Henry Farrell (henryfarrell)

My response to Marc would be "physician, heal thyself!" I think that there is plenty that is wrong with mainstream media, and many very stupid things that are published. But frankly, I think that Marc needs to get over it, and to recognize that everyone is prone to availability cascades and obsession with the "current thing," including him. As, for that matter, am I. And that we are all over inclined to treat as malice or base irrationality what is rational, even reasonable, to believe, if you start from a different place.

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We are all subject to what cognitive psychologists call the "fundamental attribution" problem and more specifically the belief that the actions of people we don't like are malignly motivated and intended to hurt us. And that we are uniquely rational, but our adversaries are irrational idiots, where they are not positively wicked. We all need to realize that this is part and parcel of our cognitive architecture, and not, usually, the architecture of the world we live in. The essay I wrote tries to take a different approach - it does not attack Marc et al. as wicked or stupid, but instead suggests that their thinking and action points in directions that go contrary to their expressed philosophy. I may not have done this well! - it is trying to model other people's thinking. But I believe that doing that will get us a lot further than dismissing the other side as gaslighters, idiots, or worse, which is the unfortunate habit that we revert to without constant vigilance.

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I think of this as voice in the _very_ limited sense that money talks - it is a pretty explicit threat that if you take positions we don't like, you will find huge amounts of money being spent to defeat you. Less persuasion than palm-greasing and panic-mongering. You could see it as buying into the existing political system (in a literal sense) but classical liberals like e.g. Adam Smith were highly skeptical of the role of such power mongering (also more recently the late Mancur Olson, whose books I warmly recommend)

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It's an interesting place to be! I have two affiliations - the other is SNF Agora, which is concerned with democracy, both in theory and practice. SAIS is much more policy oriented. Going back and forward between the two allows me to be two very different kinds of academic at once, which is fun.

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