Congratulations, Bryan! I find it genuinely moving that you’ve been inspired by your reading to engage in the business of democracy. Not always exciting, but we desperately need people doing this work, especially youngs promoting fresh ideas. Totally unironically, thank you for your service!
In terms of Informed Citizenness I really appreciate my subscription to The Economist. They have an editorial slant that's sometimes wrong but they still give a fair hearing to other points of view, but when they cover something I know a lot about I've always found their coverage pretty reasonable and better than any other general purpose publication I can think of.
Former journalist here. Here's a few good reasons for quoting experts:
1. Many experts don't write in lay terms but are capable of speaking normal English in conversation.
2. What the expert wrote is what they thought as of the publication date. A journalist might want to know what they think today, particularly in response to some current controversy.
3. Many journalists are just plain out of their depth on some of the topics they have to cover.
With all of that said, journalists often include expert quotes for non-good reasons, such is to smuggle their own opinions into the piece.
On history, Devereaux easily got the better of that argument. But it's understandable that historians are touchy these days. One of my college majors was history and I love history, but I have to admit none of the main justifications for history as a profession or field are especially flattering to the egos of historians. The most common, popular reason for history -- which many professional historians claim to disavow -- is to create identities for current living people. Telling each other stories about a real or imagined past to construct an identity we can share with other living people -- but that use of history isn't really about the past at all, the past is just a convenient grab-bag of mythmaking material for use in the present. And accuracy is totally beside the point -- a straight-up myth will serve the purpose just as well as meticulous research if present-day people buy it.
A second purpose of history, perhaps the truest from a practitioner's perspective -- is history as antiquarianism/hobbyism. It's fun to geek out about studying some obscure, strange foreign society in the past, for the same reason that's fun to imagine alternative worlds in fiction, etc., Here, accuracy in some objective sense matters a lot, from a nerd perspective. But it's not very important to people who aren't into it as a hobby.
A third purpose of history, which I suspect some academic historians have fallen into as a way to justify their funding, is essentially history as extended-anthropology, or extended-political science, extended economics, etc. Simply using past societies to expand the pool of human experience to which modern social science techniques can be applied. But why? The evidence in the past is so much thinner, and there are so many more unknown variables that it's hard to see what the value is of doing this.
Given how much richer California is than Mexico, I think one could make a moral argument that the US should have tried to take even more land from them.
Somehow the reparations bargain with Native Americans seems to have been "well how about we let you open casinos?"
I'm half-kidding, but there's some substance there. I watched with amusement as the rural whites where I grew up freaked out as the local tribal government became far more wealthy than the decaying little midwestern town...
I'd like Matt to weigh in more on Bret's actual response, because I don't think Noah Smith's argument comes across as made in good faith, and Bret seems to take the time to respond, while Matt's just handwaving it as "See, Bret had to type up all of his feelings like a thin-skinned academic!" It's feels too close to old trolling on the blogosphere of "Well I must be right because you got so upset about what I said you posted a long response!"
With all due respect, your response to David's last question about media consumption wasn't good or helpful. A lot of us have the same question and we'd appreciate a fuller response. For example, I subscribe to Slow Boring, NYT and The Dispatch and I feel better informed these days about different perspectives. But, if I didn't subscribe to The Dispatch, I'd most definitely be missing a lot of good, intelligent and thought-provoking center right points of view. Honestly, it was only after The Dispatch quoted a couple takes by you and presented them as "a center left perspective to take seriously" that I discovered Slow Boring and subscribed. I'm glad I did!
I concur with the folks disappointed by the NYT recommendation. It's true that there's occasionally good reporting, and their newsletters are quite good (RIP, Jay Caspian Kang), but I feel like the paper has succumbed to the worst sort of click-bait style headlines and misleading paragraph organization (Apoorva Mandavilli's COVID reporting, for example). I often get to the end of an article and realize that it has argued the opposite of the headline. And these complaints are all before considering the rigidly orthodox Democratic (party) perspective underwriting the topic selection among news articles or the deeply provincial point-of-view on cultural matters that take Manhattan as normative and authoritative (relative to the globe, not just "flyover country").
I'm fundamentally looking for news on matters of significance that can surprise me, at the level of story selection or detail (or both). It's demoralizing to read coverage that feels like it was written by a third-generation AI.
Then there are the comments, wow: a nightmare of repetitive, predictable in-group boundary-policing. Any opinion piece that tries to push the audience the tiniest bit triggers an onslaught of detailed comments accusing the author of "bothsiderism" followed by a tedious rehash of the crimes of Donald Trump and his accomplices in the Republican party. I get it, I hate him too, but there's more to the world, my friends.
Maybe Matt felt he couldn't recommend Bloomberg, due to a conflict of interest? I think both Bloomberg's and the Wall Street Journal's news sections are more limited, but significantly better than the NYT. Al Jazeera is often better, too. I used to like the British papers, but the Guardian just feels like feels like an NYT clone now.
Just read the Bret Devereaux piece. Can’t recommend it highly enough! A really good exposition to some of the ways historians think and work and their unique contributions, often precisely because History doesn’t work like mainstream Social Sciences. Also, that Noah Smith guy comes across as an ignorant jerk, but maybe it’s just Twitter being a bad influence ?
I am also Team Chip - tortilla and potato - but you all are wrong: great chips should not have artificial flavors sprinkled on them. Thank you for listening.
The response to Bret's post is a bit facile. You tweeted that it was confusing why historians resist explicit reasoning about counterfactuals and in his post he expressly responded to your point:
"We tend to refuse to engage in counterfactual analysis because we look at the evidence and conclude that it cannot support the level of confidence we’d need to have. This is not a mindless, Luddite resistance but a considered position on the epistemic limits of knowing the past or predicting the future."
Your response to this was: "For myself, this has mostly served as a reminder of how thin-skinned academics are!"
Bret's response (to you at least) is not in the least defensive, he's addressing your position. It's dismissive to essentially reply 'Y U Mad Bro'. It seems you should either respond to his point or say something along the lines 'Thanks for addressing my question, I still like counterfactuals though - might substack about it later but I'm not going to do a detailed response.'
Don't feel bad about abandoning R, Matt. As a coder, I can tell it's not for everyone, and it’s why I always hated the “learn to code” slam on journalists—especially since almost all of those assholes don't know how to code themselves.
Congratulations, Bryan! I find it genuinely moving that you’ve been inspired by your reading to engage in the business of democracy. Not always exciting, but we desperately need people doing this work, especially youngs promoting fresh ideas. Totally unironically, thank you for your service!
In terms of Informed Citizenness I really appreciate my subscription to The Economist. They have an editorial slant that's sometimes wrong but they still give a fair hearing to other points of view, but when they cover something I know a lot about I've always found their coverage pretty reasonable and better than any other general purpose publication I can think of.
Former journalist here. Here's a few good reasons for quoting experts:
1. Many experts don't write in lay terms but are capable of speaking normal English in conversation.
2. What the expert wrote is what they thought as of the publication date. A journalist might want to know what they think today, particularly in response to some current controversy.
3. Many journalists are just plain out of their depth on some of the topics they have to cover.
With all of that said, journalists often include expert quotes for non-good reasons, such is to smuggle their own opinions into the piece.
On history, Devereaux easily got the better of that argument. But it's understandable that historians are touchy these days. One of my college majors was history and I love history, but I have to admit none of the main justifications for history as a profession or field are especially flattering to the egos of historians. The most common, popular reason for history -- which many professional historians claim to disavow -- is to create identities for current living people. Telling each other stories about a real or imagined past to construct an identity we can share with other living people -- but that use of history isn't really about the past at all, the past is just a convenient grab-bag of mythmaking material for use in the present. And accuracy is totally beside the point -- a straight-up myth will serve the purpose just as well as meticulous research if present-day people buy it.
A second purpose of history, perhaps the truest from a practitioner's perspective -- is history as antiquarianism/hobbyism. It's fun to geek out about studying some obscure, strange foreign society in the past, for the same reason that's fun to imagine alternative worlds in fiction, etc., Here, accuracy in some objective sense matters a lot, from a nerd perspective. But it's not very important to people who aren't into it as a hobby.
A third purpose of history, which I suspect some academic historians have fallen into as a way to justify their funding, is essentially history as extended-anthropology, or extended-political science, extended economics, etc. Simply using past societies to expand the pool of human experience to which modern social science techniques can be applied. But why? The evidence in the past is so much thinner, and there are so many more unknown variables that it's hard to see what the value is of doing this.
Given how much richer California is than Mexico, I think one could make a moral argument that the US should have tried to take even more land from them.
“But for me, personally, I would say I get a lot of joy from Twitter. If Twitter is making you unhappy, I think you should try stepping away.”
I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.
Somehow the reparations bargain with Native Americans seems to have been "well how about we let you open casinos?"
I'm half-kidding, but there's some substance there. I watched with amusement as the rural whites where I grew up freaked out as the local tribal government became far more wealthy than the decaying little midwestern town...
The end of this mailbag is a really sick burn at the expense of Bret Stephens
I'd like Matt to weigh in more on Bret's actual response, because I don't think Noah Smith's argument comes across as made in good faith, and Bret seems to take the time to respond, while Matt's just handwaving it as "See, Bret had to type up all of his feelings like a thin-skinned academic!" It's feels too close to old trolling on the blogosphere of "Well I must be right because you got so upset about what I said you posted a long response!"
To me, R was more frustrating than it ended up being worth.
I can do a lot of the same stuff with Python, and it's so much more pleasant to code in.
With all due respect, your response to David's last question about media consumption wasn't good or helpful. A lot of us have the same question and we'd appreciate a fuller response. For example, I subscribe to Slow Boring, NYT and The Dispatch and I feel better informed these days about different perspectives. But, if I didn't subscribe to The Dispatch, I'd most definitely be missing a lot of good, intelligent and thought-provoking center right points of view. Honestly, it was only after The Dispatch quoted a couple takes by you and presented them as "a center left perspective to take seriously" that I discovered Slow Boring and subscribed. I'm glad I did!
I concur with the folks disappointed by the NYT recommendation. It's true that there's occasionally good reporting, and their newsletters are quite good (RIP, Jay Caspian Kang), but I feel like the paper has succumbed to the worst sort of click-bait style headlines and misleading paragraph organization (Apoorva Mandavilli's COVID reporting, for example). I often get to the end of an article and realize that it has argued the opposite of the headline. And these complaints are all before considering the rigidly orthodox Democratic (party) perspective underwriting the topic selection among news articles or the deeply provincial point-of-view on cultural matters that take Manhattan as normative and authoritative (relative to the globe, not just "flyover country").
I'm fundamentally looking for news on matters of significance that can surprise me, at the level of story selection or detail (or both). It's demoralizing to read coverage that feels like it was written by a third-generation AI.
Then there are the comments, wow: a nightmare of repetitive, predictable in-group boundary-policing. Any opinion piece that tries to push the audience the tiniest bit triggers an onslaught of detailed comments accusing the author of "bothsiderism" followed by a tedious rehash of the crimes of Donald Trump and his accomplices in the Republican party. I get it, I hate him too, but there's more to the world, my friends.
Maybe Matt felt he couldn't recommend Bloomberg, due to a conflict of interest? I think both Bloomberg's and the Wall Street Journal's news sections are more limited, but significantly better than the NYT. Al Jazeera is often better, too. I used to like the British papers, but the Guardian just feels like feels like an NYT clone now.
Just read the Bret Devereaux piece. Can’t recommend it highly enough! A really good exposition to some of the ways historians think and work and their unique contributions, often precisely because History doesn’t work like mainstream Social Sciences. Also, that Noah Smith guy comes across as an ignorant jerk, but maybe it’s just Twitter being a bad influence ?
P.S.
Link to the post:
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/29/new-acquisitions-on-the-wisdom-of-noah-smith/
I am also Team Chip - tortilla and potato - but you all are wrong: great chips should not have artificial flavors sprinkled on them. Thank you for listening.
The response to Bret's post is a bit facile. You tweeted that it was confusing why historians resist explicit reasoning about counterfactuals and in his post he expressly responded to your point:
"We tend to refuse to engage in counterfactual analysis because we look at the evidence and conclude that it cannot support the level of confidence we’d need to have. This is not a mindless, Luddite resistance but a considered position on the epistemic limits of knowing the past or predicting the future."
Your response to this was: "For myself, this has mostly served as a reminder of how thin-skinned academics are!"
Bret's response (to you at least) is not in the least defensive, he's addressing your position. It's dismissive to essentially reply 'Y U Mad Bro'. It seems you should either respond to his point or say something along the lines 'Thanks for addressing my question, I still like counterfactuals though - might substack about it later but I'm not going to do a detailed response.'
Don't feel bad about abandoning R, Matt. As a coder, I can tell it's not for everyone, and it’s why I always hated the “learn to code” slam on journalists—especially since almost all of those assholes don't know how to code themselves.