The abdication of journalistic standards has been one of the self-inflicted casualties of the Trump Era. The meltdown at CBS because a reporter had the temerity to ask difficult questions to Ta-Nahesi Coates is surprising even to a jaded media-watcher like me.
The example of TNC gives about Israel being similar to the Jim Crow south doesn't make sense to me. In order for that analogy to work the oppressed population of the Jim Crow south would need to have areas where they were operating as militia units, armed by a foreign power with the explicit political goal of eradicating all white people (and their predominate christian religions) in the US. Then whatever resolution ended it would be the example to follow (at least in theory) but that's not what happened in the US. It's apples and olives.
I thought about exploring Coates' views more but then I learned that his knowledge was gained from a ten day visit to Israel and the West Bank after which he declared that the situation was simple and nuance and complexity had no place in the debate so I was very grateful to him for freeing me to use that time for more productive purposes like watching reruns of "The Simpsons."
I thought “manufacturing consent” was interesting in the way it approached how business and political interests overlap to create decentralized systems that act like much more centralized systems. It seemed like a reasonable way to look at a lot of Cold War conflict stuff apart from the vast conspiracy messaging of the day. I didn’t agree with a lot of its conclusions but I thought the presentation of problems was pretty good.
It makes me sad, because TNC was one of my favorite writers on the old Atlantic blog-roll, about 15 years ago. He had a questing intellect, along with a beautiful and self-revealing style, and was quite transparently educating himself in public about all sorts of things. I read his first two books with pleasure.
[Edit to say, I hope unnecessarily, that I didn't always agree with him - far from it, sometimes - but I always loved what he called "the beautiful struggle", by which he meant the hard moral work of improving oneself and the world, and the bravery with which he lived that out with his readers.]
At some point - probably not coincidentally along with the collapse of the wider "blogosphere" - something changed. I suppose he came to his conclusions and doesn't feel like he needs to learn much more - or, at least, not to make that part of his intellectual life so public - but I miss reading the old Ta-Nehesi. Miss that so much.
Honestly feel bad for the guy. Charitably, his book is an error in judgement, but the result is a bonfire of all the goodwill he built up over the years with people who maybe didn't see totally eye-to-eye with him but at least respected his intellect and thoughtfulness.
I mainly think *blogs* were a great medium - maybe the best ever invented - for the exchange of ideas. They died - as a driver of conversation, at least; I'm aware that some people keep at it, and I admire their persistentance - because the major internet platforms (Google and especially Facebook) colonized their content without adequate economic exchange, and because moderating them against spam and trolling became an insupportable burden.
Boy, though, that ten years or so was an intellectual paradise. So many people writing so many amazing things, and having so many amazing discussions, in public, with each other and their readers.
Substack - though I'm glad it's solved the existential issues for a few - is but a pale imitation. In fact, the $$ earned by Matt and others on this platform demonstrates the immense public value that the old blogosphere had, and how great a [societal? | technical? | incentives? | policy?] failure its loss has been.
I'd be interested in Matt's insider take on what changes to what, and when, might have saved that intellectual eco-system. (Or, was it itself an unsustainable parasite, dependent on sucking the carcass of the legacy media institutions that it helped to kill?)
They weren’t even tough questions! Just obvious points that someone should think of within the first three seconds of deciding to write a book on the topic.
I hadn't heard about that controversy until yesterday when I saw an article about Coates' interview with Trevor Noah on the subject, and I was flabbergasted when I was reading about it. It highlighted a related point to me, which is the ways in which some corners of the left have become completely incapable of arguing from substance as opposed to caricature.
I've seen so many instances where progressives will listen to someone say "thing A is LIKE thing B" and then turn around and say "OH! So you're saying that thing A is the same as this part of thing B that you never brought up or compared thing A to but is easily characterized as bad, so what you're really saying is ALL A is the same as ALL B, and some of B is terrible so you're a terrible person."
With the Coates interview, Noah was asking about the question that Coates had been asked that boiled down to "if I read your book without knowing who you were and stripped away the titles and accolades and awards of who you are, I could easily see what you're saying as something that would be included in a terrorists handbook of propaganda", and Noah took that question and said "why do they always want to strip away all of the context of what's happening in Israel and Gaza? Why can't they address the context and recognize the reality of the situation?" Which is nowhere near what the question was, but it's framed in such a way that anyone listening to the interview can bat away legitimate objections to Coates' characterizations because the people criticizing it are refusing to address substantive reality. It's an infuriating two step that is constantly used to deflect legitimate counter arguments to positions and serves to ensure that the side that agrees with Coates (and other progressive causes in the other situations I've seen such tactics used) can feel righteous in the moral superiority of their stances. I find it all incredibly frustrating.
And to then see CBS respond the way it has and act as if the questions were out-of-bounds has been truly shocking and disappointing.
I haven't seen the Coates interview, so I can't really comment on that. But what you are describing reminds me of how on sports talk shows you inevitably get terrible exchanges like
Analyst: "This college player is a bit undersized and needs to work harder on defense, but his turnaround jumper from the midrange reminds me of a young Kobe Bryant so there's at least some potential there."
Host: "YOU CAN'T COMPARE THIS COLLEGE KID TO KOBE! HE HASN'T EVEN PLAYED A GAME IN THE NBA!"
I just read the times article and learned that CBS news has an “in house race and culture unit.”. My own views on Palestine are closer to Coates’ than those of the Democratic establishment, but the interviewer was well within the American mainstream and had every right to challenge Coates.
Ta-Nahesi Coates is sacred to many people on the left. He is due deference. Clearly none of this happens if the same kind of interview was done with JD Vance.
To cleanse CBS of its unholy act of disrespect a DEI consultant was hired to lead the Sacrament of Struggle. But the DEI clergyman was apparently throwing predictable bombs on Twitter and was unhired.
Coates then told Noah (serendipity for the religious references) that Dokoupil was taking up too much space in the conversation. In fact, he knew this because Gayle told him the tough questions she had planned to ask. Doing this apparently is not aligned with CBS journalistic standards.
Maybe Tony can say 10 hail Ta-Nahesi’s and all can be forgiven. What a tangled web we weave.
I think they were a bit flubbed because they were asked in a way that to me seemed intended to signal allegiance rather than just be challenging questions. To Matt’s point, if that’s what you end up doing, you’re not giving anyone much new information apart from which camp you’re in.
I guess I interpreted it as a warning to potential readers (this was a book promo) that Coates has produced an ahistorical, deeply anti-zionist work of quasi-fiction. I thought the exchange during the interview was excellent and revealing (more like a British news interview with a politician than a US morning show love-fest with an "esteemed author") and I appreciated CBS's chief legal correspondents eminently sensible comments on the kerfuffle.
How is this the flagship example of the "abdication of journalistic standards" in the "Trump Era" when the largest cable news outlet, dozens of online whackjob units and even the WSJ editorial page are fully engaged in publishing and amplifying lies basically 100% of the time?
Nah, compared to other abdications of journalistic standards in other eras of American history this is very much a nothing burger. Honestly on matters like this I wish newsrooms would just fight a bit more about about these sorts of thing, old school shouting matches including, rather than these weird in public "harm" based arguments. That's what's really annoying here.
You are assuming that magazines that endorse particular candidates do so because they hope to convince the undecided to vote that way. What if that is not the main motivation -- the point being, instead, to convince the people who were going to vote that way to buy, renew, or extend a subscription to the magazine?
I would think that being supported by wealthy philanthropists would make you more willing to buck readers’ expectations, rather than feeling a need to cater to them with pointless endorsements.
Yes, but would you buck the philanthropists' expectations? Or do you want to remind them that you are doing your best for the political tribe they favour?
Why would the philanthropists care whether you endorse a politician? Does Bill Gates want to support publications that endorse Kamala Harris? It seems more likely to me that he wants Kamala Harris to win, and that he wants to support publications that do useful things in the world, but why would he care about their endorsement, if it's not useful for either of those goals?
That's a very good question. It's like when I read a lot of left-leaning magazines like Vox and others that like to analyze the philanthropy of billionaires through a critical lens, but somehow they were always dead silent about Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire whose philanthropy mostly consists of donating to journalists.
This assumes that editors and journalists hate the idea of making money at the same time print media is dying. They might hate the reader letters they might end up getting, but they would definitely like the money.
the odds of that happening are quite low. the real question is how hard they will push to get school teachers and adjuncts and educated but not exactly prosperous people to subscribe/consume
GrowSF is awesome and I would die for a local news org (at this point, literally just a guy) to give endorsements like they do.
I recently moved to what I thought was a pretty big place and I cannot for the life of me figure out which mayoral candidate is pro-housing. It's brutal.
They are great, especially considering all the work they produce to help one sort through the 10 statewide ballot initiatives and the additional 15 (!) San Francisco ballot propositions, in additional to all the state and local candidates.
Hey Matt, a few days ago on twitter you made a post about how in matters of political strategy, if you go to a campaign and ask why they're doing what they're doing they can usually identify some sort of coherent rationale even if you the reporter don't agree with their reasoning.
You know a lot of people who work for the NYT. When you ask them, "What is the reasoning behind doing endorsements this way?" what can they tell you about the internal decision-making?
I assume it’s something about how they have a duty to do it in big national races, and that because they are nominally a New York publication, but one that has global rather than local ambitions, they shouldn’t do it in other races.
I am perfectly fine with the 2024 Scientific American and 2020 Science endorsements of Harris and Biden, respectively, because I see what they were trying to do there. They were not, qua some ideal notion of scientists, trying to do the most provably efficacious thing they could do to sway the election, and voters.
They were trying to do what they saw as the right thing. More to the point, they were doing what they hoped their kids/grandkids would be proud of them for doing.
This is, of course, where the David Shors of the world would butt in and say "No. NO! The job of scientists, and liberals in general, is NOT to "do the right thing"! It is to do what the data clearly shows is the effective thing--specifically, the effective thing to further liberal goals! Don't you see my data on this? I have it right here."
And fair point. The Harris campaign, specifically, has optimized itself to the point where it is practically a machine of effectiveness, not "doing the right thing"--and that is the sole reason why it is tied with Trump in the Electoral College, and not being bulldozed.
Similar reason why Biden managed to pass more than zero laws, with a 50-50 Senate. Similar reason why Democrats are competitive in nearly all the Senate races in 2024. Etc., etc.
I guess my reply to that would be: Politics, realistically, is the intersection of effectiveness and rightness. We all have our threshold, beyond which we will simply not do the wrong thing, out of effectiveness or anything else.
For example, Shor (and Yglesias!) constantly inveigh against liberals calling for gun control in the aftermath of gun massacres, on the basis that doing so not only ultimately decreases the likelihood that guns will ever be controlled, but that conservatives buy more guns in their wake. Therefore, objectively, liberals need to be smart here and. . . I guess, shut their mouths, or something.
(Whether that last thing results from liberals and their big, countereffective mouths or simply knee-jerk gun-nut reaction is an open question, of course. But regardless:)
Shor and Yglesias have a point here, of course. But *my* point is that very few libs are effectiveness mavens, constantly plotting about how to best further their cause. Especially when (as is true, in my case) a gun massacre happens down the street from them. Or, on a milder note, when guys like Trump are planning a mass political purge of scientific institutions nationwide.
Or when, in general, people are looking for a moment to step up and be counted.
Many liberals will want to carefully count their steps and ask "Okay, what's the most effective thing I can do right now to further Kamala Harris's campaign?" In fact, I think most people will be inclined to do something like that. Including most (though definitely, not all!) Slow Boring subscribers. Matt's advice on local candidates and campaign funding certainly has been useful here.
And I'm sure that even as, say, gun-control advocates reject Shor's advice and rile their fellow citizens by calling for restrictions on weapons of war, they'll be looking to see how they can be effective in other ways, by perhaps getting more like-minded people elected to Congress. State legislature. Etc.
But if you're in charge of the editorial function of Scientific American, you'll also be looking to stand up and be counted. To do what future generations might otherwise think of you as a coward for not doing.
I don't begrudge them that right. That obligation, even. Others may disagree.
As a scientist, I was extremely perturbed by the "March for Science" in 2017 because I could see quickly where it would lead. And COVID just poured gasoline on the fire. Fortunately, Elon's purchase of twitter has driven a lot of scientists off there, to our great benefit (as well as their own!). I pray when Trump goes away that we can get back to science being a mostly staid, non-partisan affair.
Yeah, I do, partly based on the timing (right after 1/6), partly because of other political comments he’s made, and partly just from the punchline (the speaker seems frantic and upset, rather than self-important or virtue-signaling). I mean I think he’s playing it for something of a joke—part of the idea is that it’s funny for apple folks to be doing this—but the target of the joke is our absurd times, rather than the apple people. Or at least that’s my reading.
"Standing up and being counted" can be brave and admirable, but only in some contexts.
It's courageous when the outcome is uncertain (or guaranteed to be negative): when others are afraid to speak or your peers are against you. But loudly adding your name to the end of a very long list is just vanity, bordering on moral exhibitionism.
There can still be a case for it, but only if it's effective.
It would be an interesting exercise to try to precisely delineate when it's better to do the right thing and when it's better to be strategic. Because it's true that sometimes the argument that you're being strategic can be a self-serving rationalization, the two classic examples of this being (1) I'm going to make money rapaciously so that I can give it to charity, (2) I'm going to support Destructive Political Leader/Movement X so that I can improve things from the inside.
But Matt’s point isn’t really contrary to any of this. He doesn’t deny that people doing this think they’re doing the right thing. The claim is that it’s *not* the right thing and they should do something else. And from the outside I think he’s right: I don’t know why I shouldn’t prefer for them to think about what’s more efficacious and so that, and it seems fair to expect them to use their platforms with care and responsibility.
It seems like when you are saying they want to do "the right thing" you are meaning they want to do the thing that makes them feel good and proud.
Doing the thing that makes you feel better or look better to "future generations" instead of doing the most effective thing to enact good policy doesn't seem like a seizing of the moral high ground.
Or, more to the point, I'll offer a deal: Nature and Scientific American stay out of the endorsement game and in exchange, all the evangelical churches out there utter not a peep about politics.
I think the evangelical churches never had any credibility with the people that would be turned off by their endorsement, and they've decided it doesn't matter if they could get that credibility.
If scientists want to go the same way, they can.
We're not trying to write laws here - we're trying to observe the practicalities, of what cost you may or may not pay if you make political endorsements. If you're already seen as political through and through, there's no cost. But if you had some possibility of being seen as credible by people who disagree with you politically, you have to decide how important that credibility is.
Progressives are the ones who want to fundamentally transform America. Conservatives, or rightists, or Republican (whatever you want to call them) do not claim to want that. Conservatives are not obligated by anything to unconditionally surrender to progressives. Therefore, because America is a democracy, progressives can only fundamentally transform America by winning elections. The more effective Democrats are at winning elections the more transformation there will be. If yelling about your moral righteousness makes Democrats less effective at winning elections the less transformation there will be.
Rightists (including JD Vance -- who knows what goes on inside the rotting hairy orange ball) do want to fundamentally transform America. That's their whole thing.
"Progressives are the ones who want to fundamentally transform America. Conservatives, or rightists, or Republican (whatever you want to call them) do not claim to want that."
According to Linker, Kamala and mainstream Democrats are small-c conservative, because they believe that American society is pretty ok as is and they want to focus on preserving the good things we have ("save democracy") and making marginal improvements, like, more housing and cleaner energy. Yes, progressives want radical change, but progressives are politically powerless in this election cycle. At most they can act as spoilers, siphoning a few votes away from Kamala.
In contrast, Republicans/Trump are not conservatives; they are trying to appeal to the disaffected "the system f**king sucks, let's burn it to the ground!" segment of the population. They want to RETVRN to a mythical past when men were men, America was mostly white, and there were plentiful well-paying factory jobs for everyone that still somehow magically provided everyone with the living standards of 2024, not 1954.
This election isn't a choice between "radical progress" vs "more of the same;" it's "let's go back to the Good Old Days" vs "We're not going back!"
Yuval Noah Harari makes the point that the Republican party, by adopting the rhetoric and policy postures of the MAGA right, has become become a radical revolutionary movement.
Would it make more sense to call it a radical reactionary/revanchist movement? They want to go back ("Make America Great AGAIN"), whereas I usually think of a revolution as going forward, as bringing into being a radically different future - the Bolshevik Revolution, the French Revolution, etc. Or am I just being nitpicky?
I think that's fair. I believe Harari's point is to analogize the MAGA rhetoric about the deep corruption and fundamental illegitimacy of government and cultural institutions to early Communist rhetoric about the need for the "revolutionary reconstitution of society at large." It's all about "overthrow" rather than "reform".
I think the idea that Republicans don't *want* major changes is both true and completely incompatible with what they propose.
That being said, the Harris being small-c conservative is hard to accept because I don't really know who she is. I know Trump, and that that's a terrible option, so will choose the unknown over the known terrible. But if you told me that upon winning the presidency, Harris was way more progressive than she is running now - would I be surprised? Not really.
She made some VERY BOLD statements in 2020 and is essentially trying to either walk way from them quietly, or mostly pretend none of it happened. Which may be what happens. But there are some similarities to JD Vance IMO. If he tries to walk away from what he said this election cycle, would you believe him in 2028?
What specific actions are you worried that she might take if, after being elected, she turns out to be way more progressive than she has presented as during the campaign? I'm genuinely curious about what this horror show people are worried about looks like.
In 2016 I remember arguing that Bernie was a useless candidate because all the things he was promising to do were utterly impossible given the structure of American governance. Congress would never abolish private insurance or pass laws that would tax millionaires at 90%, so all the outlandish stuff he was talking about was just useless bluster, and he was a horrible option because he'd spend so much time talking about nonsense that he wouldn't be able to actually achieve the things that are within the President's grasp to achieve. I see no reason to think that electing Harris will somehow result in a progressive dystopia being ushered in for the same reasons that my major concerns about Bernie were how ineffective he would have been.
One of the most frustrating things about being in election season is that the level of hype is really high and the only comparison is to the other candidate. I don't accept that rubric. Just because I don't beat my wife doesn't mean that me screaming at the kids they're stupid is okay.
As for the concerns - if the presidency didn't matter, there wouldn't be all this focus on it. My major concern for her is that she
1) Continues to push progressive spending priorities at a time when we should be getting our fiscal house in order since the economy is good. It won't always be that way and we'll want some debit capacity to do Keynesian stimulus then.
2) Insist on *everything bagel* approach that doesn't prioritize or prioritizes poorly with regards to IRA, CHIPs, etc.
3) I'm extremely pro immigration, but we need to have public support to allow for it. I don't think she abolished ICE, but I could see her doing something like Biden did which was mishandle it for years creating a sizeable backlash.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. Notice that I didn't say that Trump was better on any of these issues, just that it wouldn't be shocking to me if we come back in three years and think that her moderate rhetoric didn't really match her approach as president.
I'm sorry, where/when did he say that? JD Vance is soulless but not stupid; he must know that deporting a quarter of the population is bat-guano insane even by the Trump campaign's standards, right? Right?
What I heard—and unfortunately I can't now find the claim, so I might be misremembering, or the source might not be reliable—is that Vance said that something like a quarter of Americans are here on questionable immigration status. What is definitely true is Vance saying that he is entitled to say that millions of American residents are "illegal" even though they have legal immigration status, and those people—who, again, are here legally—should be deported.
Google says: "In 2023, 14.3% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, which is the highest percentage since 1910"
Assuming* even Vance would agree that if you're American-born, you can't possibly have "questionable immigration status," then he's off by 10 percentage points.
*Not necessarily a good assumption! If an undocumented immigrant gives birth on US soil, Vance might well say that birthright citizenship should be abolished and the child should be deported along with the parent.
Vance is probably including children of people who were undocumented and people who he thinks were here illegitimately even though they had legal status. Hell, he's probably including grandchildren—the guy is on a ticket with someone who says immigrants are poisoning our blood.
What do you mean by “rightness” if it is something that can be separated from “effectiveness”? To me, something is right if it has some significant chance of good effects, and the effectiveness is part of what makes it right. The effect doesn’t have to be short term or perfect, so giving your dying breath to defiance can sometimes be right if you think that might help inspire further, more effective resistance.
But this is an age old debate in the philosophy of ethics: whether the outcome or the actors intent is more important. You (and Matt) seem to be looking at the endorsements from a utilitarian perspective of what is their impact. While David is arguing that many of the editors might think that the morality of their actions is not determined by the outcome. The fact that this is a philosophical question without any objective way of answering is something that Matt doesn't always do a good job of grappling with when he talks about Progressives.
But so what is the basis for saying that endorsing Kamala Harris is "the right thing" for Scientific American? I understand the deontological case against lying. I don't know if I understand the deontological stance for a popular science magazine endorsing a presidential candidate. Just saying "it's the right thing to do" begs the question.
I think the deontological argument (which I think is stupid and self-aggrandizing) is that people are obligated to use whatever platform they have to shout from the rooftops about how bad the orange man is, because otherwise they’re basically Neville Chamberlain.
There are of course meta-philosophical debates about whether philosophical questions have objective answers!
I think Matt might be one of the people who think these meta-ethical questions do have objective answers, and that the thing that objectively matters is the consequences.
My view is that there are all sorts of questions here, including ones about effectiveness and ones about whether the act is somehow "fitting" in some way independent of the consequences. But if someone thinks that their act "fitting" the situation is more important than the consequences, then I think they are caring about bad things, that don't make anyone's life better, or otherwise accomplish anything good.
Some people don't care about accomplishing good. I don't like that, but it's true.
Virtue ethics vs. consequentialist ethics is one of the underappreciated political fault lines of our times!
But exactly one side of that debate is sane, and Matt is doing a huge public service by continuing to hammer that point. Some time ago it was a matter of veritable philosophical debate whether you should murder some random old ladies whenever a cow's milk goes sour, and now it isn't. Progress doesn't just happen on its own, it's a slow and painstaking process of ridding people of their misconceptions.
But the calculation of "effectiveness" revolves around the marginal reaction to your action. MY's point seems to be that Nature has "hurt its credibility" by endorsing Democratic candidates, by which I take him to be saying that the marginal Republican reader will be less inclined to "believe the science" published in Nature in the future, and that this is ultimately bad for society. The counter-argument is that any person who would shift like that based on an endorsement is so confused about the project of scientific inquiry that they would likely disbelieve the science whenever right wing media and right wing politicians tell them to, which means that the long term marginal impact of the endorsement on "scientific legitimacy" is negligible -- these people were never committed to that concept and never will be. On the other hand, the endorsement might reassure readers who are committed to that ideal that the publication is aware of the threat to free scientific inquiry presented by the MAGA right and is doing what it can to resist it. I do agree with this part of MY's argument -- any such endorsement should and easily could be rooted in the principles for which the publications stands.
That counter-argument depends on the idea that the project of scientific inquiry is not itself influenced by politics, but that is plainly false.
Off the top of my head, here are several stages of research and inquiry that are vulnerable to political influence: selecting the object of inquiry, framing the object of inquiry, funding, designing experiments, defining and selecting subjects, interpreting results, and disseminating results.
It's worth striving for the ideal, aspirational version of scientific inquiry, but the editors of Scientific American aren't trying very hard.
At the level of "all human interactions are ultimately political", I agree with you.
But challenging, analyzing and correcting errors and biases that lead to bad (untrue) conclusions about the state and processes of nature (the entirety of the noumenal universe, not the publication) is itself a (perhaps the) core feature of the scientific system. Compare that to say, the Republican party...
I think it would be helpful if they were explicit about the downsides of doing so, specifically the negative polarization likely to ensue. Then readers would know that they looked at the big picture and still found it worth taking the stand.
To do the right thing and to do the most effective thing at achieving good outcomes are synonymous. You can’t do one without the other, or more of one than the other.
Thanks for the engagement on this! I’m pleasantly surprised.
Rather than reply to each and every fellow here, I’ll just add one more point. There’s only one reason why most of us here clearly disapprove of Science’s endorsement of Biden in 2020:
Biden is president now. Trump is not.
Even if you oppose Trump, because of that, you have time and energy in 2024 to worry about the Very Prestigious Reputation of Science journal.
Rather than, say, the end of the rule of law, a political purge of the federal workforce, military crackdowns on half of America, defunding and corruption of scientific institutions, etc. etc. etc.
So, cheer up, guys! And other Strict Consequentialists!
If Harris wins, we’ll have plenty of time and energy to tut-tut our heads at Scientific American for ruining their Very Presigious Nonpartisan Reputation, in the face of an aspiring dictator wishing to use government to corrupt and purge the community they represent.
If Trump wins, though, none of you will give a shit, At least not anymore. You’ll have about two hundred (or so) more immediate things to worry about.
Real talk: Do you seriously think Scientific American is making it *less* likely for Trump to lose?
(Personally, I think the average voter doesn’t know them from Adam nor cares what they do or do not endorse. But for me, that reduces the consequences of the endorsement, and therefore makes it relatively acceptable. YMMV.)
No, I don't think it makes him less likely to lose. You're probably right that it doesn't have a major impact. But insofar as there is an impact it will be to deepen distrust of the media and experts and I think that's a bad thing to happen, *particularly* when the government is not a reliable small-d democratic partner.
Almost certainly a version of that argument was bouncing around the offices of both Science and Scientific American in the days/weeks/months leading up to their respective, fateful decisions. Most likely it was the grayer, more venerable haired persona making it.
Clearly the other argument seems to have won the day, though.
I can't claim to have been a fly on the wall during their deliberations, but here's my best guess as to what that counterargument might have been:
"If you're worried about the right wing losing further trust in us scientists and scientific publishers, well, welcome to the present day. That ship has sailed."
"Take a look around. Donald Trump and his allies have all but declared their intent to marginalize and ignore scientists at best, and at worst, defund, disempower, purge, prosecute, and punish us, no matter what we say, or endorse. A decisive portion of their voters have decided we're the literal servants of Satan, case closed."
"You can blame yourself for that propaganda, and imagine you might deserve it if you take a stand against it, or you can fight back. At the least, do what you will live with the least regret from, years from now."
That's, of course, my words. But I think it approximates what they were thinking.
Not a soul in the leadership of either of those publications is going to regret having contributed to "distrust of experts", at least. Or anything like that. They would rather regret having shut their mouths, in this moment.
P.S.: Note--I was raised in the Midwest, raised conservative, grew up evangelical. Still am kind of religious, especially compared to many of the more vocal commenters here.
You'd think I, of all people, would blame the media, the scientists, and their goldarned politics for the distrust of experts in society. And yet.
“…you can fight back. At the least, do what you will live with the least regret from, years from now.
…
Not a soul in the leadership of either of those publications is going to regret having contributed to "distrust of experts", at least. Or anything like that. They would rather regret having shut their mouths, in this moment.”
So this encapsulates pretty well the problem I have with your argument: it’s pure question-begging. WHY is publishing an endorsement against Trump “fighting back”? WHY should or would they regret not publishing the endorsement in the years to come? Earlier you referred to it as an obligation; from where does that obligation come?
It seems to me that the answer to all those questions has to involve either a) a guiding ethical principle, or b) some amount of efficacy. That is, regret comes either from some feeling of “I knew what I was supposed to do and I didn’t do it” or “in retrospect it would have helped if I had done that.” Which of these are you invoking?
If it’s the ethical principle, what principle? Do all people who oppose Donald Trump and have a platform have an obligation to use that platform to do it? In fact I think it’s the opposite in this case: the ethical obligations of the institution are to preservation of that institution, because once trust and credibility are gone they’re hard to get back. The whole reason there are ethical standards is because people will often be tempted to act in short-sighted ways in response to a temporary crisis. Unlike you I think at least a few people involved in this decision probably WILL regret it in the future, assuming they have enough capacity for reflection and perspective.
Can breaking that standard be justified? Yes, if the circumstance definitely requires it. A reporter isn’t supposed to get involved in the story, but if their subject starts choking of course they should give them the Heimlich maneuver. But that takes us back to efficacy! You can’t say “this was an emergency and we had to act” if you’re indifferent to the results of your actions.
What all of this reminds me of most is the justifications given for climate activists throwing soup on paintings in museums. Yes, climate change is an emergency. I still would ask people who want to get involved not to be satisfied with “in twenty years I might regret NOT attacking that Van Gogh” and think about what they actually should do, and why.
> "You can blame yourself for that propaganda, and imagine you might deserve it if you take a stand against it, or you can fight back. At the least, do what you will live with the least regret from, years from now."
This desire to cosplay as "freedom fighters" has led a great many people to beclown themselves, only to be surpassed by those cosplaying as "civil rights activists" (often the same people). It's embarrassing.
The point about surprising, endorsements, being more effective, goes to my sort of general view about credibility. Whenever I meet a partisan, I like to ask them which views do their party or candidate hold that are wrong. Not something trivial… Something significant.
I don’t trust a fan boy to give me a rating of a product. I don’t trust Fox News or the New York Times to give me a Presidential endorsement (In a normal year).
On another political note… Kamala Harris is bad at interviews. She reminds me of her student who uses a bunch of filler words to pad their 500 word essay.
Like I would’ve had way more respect for her if she could’ve articulated something, she would’ve done differently than Biden on her interview on The View. Or if she had a more direct way of saying that one of our previous positions, such as fracking was wrong. She was doing so good as well. She kicked ass in the debate.
While I’m here, I have a poll question. If you had to hire someone to be a manager or a CEO of your company…. Which one of the presidential or vice presidential candidates would you choose. Make this decision solely based on how well they performed in the debates… Treat it like a job interview…. And ignore the fact, checking aspect of it. Also, pretend like you know nothing else about them. They were just four strangers who were in a high school debate.
It’s got to be JD Vance, right? Kamala would be my second choice, followed by Walz and then Trump last.
Forgive the grammatical errors, I’m dictating this on my iPhone. About to head to Houston airport to fly to Mexico for a job.
"While I’m here, I have a poll question. If you had to hire someone to be a manager or a CEO of your company…. Which one of the presidential or vice presidential candidates would you choose. Make this decision solely based on how well they performed in the debates… Treat it like a job interview…. And ignore the fact, checking aspect of it. Also, pretend like you know nothing else about them. They were just four strangers who were in a high school debate."
But, if I were hiring someone for my company, why in the name of god would I do that?! I would screen their resume, I would reach out to references, I would want their vision for the company to match mine, and when I interviewed them I would care about them giving accurate answers to my questions, not just pretty-sounding ones. What you're asking me to do in this analogy is pretend to be an incredibly dumb and useless hiring manager. I refuse.
Yeah, one of the most important things I look for when interviewing candidates is technical knowledge. If they have good body language but say absolute nonsense, the interview is a waste of my time.
I take what Scott Galloway said, though I think he was more talking more about regular employees than CEO's: resumes and interviews mean a lot less than references. It really comes to down someone who I trust, admire and respect giving me a recommendation because they know this person and have worked with them before.
Being a CEO is not about being a smooth talker and a good debater. You have to actually get the facts right. I would not want to hire a CEO who does a very good job of sounding reasonable while he is spouting nonsense and outright lies. Running a company is not politics; persuading people is one part of the job, but not even close to the most important part of it.
"Sounds great, but gets everything wrong" is only slightly better than "Sounds like a moron, and gets everything wrong".
While I think that was a horrible sound bite for Vance, and that he generally very often is lying, I don't think this is a very good analogy. If you were interviewing for a job, and someone you believed to be very biased against you was on the review board, I think it's not entirely unreasonably to be miffed. You might say something like, "it's unfair that you have Bob here!", which could be uncharitably interpreted as "this person objects to the very idea of reviewing their answers, how ridiculous!", or more charitably as "this person has a problem with this specific judge, and their particular interpretation of events".
Vance's position is quite obviously not that he's lying. It's that he believes the person tasked with deciding whether or not he's lying is not a fair referee.
If you say something factually incorrect in your interview with me, and I correct you, and you then say, "I was told there would be no fact-checking" instead of, "Oops, I'm sorry, I may have gotten that one wrong," you are out. There's the door. I'm not hiring anyone who insists on their right to lie to my face and not even get corrected on their lies.
And this wasn't a close case or a matter of opinion. Vance insists he's entitled to say Haitians are here illegally when in fact they have legal status. It's despicable.
I'm as pro immigrant as you can be, and generally think we should let pretty much all of S. America that wants to come here do so.
But the reason that the recent influx of Haitians are here legally is that Biden gave them temporary legal status via TPS. Saying that they are not here illegally is kind of like saying Steve Bannon isn't guilty of committing a crime because Trump pardoned him.
My point is that your analogy doesn't apply: in the interview scenario, both the target of the response and the arbiter of its "factfulness" are the same person. Saying "I disagree with your fact check" to the person you are interviewing is obviously unwise.
In the Vance scenario, the target of the response (the American public) and the arbiter of "factfulness" are not the same entity. He's not saying "YOU are wrong", but rather, "THEY, this arbitrarily empowered third party, is wrong".
To try another analogy: if you are accused of a crime, and take a lie detector, claiming "I believe this lie detector machine is faulty" is not the same thing as lying to a police officer. In fact, it is totally possible to tell the truth, but have the machine report a false positive (especially since lie detectors are basically bullshit afaik). His claim is much the same: that the "lie detector" used is faulty and incorrect, not "I am lying and resent being called on it". In this case I believe he is lying (people hooked up to lie detectors often are!), but that's not really the claim he is clumsily making.
He didn't say the lie detector was faulty, he said they promised not to reference its output. That may very well be _because_ he didn't trust the lie detector to be accurate, which is fair, but that's not what he said (and in this case he _was_ incorrect/lying)
Vance for corporate counsel. Harris for CEO. Walz for HR director. And Trump for custodian for poetic justice reasons, though that’s too good a job for him.
If I truly ignored all substance, and just used debate performance, I'd have to pick Harris. She was overwhelmingly successful at accomplishing the task she was set: to make Trump look terrible and herself better as a result. Being that good when the stakes are that high is what you want in a CEO.
Vance, strictly as being a bit more polished and articulate outperformed Walz, but not nearly by as much, and he revealed some of his own flaws during the debate. He showed he was good as an interviewee if you will, but I'm not sure he outperformed that decisively. As someone who has interviewed hundreds of people over the years, I've learned to both highly value the communications skills demonstrated during interviews, but also to not let those skills outweigh all other considerations. And Vance did fall down pretty hard in a particular way. Even ignoring the blatant lying prior to it --- which would be a deal killer if I picked it up in any way during an interview, his last answer left me pretty unconvinced that given a choice between doing the right thing for the company or looking out for his own interest, whether by making himself look good or in some other more material way, that he would choose the company's interests.
I think if I were looking for a new CEO of a company after said company had just knowingly released a product that had poisoned many Americans and I needed the new guy to put up the best defense of the company in public, I'd definitely pick Vance.
“ Kamala Harris is bad at interviews. She reminds me of her student who uses a bunch of filler words to pad their 500 word essay.
Like I would’ve had way more respect for her if she could’ve articulated something, she would’ve done differently than Biden on her interview on The View. Or if she had a more direct way of saying that one of our previous positions, such as fracking was wrong. She was doing so good as well. She kicked ass in the debate.”
The mediocre Biden begot the mediocre Harris. Don’t think politics is attracting the best and brightest.
I don't think it's fair to compare Biden at 80something to Kamala at 59 - and I don't think it's fair either to compare Kamala at 59 to a hypothetical "peak performance" candidate aged 45-50 - obama/bush/clinton were 47/54/46 at their first elections. In a normal career, Kamala would be pushing retirement!
I suspect the best & brightest are repelled by a politics that involves apparently mandatory engagement with every bonkers thing the internet gins up, no matter how gross or ridiculous. I really don't think Ms Harris would've envisioned her Presidential run being associated with something called "brat summer," and that's about the minorest of examples.
You end up with participation pool of people who either like the nastiness or are willing to go with whatever flow flows their way. I don't think Harris is in either of those categories - she was pretty much drafted into running. But unless some new people appear who are capable of rising above the muckflood, it's gonna get bad.
"You end up with participation pool of people who either like the nastiness or are willing to go with whatever flow flows their way. I don't think Harris is in either of those categories - she was pretty much drafted into running. But unless some new people appear who are capable of rising above the muckflood, it's gonna get bad"
The way I hear it is she rapidly consolidated power to head off the idea of a contested convention.
Similar strategy I use when talking to candidates running for local office in my non-partisan election having city, which usually has many candidates for each position: "if you are forced to drop out of the race tomorrow, which of your opponents would be a good choice instead"? It is shocking how often folks say "none, only me." Or answer cynically, picking the most no name candidate on the list. There is no one else worth shouting out here, really?! It very often sours me on a candidate when the do this.
If you don’t have a ranked choice election system, then that is really what the electoral incentives push them to do. Saying anything that makes a voter think that people who like A might also like B is just a recipe to get some A voters to switch to B, unless you have a way for both A and B voters to raise the other in their vote without crowding out the first one.
I get why they do it, obviously they wouldn't say that if they had no incentive to. I get why bank robbers are incentivized to rob banks, too.
But the question is a test of intellectual integrity, similar to Rory's above. If they can't honestly admit that there is at least one other good candidate in the race, or, in Rory's case, that there is something about their party's platform they disagree with, I worry that they are just an incentive optimization machine all the way down. My preference is a person with actual, instrumental changes to the world that they are trying to accomplish, incentives be damned.
A person with actual, instrumental changes to the world that they are trying to accomplish, incentives be damned, had better well follow the incentives all the way during the election season, because nothing matters in the election season for accomplishing things in the world other than winning the election.
If they don't care about accomplishing something, and just want to make a statement, then sure, do things that go against your electoral incentives.
I think this is more true in a two-horse race like the presidential election than an open field free-for-all. If the primary goal is making an instrumental change, the difference between them and the next best candidate is presumably small (unless they have some very radical beliefs, in which case I'm not interested anyway). Sure, everyone believes that they themselves are the correct instrument for effecting change, but being able to set that aside is an important quality if the goal is the change itself, not the personal interests of the implementor.
Your proposed plan bottoms out at "lie to everyone and tell them what they want to hear all the time", which does nothing to communicate to me, the voter, that the candidate actually cares about the issue and not themselves. The question I am trying to answer in such a low-salience, low info election is not "how does the candidate most beneficial to effecting my preferred changes win?", but rather "who is, believably, such a candidate?" This is markedly different from most big elections, where the answer to the latter question is obvious, and electoral optimization is the only thing I, an already decided voter, cares about.
I agree with you- they're asking the politicians to say something that can only harm them politically. It's an unfair question intended to garner information that you think is helpful from a source that will be worse off for having answered it. Holding it against them seems particularly unfair.
It's like asking an NBA team who their top pick is in the draft but then asking them to also give you an honest answer about which other teams ahead of them in the draft would be even better off drafting your top choice. If they answer that honestly it may convince the other team to draft that player, so they're incentivized to tell you that the player would be horrible anywhere else or just refuse to answer, both of which don't provide the public with an honest evaluation of the draft. But why on earth would we turn to them to provide honest evaluations in ways that benefit their opponents?
Elections are zero sum affairs- you win or you lose, so it's just bizarre to expect candidates to try and engage in behaviors that will clearly benefit someone else at their expense.
This blog has really ranked-choice-pilled me for single-winner elections.
For multi-winners elections (like school boards or a state that decided to do at-large elections for US Congress) I wonder if some kind of proportional-allocation party + candidate system might be better.
This is often implemented as a generalization of instant runoff voting.
The way IRV works is that we are trying to elect 1 candidate, so we see if anyone has more than 1/2 of the first-place vote (better to write it as 1/(1+1) of the vote) and if they do, then they win, and if not, then we eliminate the last place candidates and move voters down to their second or third choices until someone has at least 1/(1+1) of the vote.
For STV, if we are trying to elect n candidates, we see if anyone has more than 1/(n+1) of the first-place vote, and if they do, then they get selected - but then instead of just eliminating the last-place candidates and moving their voters to second choices, we also transfer the excess votes that the winners got and transfer those fractional votes to second choices. It's a bit complicated to calculate, but after iterating the process, the end result is always n candidates who each got 1/(n+1) of the vote, plus some remainders.
I like to illustrate this with a caricature of a Belgian election. There are four parties - Flemish speaking socialists, Flemish speaking conservatives, French speaking socialists, and French speaking conservatives. Some people will rank all the socialists above all the conservatives, some people will rank all the French speakers above all the Flemish speakers, some will do some weird mix. But if we're trying to elect 9 people, then a bloc of 30% of the electorate can guarantee that 3 of their people get in, if they all put those above everyone else - and these blocs can collaborate to ensure that their representation adds up, even if they have overlapping preferences (but their distinctive preferences will also get some representation).
(It's unfortunate that the general term "ranked choice" has come to be the accepted name for instant runoff voting, because there are millions of different election systems that ask people for their ranked choices, and then output a single winner, and instant runoff is just one - it's one I happen to like, but there are also reasons one might prefer Borda count or any of the many Condorcet methods or various others.)
Explained in my reply to Kenny above. In multi candidate, low-salience races (which, again, is most of the races in my locality), it seems exceedingly unlikely that there are no other good candidates. The person I'm talking to can either: A. admit that honestly, saying something like "Stacy Jones is also good on many issues and would make a decent Transportation Board member, but I also blah blah blah". Or B. say something like "All other candidates are the scum of the earth, come with me if you want to live." A convincing politician can probably pull of option B quite convincingly, but that's just a sign of them being a rhetorically strong politician, not someone trying to effect some specific change.
I think Rory's test tries to suss out essentially the same thing: are you playing for the team, or a reasonable set of positions that happen to best be represented by your current team? If it's the former, you will struggle to find bad things about your team, since the fact that your team holds them is what makes positions good in the first place. If it's the latter, it is very unlikely that your particular team has somehow turned out to align with your sincerely held, independently derived beliefs on every issue, and you'll have no trouble admitting as much.
I completely agree with your view that Nature magazine (the foremost international technical journal of science) was unwise to endorse a US presidential candidate. I feel less strongly about Scientific American. I view it as markedly more political than Nature, but it was always intended for a mass audience of non-experts, not as a medium for scientists to present their new results to their peers.
I don't know, maybe it was just my (scientific) immaturity at the time, but I remember really liking Scientific American as a kid. Yes, it didn't publish original peer-reviewed articles, but it still was focused on science (as I recall). But it's been explicitly political at least for a while now, which is a shame because it presents itself otherwise.
I wish that newspapers and audio and visual media would stick more to news, and to impartially reporting it. Keep the endorsements to the editorial page and try to firewall out how reporters treat actual newsworthy information. It gets a little old when newspapers take an obvious slant.
Case in point, here in New Mexico there was a plea bargain in a case where an identity-politics addled conservative shot a Native American at an event staged by the NA's to protest an Onate statue about to be honored by a local government. A recent article in my local paper merely said that the conservative shot into the crowd, which he sorta did, and just got four more years in the slammer. Having followed the case, he did shoot, but he did so as he was being manhandled, assaulted, and tossed over a low stone wall by Native American group members who were offended by his obnoxious behavior. Sure, he was not justified in shooting at them (he took the plea bargain to limit the damage, I suppose) but by leaving a key part of the story out, it warps public understanding of what actually happened.
Another example was KUNM News, a few years ago, lumped Milo Yiannapolis, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Ben Shapiro into a single category of "extremist speakers" on the air and suggested they were not worth the cost of bringing them to the U of NM campus, citing damage caused by anti-Yiannapolis rioters and the university's attempts to impose a security fee. Bias? Nah! BTW, a Federal judge just enjoined the U from imposing that fee, citing numerous appellate cases all the way up to the SCOTUS (Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement).
I missed the Nature endorsement but read the Sci Am, which discussed stuff having nothing to do with science. Professional journals should stay out of the endorsement game. As a Ph.D. working scientist (geochemist/analytical chemist and registered D), I think science is often unfairly accused of being politicized; not that it is never politicized. There is no point to supporting that notion with partisan endorsements. Nature is a peer-reviewed publication; they should have known better. Sci Am is more of "Science for the People" magazine, but that subtlety might be lost on some.
Matt perhaps underestimates how hard it is not to focus on the presidential race. I don’t want the insurrectionist to win. I’m more worried about the outcome of this election than any other election in my lifetime and I’m not that prone to worry. I’m not that worried about down ballot races— they can be voted out next time and will leave office peacefully if they lose. If Republicans take the house and pass a national abortion band, they’ll get their ass kicked next time. Unless Trump protects them from facing the voters.
Relatedly, I don’t see how any good American could support Trump. I understand why reasonable people might have voted for him in 2016 and 2020. I don’t understand how anyone could vote for him this time. I see Trump yard signs in my street, I think “these people are doing about as well as I am, why don’t they want to keep having free elections.” And I hope that, deep down, enough of them love the America that our ancestors fought for that they will want to keep having free elections and will want to discredit an insurrectionist.
Of course I know the polls are pretty damn predictive and 46+% of voters say they will support Trump. But hope, especially hope for a good noble principled thing that seems fucking obvious, is a hell of a drug. I hope some critical mass of my neighbors are better than their yard signs suggest, and I’ll worry more about the Wisconsin Supreme Court if and when we have a normal election.
One of the more damning indictments of the "Threat to Democracy" language is people immediately interpreted it as "There will literally not be a 2028 election" or "Trump will be president for life" as opposed to the slow slippage in democratic rites and norms that have guided America. People can be rightfully mad about Dobbs etc but I think people's ability to convince themselves that SCOTUS will look at the 22nd amendment and just not read "Two" is becoming increasingly hard to believe. It makes otherwise persuadable voters, those who do not know for instance that Trump wants to slash medicare, doubt everything else dems say.
To be clear, I doubt Trump would run again in 2028 or become President for life. Perhaps I’m being a moralist. Still, I don’t see how electing a president who tried to storm the Capitol to overthrow an election he lost can be good for Democracy. A threat of violence will loom over every presidential election for a generation. America would be stronger if Trump were disgraced, imprisoned and granted clemency after doing a year or two.
Emphatically agree on all counts. But I think the level of nuance attached to the Democracy argument has proven to be an argument of, by, and for political science majors who were already active members of their college young dems chapter. I feel like most voters see J6 as bad, but not worse than george floyd riots, or Columbia University or the Vancouver Canucks for that matter. Which I agree, on merit is maddening, but you gotta hunt where the ducks are. 4 years on, that is just extremely hard to disabuse people of.
That ship has mostly sailed when Trump became the Republican nominee, though. Trying to steal the election and then narrowly losing the next one isn't all that different from trying to steal the election and then narrowly winning the next one, in terms of legitimizing the steal. It's bad but the damage has already been done.
>>People can be rightfully mad about Dobbs etc but I think people's ability to convince themselves that SCOTUS will look at the 22nd amendment and just not read "Two" is becoming increasingly hard to believe.<<
You're not using *nearly* enough imagination. This recalls the failure to anticipate the 911 attacks: we should've had our security people reading Tom Clancy novels.
My point being: no, Trump's not going to run for a third term in 2028 if he wins next month. He doesn't need to. He could run for a safe House seat and install himself as a dictatorial Speaker of the House (essentially an authoritarian premier, with a figurehead serving as POTUS). Or maybe he could have a lackey (Don Jr? Ivanka?) take the White House in 2028 and he could stay on as an unofficial "adviser" (wink wink) who lives in the White House by invitation of the President.
Trump doesn't have to violate the Constitution to mortally wound our democracy. He just has to subvert it.
Famously immersed in the weeds of legislative process, caucus management and whip counting, DJT is. You are correct that the corrosive impact of Donald Trump's politics, are in fact, Bad. My deeper point is that the Political, the Legal, and the Constitutional are three realms that overlap less than people imagine. Everyone has an impulse to smash them together and ratchet every concern up to the highest register by leveraging the force of the other pieces of the triad. Legal/Constitutional remedies for Political qua Political problems etc. I think that is bad and leaves us worse at performing the functions of all three legs of this stool.
By 2028, Trump will be as much of a dotard as Biden is today. Im not even sure he’ll be a very active president, but I do think his administration will include plenty of folks of enjoy LARPing “The Last Days of Weimar.”
I'm really incredulous that Trump would be willing to run for a mere House seat even if he were promised that he would get to be Speaker after winning.
If I were still on social media, I would definitely make a post “vote for Tammy Kim for Irvine mayor”, because I assume that would mean something to some of my friends, but I wouldn’t bother making a post about who to vote for in their presidential election, because it’s sorta boring and obvious.
I want to give the actionable information, rather than blinding people with even more light on the thing that is already way overexposed.
In the spirit of making endorsements by telling your audience what they might not know and would want to know:
Californians, Vote against Prop 33 and for Prop 34.
Prop 33, the rent control measure, is a bad faith measure endorsed by bad actor NIMBY cities who want to be able to impose punitive rent control that will prevent any new multifamily housing from being built. Huntington Beach, the baddest of actors, has already said they will do this. Don't fall for it.
Prop 34 is aimed squarely at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a group funded by an incredibly lucrative government-backed AIDs drug sweetheart deal—a special privilege to buy low and sell high— and which uses that money to lobby for NIMBY causes rather than helping sick people. AIDS Healthcare is also a slumlord. They're a terrible institution which should be forced to use their government-supplied bounty for health care.
I haven't looked into the California ballot measures at all, I have to educate myself and decide how to vote sometime between now and Nov 5, so I will be interested in reading that thread!
This doesn't affect policy at all, but an annoying knock-on effect of all these publications endorsing Democrats is that it makes liberals on the ground more smug and less intellectually curious. After all, they're on the "side" of "science."
I wish this article had included some new-to-me factual information, in particular why the NYT is doing this. It just seems totally inexplicable given the points that Matt makes. Also the New Yorker decision seems odd -- did David Remnick just get jealous of the people on the NYT Ed Board?
I assume it’s because they no longer feel like the y have the authority as a local publication. But it’s a weird choice at a moment when a local story really has become one of their biggest stories, which should remind them that it’s worth stepping in.
I mean, they still have a significant local section, so I don't get it. But Matt actually talks to people in journalism so I would like to hear what they say about it.
Right that's an easy story to tell, but you can also easily tell the opposite story -- the NYT Ed Board loves nothing more than to tell leftists that they should suck it up. But neither you nor I know what _actually_ happened so I wish someone would report on it.
I will continue to maintain that losing confidence in scientists because Scientific American wrote an editorial is like losing confidence in athletes because Sports Illustrated chooses to endorse someone.
It's a little murkier with Nature and Science, because they are trade publications and organizations, a fact often confused by people outside of the field. (For instance, contrary to what Matt writes, the Zhang study was published in the open access journal Nature Human Behavior, not Nature, although a discussion of the paper written by a third party was published in the section of Nature devoted to such things). In fact, although the endorsement is what the greater media picked up on, Nature wrote well-reported articles on both the Trump and Biden policies for science and related issues at the same time, just as Matt recommends:
AAAS, the publisher of Science, is a non-profit and doesn't formally endorse, but they do push a pro-science agenda on the HiIl and sponsor fellowships to put Ph.D. scientists in Congressional offices and cabinet departments for both parties. The journal employs reporters who publish weekly on science-related political topics - they were great at keeping me informed on the various hearings and progress on the CHIPs act - and they too did deep dives into the policies of both candidates in the run up to the 2020 election and I expect them to do the same this year.
I feel like if the Journal of Oil and Gas Extraction or Charted Accountancy Weekly endorsed a candidate based on their policies for those professions, no one would bat an eye; it's odd scientists aren't allowed to discuss issues in the same manner.
Mostly agree. I think the problem with peer reviewed professional journals endorsing partisan issues is it may suggest to the broader public, or at least some of it, that there is a political agenda at work in the scientific community and that we "experts" have an agenda other than doing good science. As far as Nature or Science, I am far more interested in what they say about science and government policy/support of it. Also, those two links were signed by individuals rather than Nature, right?
As far as Sci Am, it is not a trade journal so I don't hold them to the same standard. As I said in my own post, I am not sure the general public splits that hair between Sci Am and a trade journal. Sci Am's endorsement went light years beyond science policy, too.
I think some expect scientists to pick sides on important issues, e.g., climate change policy, gun control, covid policy, etc. The job of the scientist as a scientist is to collect and interpret quality data, skeptically test models, avoid question-begging, and dispassionately advise policy makers what the science says and as importantly, what it does not say. I think it is inevitable that once one studies a topic, one forms opinions on how to deal with its societal implications. Seems like a logical outcome. Kerry Emanuel's little essay about using nuclear power ("Nuclear Salvation") as a way to rapidly decarbonize our energy demands is an example. But that was based on his years of individual research in climate science and he was speaking for himself.
I think scientific organizations that wade too much into policy risk political blowback--recall the Dickey Amendment resulted from what some Congresscritters saw as too much hat-swapping. Jim Hansen resigned from NASA so he could wear the political policy hat full time and not implicate the scientists working in that agency with a political agenda.
Anyway, all something to think about. I don't personally think it is either/or as much as both/and.
Your comparison between scientists and other professions misses an important difference between these groups: Scientists, along with a few other professions such as journalists and judges, have a special and privileged place in society — they get to (collectively) decide what is true. That important social function depends critically on most people trusting them.
They are *also* a trade group like chartered accountants or oil drillers, but that’s not the main thing they are.
David Rausch has a book exploring this idea in much greater depth; it’s called The Constitution of Knowledge IIRC.
I felt like I was reading conflicting points while reading this. Once publications gets into the candidate endorsement business, they're obviously not going to make people who oppose those candidates happy, and risk losing them as readers. That might be an acceptable tradeoff in favor of gaining more readers that are of like minds to the endorsement.
But I'm not seeing how encouraging more local endorsements over more national ones is going to alter that risk. I certainly agree that endorsing a presidential candidate is of low gain, since people already have tons of awareness about it, and that the opposite is true for local races. But readers aren't dumb, and will be able to pick up trends in ideological beliefs from what they write and who they endorse. Publications whose endorsements lean considerably Democratic will be assumed to support the Democrat for president. It's fine if any publications want to enter the endorsement game, but once they do, they better be ready for the opposition to what they're doing, regardless of level.
I think the point is that endorsements are useless for highly publicized races, but impactful for low-profile races. So endorsements of Harris and Biden by the NYT, Scientific American, and Nature are all useless, and for the latter two publications they are worse than useless since the endorsements reduce trust in two otherwise useful publications. As to whether doing low-profile endorsements would lead to the same loss of trust, who knows, but if the endorsement were specific to the charter of those publications (i.e. science related) and they endorsed some from each party, perhaps the reduction in trust would be avoided.
As I said, I agree with the varying usefulness of impacts. But I feel like unless there's some very narrow subject that the publication is about, and it's one that doesn't have a common political polarization, the agenda would still be picked up.
This is probably too high profile of an example, but if a scientific publication endorsed the opponent of James Inhofe after his snowball throwing speech without endorsing a presidential candidate, I think most would pick up that they would be favorable to the Democrat in the latter race.
Are there any publications that really speak at scale to both sides anymore?
It seems to me that the probability that a lot of publications have pretty strong one side of the issue subscribers and because local media is a rotting corpse of useless coverage many places a national publication endorsing and raising its salience would be better than just less information out there.
I worked there a long time ago, pre sale to Murdoch. The saying inside was that the head of the editorial page wouldn't read the front page of his own newspaper because he thought it was a liberal yellow rag.
What exactly was the ideological belief in endorsing Kathryn Garcia rather than one of the other candidates in the mayor race? You can say something about the belief, sure, but it’s not like a party endorsement.
I don’t recall if the nytimes had an endorsement during the 2020 presidential primary, but it would be more meaningful than when they say “we endorse democrats”.
They endorsed two candidates for reasons that I can’t recall Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. I had to Google this to make sure I had the memory correct but they really split the baby there.
One thing that I find annoying about the Nature and Scientific American endorsements is that, unlike most publications, they should have very easy access the to expertise needed to understand and anticipate the effects of that decision.
Random observation: For a comment section of mainly self-identified Democrats opining on the daily postings of a self-identified Democrat, there sure are a lot of people here who give me "I desperately *WANT* to like Trump" vibes.
Really? I don't "*WANT* to like Trump", but I do *WANT* to feel like I can vote Republican again (not least because I want to feel like I can vote for _either_ candidate and thus make an actual choice) (and thus I want Trump to get out of our politics). I'm a self-identified Democrat right now because the Republicans are not currently offering me palatable options.
I agree with this - I want Republican House/Senate/Presidential candidates to not obviously be a crazy choice. I suspect I would still very often vote Democratic, but Trump - and at least as alarmingly, his acolytes' - looming presence over the entire Republican Party makes a comparison of the pros and cons of respective policies seem a little silly.
"I desperately want Republicans to stop being irrational and crazy, and forcing me into being a single-issue voter who has to vote Democrat because there is no other rational choice" is not the same thing as "I desperately want to like Trump"
I'm also pretty sure that literally zero of the people you are talking about have ever "self-identified" as Democrats. The Democratic affiliation sounds more rather more like an assumption you are making about us.
1) I think the comment section leans further to the right than the readership as a whole
2) Yglesias attracts a lot of conservative readers through the occasional lefty-punching content. That's why some of the most-liked comments here are rants about DEI, transgender college leftists, and how Ron DeSantis is the best governor in the US.
What I like about Matt is that he's resistant to the audience capture bug that melted the brains of Taibbi, Greenwald, James Lindsay, and other "why I left the Left" folks.
Greenwald hasn't left the Left, he is critical of Progressivism, which is not a leftist philosophy at all. I think Taibbi is in the same place. Lindsay got run out of the circles he was used to being in for some fairly anodyne opinions, and clearly couldn't handle it. I don't think Lindsay thinks about his audience at all, he would be saying the same things if he were strapped on a gurney in a padded room (which is where he may still end up, frankly.)
I would reference the point that some Democrats and Democratic aligned groups have used Trumps unpopularity to move the party to the left - especially on social issues - rather than try to rack up massive majorities to push Trump out of the political arena.
This naturally has left centrist voters feeling a bit homeless, including on this blog which is full of centrists.
The abdication of journalistic standards has been one of the self-inflicted casualties of the Trump Era. The meltdown at CBS because a reporter had the temerity to ask difficult questions to Ta-Nahesi Coates is surprising even to a jaded media-watcher like me.
The example of TNC gives about Israel being similar to the Jim Crow south doesn't make sense to me. In order for that analogy to work the oppressed population of the Jim Crow south would need to have areas where they were operating as militia units, armed by a foreign power with the explicit political goal of eradicating all white people (and their predominate christian religions) in the US. Then whatever resolution ended it would be the example to follow (at least in theory) but that's not what happened in the US. It's apples and olives.
I thought about exploring Coates' views more but then I learned that his knowledge was gained from a ten day visit to Israel and the West Bank after which he declared that the situation was simple and nuance and complexity had no place in the debate so I was very grateful to him for freeing me to use that time for more productive purposes like watching reruns of "The Simpsons."
America's most overrated public intellectual since…?
Noam Chomsky is still alive, so I'm not sure "since" applies.
But at least his linguistics work is very influential in the field, right?
I thought “manufacturing consent” was interesting in the way it approached how business and political interests overlap to create decentralized systems that act like much more centralized systems. It seemed like a reasonable way to look at a lot of Cold War conflict stuff apart from the vast conspiracy messaging of the day. I didn’t agree with a lot of its conclusions but I thought the presentation of problems was pretty good.
I think so, but I don't believe Chomsky's reputation as a "public intellectual" depends primarily on his actual field of study, does it?
His main linguistic theory is incresingly viewed as a wrong turn nowadays.
It makes me sad, because TNC was one of my favorite writers on the old Atlantic blog-roll, about 15 years ago. He had a questing intellect, along with a beautiful and self-revealing style, and was quite transparently educating himself in public about all sorts of things. I read his first two books with pleasure.
[Edit to say, I hope unnecessarily, that I didn't always agree with him - far from it, sometimes - but I always loved what he called "the beautiful struggle", by which he meant the hard moral work of improving oneself and the world, and the bravery with which he lived that out with his readers.]
At some point - probably not coincidentally along with the collapse of the wider "blogosphere" - something changed. I suppose he came to his conclusions and doesn't feel like he needs to learn much more - or, at least, not to make that part of his intellectual life so public - but I miss reading the old Ta-Nehesi. Miss that so much.
Honestly feel bad for the guy. Charitably, his book is an error in judgement, but the result is a bonfire of all the goodwill he built up over the years with people who maybe didn't see totally eye-to-eye with him but at least respected his intellect and thoughtfulness.
Yeah, I thought he was really good as a blogger.
I mainly think *blogs* were a great medium - maybe the best ever invented - for the exchange of ideas. They died - as a driver of conversation, at least; I'm aware that some people keep at it, and I admire their persistentance - because the major internet platforms (Google and especially Facebook) colonized their content without adequate economic exchange, and because moderating them against spam and trolling became an insupportable burden.
Boy, though, that ten years or so was an intellectual paradise. So many people writing so many amazing things, and having so many amazing discussions, in public, with each other and their readers.
Substack - though I'm glad it's solved the existential issues for a few - is but a pale imitation. In fact, the $$ earned by Matt and others on this platform demonstrates the immense public value that the old blogosphere had, and how great a [societal? | technical? | incentives? | policy?] failure its loss has been.
I'd be interested in Matt's insider take on what changes to what, and when, might have saved that intellectual eco-system. (Or, was it itself an unsustainable parasite, dependent on sucking the carcass of the legacy media institutions that it helped to kill?)
I don't know, but I miss that whole era.
They weren’t even tough questions! Just obvious points that someone should think of within the first three seconds of deciding to write a book on the topic.
I’m sure the interview generated more book sales for Coates.
Yes - there is a growing market for works of ahistorical anti-zionism.
I hadn't heard about that controversy until yesterday when I saw an article about Coates' interview with Trevor Noah on the subject, and I was flabbergasted when I was reading about it. It highlighted a related point to me, which is the ways in which some corners of the left have become completely incapable of arguing from substance as opposed to caricature.
I've seen so many instances where progressives will listen to someone say "thing A is LIKE thing B" and then turn around and say "OH! So you're saying that thing A is the same as this part of thing B that you never brought up or compared thing A to but is easily characterized as bad, so what you're really saying is ALL A is the same as ALL B, and some of B is terrible so you're a terrible person."
With the Coates interview, Noah was asking about the question that Coates had been asked that boiled down to "if I read your book without knowing who you were and stripped away the titles and accolades and awards of who you are, I could easily see what you're saying as something that would be included in a terrorists handbook of propaganda", and Noah took that question and said "why do they always want to strip away all of the context of what's happening in Israel and Gaza? Why can't they address the context and recognize the reality of the situation?" Which is nowhere near what the question was, but it's framed in such a way that anyone listening to the interview can bat away legitimate objections to Coates' characterizations because the people criticizing it are refusing to address substantive reality. It's an infuriating two step that is constantly used to deflect legitimate counter arguments to positions and serves to ensure that the side that agrees with Coates (and other progressive causes in the other situations I've seen such tactics used) can feel righteous in the moral superiority of their stances. I find it all incredibly frustrating.
And to then see CBS respond the way it has and act as if the questions were out-of-bounds has been truly shocking and disappointing.
From this description, I’m glad I hadn’t heard of this controversy.
I haven't seen the Coates interview, so I can't really comment on that. But what you are describing reminds me of how on sports talk shows you inevitably get terrible exchanges like
Analyst: "This college player is a bit undersized and needs to work harder on defense, but his turnaround jumper from the midrange reminds me of a young Kobe Bryant so there's at least some potential there."
Host: "YOU CAN'T COMPARE THIS COLLEGE KID TO KOBE! HE HASN'T EVEN PLAYED A GAME IN THE NBA!"
Bingo- that's a great example.
I just read the times article and learned that CBS news has an “in house race and culture unit.”. My own views on Palestine are closer to Coates’ than those of the Democratic establishment, but the interviewer was well within the American mainstream and had every right to challenge Coates.
Ta-Nahesi Coates is sacred to many people on the left. He is due deference. Clearly none of this happens if the same kind of interview was done with JD Vance.
To cleanse CBS of its unholy act of disrespect a DEI consultant was hired to lead the Sacrament of Struggle. But the DEI clergyman was apparently throwing predictable bombs on Twitter and was unhired.
Coates then told Noah (serendipity for the religious references) that Dokoupil was taking up too much space in the conversation. In fact, he knew this because Gayle told him the tough questions she had planned to ask. Doing this apparently is not aligned with CBS journalistic standards.
Maybe Tony can say 10 hail Ta-Nahesi’s and all can be forgiven. What a tangled web we weave.
Loved this discussion about the situation from Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, especially the latter.
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/my-perplexing-response-to-ta-nehisi?r=5h7eb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think they were a bit flubbed because they were asked in a way that to me seemed intended to signal allegiance rather than just be challenging questions. To Matt’s point, if that’s what you end up doing, you’re not giving anyone much new information apart from which camp you’re in.
I guess I interpreted it as a warning to potential readers (this was a book promo) that Coates has produced an ahistorical, deeply anti-zionist work of quasi-fiction. I thought the exchange during the interview was excellent and revealing (more like a British news interview with a politician than a US morning show love-fest with an "esteemed author") and I appreciated CBS's chief legal correspondents eminently sensible comments on the kerfuffle.
How is this the flagship example of the "abdication of journalistic standards" in the "Trump Era" when the largest cable news outlet, dozens of online whackjob units and even the WSJ editorial page are fully engaged in publishing and amplifying lies basically 100% of the time?
Nah, compared to other abdications of journalistic standards in other eras of American history this is very much a nothing burger. Honestly on matters like this I wish newsrooms would just fight a bit more about about these sorts of thing, old school shouting matches including, rather than these weird in public "harm" based arguments. That's what's really annoying here.
You are assuming that magazines that endorse particular candidates do so because they hope to convince the undecided to vote that way. What if that is not the main motivation -- the point being, instead, to convince the people who were going to vote that way to buy, renew, or extend a subscription to the magazine?
Good point, I suspect tribal signalling by managers is more important than the economic incentive to get more readers in determining endorsements.
Especially when you read things like this article in the Columbia Journalism Review about how Bill Gates and his foundation is funding so many news organisations. https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-funding.php
Are wealthy philanthropist patrons being signalled? How can we find out?
I would think that being supported by wealthy philanthropists would make you more willing to buck readers’ expectations, rather than feeling a need to cater to them with pointless endorsements.
Yes, but would you buck the philanthropists' expectations? Or do you want to remind them that you are doing your best for the political tribe they favour?
Why would the philanthropists care whether you endorse a politician? Does Bill Gates want to support publications that endorse Kamala Harris? It seems more likely to me that he wants Kamala Harris to win, and that he wants to support publications that do useful things in the world, but why would he care about their endorsement, if it's not useful for either of those goals?
That's a very good question. It's like when I read a lot of left-leaning magazines like Vox and others that like to analyze the philanthropy of billionaires through a critical lens, but somehow they were always dead silent about Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire whose philanthropy mostly consists of donating to journalists.
Spot on.
The New Yorker doesn't want a lot of subscribers in the same way Harvard doesn't want a lot of students.
That’s just false, though the certainly want high end subscribers much more.
I'm sure if hundreds of thousands of rural Appalachians subscribed to The New Yorker all the editors and journalists would freak out.
This assumes that editors and journalists hate the idea of making money at the same time print media is dying. They might hate the reader letters they might end up getting, but they would definitely like the money.
the odds of that happening are quite low. the real question is how hard they will push to get school teachers and adjuncts and educated but not exactly prosperous people to subscribe/consume
Games, apparently.
Harvard's endowment is about 6x the NYT's enterprise value, so if they don't want subscribers, it's for a different reason...
GrowSF is awesome and I would die for a local news org (at this point, literally just a guy) to give endorsements like they do.
I recently moved to what I thought was a pretty big place and I cannot for the life of me figure out which mayoral candidate is pro-housing. It's brutal.
Where you at? If there's a YIMBY Action chapter they should be providing that service, if not I can nudge them. https://new.yimbyaction.org/get-involved/
Not the original poster, but how do I vote YIMBY in New York???
Not a YIMBY Action chapter, but this group is doing aligned work in New York. https://opennewyork.org/endorsements/
Thanks! Sadly my district doesn't seem to appear in the list. (I'm not in NYC proper, and there may simply not be any YIMBYs in my entire county...)
Yup. I've often been forced to pick between a "community character" candidate and an "affordable housing" candidate. It's brutal.
They are great, especially considering all the work they produce to help one sort through the 10 statewide ballot initiatives and the additional 15 (!) San Francisco ballot propositions, in additional to all the state and local candidates.
Hey Matt, a few days ago on twitter you made a post about how in matters of political strategy, if you go to a campaign and ask why they're doing what they're doing they can usually identify some sort of coherent rationale even if you the reporter don't agree with their reasoning.
You know a lot of people who work for the NYT. When you ask them, "What is the reasoning behind doing endorsements this way?" what can they tell you about the internal decision-making?
I assume it’s something about how they have a duty to do it in big national races, and that because they are nominally a New York publication, but one that has global rather than local ambitions, they shouldn’t do it in other races.
I mean, I could guess too, but Matt can actually pick up the phone and ask them.
Time to rile up the Slow Boring comments section.
I am perfectly fine with the 2024 Scientific American and 2020 Science endorsements of Harris and Biden, respectively, because I see what they were trying to do there. They were not, qua some ideal notion of scientists, trying to do the most provably efficacious thing they could do to sway the election, and voters.
They were trying to do what they saw as the right thing. More to the point, they were doing what they hoped their kids/grandkids would be proud of them for doing.
This is, of course, where the David Shors of the world would butt in and say "No. NO! The job of scientists, and liberals in general, is NOT to "do the right thing"! It is to do what the data clearly shows is the effective thing--specifically, the effective thing to further liberal goals! Don't you see my data on this? I have it right here."
And fair point. The Harris campaign, specifically, has optimized itself to the point where it is practically a machine of effectiveness, not "doing the right thing"--and that is the sole reason why it is tied with Trump in the Electoral College, and not being bulldozed.
Similar reason why Biden managed to pass more than zero laws, with a 50-50 Senate. Similar reason why Democrats are competitive in nearly all the Senate races in 2024. Etc., etc.
I guess my reply to that would be: Politics, realistically, is the intersection of effectiveness and rightness. We all have our threshold, beyond which we will simply not do the wrong thing, out of effectiveness or anything else.
For example, Shor (and Yglesias!) constantly inveigh against liberals calling for gun control in the aftermath of gun massacres, on the basis that doing so not only ultimately decreases the likelihood that guns will ever be controlled, but that conservatives buy more guns in their wake. Therefore, objectively, liberals need to be smart here and. . . I guess, shut their mouths, or something.
(Whether that last thing results from liberals and their big, countereffective mouths or simply knee-jerk gun-nut reaction is an open question, of course. But regardless:)
Shor and Yglesias have a point here, of course. But *my* point is that very few libs are effectiveness mavens, constantly plotting about how to best further their cause. Especially when (as is true, in my case) a gun massacre happens down the street from them. Or, on a milder note, when guys like Trump are planning a mass political purge of scientific institutions nationwide.
Or when, in general, people are looking for a moment to step up and be counted.
Many liberals will want to carefully count their steps and ask "Okay, what's the most effective thing I can do right now to further Kamala Harris's campaign?" In fact, I think most people will be inclined to do something like that. Including most (though definitely, not all!) Slow Boring subscribers. Matt's advice on local candidates and campaign funding certainly has been useful here.
And I'm sure that even as, say, gun-control advocates reject Shor's advice and rile their fellow citizens by calling for restrictions on weapons of war, they'll be looking to see how they can be effective in other ways, by perhaps getting more like-minded people elected to Congress. State legislature. Etc.
But if you're in charge of the editorial function of Scientific American, you'll also be looking to stand up and be counted. To do what future generations might otherwise think of you as a coward for not doing.
I don't begrudge them that right. That obligation, even. Others may disagree.
As people, I agree with your assessment. Each person is free to post online their endorsement or hang signs all over their yard showing their support.
But as professionals, they have an obligation to their organization and their profession. And in that sense, they made a mistake.
As a scientist, I was extremely perturbed by the "March for Science" in 2017 because I could see quickly where it would lead. And COVID just poured gasoline on the fire. Fortunately, Elon's purchase of twitter has driven a lot of scientists off there, to our great benefit (as well as their own!). I pray when Trump goes away that we can get back to science being a mostly staid, non-partisan affair.
As usual, there's an xkcd for this https://xkcd.com/2410/
Yes but he’s agreeing with the apple folks there.
He, like many scientists, is probably down with Nature and SA doing anti-Trump stuff 😕
My read is that he's making fun of the apple growers. You think he's agreeing with them?
Yeah, I do, partly based on the timing (right after 1/6), partly because of other political comments he’s made, and partly just from the punchline (the speaker seems frantic and upset, rather than self-important or virtue-signaling). I mean I think he’s playing it for something of a joke—part of the idea is that it’s funny for apple folks to be doing this—but the target of the joke is our absurd times, rather than the apple people. Or at least that’s my reading.
"Standing up and being counted" can be brave and admirable, but only in some contexts.
It's courageous when the outcome is uncertain (or guaranteed to be negative): when others are afraid to speak or your peers are against you. But loudly adding your name to the end of a very long list is just vanity, bordering on moral exhibitionism.
There can still be a case for it, but only if it's effective.
It would be an interesting exercise to try to precisely delineate when it's better to do the right thing and when it's better to be strategic. Because it's true that sometimes the argument that you're being strategic can be a self-serving rationalization, the two classic examples of this being (1) I'm going to make money rapaciously so that I can give it to charity, (2) I'm going to support Destructive Political Leader/Movement X so that I can improve things from the inside.
I think we would need to define “the right thing” to make the question meaningful.
But Matt’s point isn’t really contrary to any of this. He doesn’t deny that people doing this think they’re doing the right thing. The claim is that it’s *not* the right thing and they should do something else. And from the outside I think he’s right: I don’t know why I shouldn’t prefer for them to think about what’s more efficacious and so that, and it seems fair to expect them to use their platforms with care and responsibility.
It seems like when you are saying they want to do "the right thing" you are meaning they want to do the thing that makes them feel good and proud.
Doing the thing that makes you feel better or look better to "future generations" instead of doing the most effective thing to enact good policy doesn't seem like a seizing of the moral high ground.
Famous last words from [INSERT REPUBLICAN POLITICIAN HERE].
I disagree. A lot of never Trumpers switched sides because they want to enact conservative policies and are deluding themselves about Trump.
But that’s a case where opposing Trump might have made a serious difference because, to Matt’s point, it was unexpected.
Exactly.
Disagree. It did both. :D
"...if you're in charge of the editorial function of Scientific American, you'll also be looking to stand up and be counted"
Scientific American is supposed to cover science, not politics or public policy. Or at least it was for almost all of its history.
Yeah, shut up and dribble, Scientific American.
Or, more to the point, I'll offer a deal: Nature and Scientific American stay out of the endorsement game and in exchange, all the evangelical churches out there utter not a peep about politics.
I think the evangelical churches never had any credibility with the people that would be turned off by their endorsement, and they've decided it doesn't matter if they could get that credibility.
If scientists want to go the same way, they can.
We're not trying to write laws here - we're trying to observe the practicalities, of what cost you may or may not pay if you make political endorsements. If you're already seen as political through and through, there's no cost. But if you had some possibility of being seen as credible by people who disagree with you politically, you have to decide how important that credibility is.
This would really speed racial realignment!
Progressives are the ones who want to fundamentally transform America. Conservatives, or rightists, or Republican (whatever you want to call them) do not claim to want that. Conservatives are not obligated by anything to unconditionally surrender to progressives. Therefore, because America is a democracy, progressives can only fundamentally transform America by winning elections. The more effective Democrats are at winning elections the more transformation there will be. If yelling about your moral righteousness makes Democrats less effective at winning elections the less transformation there will be.
Rightists (including JD Vance -- who knows what goes on inside the rotting hairy orange ball) do want to fundamentally transform America. That's their whole thing.
Correct, see overturning Roe vs Wade.
"Conservatives, or rightists, or Republican (whatever you want to call them) do not claim to want that."
You're kidding, right?
"Progressives are the ones who want to fundamentally transform America. Conservatives, or rightists, or Republican (whatever you want to call them) do not claim to want that."
Damon Linker makes the exact opposite argument on his Substack: https://damonlinker.substack.com/p/kamalas-conservative-pitch
According to Linker, Kamala and mainstream Democrats are small-c conservative, because they believe that American society is pretty ok as is and they want to focus on preserving the good things we have ("save democracy") and making marginal improvements, like, more housing and cleaner energy. Yes, progressives want radical change, but progressives are politically powerless in this election cycle. At most they can act as spoilers, siphoning a few votes away from Kamala.
In contrast, Republicans/Trump are not conservatives; they are trying to appeal to the disaffected "the system f**king sucks, let's burn it to the ground!" segment of the population. They want to RETVRN to a mythical past when men were men, America was mostly white, and there were plentiful well-paying factory jobs for everyone that still somehow magically provided everyone with the living standards of 2024, not 1954.
This election isn't a choice between "radical progress" vs "more of the same;" it's "let's go back to the Good Old Days" vs "We're not going back!"
Yuval Noah Harari makes the point that the Republican party, by adopting the rhetoric and policy postures of the MAGA right, has become become a radical revolutionary movement.
Would it make more sense to call it a radical reactionary/revanchist movement? They want to go back ("Make America Great AGAIN"), whereas I usually think of a revolution as going forward, as bringing into being a radically different future - the Bolshevik Revolution, the French Revolution, etc. Or am I just being nitpicky?
I think that's fair. I believe Harari's point is to analogize the MAGA rhetoric about the deep corruption and fundamental illegitimacy of government and cultural institutions to early Communist rhetoric about the need for the "revolutionary reconstitution of society at large." It's all about "overthrow" rather than "reform".
BTW, Maya Rudolph did a fantastic job as Kamala on SNL:
"As I said to my husband, Doug, when he told me he'd left his phone at Chili's: WE'RE NOT GOING BACK!"
Oof the choice of Chili’s might make me reconsider Kamala’s decision-making abilities. Thank goodness it was SNL
I think the idea that Republicans don't *want* major changes is both true and completely incompatible with what they propose.
That being said, the Harris being small-c conservative is hard to accept because I don't really know who she is. I know Trump, and that that's a terrible option, so will choose the unknown over the known terrible. But if you told me that upon winning the presidency, Harris was way more progressive than she is running now - would I be surprised? Not really.
She made some VERY BOLD statements in 2020 and is essentially trying to either walk way from them quietly, or mostly pretend none of it happened. Which may be what happens. But there are some similarities to JD Vance IMO. If he tries to walk away from what he said this election cycle, would you believe him in 2028?
What specific actions are you worried that she might take if, after being elected, she turns out to be way more progressive than she has presented as during the campaign? I'm genuinely curious about what this horror show people are worried about looks like.
In 2016 I remember arguing that Bernie was a useless candidate because all the things he was promising to do were utterly impossible given the structure of American governance. Congress would never abolish private insurance or pass laws that would tax millionaires at 90%, so all the outlandish stuff he was talking about was just useless bluster, and he was a horrible option because he'd spend so much time talking about nonsense that he wouldn't be able to actually achieve the things that are within the President's grasp to achieve. I see no reason to think that electing Harris will somehow result in a progressive dystopia being ushered in for the same reasons that my major concerns about Bernie were how ineffective he would have been.
Who said anything about a progressive dystopia?
One of the most frustrating things about being in election season is that the level of hype is really high and the only comparison is to the other candidate. I don't accept that rubric. Just because I don't beat my wife doesn't mean that me screaming at the kids they're stupid is okay.
As for the concerns - if the presidency didn't matter, there wouldn't be all this focus on it. My major concern for her is that she
1) Continues to push progressive spending priorities at a time when we should be getting our fiscal house in order since the economy is good. It won't always be that way and we'll want some debit capacity to do Keynesian stimulus then.
2) Insist on *everything bagel* approach that doesn't prioritize or prioritizes poorly with regards to IRA, CHIPs, etc.
3) I'm extremely pro immigration, but we need to have public support to allow for it. I don't think she abolished ICE, but I could see her doing something like Biden did which was mishandle it for years creating a sizeable backlash.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. Notice that I didn't say that Trump was better on any of these issues, just that it wouldn't be shocking to me if we come back in three years and think that her moderate rhetoric didn't really match her approach as president.
They want to deport a quarter of the population! JD Vance says a quarter of people in the US are here in questionable immigration circumstances.
I'm sorry, where/when did he say that? JD Vance is soulless but not stupid; he must know that deporting a quarter of the population is bat-guano insane even by the Trump campaign's standards, right? Right?
What I heard—and unfortunately I can't now find the claim, so I might be misremembering, or the source might not be reliable—is that Vance said that something like a quarter of Americans are here on questionable immigration status. What is definitely true is Vance saying that he is entitled to say that millions of American residents are "illegal" even though they have legal immigration status, and those people—who, again, are here legally—should be deported.
Google says: "In 2023, 14.3% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, which is the highest percentage since 1910"
Assuming* even Vance would agree that if you're American-born, you can't possibly have "questionable immigration status," then he's off by 10 percentage points.
*Not necessarily a good assumption! If an undocumented immigrant gives birth on US soil, Vance might well say that birthright citizenship should be abolished and the child should be deported along with the parent.
Vance is probably including children of people who were undocumented and people who he thinks were here illegitimately even though they had legal status. Hell, he's probably including grandchildren—the guy is on a ticket with someone who says immigrants are poisoning our blood.
You have to ask yourself, do you care more about being seen as being right, or do you care more about making positive change?
What do you mean by “rightness” if it is something that can be separated from “effectiveness”? To me, something is right if it has some significant chance of good effects, and the effectiveness is part of what makes it right. The effect doesn’t have to be short term or perfect, so giving your dying breath to defiance can sometimes be right if you think that might help inspire further, more effective resistance.
But this is an age old debate in the philosophy of ethics: whether the outcome or the actors intent is more important. You (and Matt) seem to be looking at the endorsements from a utilitarian perspective of what is their impact. While David is arguing that many of the editors might think that the morality of their actions is not determined by the outcome. The fact that this is a philosophical question without any objective way of answering is something that Matt doesn't always do a good job of grappling with when he talks about Progressives.
But so what is the basis for saying that endorsing Kamala Harris is "the right thing" for Scientific American? I understand the deontological case against lying. I don't know if I understand the deontological stance for a popular science magazine endorsing a presidential candidate. Just saying "it's the right thing to do" begs the question.
I think the deontological argument (which I think is stupid and self-aggrandizing) is that people are obligated to use whatever platform they have to shout from the rooftops about how bad the orange man is, because otherwise they’re basically Neville Chamberlain.
There are of course meta-philosophical debates about whether philosophical questions have objective answers!
I think Matt might be one of the people who think these meta-ethical questions do have objective answers, and that the thing that objectively matters is the consequences.
My view is that there are all sorts of questions here, including ones about effectiveness and ones about whether the act is somehow "fitting" in some way independent of the consequences. But if someone thinks that their act "fitting" the situation is more important than the consequences, then I think they are caring about bad things, that don't make anyone's life better, or otherwise accomplish anything good.
Some people don't care about accomplishing good. I don't like that, but it's true.
Virtue ethics vs. consequentialist ethics is one of the underappreciated political fault lines of our times!
But exactly one side of that debate is sane, and Matt is doing a huge public service by continuing to hammer that point. Some time ago it was a matter of veritable philosophical debate whether you should murder some random old ladies whenever a cow's milk goes sour, and now it isn't. Progress doesn't just happen on its own, it's a slow and painstaking process of ridding people of their misconceptions.
But the calculation of "effectiveness" revolves around the marginal reaction to your action. MY's point seems to be that Nature has "hurt its credibility" by endorsing Democratic candidates, by which I take him to be saying that the marginal Republican reader will be less inclined to "believe the science" published in Nature in the future, and that this is ultimately bad for society. The counter-argument is that any person who would shift like that based on an endorsement is so confused about the project of scientific inquiry that they would likely disbelieve the science whenever right wing media and right wing politicians tell them to, which means that the long term marginal impact of the endorsement on "scientific legitimacy" is negligible -- these people were never committed to that concept and never will be. On the other hand, the endorsement might reassure readers who are committed to that ideal that the publication is aware of the threat to free scientific inquiry presented by the MAGA right and is doing what it can to resist it. I do agree with this part of MY's argument -- any such endorsement should and easily could be rooted in the principles for which the publications stands.
That counter-argument depends on the idea that the project of scientific inquiry is not itself influenced by politics, but that is plainly false.
Off the top of my head, here are several stages of research and inquiry that are vulnerable to political influence: selecting the object of inquiry, framing the object of inquiry, funding, designing experiments, defining and selecting subjects, interpreting results, and disseminating results.
It's worth striving for the ideal, aspirational version of scientific inquiry, but the editors of Scientific American aren't trying very hard.
At the level of "all human interactions are ultimately political", I agree with you.
But challenging, analyzing and correcting errors and biases that lead to bad (untrue) conclusions about the state and processes of nature (the entirety of the noumenal universe, not the publication) is itself a (perhaps the) core feature of the scientific system. Compare that to say, the Republican party...
I think it would be helpful if they were explicit about the downsides of doing so, specifically the negative polarization likely to ensue. Then readers would know that they looked at the big picture and still found it worth taking the stand.
This is a great argument and making me reconsider my position.
To do the right thing and to do the most effective thing at achieving good outcomes are synonymous. You can’t do one without the other, or more of one than the other.
A very secular point of view, this. Also strikingly anti-Platonic. Almost no major religion would agree.
(Maybe Hinduism, but only when giving advice to kings and absolutely no one else.)
Thanks for the engagement on this! I’m pleasantly surprised.
Rather than reply to each and every fellow here, I’ll just add one more point. There’s only one reason why most of us here clearly disapprove of Science’s endorsement of Biden in 2020:
Biden is president now. Trump is not.
Even if you oppose Trump, because of that, you have time and energy in 2024 to worry about the Very Prestigious Reputation of Science journal.
Rather than, say, the end of the rule of law, a political purge of the federal workforce, military crackdowns on half of America, defunding and corruption of scientific institutions, etc. etc. etc.
So, cheer up, guys! And other Strict Consequentialists!
If Harris wins, we’ll have plenty of time and energy to tut-tut our heads at Scientific American for ruining their Very Presigious Nonpartisan Reputation, in the face of an aspiring dictator wishing to use government to corrupt and purge the community they represent.
If Trump wins, though, none of you will give a shit, At least not anymore. You’ll have about two hundred (or so) more immediate things to worry about.
Don't the high stakes add weight to the argument that publications should be more consequentialist in their decisionmaking?
Real talk: Do you seriously think Scientific American is making it *less* likely for Trump to lose?
(Personally, I think the average voter doesn’t know them from Adam nor cares what they do or do not endorse. But for me, that reduces the consequences of the endorsement, and therefore makes it relatively acceptable. YMMV.)
No, I don't think it makes him less likely to lose. You're probably right that it doesn't have a major impact. But insofar as there is an impact it will be to deepen distrust of the media and experts and I think that's a bad thing to happen, *particularly* when the government is not a reliable small-d democratic partner.
I get that.
Almost certainly a version of that argument was bouncing around the offices of both Science and Scientific American in the days/weeks/months leading up to their respective, fateful decisions. Most likely it was the grayer, more venerable haired persona making it.
Clearly the other argument seems to have won the day, though.
I can't claim to have been a fly on the wall during their deliberations, but here's my best guess as to what that counterargument might have been:
"If you're worried about the right wing losing further trust in us scientists and scientific publishers, well, welcome to the present day. That ship has sailed."
"Take a look around. Donald Trump and his allies have all but declared their intent to marginalize and ignore scientists at best, and at worst, defund, disempower, purge, prosecute, and punish us, no matter what we say, or endorse. A decisive portion of their voters have decided we're the literal servants of Satan, case closed."
"You can blame yourself for that propaganda, and imagine you might deserve it if you take a stand against it, or you can fight back. At the least, do what you will live with the least regret from, years from now."
That's, of course, my words. But I think it approximates what they were thinking.
Not a soul in the leadership of either of those publications is going to regret having contributed to "distrust of experts", at least. Or anything like that. They would rather regret having shut their mouths, in this moment.
P.S.: Note--I was raised in the Midwest, raised conservative, grew up evangelical. Still am kind of religious, especially compared to many of the more vocal commenters here.
You'd think I, of all people, would blame the media, the scientists, and their goldarned politics for the distrust of experts in society. And yet.
“…you can fight back. At the least, do what you will live with the least regret from, years from now.
…
Not a soul in the leadership of either of those publications is going to regret having contributed to "distrust of experts", at least. Or anything like that. They would rather regret having shut their mouths, in this moment.”
So this encapsulates pretty well the problem I have with your argument: it’s pure question-begging. WHY is publishing an endorsement against Trump “fighting back”? WHY should or would they regret not publishing the endorsement in the years to come? Earlier you referred to it as an obligation; from where does that obligation come?
It seems to me that the answer to all those questions has to involve either a) a guiding ethical principle, or b) some amount of efficacy. That is, regret comes either from some feeling of “I knew what I was supposed to do and I didn’t do it” or “in retrospect it would have helped if I had done that.” Which of these are you invoking?
If it’s the ethical principle, what principle? Do all people who oppose Donald Trump and have a platform have an obligation to use that platform to do it? In fact I think it’s the opposite in this case: the ethical obligations of the institution are to preservation of that institution, because once trust and credibility are gone they’re hard to get back. The whole reason there are ethical standards is because people will often be tempted to act in short-sighted ways in response to a temporary crisis. Unlike you I think at least a few people involved in this decision probably WILL regret it in the future, assuming they have enough capacity for reflection and perspective.
Can breaking that standard be justified? Yes, if the circumstance definitely requires it. A reporter isn’t supposed to get involved in the story, but if their subject starts choking of course they should give them the Heimlich maneuver. But that takes us back to efficacy! You can’t say “this was an emergency and we had to act” if you’re indifferent to the results of your actions.
What all of this reminds me of most is the justifications given for climate activists throwing soup on paintings in museums. Yes, climate change is an emergency. I still would ask people who want to get involved not to be satisfied with “in twenty years I might regret NOT attacking that Van Gogh” and think about what they actually should do, and why.
> "You can blame yourself for that propaganda, and imagine you might deserve it if you take a stand against it, or you can fight back. At the least, do what you will live with the least regret from, years from now."
This desire to cosplay as "freedom fighters" has led a great many people to beclown themselves, only to be surpassed by those cosplaying as "civil rights activists" (often the same people). It's embarrassing.
The point about surprising, endorsements, being more effective, goes to my sort of general view about credibility. Whenever I meet a partisan, I like to ask them which views do their party or candidate hold that are wrong. Not something trivial… Something significant.
I don’t trust a fan boy to give me a rating of a product. I don’t trust Fox News or the New York Times to give me a Presidential endorsement (In a normal year).
On another political note… Kamala Harris is bad at interviews. She reminds me of her student who uses a bunch of filler words to pad their 500 word essay.
Like I would’ve had way more respect for her if she could’ve articulated something, she would’ve done differently than Biden on her interview on The View. Or if she had a more direct way of saying that one of our previous positions, such as fracking was wrong. She was doing so good as well. She kicked ass in the debate.
While I’m here, I have a poll question. If you had to hire someone to be a manager or a CEO of your company…. Which one of the presidential or vice presidential candidates would you choose. Make this decision solely based on how well they performed in the debates… Treat it like a job interview…. And ignore the fact, checking aspect of it. Also, pretend like you know nothing else about them. They were just four strangers who were in a high school debate.
It’s got to be JD Vance, right? Kamala would be my second choice, followed by Walz and then Trump last.
Forgive the grammatical errors, I’m dictating this on my iPhone. About to head to Houston airport to fly to Mexico for a job.
"While I’m here, I have a poll question. If you had to hire someone to be a manager or a CEO of your company…. Which one of the presidential or vice presidential candidates would you choose. Make this decision solely based on how well they performed in the debates… Treat it like a job interview…. And ignore the fact, checking aspect of it. Also, pretend like you know nothing else about them. They were just four strangers who were in a high school debate."
But, if I were hiring someone for my company, why in the name of god would I do that?! I would screen their resume, I would reach out to references, I would want their vision for the company to match mine, and when I interviewed them I would care about them giving accurate answers to my questions, not just pretty-sounding ones. What you're asking me to do in this analogy is pretend to be an incredibly dumb and useless hiring manager. I refuse.
Yeah, one of the most important things I look for when interviewing candidates is technical knowledge. If they have good body language but say absolute nonsense, the interview is a waste of my time.
I take what Scott Galloway said, though I think he was more talking more about regular employees than CEO's: resumes and interviews mean a lot less than references. It really comes to down someone who I trust, admire and respect giving me a recommendation because they know this person and have worked with them before.
But, if you were hiring a janitor, Vance would definitely be your first choice, no? /S
It would definitely not be Vance, lol.
Being a CEO is not about being a smooth talker and a good debater. You have to actually get the facts right. I would not want to hire a CEO who does a very good job of sounding reasonable while he is spouting nonsense and outright lies. Running a company is not politics; persuading people is one part of the job, but not even close to the most important part of it.
"Sounds great, but gets everything wrong" is only slightly better than "Sounds like a moron, and gets everything wrong".
The interview candidate who says, "You promised not to point out I'm lying" gets escorted out of my office then and there.
While I think that was a horrible sound bite for Vance, and that he generally very often is lying, I don't think this is a very good analogy. If you were interviewing for a job, and someone you believed to be very biased against you was on the review board, I think it's not entirely unreasonably to be miffed. You might say something like, "it's unfair that you have Bob here!", which could be uncharitably interpreted as "this person objects to the very idea of reviewing their answers, how ridiculous!", or more charitably as "this person has a problem with this specific judge, and their particular interpretation of events".
Vance's position is quite obviously not that he's lying. It's that he believes the person tasked with deciding whether or not he's lying is not a fair referee.
If you say something factually incorrect in your interview with me, and I correct you, and you then say, "I was told there would be no fact-checking" instead of, "Oops, I'm sorry, I may have gotten that one wrong," you are out. There's the door. I'm not hiring anyone who insists on their right to lie to my face and not even get corrected on their lies.
And this wasn't a close case or a matter of opinion. Vance insists he's entitled to say Haitians are here illegally when in fact they have legal status. It's despicable.
I'm as pro immigrant as you can be, and generally think we should let pretty much all of S. America that wants to come here do so.
But the reason that the recent influx of Haitians are here legally is that Biden gave them temporary legal status via TPS. Saying that they are not here illegally is kind of like saying Steve Bannon isn't guilty of committing a crime because Trump pardoned him.
My point is that your analogy doesn't apply: in the interview scenario, both the target of the response and the arbiter of its "factfulness" are the same person. Saying "I disagree with your fact check" to the person you are interviewing is obviously unwise.
In the Vance scenario, the target of the response (the American public) and the arbiter of "factfulness" are not the same entity. He's not saying "YOU are wrong", but rather, "THEY, this arbitrarily empowered third party, is wrong".
To try another analogy: if you are accused of a crime, and take a lie detector, claiming "I believe this lie detector machine is faulty" is not the same thing as lying to a police officer. In fact, it is totally possible to tell the truth, but have the machine report a false positive (especially since lie detectors are basically bullshit afaik). His claim is much the same: that the "lie detector" used is faulty and incorrect, not "I am lying and resent being called on it". In this case I believe he is lying (people hooked up to lie detectors often are!), but that's not really the claim he is clumsily making.
He didn't say the lie detector was faulty, he said they promised not to reference its output. That may very well be _because_ he didn't trust the lie detector to be accurate, which is fair, but that's not what he said (and in this case he _was_ incorrect/lying)
Reminds me of a West Wing joke: "One politician says to the other 'You've lying about that!', the other one says 'Yes I am -- but hear me out..."
Vance for corporate counsel. Harris for CEO. Walz for HR director. And Trump for custodian for poetic justice reasons, though that’s too good a job for him.
If I truly ignored all substance, and just used debate performance, I'd have to pick Harris. She was overwhelmingly successful at accomplishing the task she was set: to make Trump look terrible and herself better as a result. Being that good when the stakes are that high is what you want in a CEO.
Vance, strictly as being a bit more polished and articulate outperformed Walz, but not nearly by as much, and he revealed some of his own flaws during the debate. He showed he was good as an interviewee if you will, but I'm not sure he outperformed that decisively. As someone who has interviewed hundreds of people over the years, I've learned to both highly value the communications skills demonstrated during interviews, but also to not let those skills outweigh all other considerations. And Vance did fall down pretty hard in a particular way. Even ignoring the blatant lying prior to it --- which would be a deal killer if I picked it up in any way during an interview, his last answer left me pretty unconvinced that given a choice between doing the right thing for the company or looking out for his own interest, whether by making himself look good or in some other more material way, that he would choose the company's interests.
I think if I were looking for a new CEO of a company after said company had just knowingly released a product that had poisoned many Americans and I needed the new guy to put up the best defense of the company in public, I'd definitely pick Vance.
“ Kamala Harris is bad at interviews. She reminds me of her student who uses a bunch of filler words to pad their 500 word essay.
Like I would’ve had way more respect for her if she could’ve articulated something, she would’ve done differently than Biden on her interview on The View. Or if she had a more direct way of saying that one of our previous positions, such as fracking was wrong. She was doing so good as well. She kicked ass in the debate.”
The mediocre Biden begot the mediocre Harris. Don’t think politics is attracting the best and brightest.
I don't think it's fair to compare Biden at 80something to Kamala at 59 - and I don't think it's fair either to compare Kamala at 59 to a hypothetical "peak performance" candidate aged 45-50 - obama/bush/clinton were 47/54/46 at their first elections. In a normal career, Kamala would be pushing retirement!
I suspect the best & brightest are repelled by a politics that involves apparently mandatory engagement with every bonkers thing the internet gins up, no matter how gross or ridiculous. I really don't think Ms Harris would've envisioned her Presidential run being associated with something called "brat summer," and that's about the minorest of examples.
You end up with participation pool of people who either like the nastiness or are willing to go with whatever flow flows their way. I don't think Harris is in either of those categories - she was pretty much drafted into running. But unless some new people appear who are capable of rising above the muckflood, it's gonna get bad.
"You end up with participation pool of people who either like the nastiness or are willing to go with whatever flow flows their way. I don't think Harris is in either of those categories - she was pretty much drafted into running. But unless some new people appear who are capable of rising above the muckflood, it's gonna get bad"
The way I hear it is she rapidly consolidated power to head off the idea of a contested convention.
> I don't think Harris is in either of those categories - she was pretty much drafted into running.
... after losing in the previous election. She signed up for all of it as much as any other presidential candidate.
Similar strategy I use when talking to candidates running for local office in my non-partisan election having city, which usually has many candidates for each position: "if you are forced to drop out of the race tomorrow, which of your opponents would be a good choice instead"? It is shocking how often folks say "none, only me." Or answer cynically, picking the most no name candidate on the list. There is no one else worth shouting out here, really?! It very often sours me on a candidate when the do this.
If you don’t have a ranked choice election system, then that is really what the electoral incentives push them to do. Saying anything that makes a voter think that people who like A might also like B is just a recipe to get some A voters to switch to B, unless you have a way for both A and B voters to raise the other in their vote without crowding out the first one.
The only reason I am voting this year is to support Proposition 1 in Idaho which puts in ranked choice voting.
I get why they do it, obviously they wouldn't say that if they had no incentive to. I get why bank robbers are incentivized to rob banks, too.
But the question is a test of intellectual integrity, similar to Rory's above. If they can't honestly admit that there is at least one other good candidate in the race, or, in Rory's case, that there is something about their party's platform they disagree with, I worry that they are just an incentive optimization machine all the way down. My preference is a person with actual, instrumental changes to the world that they are trying to accomplish, incentives be damned.
A person with actual, instrumental changes to the world that they are trying to accomplish, incentives be damned, had better well follow the incentives all the way during the election season, because nothing matters in the election season for accomplishing things in the world other than winning the election.
If they don't care about accomplishing something, and just want to make a statement, then sure, do things that go against your electoral incentives.
I think this is more true in a two-horse race like the presidential election than an open field free-for-all. If the primary goal is making an instrumental change, the difference between them and the next best candidate is presumably small (unless they have some very radical beliefs, in which case I'm not interested anyway). Sure, everyone believes that they themselves are the correct instrument for effecting change, but being able to set that aside is an important quality if the goal is the change itself, not the personal interests of the implementor.
Your proposed plan bottoms out at "lie to everyone and tell them what they want to hear all the time", which does nothing to communicate to me, the voter, that the candidate actually cares about the issue and not themselves. The question I am trying to answer in such a low-salience, low info election is not "how does the candidate most beneficial to effecting my preferred changes win?", but rather "who is, believably, such a candidate?" This is markedly different from most big elections, where the answer to the latter question is obvious, and electoral optimization is the only thing I, an already decided voter, cares about.
I agree with you- they're asking the politicians to say something that can only harm them politically. It's an unfair question intended to garner information that you think is helpful from a source that will be worse off for having answered it. Holding it against them seems particularly unfair.
It's like asking an NBA team who their top pick is in the draft but then asking them to also give you an honest answer about which other teams ahead of them in the draft would be even better off drafting your top choice. If they answer that honestly it may convince the other team to draft that player, so they're incentivized to tell you that the player would be horrible anywhere else or just refuse to answer, both of which don't provide the public with an honest evaluation of the draft. But why on earth would we turn to them to provide honest evaluations in ways that benefit their opponents?
Elections are zero sum affairs- you win or you lose, so it's just bizarre to expect candidates to try and engage in behaviors that will clearly benefit someone else at their expense.
This blog has really ranked-choice-pilled me for single-winner elections.
For multi-winners elections (like school boards or a state that decided to do at-large elections for US Congress) I wonder if some kind of proportional-allocation party + candidate system might be better.
What I like is Single Transferable Vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
This is often implemented as a generalization of instant runoff voting.
The way IRV works is that we are trying to elect 1 candidate, so we see if anyone has more than 1/2 of the first-place vote (better to write it as 1/(1+1) of the vote) and if they do, then they win, and if not, then we eliminate the last place candidates and move voters down to their second or third choices until someone has at least 1/(1+1) of the vote.
For STV, if we are trying to elect n candidates, we see if anyone has more than 1/(n+1) of the first-place vote, and if they do, then they get selected - but then instead of just eliminating the last-place candidates and moving their voters to second choices, we also transfer the excess votes that the winners got and transfer those fractional votes to second choices. It's a bit complicated to calculate, but after iterating the process, the end result is always n candidates who each got 1/(n+1) of the vote, plus some remainders.
I like to illustrate this with a caricature of a Belgian election. There are four parties - Flemish speaking socialists, Flemish speaking conservatives, French speaking socialists, and French speaking conservatives. Some people will rank all the socialists above all the conservatives, some people will rank all the French speakers above all the Flemish speakers, some will do some weird mix. But if we're trying to elect 9 people, then a bloc of 30% of the electorate can guarantee that 3 of their people get in, if they all put those above everyone else - and these blocs can collaborate to ensure that their representation adds up, even if they have overlapping preferences (but their distinctive preferences will also get some representation).
(It's unfortunate that the general term "ranked choice" has come to be the accepted name for instant runoff voting, because there are millions of different election systems that ask people for their ranked choices, and then output a single winner, and instant runoff is just one - it's one I happen to like, but there are also reasons one might prefer Borda count or any of the many Condorcet methods or various others.)
I'm curious: what's the point of asking that question?
Explained in my reply to Kenny above. In multi candidate, low-salience races (which, again, is most of the races in my locality), it seems exceedingly unlikely that there are no other good candidates. The person I'm talking to can either: A. admit that honestly, saying something like "Stacy Jones is also good on many issues and would make a decent Transportation Board member, but I also blah blah blah". Or B. say something like "All other candidates are the scum of the earth, come with me if you want to live." A convincing politician can probably pull of option B quite convincingly, but that's just a sign of them being a rhetorically strong politician, not someone trying to effect some specific change.
I think Rory's test tries to suss out essentially the same thing: are you playing for the team, or a reasonable set of positions that happen to best be represented by your current team? If it's the former, you will struggle to find bad things about your team, since the fact that your team holds them is what makes positions good in the first place. If it's the latter, it is very unlikely that your particular team has somehow turned out to align with your sincerely held, independently derived beliefs on every issue, and you'll have no trouble admitting as much.
Nope, Walz. Maybe Vance for head of PR.
I definitely would not hire Trump to be my CEO in Mexico...
I completely agree with your view that Nature magazine (the foremost international technical journal of science) was unwise to endorse a US presidential candidate. I feel less strongly about Scientific American. I view it as markedly more political than Nature, but it was always intended for a mass audience of non-experts, not as a medium for scientists to present their new results to their peers.
I don't know, maybe it was just my (scientific) immaturity at the time, but I remember really liking Scientific American as a kid. Yes, it didn't publish original peer-reviewed articles, but it still was focused on science (as I recall). But it's been explicitly political at least for a while now, which is a shame because it presents itself otherwise.
I wish that newspapers and audio and visual media would stick more to news, and to impartially reporting it. Keep the endorsements to the editorial page and try to firewall out how reporters treat actual newsworthy information. It gets a little old when newspapers take an obvious slant.
Case in point, here in New Mexico there was a plea bargain in a case where an identity-politics addled conservative shot a Native American at an event staged by the NA's to protest an Onate statue about to be honored by a local government. A recent article in my local paper merely said that the conservative shot into the crowd, which he sorta did, and just got four more years in the slammer. Having followed the case, he did shoot, but he did so as he was being manhandled, assaulted, and tossed over a low stone wall by Native American group members who were offended by his obnoxious behavior. Sure, he was not justified in shooting at them (he took the plea bargain to limit the damage, I suppose) but by leaving a key part of the story out, it warps public understanding of what actually happened.
Another example was KUNM News, a few years ago, lumped Milo Yiannapolis, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Ben Shapiro into a single category of "extremist speakers" on the air and suggested they were not worth the cost of bringing them to the U of NM campus, citing damage caused by anti-Yiannapolis rioters and the university's attempts to impose a security fee. Bias? Nah! BTW, a Federal judge just enjoined the U from imposing that fee, citing numerous appellate cases all the way up to the SCOTUS (Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement).
I missed the Nature endorsement but read the Sci Am, which discussed stuff having nothing to do with science. Professional journals should stay out of the endorsement game. As a Ph.D. working scientist (geochemist/analytical chemist and registered D), I think science is often unfairly accused of being politicized; not that it is never politicized. There is no point to supporting that notion with partisan endorsements. Nature is a peer-reviewed publication; they should have known better. Sci Am is more of "Science for the People" magazine, but that subtlety might be lost on some.
Matt perhaps underestimates how hard it is not to focus on the presidential race. I don’t want the insurrectionist to win. I’m more worried about the outcome of this election than any other election in my lifetime and I’m not that prone to worry. I’m not that worried about down ballot races— they can be voted out next time and will leave office peacefully if they lose. If Republicans take the house and pass a national abortion band, they’ll get their ass kicked next time. Unless Trump protects them from facing the voters.
Relatedly, I don’t see how any good American could support Trump. I understand why reasonable people might have voted for him in 2016 and 2020. I don’t understand how anyone could vote for him this time. I see Trump yard signs in my street, I think “these people are doing about as well as I am, why don’t they want to keep having free elections.” And I hope that, deep down, enough of them love the America that our ancestors fought for that they will want to keep having free elections and will want to discredit an insurrectionist.
Of course I know the polls are pretty damn predictive and 46+% of voters say they will support Trump. But hope, especially hope for a good noble principled thing that seems fucking obvious, is a hell of a drug. I hope some critical mass of my neighbors are better than their yard signs suggest, and I’ll worry more about the Wisconsin Supreme Court if and when we have a normal election.
One of the more damning indictments of the "Threat to Democracy" language is people immediately interpreted it as "There will literally not be a 2028 election" or "Trump will be president for life" as opposed to the slow slippage in democratic rites and norms that have guided America. People can be rightfully mad about Dobbs etc but I think people's ability to convince themselves that SCOTUS will look at the 22nd amendment and just not read "Two" is becoming increasingly hard to believe. It makes otherwise persuadable voters, those who do not know for instance that Trump wants to slash medicare, doubt everything else dems say.
To be clear, I doubt Trump would run again in 2028 or become President for life. Perhaps I’m being a moralist. Still, I don’t see how electing a president who tried to storm the Capitol to overthrow an election he lost can be good for Democracy. A threat of violence will loom over every presidential election for a generation. America would be stronger if Trump were disgraced, imprisoned and granted clemency after doing a year or two.
Emphatically agree on all counts. But I think the level of nuance attached to the Democracy argument has proven to be an argument of, by, and for political science majors who were already active members of their college young dems chapter. I feel like most voters see J6 as bad, but not worse than george floyd riots, or Columbia University or the Vancouver Canucks for that matter. Which I agree, on merit is maddening, but you gotta hunt where the ducks are. 4 years on, that is just extremely hard to disabuse people of.
That ship has mostly sailed when Trump became the Republican nominee, though. Trying to steal the election and then narrowly losing the next one isn't all that different from trying to steal the election and then narrowly winning the next one, in terms of legitimizing the steal. It's bad but the damage has already been done.
If he loses this time he probably goes to prison
>>People can be rightfully mad about Dobbs etc but I think people's ability to convince themselves that SCOTUS will look at the 22nd amendment and just not read "Two" is becoming increasingly hard to believe.<<
You're not using *nearly* enough imagination. This recalls the failure to anticipate the 911 attacks: we should've had our security people reading Tom Clancy novels.
My point being: no, Trump's not going to run for a third term in 2028 if he wins next month. He doesn't need to. He could run for a safe House seat and install himself as a dictatorial Speaker of the House (essentially an authoritarian premier, with a figurehead serving as POTUS). Or maybe he could have a lackey (Don Jr? Ivanka?) take the White House in 2028 and he could stay on as an unofficial "adviser" (wink wink) who lives in the White House by invitation of the President.
Trump doesn't have to violate the Constitution to mortally wound our democracy. He just has to subvert it.
Famously immersed in the weeds of legislative process, caucus management and whip counting, DJT is. You are correct that the corrosive impact of Donald Trump's politics, are in fact, Bad. My deeper point is that the Political, the Legal, and the Constitutional are three realms that overlap less than people imagine. Everyone has an impulse to smash them together and ratchet every concern up to the highest register by leveraging the force of the other pieces of the triad. Legal/Constitutional remedies for Political qua Political problems etc. I think that is bad and leaves us worse at performing the functions of all three legs of this stool.
By 2028, Trump will be as much of a dotard as Biden is today. Im not even sure he’ll be a very active president, but I do think his administration will include plenty of folks of enjoy LARPing “The Last Days of Weimar.”
I'm really incredulous that Trump would be willing to run for a mere House seat even if he were promised that he would get to be Speaker after winning.
FWIW, you don't even have to be a member of the House to become speaker.
Good point!
If I were still on social media, I would definitely make a post “vote for Tammy Kim for Irvine mayor”, because I assume that would mean something to some of my friends, but I wouldn’t bother making a post about who to vote for in their presidential election, because it’s sorta boring and obvious.
I want to give the actionable information, rather than blinding people with even more light on the thing that is already way overexposed.
Do you really think your neighbors think that a vote from Trump is a vote against free elections?
In the spirit of making endorsements by telling your audience what they might not know and would want to know:
Californians, Vote against Prop 33 and for Prop 34.
Prop 33, the rent control measure, is a bad faith measure endorsed by bad actor NIMBY cities who want to be able to impose punitive rent control that will prevent any new multifamily housing from being built. Huntington Beach, the baddest of actors, has already said they will do this. Don't fall for it.
Prop 34 is aimed squarely at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a group funded by an incredibly lucrative government-backed AIDs drug sweetheart deal—a special privilege to buy low and sell high— and which uses that money to lobby for NIMBY causes rather than helping sick people. AIDS Healthcare is also a slumlord. They're a terrible institution which should be forced to use their government-supplied bounty for health care.
This is a very helpful comment! I’m going to post a CA Prop thread in today’s open thread, we should definitely bring this info up then.
I haven't looked into the California ballot measures at all, I have to educate myself and decide how to vote sometime between now and Nov 5, so I will be interested in reading that thread!
Excellent!
This doesn't affect policy at all, but an annoying knock-on effect of all these publications endorsing Democrats is that it makes liberals on the ground more smug and less intellectually curious. After all, they're on the "side" of "science."
I wish this article had included some new-to-me factual information, in particular why the NYT is doing this. It just seems totally inexplicable given the points that Matt makes. Also the New Yorker decision seems odd -- did David Remnick just get jealous of the people on the NYT Ed Board?
Don't they always endorse candidates?
No, why they're no longer endorsing in local races.
I assume it’s because they no longer feel like the y have the authority as a local publication. But it’s a weird choice at a moment when a local story really has become one of their biggest stories, which should remind them that it’s worth stepping in.
I mean, they still have a significant local section, so I don't get it. But Matt actually talks to people in journalism so I would like to hear what they say about it.
Right that's an easy story to tell, but you can also easily tell the opposite story -- the NYT Ed Board loves nothing more than to tell leftists that they should suck it up. But neither you nor I know what _actually_ happened so I wish someone would report on it.
I will continue to maintain that losing confidence in scientists because Scientific American wrote an editorial is like losing confidence in athletes because Sports Illustrated chooses to endorse someone.
It's a little murkier with Nature and Science, because they are trade publications and organizations, a fact often confused by people outside of the field. (For instance, contrary to what Matt writes, the Zhang study was published in the open access journal Nature Human Behavior, not Nature, although a discussion of the paper written by a third party was published in the section of Nature devoted to such things). In fact, although the endorsement is what the greater media picked up on, Nature wrote well-reported articles on both the Trump and Biden policies for science and related issues at the same time, just as Matt recommends:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02786-4
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02800-9
AAAS, the publisher of Science, is a non-profit and doesn't formally endorse, but they do push a pro-science agenda on the HiIl and sponsor fellowships to put Ph.D. scientists in Congressional offices and cabinet departments for both parties. The journal employs reporters who publish weekly on science-related political topics - they were great at keeping me informed on the various hearings and progress on the CHIPs act - and they too did deep dives into the policies of both candidates in the run up to the 2020 election and I expect them to do the same this year.
I feel like if the Journal of Oil and Gas Extraction or Charted Accountancy Weekly endorsed a candidate based on their policies for those professions, no one would bat an eye; it's odd scientists aren't allowed to discuss issues in the same manner.
Mostly agree. I think the problem with peer reviewed professional journals endorsing partisan issues is it may suggest to the broader public, or at least some of it, that there is a political agenda at work in the scientific community and that we "experts" have an agenda other than doing good science. As far as Nature or Science, I am far more interested in what they say about science and government policy/support of it. Also, those two links were signed by individuals rather than Nature, right?
As far as Sci Am, it is not a trade journal so I don't hold them to the same standard. As I said in my own post, I am not sure the general public splits that hair between Sci Am and a trade journal. Sci Am's endorsement went light years beyond science policy, too.
I think some expect scientists to pick sides on important issues, e.g., climate change policy, gun control, covid policy, etc. The job of the scientist as a scientist is to collect and interpret quality data, skeptically test models, avoid question-begging, and dispassionately advise policy makers what the science says and as importantly, what it does not say. I think it is inevitable that once one studies a topic, one forms opinions on how to deal with its societal implications. Seems like a logical outcome. Kerry Emanuel's little essay about using nuclear power ("Nuclear Salvation") as a way to rapidly decarbonize our energy demands is an example. But that was based on his years of individual research in climate science and he was speaking for himself.
I think scientific organizations that wade too much into policy risk political blowback--recall the Dickey Amendment resulted from what some Congresscritters saw as too much hat-swapping. Jim Hansen resigned from NASA so he could wear the political policy hat full time and not implicate the scientists working in that agency with a political agenda.
Anyway, all something to think about. I don't personally think it is either/or as much as both/and.
Your comparison between scientists and other professions misses an important difference between these groups: Scientists, along with a few other professions such as journalists and judges, have a special and privileged place in society — they get to (collectively) decide what is true. That important social function depends critically on most people trusting them.
They are *also* a trade group like chartered accountants or oil drillers, but that’s not the main thing they are.
David Rausch has a book exploring this idea in much greater depth; it’s called The Constitution of Knowledge IIRC.
I felt like I was reading conflicting points while reading this. Once publications gets into the candidate endorsement business, they're obviously not going to make people who oppose those candidates happy, and risk losing them as readers. That might be an acceptable tradeoff in favor of gaining more readers that are of like minds to the endorsement.
But I'm not seeing how encouraging more local endorsements over more national ones is going to alter that risk. I certainly agree that endorsing a presidential candidate is of low gain, since people already have tons of awareness about it, and that the opposite is true for local races. But readers aren't dumb, and will be able to pick up trends in ideological beliefs from what they write and who they endorse. Publications whose endorsements lean considerably Democratic will be assumed to support the Democrat for president. It's fine if any publications want to enter the endorsement game, but once they do, they better be ready for the opposition to what they're doing, regardless of level.
I think the point is that endorsements are useless for highly publicized races, but impactful for low-profile races. So endorsements of Harris and Biden by the NYT, Scientific American, and Nature are all useless, and for the latter two publications they are worse than useless since the endorsements reduce trust in two otherwise useful publications. As to whether doing low-profile endorsements would lead to the same loss of trust, who knows, but if the endorsement were specific to the charter of those publications (i.e. science related) and they endorsed some from each party, perhaps the reduction in trust would be avoided.
Scientific American hasn't been worth reading as a science publication for at least 20 years.
As I said, I agree with the varying usefulness of impacts. But I feel like unless there's some very narrow subject that the publication is about, and it's one that doesn't have a common political polarization, the agenda would still be picked up.
This is probably too high profile of an example, but if a scientific publication endorsed the opponent of James Inhofe after his snowball throwing speech without endorsing a presidential candidate, I think most would pick up that they would be favorable to the Democrat in the latter race.
I think the idea is that local races are vastly less polarized than national ones, particularly when parties are involved.
Are there any publications that really speak at scale to both sides anymore?
It seems to me that the probability that a lot of publications have pretty strong one side of the issue subscribers and because local media is a rotting corpse of useless coverage many places a national publication endorsing and raising its salience would be better than just less information out there.
Maybeeee the WSJ? Maybe? The divide between its strict reporting and Op Ed section is wild
I worked there a long time ago, pre sale to Murdoch. The saying inside was that the head of the editorial page wouldn't read the front page of his own newspaper because he thought it was a liberal yellow rag.
What exactly was the ideological belief in endorsing Kathryn Garcia rather than one of the other candidates in the mayor race? You can say something about the belief, sure, but it’s not like a party endorsement.
I don’t recall if the nytimes had an endorsement during the 2020 presidential primary, but it would be more meaningful than when they say “we endorse democrats”.
They endorsed two candidates for reasons that I can’t recall Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. I had to Google this to make sure I had the memory correct but they really split the baby there.
Well, for one, it was stepping into a Democratic primary. That can be an indication that they want a certain type of Democratic agenda to take over.
One thing that I find annoying about the Nature and Scientific American endorsements is that, unlike most publications, they should have very easy access the to expertise needed to understand and anticipate the effects of that decision.
If only there was some sort of . . . method, for lack of a better word, that could be applied to try to discover information about the world!
Random observation: For a comment section of mainly self-identified Democrats opining on the daily postings of a self-identified Democrat, there sure are a lot of people here who give me "I desperately *WANT* to like Trump" vibes.
Really? I don't "*WANT* to like Trump", but I do *WANT* to feel like I can vote Republican again (not least because I want to feel like I can vote for _either_ candidate and thus make an actual choice) (and thus I want Trump to get out of our politics). I'm a self-identified Democrat right now because the Republicans are not currently offering me palatable options.
Are you conflating the latter with the former?
I agree with this - I want Republican House/Senate/Presidential candidates to not obviously be a crazy choice. I suspect I would still very often vote Democratic, but Trump - and at least as alarmingly, his acolytes' - looming presence over the entire Republican Party makes a comparison of the pros and cons of respective policies seem a little silly.
"I desperately want Republicans to stop being irrational and crazy, and forcing me into being a single-issue voter who has to vote Democrat because there is no other rational choice" is not the same thing as "I desperately want to like Trump"
I'm also pretty sure that literally zero of the people you are talking about have ever "self-identified" as Democrats. The Democratic affiliation sounds more rather more like an assumption you are making about us.
Couple Things:
1) I think the comment section leans further to the right than the readership as a whole
2) Yglesias attracts a lot of conservative readers through the occasional lefty-punching content. That's why some of the most-liked comments here are rants about DEI, transgender college leftists, and how Ron DeSantis is the best governor in the US.
What I like about Matt is that he's resistant to the audience capture bug that melted the brains of Taibbi, Greenwald, James Lindsay, and other "why I left the Left" folks.
Greenwald hasn't left the Left, he is critical of Progressivism, which is not a leftist philosophy at all. I think Taibbi is in the same place. Lindsay got run out of the circles he was used to being in for some fairly anodyne opinions, and clearly couldn't handle it. I don't think Lindsay thinks about his audience at all, he would be saying the same things if he were strapped on a gurney in a padded room (which is where he may still end up, frankly.)
I would reference the point that some Democrats and Democratic aligned groups have used Trumps unpopularity to move the party to the left - especially on social issues - rather than try to rack up massive majorities to push Trump out of the political arena.
This naturally has left centrist voters feeling a bit homeless, including on this blog which is full of centrists.