For example, I’ve been privy to two parallel, heated debates about foreign aid over the past half-decade. People who work in foreign development (especially effective altruists) have engaged in a battle about the efficacy of various forms of foreign aid: what works best, what works less well, what doesn’t work at all, and how we can know.
[A reader points out that some of the criticism of American foreign aid on the right is older, and comes from a broader critique about the liberal world order — I think that’s also true.]
But neither debate exhibits much awareness of the other at all, with very negative consequences. The DOGE team has axed the most effective and efficient programs at USAID, forced out the chief economist, who was brought in to oversee a more aggressive push toward efficiency. It does not appear to be interested in engaging with what we know about more or less effective humanitarian aid.
And people in the NGO class were completely blindsided by the animosity the Trump administration had toward them and the speed at which many of their contracts would be torn up.
This makes me wonder whether there’s something like a “targeted de-siloing intervention” to prevent risks like the above. Asking LLMs yielded a variety of ideas, none all that insightful or promising.
My own not-that-useful observation is that this is yet another instance of the observation John Nerst made in Partial Derivatives and Partial Narratives that narratives can be both correct and seem totally contradictory, the way partial derivatives of a higher-order function (representing reality, too complicated for human minds to grok) can be both correct and seem nothing alike, so that asking “what’s the real story here?” is a bit like asking “what’s the real derivative of f(x,y,z) = 4x^2 y – y^z?”.
Quoting Nerst’s square-and-circle example for more intuition-building:
Imagine that the world was just a set of dots like this picture:
What happens then? Say Alice is told (or, because of psychological predilections, personal experiences or self interest, is more likely to internalize) that the world is a square (left picture), while Bob is told it’s a circle (right picture).
Alice and Bob now have differing ideas about which dots are the important ones, which are expressions of something fundamental (signal) and which are just isolated incidents (noise). They will be interested in and eager to talk about the dots that make up their preferred shape.
When Alice talks about any dot in the square she’s actually taking about the square and other dots are Beside The Point. When Bob talks about a dot that makes up the circle, he’s just ranting about some insignificant dot. If Alice is feeling uncharitable she might think Bob’s just talking about irrelevant dots because he doesn’t want to talk about the square. Bob thinks that Alice taking a great interest in dots in the square and dismisses dots in the circle is hypocritical.
Note that they don’t have to disagree on which dots exist or where they are. Savage political fights can happen without any factual disagreement or fundamental value difference.
There are of course more examples than capitalism. Like nature vs. nurture. “People’s behavior are the result of socialization that works to perpetuate power structures” and “people’s behavior are the result of biological impulses and instincts” are both partial truths. But the full truth is not “in the middle” but on another plane entirely.
“History is determined by the actions of individuals” vs. “history is determined by large scale economic and technological forces.”
“Art subverts the audience’s unexamined preconceptions” vs. “art is the creation of transcendent beauty.”
“Sex is about satisfying basic, impersonal appetites” vs. “sex is an act of intimacy and an expression of love.”
“Ethics is about maximizing happiness” vs. “ethics is about doing your duty”.
“Science works by accumulating knowledge about the world, asymptotically approaching perfect correctness” vs. “science works by replacing one paradigm with another in a series of revolutions.”
“Moral rules and norms are symmetrical, exactly the same for everyone” vs. “Moral rules are there to protect the weak, favoring them over the strong.”
I suspect Nerst is sadly right that “savage political fights can happen without any factual disagreement or fundamental value difference”, which makes me bearish on the effectiveness of potential interventions involving better awareness-raising of correct factual information for preventing or mitigating risks like the dismantling of USAID, but I’d love to be proven wrong here.
#9 of Santi Ruiz’s 50 thoughts on DOGE over at Statecraft caught my eye:
This makes me wonder whether there’s something like a “targeted de-siloing intervention” to prevent risks like the above. Asking LLMs yielded a variety of ideas, none all that insightful or promising.
My own not-that-useful observation is that this is yet another instance of the observation John Nerst made in Partial Derivatives and Partial Narratives that narratives can be both correct and seem totally contradictory, the way partial derivatives of a higher-order function (representing reality, too complicated for human minds to grok) can be both correct and seem nothing alike, so that asking “what’s the real story here?” is a bit like asking “what’s the real derivative of f(x,y,z) = 4x^2 y – y^z?”.
Quoting Nerst’s square-and-circle example for more intuition-building:
I suspect Nerst is sadly right that “savage political fights can happen without any factual disagreement or fundamental value difference”, which makes me bearish on the effectiveness of potential interventions involving better awareness-raising of correct factual information for preventing or mitigating risks like the dismantling of USAID, but I’d love to be proven wrong here.