On an episode of one of Vox’s podcasts, Ezra Klein said something that I can’t get out of my head, and that bothers me on a deep level. He said that in the present age, with the internet, myriads of think tanks, public intellectuals, universities, and ideological outlets, that any intelligent well-educated person can come up with a strong and hard-to-conclusively-refute argument, with copious citations, expert opinions, interpretation, and analysis, and supportive anecdotes, for almost any position they like in politics.
It really is bothering me because at some level I suspect it is true. I think of how often I see thousands of words used in internet arguments, with copious quotation and citation of experts, for many different sides of an issue, and they all seem pretty convincing if I took them on their face, and it would probably take me dozens of hours of research to be able to engage with them.
You could spend years just reading the output from libertarian intellectuals and outlets and experts, or liberal ones, or socially conservative ones, or anarchist ones, or marxist ones, etc. and still have more to consume without ever challenging your ideological preferences. If you encounter an expert or opinion that is disagreeable to your worldview, you can use Google to pretty quickly find a very articulate and well-cited counterargument to, if not that particular argument, at least that worldview and that position.
You can spend years becoming an expert on a particular issue, and read every expert and source from all sides, and still you’ll probably find people as well-informed as you with the opposite view.
I wouldn’t say this is the fault of, as many people in the rationalist community put it, the mindkilling ability of politics (I think there is truth to that, but I don’t think it’s strong enough to explain this). Rather, I believe it’s because understanding politics involves the intersection of two notoriously difficult areas of study, the social sciences of large groups/societies on the one hand, and ethical and political philosophy on the other. They’re hard because they’re subject matter is so vastly complicated, in a way that is extremely difficult to comprehend and think about.
But, we’re still political animals, and we have to do politics, so we have to keep thinking about this stuff (or, at least, some subset of intelligent people do) to keep society functioning and (hopefully) improving.
It becomes necessary to use intuition and other means of attempting to infer the truth.
I did not return to Nationalism because of overwhelming statistical evidence, but from a set of broader observations about the conditions of terrorism, the social fabric, incentives on actors, and so on.
The number of political operators using statistics badly is high, and they often either fabricate statistics using bad methodology (occurs in Feminism with things like the formation of the Duluth Model), or just exclude any statistics that don’t agree with them. Sometimes they don’t even realize they’re doing it.
Other times they just don’t even think of things that are against the argument. To take a recent example that many of you will disagree with me on, “but we gained so much economic value from immigrants from the middle east!” in response to wanting to limit travel and immigration. It doesn’t account for the estimated $2 trillion cost of 9/11, which then created the “justification” for the Iraq War (also very expensive) and further erosions of civil liberties and the advancement of the surveillance state. It also doesn’t account for the fact that the US’s immigration demand exceeds immigration quotas, and therefore every one of those slots could have been filled from another country instead.