A Silent Diplomat

A friend of mine sometimes sends me links to articles, blog posts, etc. that he finds interesting. As the saying goes, this does not necessarily equal endorsement of their ideas. I’ve got a bit of a backlog of these that I’ve been meaning to respond to, so I decided to compile them here as well.

I often worry about being, ironically enough, undiplomatic. I’m a lawyer by training, and part of the culture of lawyers is that we argue and criticize the other person’s arguments, then go have a drink together afterwards. Arguing and poking holes in someone else’s arguments are basically the job, so it doesn’t generally get taken personally by those involved. We’re all just trying to do our duty (that of zealously representing our clients) at the end of the day.

This can clash, and clash hard, in settings involving other people. This is true even in ostensibly legal settings when non-lawyers are involved. The two worst jobs I’ve ever had in my life were both “legal” jobs where I was supervised by non-lawyers. It was maddening for a host of reasons, and it conflicted heavily with what I’m supposed to do as a lawyer, which is provide an opinion and judgment, and be willing to disagree with people and/or say they’re wrong. A good supervisor understands this...the people I worked for were not good.

So it is that I remain gun-shy when asked about an opinion on something from a non-lawyer. We’re not really supposed to be diplomatic where that can inhibit clarity or make things seem like less of a problem than they are. I don’t go out of my way to insult people, but for some, disputing something they’ve said is the same thing.

In the present instance, adhering to this was hard.

The links were all stories from something called The Lindy Newsletter (hosted on a SubStack-alike), and written by someone called Paul Skallas. I didn’t know anything about the author going in, and for the most part still don’t. What I found out is that, unfortunately, he sucks at presenting arguments.

It’s strange because he has some good ideas, and there are underlying points to what he writes that are seriously worth thinking about and discussing. The problem is that these tend to get buried among a lot of nonsense, and he consistently relies on either blanket pronouncements, evidence that doesn’t actually prove his point (or worse, undercuts it), or weasel worlds. It’s doubly strange because he doesn’t seem to have an overt political goal; every time I thought he was going straight to Chudsville, he stopped well before getting there.

It was surprising just how tired I found reading all this. I knew that poorly-formed arguments annoy the hell out of me, but it was weird just how much they bothered me in this case, especially since he’s not trying to get people to vote Republican or whatever (as far as I can tell, anyway).

This will make more sense with specifics. The first article I read was called “Are We Becoming Too Domesticated?” So we’re confronted first with a clear example of Betteridge’s law, even if I didn’t know that until later. The title alone gave me pause, as my experience has been that whenever people start talking about ideas in this vein, i.e. that we’ve somehow lost things from prior eras, it can get ugly real fast. That’s not really where it goes, thankfully, even if it’s because it never really goes anywhere.

He never clearly defines “domesticated,” but seems to be saying “risk-adverse.” The argument is basically that we’re becoming less willing to take risks than before, and that lives with lots of twists and turns have “vanished from modern Western life.” His examples for this are (1) the life of Col. Sanders (of KFC fame) and (2) two novels: Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck and Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. This is as far as it goes, though: he just says things were different (as recently as 50 years ago, apparently), full stop. The only specific evidence he gives of actual changes in this regard is that teenagers are engaging in less risk-taking behavior, namely things like drug use, reckless driving, unprotected sex, etc. (really). Beyond that, he says that, for example, people are buying more cars painted black, white, or gray, “because it’s safe.” He provides a graph (without any indication of the source) showing this trend, but never even attempts to show that this is because “it’s safe” (whatever that means). So to recap, all we have is his statement that this is a trend, and we know it’s a trend because teenagers are doing fewer harmful things.

This leads into the second issue, which is that he never even gives us a reason to care. He says at one point that “successful upper middle class professional people tend to be dull” and that the modern form of our society/economy/workforce (all of them at various times) encourages this. This is one of those instances where there’s actually an interesting idea here: we’re still trying to understand what the Industrial Revolution has done to us, much less the more recent shift towards more white-collar work. Skallas never goes anywhere with it, though. Instead, we’re supposed to believe that life being “dull” is both bad and inevitable based on this supposed trend. He does at one point gesture vaguely towards “creativity” being lessened, but never connects this to anything.

This is not the extent of the problems, but it gives a good idea of what’s going on. There’re a couple just bizarre arguments too, namely that because people of the same “educational class” tend to “mate,” we’re already engaged in “embryo selection” for traits such as docility. It’s certainly a take, and starts to get into weird techbro pro-natalist stuff.

. . .

I don’t know the author well enough to impugn any kind of motive, chalk it up to a case of Dunning-Kruger, or anything like that. But I do see how easy a trap it is to fall into. It takes a lot more work and time to be precise and to really provide background for what you’re saying, and in the context of a blog post or newsletter especially, you have to draw the line somewhere to avoid it turning into a full-on book. This author seriously misses that mark, though. More than being directed at the author specifically, I’m frustrated that something this trite and lazy is taken seriously.

This is part of a broader frustration, I think, and this relates to one of the good ideas that Skellas accidentally ran over in passing. Complacency is dangerous in the political context, and maintaining vigilance over time is exceedingly difficult. This is worth its own post, so I won’t go into detail here. Instead, there’s a related problem brought to mind: why don’t we demand more?

I keep coming back to this when thinking about politics and public policy. Everyone hates politicians, but why don’t we require more of them? There is a chicken-and-the-egg problem, of course, because there’s the issue of getting better people to actually seek office. Regardless, I don’t understand why so many people think they don’t deserve better.