What gets me is the poor judgement of so many people who became victims of the greatest blackmailer in history. Steven Pinker proved himself completely devoid of real guile but he is still publishing books about human nature.
(People are also upset abt PG & his wife doubling down on sama. Ofc I don't know much about these guys apart from hearsay, but the "public" rage is similar. Dark traits are associated with agency, the "elites" just happen to rationalize this bellyfeel better?)
Purely based on bellyfeel, there's something deep here..
Related to informal rules/institutions: these might be ways to filter out high Ds ..?
Building a framework to understanding false negatives/false positives with respect to different systems of rules would be the goal. Social proof is one such,surely there is some better tradeoff?
Well, in the last six months there has been an attempt to push a "high agency = high-D" meme which is just not true. Elon Musk is effective in the ways he is effective despite being an asshole, not because he's an asshole. I've known a few Nobel Prize and McArthur Genius winners and worked closely with two: one was a real asshole, the others were average to highly agreeable people.
There is a "low agency" problem with the Democratic Party and the left which turns in a few ways.
Excessive valorization of marginalization makes you low agency. Being afraid to say anything that offends donors or groups make you low agency. The interpretation that Kamala Harris lost the last election because of inflation is a low agency interpretation (even if it is true) because there's nothing she could do about it and it doesn't give any guidance for how the next candidate could change or even indication that the other candidate needs to change. Interpretations that blame the "they/them" ad and the context around it are higher agency because they can do something about it.
It's not directly related to high-D or low-D, I think Clinton and Cuomo are very high-D, Harris was not particularly high-D, Biden hanging on despite promising to be a "transitional figure" was high-D.
As for Pinker I am calling him out for remarks he made about being in a clique that had dealings with Epstein. I'm aware of no evidence that Pinker did anything criminal. But he showed bad judgement in being there and particularly bad judgement in statements he made about it where he failed to "cover his ass" and instead tried to present himself as "interesting" or "cool" or "incisive" or something. Wisdom in that case would have been to do what his lawyer would have told him to do which is to say "no comment" -- covering your ass doesn't make you a great human being, but it's better than the alternative of opening your mouth and making yourself look bad.
It's one thing if you're a rando, it's another thing if you want people to think you're an expert in human nature.
Whatever Pinker's D score is, he's embedded in a high-D culture and in a high-D culture you tend to be tolerant of high-D people. One of the codes of high status is deference; you are an expert on your domain, somebody else is an expert on their domain. You don't criticize high status people: when people like Musk and Trump do this, people are shocked.
Thank you for this analysis! How trust (or distrust) is navigated (created;destroyed;parlayed into more trust) seems to be the thread that runs through all that. How (reputational) proceeds are shared following risky actions.
Going on from your pointers, I'm going to think about whether some combos, like mid-D in high/low (or: high in high/low in low) are indeed better correlated with low agency than the others (high in low, low in high).
Very much still groping about, this will take a long time :)
purely-D analysis also seems more tied to virtue ethics, which is like a lowest-agency sibling of the 3. But also not, in a motivational sense (like guidelines that promote thoughtful action, not knee jerk reactions)
> His public statements, urging the MAGA faithful to move on from Epstein, come across as an attempt to shut down discussion rather than encourage transparency.
That's all he can do. Just hope people forget or grow bored of nothing changing. How do you have your AG say there are thousands of hours of CSAM video and then not follow that up with, "... and here are the indictments".
And it will probably work. The faithful are pretty faithful.
They really, really wanted the Epstein files because they're convinced that a lot of their enemies are in there, and there's a pretty good chance that they're correct about that.
They'll hate to lose that, but they don't really care that the reason for it (that some of the people they support are also in it) is obvious. It has nothing to do with the victims; it's solely about punishing their opponents.
So it was a useful political tool, and it's not as hard to jettison as you might expect. It doesn't stir up cognitive dissonance because the claimed reasons for interest are not the same as the real ones.
