(2021-06-13) Torenberg The Tautology Of The Elites

Erik Torenberg: The Tautology of the Elites. A few weeks ago we spoke about how institutions are failing. (2021-04-26-TorenbergWhyAreInstitutionsFailingUs) This week, we’ll talk about how those institutions — and the elites that run them — stay in power despite their repeated blunders

An easy example to point to would be how our collective sense-making institutions botched COVID-19.

In reality, no one knew what was going on, so everyone used an “appeal to authority”.

Indeed, these appeals to authority run more of society than we realize: Who designs government policies? Experts.

Balaji Srinivasan calls this the information supply chain: Stanford does a study which gets published in a peer reviewed journal, like Nature or Science. That study is then written about in the New York Times and becomes conveyed as truth. Finally, the U.S. Government then enacts some policy based broadly on that original study, claiming their action is based in science.

at least there’s an initial filtering process. It’s the continuous filter process that is lacking. Or in other words, once someone has been blessed—as long as they have the morally right opinions—they face little accountability for repeatedly making incorrect claims or wrong predictions.

Indeed, we’ve been appealing to authority for centuries, except the authority we used to call “God” we now call science.

But science has been misused for centuries too. The Nazis misused it for their eugenics program, and the communists misused it for their model of how the economy works. They too said “believe in science,” and they were wrong.

there's also the question of science vs scientism — the contrast between those who do real scientific inquiry and those who launder the prestige of science into fields where it doesn’t apply, where experiments are harder to replicate and it’s more of an art than a science.

*But just because they say something is true, and just because people believe it, doesn’t mean it’s actually true.

You can see this as the difference between political and technical truths.*

What if we had a way to make political truths more like technical truths — a way to make things based on consensus better align with our objective reality? (futarchy)