additive ad hominem sense-making

Making judgments about people is good, actually.

A bit part of how I make sense of the world in a fractured and low-trust information environment is by finding people who write a lot and figuring out who seems trustworthy and who seems untrustworthy. This saves me a ton of work.

During COVID, when the CDC and Anthony Fauci were lying me, I read a lot about masks and disease transmission from Zeynep Tufekci. She made strong arguments for masks and for COVID being airborne. Now she’s someone I take seriously about bird flu. I am fairly busy, and I can’t be an expert on bird flu. Zeynep can. Great.

There’s a ton of stuff I want to know about but don’t want to become an expert on.

• Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall help me make sense of politics

• Tyler Cowen helps me make sense of economics

• Romeo Stevens & many other Twitter folks help me make sense of esoteric therapy/meditation technology

Having access to trustworthy experts is incredibly useful in a world where context is that which is scarce.

It’s also helpful to have a sense of people who talk a lot but are idiots. I tend to mute these people on Twitter as a useful shorthand for “You looked into this person at some point and decided they were an idiot.”

I have fantasized about creating a web service to let people easily categorize folks in this way, becuase it can be hard to remember the folks who aren’t trustworthy. Some people vaguely on this list: Michael Hobbes, Glenn Greenwald, Robert Reich, Alex Berenson.

This is a very important process and maybe it’s just too obvious to talk about. One thing this internal process is not is an argument for other people. When my friend asks “Why shouldn’t I like Tulsi Gabbard,” the answer “I looked into her at one point, became convinced that she’s a fucking moron, and then jettisoned the reasons why she’s a moron because I have limited mental capacity” isn’t very satisfying, and for good reason. I read “How to Disagree” and it’s good and correct about how to refute an argument. That's not what this process is for.

Tulsi Gabbard was recently right about something, which is great! Good for her. Being right about multiple things over time may move her out of fucking moron status, but being wrong about one important thing is probably going to keep her there forever. Whatever, she doesn't care.

Some tips:

• Revisit your sources over time and figure out if they’re actually reliable. Maybe you’ve changed! Maybe they’ve gotten brainworms!

• Don’t confuse disagreeing with you about something with being a fucking moron. A friend of mine sent me an episode of the Tucker Carlson show podcast to listen to where Tucker interviews Jeffrey Sachs. The episode is called “Jeffrey Sachs: The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin.” Tucker is untrustworthy. My view of Jeffrey Sachs is that he’s probably a useful stooge about Ukraine / Russia, but I haven’t actually read or listened to anything by him about this. It’s worth reading the transcript and figuring out whether he seems trustworthy. Even better would be to read his writing about something else and get a feel for his sensemaking before engaging with him on an issue where I have very strong priors that tell me he’s a fucking moron.

Normies trust the NYT or WSJ editorial boards. There’s something useful to that. I trust Tulsi and Matt and Ezra and Tyler and Romeo.