When I read the Moynahan quote, my first thought was that he is wrong - and in a very fundamental way. Everyone's "facts" are always and have always been what they privately think they are. I think modern neuroscience strongly agrees with me. Nobody has any ability to directly observe the world we live in - all we have access to is highly processed interpretations of it through neural processing operations whose mechanisms nobody has the faintest clue about yet. To say they aren't "entitled" to them is essentially to say they don't have the right to think what they want to think privately. And that implies some kind of thought policing. Certainly it implies censorship.
It seems to me that what this always boils down to is who gets to decide what ideas and information is allowed to be propagated to where other people can see it. And, of course, librarians have a deep interest in how this argument plays out.
And - on the Free Press - your depiction of them made me laugh. I was one of the founding members but dropped my subscription after the platform took what my perception told me was a persistent move leftward in its handling of virtually every political event - with the exception of anything having to do with Israel, which is sacrosanct and off limits for Bari Weiss. Most telling was their handling of the comments section. At first, they only censored highly abusive comments. But then after awhile they began acting like what the conspiracy theorists accused Facebook and Twitter of at their worst. People began dropping their subscriptions in droves and many have gone to other substacks where they trade stories about what they were put on timeout or banned for. There was a troll, who started out with the pen-name "Comprof" who seemed to have some kind of vendetta against Bari, mercilessly and very abusively derided virtually everything in the FP and it's "troglodyte" readership. He would periodically remind everyone what a hypocrite Bari is, for while she was a student at Columbia, she personally spearheaded an activist movement attempting to have a middle-eastern studies professor fired, whose sole crime seems to have been that he was decidedly "anti-Zionist" in his classes. Comprof eventually did get banned. He payed for another subscription, resurrecting himself as "Comprof 2.0" (gotta give this guy credit for a sense of humor). He claimed consistently to be a black communist college professor at a midwestern University.
Anyway, my point in that narration is that you have depicted the FP as "Center-Right". I and virtually everyone I ever read in the comments except Comprof had the opposite opinion - that she was creating a "Center-left" publication, decidedly at odds with her readership at the time. She had this one big chance to get into the market as a result of her highly publicized exit from the NYT and capitalized on it like she had Hearst blood in her veins - I'll give her that. But she really, really wanted to be working for a leftwing publication like the NYT, except for that Israel thing.
I also subscribe to Quillette. I like Quillette by and large - the long form essays generally have a lot more meat to them than most outlets produce (I also subscribe to Unherd). But in some ways it suffers from a similar bias that the FP does. If you look at their articles over the last year, say, you'll be hard pressed to come up with more than one or two that could make what one would honestly call a conservative case for anything. The were big on deconstructing the Canadian myth of Indian children burials and all that. But on pretty much everything else, I could just as well be reading an MSM publication, only better written. Unherd is all over the map. It's Kathleen Stock's home right now. And they regularly feature some interesting articles by conservitive-ish writers. But it's 10-1 the other way. I think the problem is that people who have been trained to write have come through programs utterly dominated 100% by far-left thinking people. They end up just not knowing how left of center they think the center is.
I don't consider myself a hardcore conservative by any means. More of a libertarian. The way I look at labels like these is that one probably ought to define them statistically. Look for where the median voter stands. That's the center. There is some probability distribution spread around that center - doesn't have to be uniform (gaussian). But the tails go way out both ways. Most writers in all these publications discussed in your essay and by me here are somewhere left of that median.
Thanks, Jeff, very helpful comments here. I didn't know about the origin of "Cathedral"; obviously, Yarvin has become famous for appropriating it. Lots of press coverage of his "confabulations" in the past year or so, as well as the other important "thinkers" from Silicon Valley (and some of them have been iconoclastic, though not I'm not sure in a positive way).
I think I agree mostly about Senator Moynihan's flip comment, though it did capture some of a consensus (maybe?) at the time when it was made about facts and how to establish them in political debate and in the public discourse. But I see your point, and the neuroscientific aspect is compelling.
As for The Free Press, I was enthusiastic initially, a big supporter, and got a free subscription as an academic for a year, but my enthusiasm has waned over time. The emerging model there seems to be a kind of cultural entrepreneurialism for Bari Weiss on multiple fronts, and The Free Press is part of it. I just can't see the "branding" of "fierce independence", though, with the prevailing politics of that journal. Some of the guest pieces are outstanding, (Yuval Levin just published one), but the regular "reporting" is often jejune and unserious. There are other opportunities now for "heterodox" journalism, and I suggested two here. There are others.
I had to find the right word when reading Nellie Bowles' Friday "updates" in the Free Press, and "jejune" was perfect. Clever, glib, but not mature or well-reasoned.
Thank you for an interesting set of articles. You respond fairly and accurately to what I regard as the most important actors in US political and intellectual heterodoxy/"heterodoxy."
Thank you Craig for a fascinating and important series of articles. It is very important that "heterodoxy" be defined by epistemic conduct and doxastic attitudes, rather than in terms of positions on particular issues, or fealty to specific cultural tribe. Your summary of what those principles comprise are excellent, and I'll be referring readers to them in the future. I've been following the intellectuals you name here--Boghossian, Murray, and Weinstein--for a number of years now, and while I still appreciate much of what the first two are still doing I have come to view them with a degree of circumspection, while I've stopped following Weinstein altogether because I've found his arguments have gone rather off the rails.
Thanks, Michael. I believe the most important way of thinking about "heterodoxy" is that "better heterodoxy" strives for better epistemic norms and both individual and collective intellectual virtues. "Dark heterodoxy", for a variety of motivations, moves away from those norms and virtues. And it shouldn't be thought of in an political way--some conservatives strive for "better heterodoxy"--It think Damon Linker in Part One is an example, since he still describes himself as center-right; while liberals and progressives can devolve into "dark heterodoxy"--I think some of the examples in the second article like Weinstein or Shellenberger definitely move in that direction (though neither might describe himself as a "liberal" now . . . . . lots of flipping with these terms now, of course).
I didn't even mention Michael Hobbes in either article . . . he's a left/progressive writer who steadily refuses to accept there's such a thing as "Cancel Culture" (or that it's wildly exaggerated). I totally disagree, and I think many of us know it's not true from either personal experience, or from the data documented in FIRE's "Scholars Under Fire" database.
Really appreciate your considered observations and thoughts here, Craig.
Are you (and we), in part, looking for exemplars of people in the public arena who are – with an extraordinary degree of consistency, regardless of topic – intellectually curious, hyper-rational, and constructive in intent? No matter where that may lead regarding their takes?
If so, such people seem increasingly hard to find in an online world, one whose incentives foster simplistic and often controversial positions. The sort of positions which build large audiences and draw high levels of engagement.
However, might Helen Pluckrose qualify as one such exemplar? Somewhat quietly, she has long struck me as exhibiting many of those qualities.
Am also eager to see your and any other readers' suggestions for others who consistently follow the truth, wherever it might lead, and are willing to "complicate the narrative" when warranted!
Regarding "complicating the narrative," this piece by journalist Amanda Ripley outlines several pragmatic approaches that any of us – from people with large public audiences to those of us leaving occasional comments on Substack posts :) – can use to create more honest and accurate narratives of real-world issues:
Aron, many thanks for this suggestion about Amanda Ripley. I got to hear her talk at a conference on pluralism last fall, and she's very compelling. She has a book on "conflict entrepreneurs" and how they operate--I read it before the conference. And of course, the Very Online who spend much time on social media are among the most prominent "conflict entrepreneurs" in our society. Ripley has some excellent suggestions about detecting "conflict entrepreneurs" and mitigating the harms they cause. I strongly suggest her book, High Conflict: How We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.
Aron, such a coincidence, just today I saw on (x) that Claire Lehmann of Quillette put out a call for examples of journalists, media figures, and others who look for the truth and resist "audience capture" no matter what. So very timely! She got a load of suggestions, and I've read through the whole thread and picked up quite a few names that may be familiar, others maybe not so much. It's almost worth writing another article here on "audience capture" and how some leading figures in journalism, media, and public discourse resist it and annoy or piss off their readers and viewers for the greater goal of facts, evidence, and truth-aspiration. This was one of my themes, to the degree that I could develop it, in both parts of "Toward a Better Heterodoxy."
Here are some names that resulted from Lehmann's very informal survey (and she's apparently writing an article herself on the responses she's receiving):
Helen Pluckrose (so yes, your example there is totally a good one)
Jesse Singal (mentioned numerous times)
Andrew Sullivan
Sam Harris (mentioned numerous times)
Bill Maher (!)
Richard Hanania (mentioned numerous times)
journalists at The Dispatch
Scott Alexander
Jon Haidt
Ezra Klein
Alex O'Connor
Noah Smith
Michael Shermer
David Harsanyi
Alice Dreger
Tyler Cown
Robin Hanson
Scott Galloway
Nate Silver
James Lindsay
Brianna Wu
Cathy Young
Nicholas Christakis
Nick Gillespie
I realize this is a disordered list but it does convey something of what some people consider better-aspiring "heterodox" figures in the media, in academia, and in public life in general
I find that Claire Lehmann is really effective in exploring the many ways in which journalists and public intellectual go astray, and she's admitted how views at Quillette have changed as well over time--she does aspire to take that journal to a better place all the time. I also find that Cathy Young (who writes for The Bulwark, Newsday, Persuasion, and other publications) is really good at getting at double standards and bad faith in reporting on facts and evidence. One of my other favorites reporters is Ed Luce who writes for the Financial Times. He has a lot of integrity as well.
Right now--maybe it's my own biases--but the most effective independent writers/reporters in my view are Jesse Singal and Matt Yglesias.
I also recommend Brink Lindsay, another substack writer from the center-right/Never Trump world.
Interesting article. Thank you.
A couple of asides: "Cathedral" used in the sense above was used much earlier - first, I think, by Eric Raymond in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar .
When I read the Moynahan quote, my first thought was that he is wrong - and in a very fundamental way. Everyone's "facts" are always and have always been what they privately think they are. I think modern neuroscience strongly agrees with me. Nobody has any ability to directly observe the world we live in - all we have access to is highly processed interpretations of it through neural processing operations whose mechanisms nobody has the faintest clue about yet. To say they aren't "entitled" to them is essentially to say they don't have the right to think what they want to think privately. And that implies some kind of thought policing. Certainly it implies censorship.
It seems to me that what this always boils down to is who gets to decide what ideas and information is allowed to be propagated to where other people can see it. And, of course, librarians have a deep interest in how this argument plays out.
And - on the Free Press - your depiction of them made me laugh. I was one of the founding members but dropped my subscription after the platform took what my perception told me was a persistent move leftward in its handling of virtually every political event - with the exception of anything having to do with Israel, which is sacrosanct and off limits for Bari Weiss. Most telling was their handling of the comments section. At first, they only censored highly abusive comments. But then after awhile they began acting like what the conspiracy theorists accused Facebook and Twitter of at their worst. People began dropping their subscriptions in droves and many have gone to other substacks where they trade stories about what they were put on timeout or banned for. There was a troll, who started out with the pen-name "Comprof" who seemed to have some kind of vendetta against Bari, mercilessly and very abusively derided virtually everything in the FP and it's "troglodyte" readership. He would periodically remind everyone what a hypocrite Bari is, for while she was a student at Columbia, she personally spearheaded an activist movement attempting to have a middle-eastern studies professor fired, whose sole crime seems to have been that he was decidedly "anti-Zionist" in his classes. Comprof eventually did get banned. He payed for another subscription, resurrecting himself as "Comprof 2.0" (gotta give this guy credit for a sense of humor). He claimed consistently to be a black communist college professor at a midwestern University.
Anyway, my point in that narration is that you have depicted the FP as "Center-Right". I and virtually everyone I ever read in the comments except Comprof had the opposite opinion - that she was creating a "Center-left" publication, decidedly at odds with her readership at the time. She had this one big chance to get into the market as a result of her highly publicized exit from the NYT and capitalized on it like she had Hearst blood in her veins - I'll give her that. But she really, really wanted to be working for a leftwing publication like the NYT, except for that Israel thing.
I also subscribe to Quillette. I like Quillette by and large - the long form essays generally have a lot more meat to them than most outlets produce (I also subscribe to Unherd). But in some ways it suffers from a similar bias that the FP does. If you look at their articles over the last year, say, you'll be hard pressed to come up with more than one or two that could make what one would honestly call a conservative case for anything. The were big on deconstructing the Canadian myth of Indian children burials and all that. But on pretty much everything else, I could just as well be reading an MSM publication, only better written. Unherd is all over the map. It's Kathleen Stock's home right now. And they regularly feature some interesting articles by conservitive-ish writers. But it's 10-1 the other way. I think the problem is that people who have been trained to write have come through programs utterly dominated 100% by far-left thinking people. They end up just not knowing how left of center they think the center is.
I don't consider myself a hardcore conservative by any means. More of a libertarian. The way I look at labels like these is that one probably ought to define them statistically. Look for where the median voter stands. That's the center. There is some probability distribution spread around that center - doesn't have to be uniform (gaussian). But the tails go way out both ways. Most writers in all these publications discussed in your essay and by me here are somewhere left of that median.
Thanks, Jeff, very helpful comments here. I didn't know about the origin of "Cathedral"; obviously, Yarvin has become famous for appropriating it. Lots of press coverage of his "confabulations" in the past year or so, as well as the other important "thinkers" from Silicon Valley (and some of them have been iconoclastic, though not I'm not sure in a positive way).
I think I agree mostly about Senator Moynihan's flip comment, though it did capture some of a consensus (maybe?) at the time when it was made about facts and how to establish them in political debate and in the public discourse. But I see your point, and the neuroscientific aspect is compelling.
As for The Free Press, I was enthusiastic initially, a big supporter, and got a free subscription as an academic for a year, but my enthusiasm has waned over time. The emerging model there seems to be a kind of cultural entrepreneurialism for Bari Weiss on multiple fronts, and The Free Press is part of it. I just can't see the "branding" of "fierce independence", though, with the prevailing politics of that journal. Some of the guest pieces are outstanding, (Yuval Levin just published one), but the regular "reporting" is often jejune and unserious. There are other opportunities now for "heterodox" journalism, and I suggested two here. There are others.
You made me look up "jejune". Great word.
I had to find the right word when reading Nellie Bowles' Friday "updates" in the Free Press, and "jejune" was perfect. Clever, glib, but not mature or well-reasoned.
Thank you for an interesting set of articles. You respond fairly and accurately to what I regard as the most important actors in US political and intellectual heterodoxy/"heterodoxy."
Thank you Craig for a fascinating and important series of articles. It is very important that "heterodoxy" be defined by epistemic conduct and doxastic attitudes, rather than in terms of positions on particular issues, or fealty to specific cultural tribe. Your summary of what those principles comprise are excellent, and I'll be referring readers to them in the future. I've been following the intellectuals you name here--Boghossian, Murray, and Weinstein--for a number of years now, and while I still appreciate much of what the first two are still doing I have come to view them with a degree of circumspection, while I've stopped following Weinstein altogether because I've found his arguments have gone rather off the rails.
Thanks, Michael. I believe the most important way of thinking about "heterodoxy" is that "better heterodoxy" strives for better epistemic norms and both individual and collective intellectual virtues. "Dark heterodoxy", for a variety of motivations, moves away from those norms and virtues. And it shouldn't be thought of in an political way--some conservatives strive for "better heterodoxy"--It think Damon Linker in Part One is an example, since he still describes himself as center-right; while liberals and progressives can devolve into "dark heterodoxy"--I think some of the examples in the second article like Weinstein or Shellenberger definitely move in that direction (though neither might describe himself as a "liberal" now . . . . . lots of flipping with these terms now, of course).
I didn't even mention Michael Hobbes in either article . . . he's a left/progressive writer who steadily refuses to accept there's such a thing as "Cancel Culture" (or that it's wildly exaggerated). I totally disagree, and I think many of us know it's not true from either personal experience, or from the data documented in FIRE's "Scholars Under Fire" database.
Really appreciate your considered observations and thoughts here, Craig.
Are you (and we), in part, looking for exemplars of people in the public arena who are – with an extraordinary degree of consistency, regardless of topic – intellectually curious, hyper-rational, and constructive in intent? No matter where that may lead regarding their takes?
If so, such people seem increasingly hard to find in an online world, one whose incentives foster simplistic and often controversial positions. The sort of positions which build large audiences and draw high levels of engagement.
However, might Helen Pluckrose qualify as one such exemplar? Somewhat quietly, she has long struck me as exhibiting many of those qualities.
Am also eager to see your and any other readers' suggestions for others who consistently follow the truth, wherever it might lead, and are willing to "complicate the narrative" when warranted!
Regarding "complicating the narrative," this piece by journalist Amanda Ripley outlines several pragmatic approaches that any of us – from people with large public audiences to those of us leaving occasional comments on Substack posts :) – can use to create more honest and accurate narratives of real-world issues:
https://thewholestory.solutionsjournalism.org/complicating-the-narratives-b91ea06ddf63
Aron, many thanks for this suggestion about Amanda Ripley. I got to hear her talk at a conference on pluralism last fall, and she's very compelling. She has a book on "conflict entrepreneurs" and how they operate--I read it before the conference. And of course, the Very Online who spend much time on social media are among the most prominent "conflict entrepreneurs" in our society. Ripley has some excellent suggestions about detecting "conflict entrepreneurs" and mitigating the harms they cause. I strongly suggest her book, High Conflict: How We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.
Aron, such a coincidence, just today I saw on (x) that Claire Lehmann of Quillette put out a call for examples of journalists, media figures, and others who look for the truth and resist "audience capture" no matter what. So very timely! She got a load of suggestions, and I've read through the whole thread and picked up quite a few names that may be familiar, others maybe not so much. It's almost worth writing another article here on "audience capture" and how some leading figures in journalism, media, and public discourse resist it and annoy or piss off their readers and viewers for the greater goal of facts, evidence, and truth-aspiration. This was one of my themes, to the degree that I could develop it, in both parts of "Toward a Better Heterodoxy."
Here are some names that resulted from Lehmann's very informal survey (and she's apparently writing an article herself on the responses she's receiving):
Helen Pluckrose (so yes, your example there is totally a good one)
Jesse Singal (mentioned numerous times)
Andrew Sullivan
Sam Harris (mentioned numerous times)
Bill Maher (!)
Richard Hanania (mentioned numerous times)
journalists at The Dispatch
Scott Alexander
Jon Haidt
Ezra Klein
Alex O'Connor
Noah Smith
Michael Shermer
David Harsanyi
Alice Dreger
Tyler Cown
Robin Hanson
Scott Galloway
Nate Silver
James Lindsay
Brianna Wu
Cathy Young
Nicholas Christakis
Nick Gillespie
I realize this is a disordered list but it does convey something of what some people consider better-aspiring "heterodox" figures in the media, in academia, and in public life in general
Wild, Craig!
I just came across that on X/Twitter (https://x.com/clairlemon/status/1905742521290117185) and was coming here to share that, and you – felicitously – had already found and commented!
I find that Claire Lehmann is really effective in exploring the many ways in which journalists and public intellectual go astray, and she's admitted how views at Quillette have changed as well over time--she does aspire to take that journal to a better place all the time. I also find that Cathy Young (who writes for The Bulwark, Newsday, Persuasion, and other publications) is really good at getting at double standards and bad faith in reporting on facts and evidence. One of my other favorites reporters is Ed Luce who writes for the Financial Times. He has a lot of integrity as well.
Right now--maybe it's my own biases--but the most effective independent writers/reporters in my view are Jesse Singal and Matt Yglesias.
I also recommend Brink Lindsay, another substack writer from the center-right/Never Trump world.