, you see that the townships are in one place and the white mansions are in a different place. That was mandated by the Group Areas Act of 1950. The question we’re asking is: What has happened since then?

Like always, the data-set work was the most important and time-consuming work, and that was where we made the biggest innovations. And it’s so hard to publish that kind of work—as we knew already, we’ve been through this multiple times. You go to the computer vision community and they’re like, “Oh, it’s a data-set paper, where’s the algorithm?” But NeurIPS had this new data sets and benchmarks track and that’s where we published it.

This project is an example of a lot of the things we’re hoping to do here. We don’t want to just write a paper and move on. We’re working on visualizations; we’re working on how to effectively communicate our findings to relevant groups. [Sefala] is going to write an article for Africa is a Country about some of the findings. We’ve realized that one of the most important things we did was to label townships in the data sets, because the South African government doesn’t label townships in the census. Just that is very important, because how can you analyze the impacts of spatial apartheid if you don’t label the townships? I don’t know if you know Mimi Onuoha—she’s an artist who made a similar point about how Google Maps completely ignores favelas in Brazil.

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It’s interesting to hear you talk about challenges with the data sets. Timnit, in your work on large language models you’ve called attention to problems with existing data sets, including embedded bias. The response I often hear is, essentially, “It’s just too hard to make data sets better.”

Gebru: If it’s just too hard to build a safe car, would we have cars out there? It goes back to what Alex was saying about a hammer. People think there’s just one way to do it. We’ve been trying to say, “Maybe there’s a different way we can think about this.” If you think [data-set curation] is a necessity, that means it’ll take more time and resources before you put something out there.

Hanna: This is a point we’ve made over and over. We’ve published on data-set practices and how many of these things go out with not enough attention paid to what’s in them. This data-hungry version of building models started with ImageNet, and it wasn’t until ImageNet was out for about 10 years that people started to dig in and say, “Wait, this [data set] is really problematic.”

I’ve been working on a paper with a legal scholar named Mehtab Khan on the legal dimensions of these huge data sets. The big firms like OpenAI are really pushing to say, “Oh, we can use these data, it’s fair use.” But we actually don’t know that—there’s not a lot of prior case law. Plus, fair use only matters for copyright holders, it doesn’t matter for data subjects and it doesn’t matter for the people who are affected by the decisions when these models are deployed.

It seems like a lot of the big changes need to happen within the big industry players. But can you affect change from the outside? And have you seen signs that this philosophy of AI development is spreading?

Gebru: I’ve seen changes. For instance, we’ve been talking for a long time about how data labor is completely undervalued. If you have PhD students and you want them to spend their time very carefully thinking through how they’re going to gather data sets, but then they have nowhere to publish… Now NeurIPS has the data sets and benchmarks track. When you think about what people need to do, you also have to think about the incentive structures. I see some of that changing, with help from labor organizing. And I think from the outside we can help. When we were on the inside, we partnered with people on the outside all the time. And the government has a huge role to play.

But what I worry about—and I said this to the EU parliament—is that we are stuck in this cycle where we are still talking about the potential harms of technology from a long time ago. And now people are talking about the metaverse! We have to figure out how to slow down, and at the same time, invest in people and communities who see an alternative future. Otherwise we’re going to be stuck in this cycle where the next thing has already been proliferated by the time we try to limit its harms.

Hanna: There’s a big desire for some kind of ethical framework. There is already legislation, and there’s going to be more regulations and ongoing litigation. But it’s not going to happen without a concerted effort from people who are willing to push and advocate for it.

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How Liberals Can Avoid Succumbing to the Illiberal Temptation

www.theunpopulist.net

How Liberals Can Avoid Succumbing to the Illiberal Temptation

Ben Klutsey

12 - 16 minutes

Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in Germany, 1940 (Everett Collection, Shutterstock)

In the United States and Europe over the past two decades, we’ve seen the emergence of movements that seek to reverse the Enlightenment-era liberalism on which modern liberal democracies are founded. Populist authoritarianism is one form of anti-liberalism that readers of The UnPopulist are familiar with, but there are many others that may or may not involve populism: nationalism, nativism, statism, theocracy and so on.

These movements aren’t simply illiberal. At times, there’s a ruthlessness to them. There’s a certain ruthlessness that entices people to storm the U.S. Capitol to challenge legitimate elections. There can even be a ruthlessness in the use of our rights, such as canceling and ostracizing people when they naively, or in the callowness of youth, utter opinions that stray from current orthodoxies and mores.

Of course, these examples are not morally equivalent; moreover, the ruthlessness of our time pales in comparison to the ruthlessness of the dark times inspired by totalitarianism, fascism and Nazism in the 20th century. This is the period that Joshua Cherniss, a political theorist at Georgetown University, writes about in his insightful book Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century. Cherniss draws lessons from the lives of figures like German sociologist Max Weber, French sociologist Raymond Aron, French author Albert Camus, American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and British philosopher Isaiah Berlin to address what he calls the “liberal predicament” in the face of anti-liberal ruthlessness.

The liberal predicament is a phenomenon experienced by each generation. When a new cycle of anti-liberal fervor picks up, Cherniss writes, liberals are faced with the quandary of “how to respond to the ruthlessness of anti-liberals without either abandoning liberalism’s core ethical values or allowing anti-liberals to triumph politically. They also [face] a theoretical challenge: how to justify insistence on liberal limits and scruples, and condemn anti-liberal ruthlessness, without falling into rigid, blind absolutism?”

It is very tempting to fight fire with fire. In fact, some of the staunchest anti-liberals started out with liberal causes. They were the ones championing freedom, equality, justice and other great ideals, but eventually crossed over into anti-liberal territory.

Thus, Cherniss poses this vexing question: “How do humanitarian idealists become butchers of human beings?” Robespierre opposed the death penalty and strongly championed the rights of man. How did he end up presiding over the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution? No one is immune to crossing over from humanitarian ideals like freedom and justice into anti-liberal cruelty in an attempt to achieve those ideals. As Cherniss warns, “Anyone who feels the force of revulsion against the injustice, cruelty, and oppression of this world should be alert to this temptation; so should those who believe that they have discovered the truth about how to improve human life (whether this truth is secular or religious, and identified with the political right or left).”

It's a cautionary tale about the relevance of limits and taking them seriously. Liberalism involves institutional, normative and ethical limits like the rule of law, adherence to individual rights, tolerance of a diverse civil society, protections from the state’s overreach, and the power to criticize and challenge activities of the state.

But liberalism isn’t concerned only with limits. It is also a “magnanimous politics.” This magnanimity requires tolerance and forbearance. Those of us who work to bridge divides and foster pluralism are often confronted with the question of whether to be tolerant of intolerant people and behaviors. This is another version of the liberal predicament. Cherniss says that ultimately, the difference between a liberal and anti-liberal is political ethos. It is a stance that is formed by “patterns of disposition, perception, commitment, and response,” and it shapes how we act politically. We can think of ethos as a manner through which we apply a certain creed or belief system.

According to Cherniss, to understand the nature of the tensions between liberalism and its fiercest opponents, “We must, as Amanda Anderson has argued, move beyond blunt ideological labels, defined in terms of doctrines and programs, and attend to contrasting ‘styles and dispositions.’” He adds, “Politics should be approached, not solely through the question of ‘who does what to whom for whose benefit,’ but also through the additional question of ‘how do they (actors) do it (the action) to them?’” And we should approach the “how” not only in terms of process, but of attitudes and temperament displayed in action. Cherniss isn’t ignoring the power of doctrines, theories and arguments, but highlighting the important role of ethos in how we apply and live our ideas in practice.

By attending to ethos, Cherniss seeks to go beyond principles and programs to a kind of liberalism that is fundamentally an ethical disposition—what he calls “tempered liberalism.” Tempered liberalism aims to “balance between (and maintain its balance against) extremes” and to achieve “a liberalism that centers on personal temperament, seeking not to advance a general theory or program of institutional design or a set of general principles, but to cultivate a particular way of thinking about and engaging in political life.” The term also indicates an opposition to ruthlessness, extremism and fanaticism. The way to deal with the liberal predicament, he argues, is to maintain the ethos of a tempered liberalism.

The 20th century thinkers Cherniss takes lessons from, such as Aron, Camus, Berlin and Niebuhr, didn’t always embody the ethos of tempered liberalism. There were times in their lives when they deviated, which Cherniss uses to illustrate how difficult it is to maintain this disposition in the face of anti-liberalism.

Niebuhr for example, was radicalized by the carnage on the battlefield of World War I and the vindictive negotiations and settlements in the aftermath of the war. They seemed imperialist to him. At home, when he visited Henry Ford’s factories and saw the labor conditions of the factory workers, he was further radicalized. He turned against market liberalism, as well as the political actions and processes that liberalism fostered. He didn’t go as far as some of the ruthless anti-liberals, but he was open to injecting an ethos of hardness, single-mindedness and fanaticism to serve the causes of democracy and justice. He was an idealist.

Eventually, “his awareness of the evils of power both fueled and modified” his radicalism. Having analyzed the psychology of domination among political leaders, he increasingly became suspicious of “reformers,” and he came to value ethical and institutional limits on political contestation. Ultimately, his experiences with communism, beginning in the 1930s, drew him back toward liberalism.   

Another liberal exemplar, Raymond Aron, became frustrated during his youth with the gradualism, and at times paralysis, of democratic systems in comparison to the activity of totalitarian governments. He even entertained the idea that if France’s salvation required an authoritarian regime, he would accept it, even if he would detest it.

But he was struck by his first-hand experience with the rise of Nazism while he was studying in Cologne and Berlin. Witnessing his otherwise friendly German acquaintances become supporters and enthusiasts of Hitler’s Reich shocked him. He increasingly saw people energized by a populist fervor become ruthless in support of a regime that engaged in some of the worst atrocities the world has ever witnessed. The brutalities drove Aron toward an anti-totalitarian stance.  

Aron eventually emphasized restraint and humility in political activity. He concluded that the right response to the liberal predicament might indeed involve decisiveness during emergencies like an imminent civil war, but, as Cherniss observes, “It also required the maintenance or restoration of liberal means and a liberal style and spirit of political engagement, marked by commitment to legality, respect for disagreement and plurality, and sufficient modesty to listen, and seek to genuinely respond, to the complaints of critics.”

Tempered liberalism isn’t some kind of pacifism in the face of brutality. It is a resolute application of the principles of liberty and equality, but with a sense of balance, proportion and pluralism in advancing ideas.

Another complication in seeking to cultivate a liberal ethos is developing a sense of balance between means and ends. Among Cherniss’ examples, Albert Camus’ decisions perhaps best illustrate this dilemma. Even as Camus supported the French Resistance against Nazism—a clear liberal stance—he did not support the independence movement of his native land, Algeria, as it sought to separate itself from France.

Not surprisingly, he was accused of being on the side of the colonialists. But Camus was concerned that the Algerian independence movement was less interested in advancing the lives of the poor in Algeria than it was in advancing a Moscow-sponsored pan-Arabism. Thus, while he principally supported political rights for Algerians, he remained skeptical of the independence movement’s atrocities and main objectives. He once remarked: “At this moment bombs are being planted in the trams in Algiers. My mother could be on one of those trams. If that is justice, I prefer my mother.” One important view Cherniss advances is that we cannot abandon the evaluation of means when we consider even ostensibly liberal ends, and sometimes different tempered liberals might come to different conclusions based on the values they emphasize in their ethos. 

In a January interview with Cherniss, I asked him the question that had been on my mind since reading the book: Who are the tempered liberals of our time? He didn’t find it easy to come up with names, but he highlighted a few people outside the United States. One who stood out was Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy, he said, is “not a moderate and not an intellectual, and not necessarily even the best political judge in all cases, but … does give this model of a particular kind of courage which is calmer, more humane, more moderate.”

Essentially, there isn’t one ideal ethos of tempered liberalism. It is about how we practice politics on behalf of liberal ideals. It supports a range of behaviors and practices appropriate to different situations and roles, and how we deploy them depends on our own judgment and circumstance, Cherniss believes. Indeed, he writes, “not everyone needs to exhibit or enact all of them, in all cases.” He suggests, for instance, that a politician should seek to cultivate sensitivity toward others’ moral views; a philanthropist, to harbor some skepticism and an acceptance of the limitations of an imperfect world; and a morally inspired activist, to develop a tolerance of human frailty.

Cherniss’ response to the liberal predicament may not be the most satisfying to liberals outraged by the illiberal practices and ideas that have recently emerged in America and around the world. But in a truly liberal fashion, Cherniss offers an approach that is focused on the individual. Tempered liberalism requires self-reflection and will power.

Isaiah Berlin, whom Cherniss discusses, offers a set of tendencies that an aspiring tempered liberal should be mindful of: avoiding monism (a tendency to reject all but a single value or goal), maximalism (seeking utopian results in pursuing goals), fanaticism (excessive zeal), and extremism (an all-or-nothing approach that rejects compromise). These admonitions encourage the tempered liberal to be suspicious of grand programs, to entertain fallibilism about beliefs, to embrace a sense of responsibility and to show fortitude in tolerating those with different views.

How do we foster this ethos? According to Cherniss, we need a “pedagogy of exemplification.” We need to identify those who exemplify the right ethos, emulate them and encourage others to do the same, even as we keep in mind that these exemplars might be “admirable, but not perfect.” In addition, our emulation of these exemplars should not be exact; depending on our particular roles in society, some aspects may not be replicable.

Cherniss’ approach may not be a perfect response to the liberal problem of character formation, but again, it is appropriately individualistic, and ultimately, there are no easy answers to anti-liberalism. The road to a more liberal society may not be a straight line, but robust defenders of liberalism need to consider that future generations may be grateful for the examples we set in our own time to address illiberal ruthlessness. We need to ensure that in a bid to challenge anti-liberalism, we do not ourselves become anti-liberals. And if we ask ourselves who the tempered liberals of our time are and we have a hard time identifying any, it may be a sign that we should each do more to fill the void.

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We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too? by Martin Baron

We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too?

Martin Baron — Read time: 14 minutes

Opinion We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too?

March 24, 2023 at 11:47 a.m. EDT

(Video: Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

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Martin Baron was executive editor of The Post from January 2013 through February 2021 and, before that, editor of the Boston Globe for more than 11 years. His book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” is to be published in October. This essay is adapted from a speech he gave March 16 as part of the Richman Fellowship at Brandeis University.

Objectivity in journalism has attracted a lot of attention lately. It also is a subject that has suffered from confusion and an abundance of distortion.

I’m about to do something terribly unpopular in my profession these days: Defend the idea.

Let’s step back a bit. First, a dictionary definition of objectivity. This is from Merriam-Webster: “expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.”

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That’s of some, but limited, help in understanding the idea. Let me suggest thinking about objectivity in the context of other professions. Because as journalists, and as citizens, we routinely expect objectivity from professionals of every sort.

We want objective judges. We want objective juries. We want front-line police officers to be objective when they make arrests and detectives to be objective in conducting investigations. We want prosecutors to evaluate cases objectively, with no preexisting bias or agendas. In short, we want justice to be equitably administered. Objectivity — which is to say a fair, honest, honorable, accurate, rigorous, impartial, open-minded evaluation of the evidence — is at the very heart of equity in law enforcement.

We want doctors to be objective in their diagnoses of the medical conditions of their patients. We don’t want them recommending treatments based on hunches or superficial, subjective judgments about their patients. We want doctors to make a fair, honest, honorable, accurate, rigorous, impartial, open-minded evaluation of the clinical evidence.

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We want medical researchers and government regulators to be objective in determining whether new drugs might work and whether they can be taken safely. We want scientists to be objective in evaluating the impact of chemicals in the soil, air and water. In short, we want to know with confidence that we can live in healthful conditions, without injury to our children, our parents, our friends or ourselves.

Objectivity among science and medical professionals is at the very heart of our faith in the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe and the medicines we take.

In business, too, we want objectivity. We want applicants for bank loans to be considered objectively, based on valid criteria about collateral and borrowers’ capacity to repay debt — not on biases about race and ethnicity. The same goes for credit cards, where access to the consumer marketplace should rest on objective standards and not on prejudices or flawed assumptions about who qualifies as a good risk and who does not.

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The concept of objectivity in all these fields gets no argument from journalists. We accept it, embrace it, insist on it. Journalists investigate when we find it missing, particularly when it leads to acts of injustice.

And today — in an era of misinformation, disinformation and crackpot conspiracy theories that poison our politics and threaten the public health — we rightly ask leaders of all sorts to face up to “objective reality,” or what we commonly call truth.

Of course, objectivity is not always achieved. Judges, police and prosecutors don’t always act without bias. Scientists sometimes succumb to wishful thinking or manipulate data in a dishonest pursuit of professional glory. In business, bias has inflicted profound, enduring damage on marginalized communities by barring full participation in the economy.

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But failure to achieve standards does not obviate the need for them. It does not render them outmoded. It makes them more necessary. And it requires that we apply them more consistently and enforce them more firmly.

Most in the public, in my experience, expect my profession to be objective, too. Dismissing their expectations — outright defying them — is an act of arrogance. It excuses our biases. It enshrines them. And, most importantly, it fails the cause of truth.

Increasingly now, journalists — particularly a rising generation — are repudiating the standard to which we routinely, and resolutely, hold others.

These critics of objectivity among journalism professionals, encouraged and enabled by many in the academic world, are convinced that journalism has failed on multiple fronts and that objectivity is at the root of the problem.

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Various arguments are made:

First, that no one can be truly objective — that we all have opinions. Why not admit them? Why hide them? We’re not being honest if we do.

Second, that true objectivity is unattainable. Our views shape every choice we make in practicing journalism — from the stories we select to pursue, to the people we interview, to the questions we ask, to the ways we write stories. So, if genuine objectivity is beyond reach, the argument goes, let’s not pretend we’re practicing it and let’s not even try.

Third, that objectivity is just another word for false balance, false equivalence, neutrality, both-sidesism and “on the one hand, on the other hand” journalism. According to this argument, objectivity is nothing more than an effort to insulate ourselves from partisan criticism: When the evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction, we deceitfully suggest otherwise.

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Ultimately, critics consider the idea of objectivity antithetical to our mission overall: The standard is a straitjacket, the argument goes. We can’t tell it like it is. The practical effect is to misinform. Moral values are stripped from our work. The truth gets buried.

Many journalists have concluded that our profession has failed miserably to fulfill its responsibilities at a perilous moment in history. Their evidence is that Donald Trump got elected in the first place, despite his lies, nativism, brutishness and racist and misogynistic language; that Donald Trump still maintains a strong grip on Republican politicians and so much of the American public; and that so many American voters refuse to accept basic facts, that they reject reason and logic and evidence, and get swept up in outlandish conspiratorial thinking.

Had we not been constrained by standards like objectivity, critics believe, we would have been more faithful to our profession’s truth-telling mission. American politics might be different. People could better sift truth from lie.

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There is also the view that we have never actually been reliable truth-tellers. That what we call “objective” is, in fact, subjective.

Objectivity’s detractors note, with merit, that American media have been dominated by White males. Historically, the experiences of women, people of color and other marginalized populations have not been adequately told — or told at all. What White males consider objective reality isn’t that at all, they say. It’s really nothing more, in their view, than the world seen from the White male perspective.

That’s the criticism. So, where did this idea of objectivity come from? And how did it become a journalistic standard in the first place? The origins are a bit murky, but they are typically traced to about a century ago.

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In 1920, Walter Lippmann, a renowned American journalist, published “Liberty and the News.” He was one of the most influential advocates for the idea of “objectivity” in journalism. In that brief collection of essays, he sought to advance the concept.

For context, here is what he had to say about his own era. It should have a familiar ring.

“There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled.” He saw an onslaught of news that comes “helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion” and a public “protected by no rules of evidence.”

He feared an environment where people, as he put it, “cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions … what somebody asserts, not what actually is.”

“The cardinal fact,” he said, “is the loss of contact with objective information.” And he worried that people “believe whatever fits most comfortably with their prepossessions.”

His diagnosis was much like what causes us so much worry today: Democratic institutions were threatened. He saw journalism as essential to democracy. But to properly serve its purpose, journalism — in his view — needed standards.

“Without protection against propaganda,” he wrote, “without standards of evidence, without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation. … There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”

Lippmann was seeking a means for countering the propaganda of his time. He well understood the tools for manipulating public opinion. He himself participated in the propaganda machine of the Woodrow Wilson administration. He saw how propaganda of the early 20th century carried the world into the slaughter of World War I, and how public sentiment could be influenced and exploited through calculated effort. And he called this propaganda emanating from government the “manufacture of consent.”

counterpointNewsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust

Lippmann recognized that we all have our preconceptions. But he wrote that “we shall accomplish more by fighting for truth than by fighting for our theories.” And so he called for as “impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.” Which is where the idea of objectivity came in: as impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.

Our job as journalists, as he saw it, was to determine the facts and place them in context. The goal should be to have our work be as scientific as we could make it. Our research would be conscientious and careful. We would be guided by what the evidence showed. That meant we had to be generous listeners and eager learners, especially conscious of our own suppositions, prejudices, preexisting opinions and limited knowledge.

So, when I defend objectivity, I am defending it as it was originally defined and defending what it really means. The true meaning of objectivity is not the straw man that is routinely erected by critics so that they can then tear it down.

Objectivity is not neutrality. It is not on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand journalism. It is not false balance or both-sidesism. It is not giving equal weight to opposing arguments when the evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction. It does not suggest that we as journalists should engage in meticulous, thorough research only to surrender to cowardice by failing to report the facts we’ve worked so hard to discover.

The goal is not to avoid criticism, pander to partisans or appease the public. The aim is not to win affection from readers and viewers. It does not require us to fall back on euphemisms when we should be speaking plainly. It does not mean we as a profession labor without moral conviction about right and wrong.

Nor was the principle of objectivity “meant to imply that journalists were free of bias,” as Tom Rosenstiel, a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland and former executive director of the American Press Institute, and Bill Kovach, a former top editor, wrote in their book, “The Elements of Journalism.” “Quite the contrary,” they noted. The term arose “out of a growing recognition that journalists were full of bias, often unconsciously. Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information — a transparent approach to evidence — precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.”

As Rosenstiel and Kovach pointed out, “the method is objective, not the journalist,” and “the key was in the discipline of the craft.”

The idea is to be open-minded when we begin our research and to do that work as conscientiously as possible. It demands a willingness to listen, an eagerness to learn — and an awareness that there is much for us to know.

We don’t start with the answers. We go seeking them, first with the already formidable challenge of asking the right questions and finally with the arduous task of verification.

It’s not that we know nothing when we embark on our reporting. It is that we don’t know everything. And typically we don’t know much, or perhaps even most, of what we should. And what we think we know may not be right or may be missing important pieces. And so we set out to learn what we do not know or do not fully understand.

I call that reporting. If that’s not what we mean by genuine reporting, what exactly do we mean?

I believe our profession would benefit from listening more to the public and from talking less at the public, as if we knew it all. I believe we should be more impressed with what we don’t know than with what we know — or think we know. In journalism, we could use more humility — and less hubris.

We of course want journalists to bring their life experiences to their jobs. The collective life experiences of all of us in a newsroom are an invaluable resource of ideas and perspectives. But every individual’s life experience is, inescapably, narrow. Life experience can inform us. But, let’s be honest, it can also limit us. There is an immense universe beyond the lives we ourselves have lived. And if there are constraints on our ability to understand a world beyond our own, we as journalists should strive to overcome them.

I made a statement in my retirement note to staff in early 2021 that reflects my belief: “We start with more questions than answers, inclined more to curiosity and inquiry than to certitude. We always have more to learn.”

This gets at a point that my longtime friend and competitor, Dean Baquet, then executive editor of the New York Times, eloquently articulated in a speech in 2021. I wholeheartedly embrace his perspective.

Dean said: “My theory, secretly shared by many editors I know and respect, is that one of the major crises in our profession is the erosion of the primacy of reporting.”

“There is not enough talk about the beauty of open-minded and empathetic reporting and the fear that its value will fade in an era where hot takes, quick analysis and riffs are held in such high esteem. …”

“Certainty,” Dean said, “is one of the enemies of great reporting.” And he called upon reporting to be “restored to the center.”

Dean quoted Jason DeParle, the New York Times’s superb reporter on poverty in America: “The great lesson of reporting,” Jason said, “is that the world is almost always more complicated and unlikely than it seems while sitting at your desk.”

None of these statements argues for false balance. They argue for genuine understanding of all people and perspectives and a receptivity to learning unfamiliar facts.

None argue for ignoring or soft-pedaling the revelations of our reporting. They are arguments for exhaustively thorough and open-minded research.

None of them are arguments against moral values in our work. Of course, we as a profession must have a moral core, and it begins with valuing truth, equal and fair treatment of all people, giving voice to the voiceless and the vulnerable, countering hate and violence, safeguarding freedom of expression and democratic values, and rejecting abuses of power.

All of them, however, suggest we avoid self-appointment as moral authorities. All are arguments against stories that are precooked before a lick of research is conducted, where source selection is an exercise in confirmation bias and where comment is sought (often at the last minute) only because it’s required and not as an essential ingredient of honest inquiry.

All argue against a madcap rush to social media soapboxes with spur-of-the-moment feelings or irrepressible snark and virtue signaling.

All of them are arguments for acknowledging our limitations — for simultaneously opening the aperture of journalism and going deeper. That is the simple demand of objectivity and what, to me, is its unarguable point.

To those today who say that the media needs to be explicitly pro-democracy, I would say this: Every newspaper I’ve ever worked for always has been. They have been vigorously protecting democracy for decades. How is it possible that you failed to notice?

One of the ways those news organizations protected democracy was by holding government and other powerful interests accountable.

When The Washington Post broke open the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon, along with his aides and allies, portrayed The Post’s journalists as liars and political opponents. In the end, their reporting was vindicated, and ultimately the Nixon administration was held to account for abuse of power, criminal behavior and obstruction of justice.

When the New York Times first published the Pentagon Papers, the secret official history of the Vietnam War, it was accused of treason and threatened with criminal prosecution on the grounds that it had revealed classified information. So was The Washington Post, which began publishing the Pentagon Papers shortly afterward. But what was the government really trying to conceal from the public? How it had deceived American citizens about the war and its progress. The Times and The Post stood their ground on behalf of informing the American public.

When the Boston Globe in 2002 exposed a decades-long coverup of sexual abuse by clergy in the Catholic Church, we were taking on what was then the most powerful institution in New England. There was every chance that the large Catholic population of the region would react by canceling subscriptions. But we did our work anyway, exposing how the Church had betrayed parishioners and its own principles. The repercussions continue today — within dioceses throughout the world and within the Vatican itself.

Today, the question is commonly asked: Was the media, in adhering to traditional standards, up to the task of covering a government led by Donald Trump, with his pattern of mendacity and anti-democratic impulses?

And yet virtually everything the public knows about his lies and his abuse of power is because of the work of mainstream news organizations.

There is no profession without flaws. There is not one that always fulfills its highest ideals. Journalism is by no means an exception. We have often failed, embarrassingly and egregiously. We often did harm: Through errors of commission and errors of omission. Because of haste and neglect. Because of prejudice and arrogance.

But our failures were not ones of principle. They were failures to live up to principle.

We can — and should — have a vigorous debate about how a democracy and the press can serve the public better. But the answer to our failures as a society and as a profession is not to renounce principles and standards. There is far too much of that taking place in today’s America. The answer is to restate our principles, reinforce them, recommit to them and do a better job of fulfilling them.

Nature's bad editorial is a small part of a bigger problem

www.slowboring.com

Nature's bad editorial is a small part of a bigger problem

Matthew Yglesias

14 - 17 minutes

Hey Chicago! Come hang out at an informal Slow Boring happy hour tonight, starting at 5:30 p.m. at Radio Room, 400 North State Street.

In October 2020, the scientific journal Nature took the unusual step of endorsing Joe Biden’s election — the first time the publication had ever endorsed a candidate for office.

“No US president in recent history has so relentlessly attacked and undermined so many valuable institutions, from science agencies to the media, the courts, the Department of Justice — and even the electoral system,” they wrote. “Trump claims to put ‘America First’. But in his response to the pandemic, Trump has put himself first, not America.”

Their argument was not particularly novel, but I was broadly sympathetic to the points and certainly found it understandable that the journal’s editors wanted to do what they could to contribute to the functioning of society. It also did not, at the time, strike me as an intervention that was likely to be successful. And this fall, Nature’s sister publication, Nature Human Behavior, did what science journals do best and published an experiment. Floyd Jiuyun Zhang conducted a pre-registered exercise in which he randomly exposed participants to information about the Nature endorsement. He found that doing so “caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters” and a big reduction in Trump supporters’ level of interest in Nature as a source of information on Covid-related topics like vaccine efficacy. He reports that “the endorsement also reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general,” but there is “little evidence that the endorsement changed views about Biden and Trump.”

I do not find this result shocking.

Changing minds about presidential politics is an undertaking with a very high degree of difficulty. The Nature article was not well-designed to persuade anyone, but my guess is that more conventional newspaper endorsements probably matter a fair amount for things like city council primaries and not at all for presidential general elections. What really did surprise me was Nature’s reaction to the follow-up study, which was to publish a second editorial arguing “political endorsements might not always win hearts and minds, but when candidates threaten a retreat from reason, science must speak out.”

This second editorial is really dumb, and I can’t explain why much better than Josh Barro does here. It also, unfortunately, speaks to a much broader pathology: modern technology has greatly increased the size of the audience that the average person can reach and also greatly increased the number of people who can reach genuinely large audiences. And due to the stochastic nature of virality, it’s at least possible that something a very obscure person says will end up circulating widely. As Uncle Ben says, with great power comes great responsibility — people need to learn to at least try to practice responsible posting. Nature is in the unusual position of having specific evidence that what they did was counterproductive and they persisted anyway, which is really bad.

Holden Thorp, who edits the Science family of journals, liked the Nature editorial and explained his view in a series of badly misguided tweets. Flagging this poll result from Pew, Thorp argued that “following the admonition to stick to science is conceding the idea that scientists can be sidelined in policy decisions. ‘Stick to science’ infantilizes scientists and tells us to sit at the kids table and let the adults decide.”

He followed that with a complaint that the public doesn’t actually want science, it wants “scientific information they can use as they see fit.”

I think any left-of-center person can very clearly see the problem with this by thinking about a community of experts whose political opinions they generally disagree with.

For example, the mayor of a large city cannot completely ignore the opinions of the police department’s leadership or rank-and-file officers or other law enforcement experts. These professionals have information, expertise, and practical know-how that is invaluable. At the same time, “just do whatever the cops want” is not a good approach to policing either. Some of that is because the cops may be sincerely mistaken about things — practitioners have unique insights but also blind spots — but it’s also because like any interest group, they have selfish desires that are not in the public interest.

The military is another obvious example. Congress can’t draw up the budget for the Navy without talking to naval officers and taking their views seriously. But “information they can use as they see fit” is ideally what the officers would be giving Congress. Congress probably can’t actually get that idealized information in the real world; the information provided is invariably colored by self-interest, by bias, by blind spots. That’s life, and we should be realists about it. But if we started seeing admirals tweeting about how “information they can use as they see fit” is a bad ideal, and actually the way it should work is that Annapolis graduates receive absolute deference, that would be alarming.

And note that these dynamics can be poisonous in both directions.

I think progressive city officials really did go overboard in ignoring cops’ professional expertise in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. But that happened in part because police unions spent the prior five years being unduly dismissive of urban progressives’ concerns and failing to distinguish their specific expertise from their all-around conservative political opinions.

By the same token, I don’t see how anyone could read Thorp’s tweets and not come away with a somewhat reduced level of confidence in anything politically relevant that comes out of his journals. Scientists are, as a whole, well to the left of the American public in their political opinions. That doesn’t mean their outputs will be biased by groupthink, peer pressure, and ideology. But it certainly means those are reasonable things to guard against. When a top editor dismisses those concerns, dismisses the idea of worrying about the appearance of bias, and then says that providing people with “information they can use as they see fit” isn’t a good regulative ideal, public confidence naturally falls. That’s bad, and it’s especially bad if you think scientific knowledge has something important to offer the political domain.

I often feel like actually trying to persuade people is underrated.

It’s a tough assignment because it involves doing something a little unnatural. When I wrote “The Case for Bernie Sanders” for Vox, I tried to write an article that didn’t just repeat the normal pro-Bernie talking points because I wanted to address moderate Democrats’ fears.

So I noted, for example, that exactly zero of Bernie’s far-fetched policy ideas would come to fruition in a Sanders administration because the congressional pivot points would be in the hands of someone to the right of Joe Biden. But I also argued that Bernie is a veteran member of Congress who’s actually been a reasonably effective legislator. He knows how to get bills and amendments passed, and he has a good track record of saying yes to other people’s incremental reforms. He’s absolutely cast “no” votes dissenting from bipartisan legislation he regards as too moderate or otherwise inadequate. But whenever his vote is absolutely needed to get something important done, he casts it in support of the Democrats’ agenda, including on bills like Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act. Of course, Bernie didn’t become president. But his role during the Biden era has been exactly what I expected: he’s been a pragmatic legislator who didn’t throw bombs and blow up the IRA or the American Rescue Plan.

I will admit that not as many moderates were persuaded by my pro-Bernie argument as I hoped. But I really was trying — trying to imagine a persuadable audience, trying to imagine what they were worried about, trying to imagine how I could set some of those fears to rest.

None of this is as fun as clowning around and dunking on someone your intended audience already dislikes.

And it’s totally fair that people want, to some extent, to just have fun on the internet and not worry too much about whether the things they’re saying or doing are constructive politics. But I do think Eitan Hersh’s concept of “political hobbyism” is important here because politics-adjacent speech invites confusion in a way that speech about a hobby like Minecraft or college basketball or a monthly book club does not. Because part of what makes politics compelling for the minority of people who pay close attention to it is that politics really matters, that the stakes are high in presidential elections, and that alongside the nonsense that accretes to any campaign, we are also debating ideas of consequence.

Under the circumstances, it’s incredibly easy to delude yourself into believing that the forms of political expression you personally enjoy are also the ones that are constructive and useful. Sometimes that might even be true. But generally, you need to be on guard against self-deception.

The upshot of this is that I think everyone, from the editors of science journals to professors who like to tweet about their areas of academic expertise to political obsessives posting pseudonymously while slacking off on their real jobs, would benefit from thinking a little bit harder about what they say.

We’re all habituated to living in a world where there’s a big dichotomy between being a guest on the Today Show and blowing off steam at the bar. You have one way of thinking about your words for that big broadcast television spot (cautious, measured, considered) and another when you’re just shooting the shit with friends. But the nature of social media is to collapse that distinction. It wouldn’t do to be stilted and formal all the time on social media — it’s social! — but at the same time, it really is media. It’s very hard to say how many right-wing frog-meme people there are or what their actual influence is, but their weird, creepy, racist, anti-semitic behavior during the 2016 campaign was incredibly off-putting. I’m sure 90% of the people who posted “defund the police” Instagram memes in the summer of 2020 had never looked into this topic and had no genuine strong feelings about police budgets, they were just trying to express the idea that racism is bad and avow solidarity with its victims. But that didn’t stop “defund the police” from becoming a huge political issue that’s backfired and hurt reform causes.

A lot of scientists felt strongly about the importance of urging people to adopt sound approaches to the pandemic in their personal lives and also about the merits of Biden vs. Trump. Mushing these two ideas together was not constructive any more than tweeting “ban cars!” is a good way to convince people that we should alter our transportation policy priorities. There’s no way to force everyone to act like well-behaved messaging robots. But I do think we all have the ability, at the margin, to control our own behavior and the kind of behavior we incentivize. Fundamentally, we all have to try our best to discourage ill-disciplined and counterproductive behavior, even in the absence of a quick fix or obvious solution.

At this point, I think astute readers are probably thinking “does this asshole realize how often he’s failed to practice what he’s preaching here?”

And honestly — I do! This is a topic I’ve thought a lot about because I love writing at high volume. I loved writing multiple blog posts per day, I love tweeting constantly, and when you do what you love, you sometimes take things too far. I’m also someone who thinks that on some level, there is too much cowardice and too much groupthink in the content game, so I’d hate to be read as simply encouraging everyone to be more fearful and timid. What I would like is for everyone to be more thoughtful and considerate. In Dan Zak’s profile of me for the Washington Post, he highlights two specific instances (my Rana Plaza blog post and my Uvalde tweet) that I think are clear and egregious examples of content that failed to meet this standard. In both cases, I had a kernel of an idea that I thought was valid but the time, place, and manner of the posts and the framing weren’t just “provocative” but obnoxious and counterproductive.

But I would say a more workaday problem is that like everyone, I sometimes have a bad day and feel grumpy and easily annoyed. When you write from a place of peevish annoyance, you can sometimes generate entertaining copy or social media posts that feel therapeutic. But that’s rarely constructive.

As a counterpoint, though, I’d offer my tweeting jag about fake license plates in D.C. This was actually a considered strategy that I knew would prompt some backlash under circumstances where I thought a backlash would be constructive by elevating the salience of a problem nobody was talking about but where I think the solutions are relatively uncontroversial. Despite the perception of a Twitter pile-on, I’ve gotten positive feedback from a number of elected officials around the country. We had ANC members in D.C. start to tweet about the problem, the Department of Public Works is becoming more responsive to citizen complaints about fake tags, Tom Fitzgerald (a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who follows me on Twitter) published a great investigative piece about the Philly version of this problem, local TV news in D.C. did a story about it last week, and Brianne Nadeau who chairs the relevant committee in the D.C. Council is promising to put forward legislation. I don’t want to claim that my tweets somehow single-handedly caused all this, but I was not just posting because I felt irritated — I felt that relatively easy and uncontroversial solutions were available if only more people paid attention to the issue, so it would be constructive to do something attention-grabbing.

But many times in my life I’ve posted thoughtlessly or self-indulgently, just like I’ve eaten bags of potato chips I should have left unopened or had one more drink at the bar when I should have said “enough.” A lot of people don’t enjoy public writing at all, but for those of us who do like it, I think it’s pretty natural to be sloppy about it sometimes. That said, I think this is the kind of situation where you want to respond to potential accusations of hypocrisy by leveling up and saying we should all try to reach a higher standard rather than avoid these accusations by leveling down and giving everyone a pass. The Nature thing was unusually egregious because they had a study at hand, but that really ought to be a signal for us to all be more diligent.