Outside of narrow domains, knowledge of our reality is not the default state of human minds, even when they are healthy or functioning well. It is, instead, a fragile achievement of complex epistemic cooperation—of a vast collaborative enterprise of creating, communicating, and evaluating information—that rests on precarious networks of trust, testimony, reputation, and a division of intellectual labour.
This social-epistemic machinery, we argue, is our species’ epistemic superpower, but it is also the source of our vulnerability to becoming delusional.
…People co-create “epistemic reward systems”—systems of social incentives, status competition, and a division of intellectual labour—that support forms of collective irrationality no individual could achieve alone.
Keep in mind that Williams’ post is itself a distillation of a book, so do not expect me to be able to portray the ideas with just those excerpts.
A moral verdict — “unacceptable” — closes a conversation: it isn’t the kind of thing you argue with, only submit to or offend against. But the claim underneath it is a different kind of thing. That there is an inner fact of gender, that it’s involuntary, that it owes nothing to the body, and that pronouns track it — every part of that can be disputed by reasonable, informed people. And a claim that reasonable people dispute is, by definition, arguable: something you can hold up, examine, agree or disagree with, ask for reasons about.
Rather than jockeying for a fixed number of slots in a preordained order, ambitious Americans embraced the Declaration’s promises of equality and liberty to shape new outlets for their aspirations. They instantiated the pursuit of happiness in new towns, inventions, schools, occupations, and religious institutions. In an economy of scarce labor and abundant, albeit contested, land, they transformed ambition from a vice threatening a few well-established hierarchies into a virtue enriching a diverse, dynamic society with countless sources of status and respect.
She closes with a warning:
At its two hundred fiftieth anniversary, the ambition unleashed by the Declaration’s principles of liberty and equality remains a potent characteristic of American culture. But it is one always at risk of succumbing to procedural rigidity, nihilistic envy, or old-fashioned status-seeking.
I worry especially about nihilistic envy, coming from the DSA.
our racial bargain was supposed to be temporary. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it was quickly agreed that some racial favoritism was justified to compensate for the black minority’s unequal starting point. The temporary nature of this favoritism was crucial to the deal. The imperative to treat citizens equally under the law was the moral claim on which the whole civil rights movement was based. Race-based remedies were only “transitional,” promised one chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and would “fall into disuse once the job is done.”
At the time, it was sincerely expected that black and white outcomes would converge.
Her point is that we either give up on achieving equal outcomes or we have to live with a permanent affirmative-action regime that will become increasingly absurd and difficult to change as minorities become a larger share of the population.
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