Mailbag: More philosophical than usual

Plus, George Eliot's mod takes and why normal teachers are repped by weird unions

Five things I accomplished this week:

• Gave a talk at Penn

• Wrote some articles

• Recorded an episode of Politix and guested on Jane Coaston’s pod

• Answered some emails

• Strongly considered addressing a backlog of invoices I need to send, but procrastinated

Hopefully, you guys won’t fire me!

The first half of our mailbag questions today come from our GiveDirectly fundraiser participants. Thanks again to everyone who joined!

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Cathy C: Why don’t we see in the media today an invitation to approach today’s chaos from a place of meta-awareness?  I don’t think the works of Eckhardt Tolle, Byron Katie, and Epictetus (just read James Stockdale’s “Courage Under Fire” Hoover essay) — which teach us how to work with our mindsets to find peace with what is — are selfish or elitist. Katie’s book called “Loving What Is” might sound like denial, but to me it’s an inspiring way to deal with scary world events and make me a more supportive citizen. What do you two think?

I have to confess that I have not read any of these authors. But, I am broadly sympathetic to what you’re saying, which I think aligns with what I was trying to say about Slow Boring’s approach to Trump coverage. I don’t want to paint an overly rosy or Pollyanna-ish view of the situation. But if you stipulate that the current situation is bad and the trajectory of policy is bad, then I think that a lot of left-of-center people are currently deploying too much time and mental energy on contemplating exactly how bad. However bad things may be, all you can do is to see what opportunities may exist and make the most of them.

Mark K: What was your dating life like when you were single? What kind of women did you date and how did you meet them? How did you know when you'd met the woman you wanted to marry?

We don’t usually get so personal on here! I was not what I would have called a big ladies man in my pre-marriage days, though by the standards of what I read about the contemporary dating scene, I feel like we all were. Mainly, though, I had two long-term girlfriends before I met Kate. In retrospect, in both cases, the relationships had sort of fundamental misalignments that should have made it pretty clear that we weren’t going to end up together, and they probably should have ended long before they did.

After that second breakup, I had a mindset shift that might be considered red-pilled these days (or maybe not), but really only had two elements. One was that if you ask a bunch of girls out, some of them will go out with you, whereas if you don’t, none of them will. The other was that if you’re actually paying attention, it’s pretty easy to tell if things aren’t going to work out in the long run, even if the person you’re seeing is nice. So when I met Kate, I not only knew right away that she was beautiful and brilliant and charming, but also that we had broadly compatible values and goals in life.

Yoel I: What do you make of moral arguments from effective altruists that seem logically sound but lead to extremely counter-intuitive conclusions? For example, Substacker Bentham’s Bulldog has argued that we should care a lot about the suffering of farmed shrimp, or of wild animals. The arguments seem simple and correct if you grant some premises that seem unobjectionable (suffering is bad and we should reduce it, our moral concern for non-human animals should not be zero), but the conclusions seem ridiculous. As someone who generally thinks reasoning is a good way to decide how to give, this worries me.

The shrimp welfare thing unquestionably sounds weird, in the sense that if you told a room full of strangers that you were very concerned about the well-being of shrimp, I would expect them to have puzzled and negative reactions. But I don’t think the argument is actually all that counterintuitive. To me, the reason that it sounds weird is that the underlying fact pattern is odd:

• There are just an incredibly large number of farmed shrimp in the world, five times the number of farmed land animals.

• Standard shrimp slaughtering practices don’t involve any standards for humane treatment.

• Very straightforward approaches like electrical stunning exist, are proven, and work at scale.

It just happens to be true that relatively modest interventions can save a very large number of creatures from painful slaughter. I think this sounds like a weird idea on first mention primarily because normal people (a) don’t think about the quantity of shrimp in the world and (b) have no information about shrimp slaughter practices.

But while shrimp are obviously not adorable or as relatable as some mammals, if you saw a kid with a tank of water and some shrimp in it and he was torturing them, you’d find that to be objectionable behavior. The idea that the shrimp’s interests count for something is not that strange. And even though our farmed land animals are generally treated quite poorly, we do accept some standards for humane slaughter as a matter of course. Why should shrimp be different? The actual counterintuitive thing — the thing that surprised me when I heard about it (but that I will also confess I have not investigated in great detail) — was that more humane methods exist and are perfectly workable, but just not used.

Michael: I’d be interested to hear Matt articulate his moral philosophy and its influences. The GiveDirectly donation drive suggests a certain consequentialist inclination / desire to do altruistic things effectively, and moral themes have been coming up in Matt’s writing (or at least tweeting) lately. But despite Matt's background in philosophy, I don't recall him referencing specific theories of ethics or particular philosophers much. So I'm curious what he actually thinks about ethics, and why.

I did not specialize in moral philosophy in college, so while I do know more about this than the average person, I don’t have incredibly detailed academic opinions about it.

But I do broadly align with utilitarian/consequentialist ideas, and I particularly like the formulation Richard Y Chappell calls Beneficentrism, which is simply the claim that one very important thing in life is to try to help others, including those who are very different or distant from ourselves.

I think that in that formulation, you address in one fell swoop 95 percent of what trips people up about utilitarianism. You can take special care of your friends and family. You can care more about citizens of your country than you care about people on the other side of the world. But you should care some about the general welfare. This is in fact pretty important and you should be doing something about it. How much? Probably more than you are doing. Probably more than I am doing.

Daniel L: There’s been a push recently to contact your representatives frequently. Is this useful? Counterproductive? Low-effort form letters don’t seem like they’d be impactful, especially when sent to my MAGA-ish Republican senator. I could craft a more nuanced message that could plausibly have come from a Republican voter, but I suspect it would just be sorted into an overall support/oppose tally anyway. And to my Democratic representatives, I wouldn’t want to accidentally push them to more extreme positions that end up hurting them electorally. Plus, if they’re already doing what they can, sending them letters might be more of an annoyance than anything. The whole thing seems like a bad use of everyone’s time, but I’m wondering if you had any insight.

Members do care about their mail, and I think it’s a good idea to write slightly nuanced messages. Just something as simple as, “Senator so-and-so, I live in your state, and I’m worried about X and I wish you’d do Y” counts for something. I wouldn’t bother pretending to be a Republican. It’s just that you should pick an issue to write about where it’s plausible that a Republican might be on the other side. Mail criticizing deficit-increasing tax cuts or big cuts to Medicaid is going to give GOP members at least a little pause. If you write saying they should ban handguns, they’re not going to care.

I agree with not accidentally pushing Democrats into extreme views. You could always just thank them! You could say something like, “I know a lot of people seem irrationally mad that Democrats aren’t ‘doing more’ to stop Trump, but I think voting no on the House budget was a good idea and I hope you won’t vote for any appropriations bills, unless they ensure Trump will actually follow the law and implement them.”

Jennifer: What do you think about the idea of turning community colleges into a system that looks more like K-12 education and less like public higher ed? Seems like the majority of states have some sort of “free community college” program (but not actually always free and requires jumping through hoops), and a significant portion of many community college students are actually high school students in dual-enrollment programs. So, some layer(s) of government are already spending lots of money on community college. Why not make community college free and open (but not mandatory) to any resident who wants to enroll?

I don’t have any huge objections to this.

The cautionary note that I would flag is that the actual quality of community college institutions seems to vary very widely. Raj Chetty and his team have documented that certain community colleges, especially in big immigrant entrepôt cities, are incredible engines of upward mobility. And in general, students who actually complete programs at community colleges seem to earn a good return on investment. But it also seems to be the case that a lot of people enroll in community college intending to transfer to a four-year institution and get a bachelor’s degree, but don’t actually finish. There are also some widespread misalignments between community college programming and what employers say they are looking for in workers.

This all means that I would be a little hesitant to do things that are focused on increasing community college uptake without first taking steps to improve completion rates and outcomes.

Ben B: I'm interested in what advice Matt would give current Democratic Mayor of Detroit Michael Duggan in his independent run for Governor of Michigan.

I think it’s a really bad idea, and he should run in a Democratic primary.

Ethan Morales: I’m interested in the idea of “centrism” as it relates to the arc of political history. Both the left and the right believe that there is a correct vision of politics that the country needs to move towards — this directionality is obvious in the rhetoric of the Left (especially the “wrong side of history” language), and increasingly so in the Right. In other words, both are working off models of an ideal society.

I’m a moderate/centrist, terms you frequently associate yourself with. But I struggle with the question of political change over time. The Left is right that politics does shift over time, and the “centrist”positions, while likely politically vital in the moment for making that shift possible (as you have discussed before), are not seen as the “correct” result. The middle ground on halting slavery’s expansion was potentially politically vital instead of pressing abolition too early, but it wasn’t the end result people today would say it was acceptable to stay at.

Yet many “moderate” stances today do feel like an endpoint. We should police public disorder while also being attentive to police misconduct, etc. I’m sure historic centrists felt this way too — it cannot be that this moment is the one moment where centrism is actually the endpoint. How do you think about centrism as it relates to the arc of history? Is centrism really in the middle between Left and Right, as the metaphor describes, and if so, is the particular middle at the moment a landing point, or a tactical tool? What’s your political end state — what are we boring the boards towards?

George Eliot is known today primarily as a novelist, but something I learned recently is that before she was publishing fiction, she and a guy named John Chapman ran a politics and culture magazine called The Westminster Review.