Old Scottish joke:
An old man at a bar is complaining. “You see that bridge there? I built it with my own hands! But do they call me ‘MacGregor The Bridge-Builder’? No! And I raised five beautiful children! But do they call me ‘MacGregor The Child-Raiser’? No! But, you fuck
onesheep . . .”
Has MacGregor been treated unfairly?
This was my complaint in The Beauty Of Settled Science. Psychology laid bare the secrets of the brain - it performs computations through a neural network communicating via electrical impulses intermediated by neurotransmitters crossing synaptic gaps - but do they call it Psychology The Brain-Secret-Revealer? Its concepts have turned into the categories that ordinary people use to interpret the world - extraverts, ingroups, the unconscious, IQ, Pavlovian conditioning - but do they call it Psychology The Useful Concept Creator? But you do one (thousand) bad social priming studies!
I had the same complaint in In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism. Nobody has the slightest interest in the first-order effects of effective altruism - the hundreds of thousands of lives saved - but you buy one castle! Even capitalism is a sort of MacGregor - the average kid these days seems to think of it as centrally about Mark Zuckerberg stealing your data, rather than about whether you have electricity at all, or whether you die from cholera at age three because your country is too poor to afford health care. Someone or something spends years, decades, or centuries doing amazing work, winning victory after victory, and it all fades into noise, leaving the topic to be identified entirely with last week’s tawdry scandal.
On a more personal level, this is the essence of cancel culture. You judge someone by their single worst and most embarrassing action. At its worst, the victim gets fired, but that part is hardly necessary. For a while, the culture enforced conformity just by making sure that the slightest deviation would become 100% of your reputation. Write 100 great blog posts on technical topics, 100 orthodox liberal blog posts, and one blog post expressing where you disagreed with feminism, and for the rest of your life the media would introduce you as “So-and-so, known for his anti-feminist blogging…” Everyone knew this would happen, and it was more than enough to produce chilling effects even without the immediate job loss.
One time we invited Richard Hanania to a prediction market conference. There were five or six news articles about it, and I can’t remember whether any of them mentioned the word “prediction”. As far as our reputation was concerned, it had become the Richard Hanania Conference For Richard Hananias. You invent an amazing new form of forecasting, incubate multibillion dollar startups, accidentally get thousands of people addicted to sports gambling - but you invite *one *conservative! If you allow this sort of thing, you can discredit any individual, field, or movement. Nobody is perfect enough to survive having every good thing they’ve ever done swept to one side while people hyperfocus on a single indiscretion. In this sense, the dynamic that MacGregor points out is antithetical to human freedom.
On the other hand, I do this all the time and don’t feel bad about it. For example, I assume Anthony Weiner had a rich and diverse career full of many highs, lows, accomplishments, and defeats. He even spent twelve years in Congress - for all I know, he saved taxpayers billions of dollars, or created new social programs to help the neediest among us, or cut red tape to unleash some new form of economic dynamism. Maybe he burnt himself out over years, spending late nights hunched over his desk trying to get the text of some bill exactly right, stressed to the point of ulceration about the possibility of failing in his duty to the American people. I have no idea. All I know about him is that he kept sending pictures of his penis to women who were not his wife, and that one of these times, it had an indirect but significant effect on the 2016 presidential election. Am I being a bad and unfair person for not caring too much about the rest of his Congressional career, let alone whether he is a good husband or a good father or a dutiful son or loves volleyball or collects stamps or otherwise has a multifaceted life?
If I were to force myself to regard Anthony Weiner as a complex individual - maybe go over his Wikipedia page and carefully read every section except Scandals - it would feel like exactly that: forcing myself. Even after doing this (I tried it as an experiment) I’m still unable to think of him in any terms besides “generic Congressman who did various generic Congressman things and then had some extremely nominative deterministic sex scandals”. Apparently he fought hard for health care for 9-11 first responders, good job Representative Weiner, too bad I am going to forget about that literally the moment I stop typing this sentence. Trying to temper judgment this way feels like violence against my brain’s attention heads, the sort of thing that would turn me into an opinionless zombie.
(It’s the same with people who make one nasty barb on Twitter. No matter what else they accomplish, they will always and forever be “that one guy who called my friend an ignorant buffoon that one time”. I feel bad about it, I try to regard them as a complex individual who may do good work, but I can’t do.)
I still find the problem of how to be scrupulously fair to MacGregor one of the thorniest social-norm-related questions, and have no good solution. I hope he accepts the title of this post as partial compensation.
