- David Brooks’ favorite essays include one about how Trump’s people have no clue about how to fix complex problems, and one about why people believe *true* things;
- Two pieces from The Atlantic about 77 facts from 2024, and important breakthroughs in 2024;
- And Heather Cox Richardson’s take on the civil war among MAGA Republicans.
NY Times, Opinion by David Brooks, 26 Dec 2024: The Sidney Awards
These are “awards” that Brooks personally announces for his favorite essays of the past year, from “small and medium-size publications,” i.e. avoiding the big papers and magazines. I’m noting this to note a couple of his selections that appeal to me and my big themes. First this:
What posture are we to take toward the incoming Trump administration? Some have opted for pre-emptive panic. I prefer the posture Jennifer Pahlka — who founded Code for America and served in the Obama administration — takes in “Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight.” She writes about Elon Musk’s plans for the Department of Government Efficiency, dwelling on the policy substance, not the histrionics.
Here’s the point that resonates:
I take Pahlka’s stance to be this: Trump’s people aren’t always wrong when they identify what the problems are. But they have no clue about the complicated sources of those problems, and they don’t possess the right expertise to fix them. That strikes me as a pattern that will afflict the Trump administration not only on government reform but also on a range of issues, including deportations, tariffs and relations with China.
And second:
Let me ask you a question: Why is there poverty in the world? That might be the wrong question, as Dan Williams writes in an essay titled “Why Do People Believe True Things?” Poverty has been the norm through most of human history. The real question is not “Why is there poverty?” but “Why is there wealth?”
The source essay is Why do people believe true things? is subtitled “Ignorance and misperceptions are not puzzling. The challenge is to explain why some people see reality accurately.”
This suggests a new dimension to the issues of why people believe weird things, or why some people are so easily duped into believing conspiracy theories. It seems that there are actually evolutionary advantageous — better safe than sorry — to provisionally accepting conspiracy theories, as writers like Michael Shermer have pointed out, as long as believing in them doesn’t cause any immediate, personal harm. Back to Brooks:
This is called an explanatory inversion, in which you flip a common question around. For example, why do people commit crimes? They commit crimes, obviously, because it’s easier to steal something than earn enough money to buy it. The real question, then, is why, in a lightly policed society, do people obey the law?
Well, this is easy: because over millions of years humans evolved a morality that enabled cooperation among larger and larger groups.
Williams points out that these days there’s a lot of commentary on misinformation and on why people believe false things. But that’s obvious. It feels good to believe what’s convenient to believe, even if it’s fake. The real question is “Why are people willing to go through the arduous process of discovering the truth and believing true things?”
Well again: because believing true things enables an honest interaction with the world, the understanding of the world (through science), and the application of that understanding to technology, which has created our modern world, for better or for worse. Those who wallow in the “demon-haunted world” as Carl Sagan put it aren’t those creating new knowledge or inventing new technologies or building a better world.
Those habits, he continues, require social norms about standards of evidence. They require institutions like academic journals and the scientific method that test ideas and challenge other people’s findings. Williams’s key insight is that “truth is not the default.” It took centuries of work to build a society in which more people would believe true things, work that is being undone in a jiffy.
This is Jonathan Rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge again: the norms of science, and society, that entail the verification of policies and truths, that are now being undone by the ideologues on the religious and political right, who would return us to tribalism.
I’ll quote one more paragraph, in which Brooks identifies his favorite sources.
This year, as usual, I was steered toward the best essays by people who run three of the most interesting aggregators on the web: Caroline Crampton and Robert Cottrell, who edit The Browser, which gathers literary and other essays from all over the English-speaking world; Conor Friedersdorf, whose The Best of Journalism Substack hits my inbox every Sunday with the best that was written over the previous week; and Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, which has remained, for many years, the go-to blog for people seeking to arouse and satisfy their curiosity.
(So that’s where Conor Friedersdorf went!)
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It’s the end of the year. Despite religion, the world progresses.
The Atlantic, The Atlantic Science Desk, 28 Dec 2024: 77 Facts That Blew Our Minds in 2024, subtitled “Chewing gum, space capsules, and minivans are just a few of the things we see differently after a year of reporting.”
I’ll note this piece simply by quoting the first dozen items.
- Onions were used to treat wounds during the French and Indian War.
- The energy required to show a new Instagram post from Cristiano Ronaldo to each of his followers could power a house for several years.
- A group of butterflies flew across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping. It took them only about eight days.
- Children with cystic fibrosis are no longer automatically eligible for the Make-A-Wish Foundation because a new drug works so well that these kids are now expected to have an essentially normal lifespan.
- Your body carries literal pieces of your mom—and maybe your grandmother, siblings, aunts, and uncles.
- The generative-AI boom is on pace to cost more than the Apollo space missions.
- Early space capsules lacked handholds and footholds on the outside, and some spacewalking astronauts really struggled to make it back on board.
- Around the world, more than 10,000 barcodes are scanned every second.
- McDonald’s cooked its french fries in beef tallow until 1990.
- The fast-food giant also grills its beef patties for exactly 42 seconds.
- California grizzly bears are mostly vegan, but over time, humans have made them more carnivorous.
- A tick bite can make you allergic to mammalian meat—so much so that some ranchers are becoming allergic to their own cattle.
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And a similar piece from the same magazine.
The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, 29 Dec 2024: The Most Important Breakthroughs of 2024, subtitled “This year saw several advancements across medicine, space technology, and AI that extend our knowledge in consequential ways.”
I’ll quote his headings:
- An Ingenious Defense Against HIV
- The U.S. Enters the Age of Rocket-Catching
- A Quantum Breakthrough
- Another Year of Generative-AI Wizardry
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Let’s finish with this. As an historian, Heather Cox Richardson takes an historical perspective.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 27 Dec 2024: December 27, 2024
Civil war has broken out within the MAGA Republicans. On the one side are the traditional MAGAs, who tend to be white, anti-immigrant, and less educated than the rest of the U.S. They believe that the modern government’s protection of equal rights for women and minorities has ruined America, and they tend to want to isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world. They make up Trump’s voting base.
On the other side are the new MAGAs who appear to have taken control of the incoming Trump administration. Led by Elon Musk, who bankrolled Trump’s campaign, the new MAGA wing is made up of billionaires, especially tech entrepreneurs, many of whom are themselves immigrants.
During the campaign, these two wings made common cause because they both want to destroy the current U.S. government, especially as President Joe Biden had been using it to strengthen American democracy. Traditional MAGA wants to get rid of the government that protects equality and replace it with one that enforces white male supremacy and Christianity. New MAGA—which some have started to call DOGE, after the Department of Government Efficiency run by Musk and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy—wants to get rid of the government that regulates business, especially technology, and protects American interests against competition from countries like China.
Their shared commitment to the destruction of the current government is about the only overlap between these two factions.
The American revolution was about building a better society, with ideas about equality and rights derived from Enlightenment values. As I’ve suggested here several times, the idea of democracy might be a temporary glitch in the history of humanity, just as science has been. Base human nature will never go away. The religious right doesn’t believe in Enlightenment values, not even those enshrined in the US Constitution.
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Today’s reading: 75 pages of Bill Adair’s BEYOND THE BIG LIE.
