From MIT Press:
How much information is too much? Do we need to know how many calories are in the giant vat of popcorn that we bought on our way into the movie theater? Do we want to know if we are genetically predisposed to a certain disease? Can we do anything useful with next week’s weather forecast for Paris if we are not in Paris? In Too Much Information, Cass Sunstein examines the effects of information on our lives. Policymakers emphasize “the right to know,” but Sunstein takes a different perspective, arguing that the focus should be on human well-being and what information contributes to it. Government should require companies, employers, hospitals, and others to disclose information not because of a general “right to know” but when the information in question would significantly improve people’s lives.
Sunstein argues that the information on warnings and mandatory labels is often confusing or irrelevant, yielding no benefit. He finds that people avoid information if they think it will make them sad (and seek information they think will make them happy). Our information avoidance and information seeking is notably heterogeneous—some of us do want to know the popcorn calorie count, others do not. Of course, says Sunstein, we are better off with stop signs, warnings on prescription drugs, and reminders about payment due dates. But sometimes less is more. What we need is more clarity about what information is actually doing or achieving.
Link to the rest at MIT Press
PG was drawn to the OP for two reasons:
- He had previously read several short works from the author, Cass Sunstein, and enjoyed them.
- At the end of the worst presidential campaign season in the history of the United States, PG (along with a great many other people) is sick and tired of hearing about the two candidates, their appearances, their statements, their goals, their relatives, their assistants, their past, their futures, etc., etc., etc., etc.
In other words, PG is suffering from too much information about people, opinions and events that tend to disgust him.
PG is looking forward to the day, hopefully not too far in the future, when he doesn’t come across a single mention of either candidate or anything associated with them.
From anyone else than Cass, I’d, maybe, buy this. But, I also read Nudge, and, to me, this is more Nanny State “We Superior Thinkers know what you Proles need. We’ve decided to limit the amount of information available to you, of course, for YOUR own good. Aren’t we Fabulous to be thinking ONLY of you?”
I’m not buying it. Freedom of information has been one of the greatest tools that we can use to push back against the Elite.
Is there any situation where not knowing is better than knowing?
If we look at the origin of the progressive movement in the early 1900s, and follow it through today, it is concerned with who should rule, not the policy of those rulers.
The idea is simple.
First, the population lacks intelligence, education, knowledge, experience, and wisdom to know what is in its own best interests. Therefore, university educated experts should determine what is in the best interests of the population, and government should enforce their decisions.
Second, since the population cannot determine what is in its own best interests, neither can it determine who should represent it in determining those best interests. That means the population can’t vote for people to represent it.
The progressive solution is the installation of university educated experts who cannot be removed via the democratic process. These would be similar to federal judges. They would make all the best decisions, and their decisions could not be changed by an ignorant and disgruntled population.
Note, nothing above deals with capitalism, socialism, taxes, welfare, education, etc. If the university educated experts decide unfettered capitalism is best, then it is. If they decide a welfare state is best, then it is. If they determine a strong military is best, then it is. Nobody else has the the intelligence, education, knowledge, experience, and wisdom to know better.
Think I’m stressing the “university educated” bit too much? No. Those are the words of the progressives, and they are very important to the movement.
And we should not be fooled into thinking the progressive movement is a partisan movement. It’s not about policy. It’s about who sets the policy. In the 1924 presidential election the Progressive Party candidates were, LaFollette (R) and with Wheeler (D).
Maybe the Progressives should follow the French model and set up a separate school for mandarins, teaching how to run a government while pretending to honor voter preferences.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/École_nationale_d%27administration
—
The École nationale d’administration (generally referred to as ENA; French pronunciation: [ekɔl nɑsjɔnal dadministʁasjɔ̃]; English: National School of Administration) is a French grande école, created in 1945 by French President, Charles de Gaulle, and principal author of the French Constitution, Michel Debré, to democratise access to the senior civil service. The ENA selects and undertakes initial training of senior French officials. It is considered to be one of the most academically exceptional French schools, both because of its low acceptance rates and because a large majority of its candidates have already graduated from other elite schools in the country. Thus, within French society, the ENA stands as one of the main pathways to high positions in the public and private sectors.
Originally located in Paris, it has now been almost completely relocated to Strasbourg to emphasise its European character. It is based in the former Commanderie Saint-Jean, though continues to maintain a Paris campus. ENA produces around 80 to 90 graduates every year, known as étudiants-fonctionnaires, “enaos” or “énarques” (IPA: [enaʁk]) for short. In 2002 the Institut international d’administration publique (IIAP) which educated French diplomats under a common structure with the ENA was merged with it. The ENA shares several traditions with the College of Europe, which was established shortly after.
The future of ENA is uncertain; on 25 April 2019, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, promised that he would close ENA. Macron is an ENA graduate himself, but the tight network of ENA graduates influencing the French civil service has been decried by populist protests such as the gilets jaunes as an elite governing class out of touch with civilians.
—
I expect the operation to be renamed but remain in business.
The Gaullist ghost looms eternal.
Much as the ’68 gerontocracy on this side of the pond.
Maybe the Progressives should follow the French model and set up a separate school for mandarins, teaching how to run a government while pretending to honor voter preferences.
They have. The Harvard Kennedy School. They don’t seem to have done any better than the French.
Aw!
I’m Shocked. Shocked, I tell ya!
Elliot01 said: The progressive solution is the installation of university educated experts who cannot be removed via the democratic process.
I like that model. Great for Story.
Thanks…
By that definition you would limit who could go to University, and the best way to do that is limit the number of Universities.
I see stories where a century ago they did that, and for the future I see them closing down Universities and restricting access.
That works either way for many stories.
I’ve started a Story folder.
Some Universities Are About to Be “Walking Dead” | Amanpour and Company
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM5HkpyXxsQ
The Coming Disruption to College
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/scott-galloway-future-of-college.html
I think Oxford had some sort of legal monopoly rights for a long time. Forget the details.
It was mostly a duopoly: Oxford and Cambridge.
https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/medieval-university-monopoly
It lasted for centuries, until the 19th Century.
—
“From 1334 onwards, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were required to swear an oath that they would not give lectures outside these two English universities. It was a prohibition occasioned by the secession in 1333 of men from Oxford to the little Lincolnshire town of Stamford. They were escaping the violence and chaos which often attended medieval university life – the frequent battles between students, and between students and other communities within the town – the same conditions, in fact, which had led an earlier generation of scholars to up sticks and leave Oxford for Cambridge. But their action now threatened both universities, and so the Stamford experiment had to be suppressed. The sheriff of Lincoln, the lord chancellor, even the king, Edward III, were all called into play and the result became known as the ‘Stamford Oath’; an oath which Oxford and Cambridge graduates continued to swear until 1827. ”
“Universities were originally little more than a sort of trade guild, a separate group of masters and their students, who controlled admission, regulated quality and negotiated with the local authorities. Just as butchers and bakers sought to restrict the supply of their skills, so masters within the university hoped to protect their distinctive rights. These privileges were threatened by rivals. Oxford and Cambridge continued to act like guilds long after they lost or forgot their origins. Thus it was that even in the 17th century they fought off attempts by places as various as Carlisle and London, Ripon and Shrewsbury to establish their own institutes of higher learning. Thus it was that they crushed the nascent Durham University in 1660. ”
“Just as the two universities wanted to control the supply of teachers and students, so the English Church and state wanted to control the universities. Universities could be – indeed, were – the source of dangerous heresies, where people learnt to think the wrong things.”
“Politically, too, universities could be highly problematic for the powerful, providing an environment in which subversion could be debated and even promoted. ”
—
So, the usual: old foggies looking to indoctrinate the next generation in the “right way of thinking”. No surprise that the duopoly ended as the industrial revolution, ahem, gathered steam.
You can regulate many things but you can’t regulate physics and the other hard sciences.
The Elites have always sought to limit what the masses know, just with different methods and excuses. Educational reform is endless, whether rooted in the STAMFORD OATH or in COMMON CORE. It’s all about control and it always fails, usually via self-teaching.
Which is why modern authoritarians have turned to book burning, book banning, and cancel culture. Common roots, common goals, common fails; their actions breed reactions and the masses have their say sooner or later.
I have never really understood the problem here. I consume information. I’m not force fed. I don’t Twit, and have no Facebook page. I did create accounts on both platforms, and mastered the user interface so I could understand how they work. But then I deleted them because I didn’t care.
The paper Wall Street Journal sits in the driveway six days a week, and the included web site can be quite good. I scan the web for items of interest, and haven’t read calorie counts except for amusement. (An infantryman can hump all day on the calories in one of those movie theater popcorn tubs.)
I just read Amity Shlaes book on the Great Society, and nobody interrupted me with unwanted information at any time as I clicked through the Kindle.
Today I tackled rerouting my irrigation system, and found all kinds of deep dive info on Youtube. It was just sitting there waiting for me to need it.
Sunstein is a classical Progressive. He wants experts to guide our lives because they are so much better at determining what is in my best interest than I am. A few years back, he was advocating “nudging” as the preferred solution, so people could be pushed in the right direction without feeling compelled.
I also have a wonderful device called a clicker beside my chair. It’s been around for about fifty years. I use it to change channels or click off the TV. One might have had an argument before the clicker was invented and it took a trip from the chair to the TV to hit the controls.
Information consumption is a choice. Choose.
Well said. The ancient question of “Who shall guard the guardians?” applies just as much to information as it did to the city gates of Rome.
(Parenthetically, I know that nobody here, especially our host, is naive enough to think that we will stop hearing about at least one of the persons. Of course, it won’t be about “Candidate X,” but about “President X.” There is also the fact that we will be hearing from the other one, and the possibility that we will hear a lot about “Y did it” whenever the latest scheme of “X” blows up and burns. Have to blame somebody for the empty cookie jar.)
Agreed on all counts.
The chinese CCP is a big fan of “nudging”, for varying degrees of forcefulness.
Cancel culture is also a proponent of “nudging”.
(So are the modern Jacobins pulling the strings of Mr X.)
That way lies tyranny.
Personally, I believe one cannot be too rich, too cute, or too informed.
And since I am neither rich nor cute the only tool I have for navigating the world outside as it exists has always been information. In all fields.
Only a fool chooses to be uninformed.
That way lies unpreparedness.
The world is change in all its aspects.
The only defense is to be alert and keep a *non-obsessive* watch on the world outside.
Choose to focus solely on one aspect and you’ll be blindsided by another. Guaranteed.
To survive the 21st century we all need to be generalists in our day to day activities, even if a specialist in a profitable area or two. Competence is being informed and being able to adjust, to have a viable “plan B” for whatever life is likely to send your way. Particularly in a time and place of incompetent leaders but competent antagonists.
Ages ago, Robert Anson Heinlein built a career writing about that archetype, the “Competent man”, who he described as:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
(In retrospect, I have at one time or another checked off most of those. Except the hog and dying. Those I’d prefer to skip.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man#:~:text=A%20human%20being%20should%20be%20able%20to%20change,cook%20a%20tasty%20meal%2C%20fight%20efficiently%2C%20die%20gallantly.
One might suggest to PG that his “information overload” may be due more to paying too much attention to what is being forced upon us in one area and not diversifying on other areas of significance. As Mr Holmes might say “the game is afoot”. Many games. And not always subtly.
Me, I actively tracked the pandemic for a couple of weeks, getting a feel for what it required to survive, how it started (and when: August 2019, actually) and how it will play out. After that, I shifted most of my attention to other areas of real long-term relevance, unlike tbe contest between paranoid and senile figurehead. Or the mainsteam media’s fearmongering and tbeir obsession with weather porn.
The world post-pandemic is going to be a different place because the most important changes–in economics, technology, warfare, global affairs, and society–haven’t stopped just because big media has spent four years focusing on some orange dude. As folks here are aware, the pandemic is accelerating trends that were already ongoing. It isn’t true just in retail. It is all over.
There’s a new era coming.
It is safest to have at least an inkling of what’s coming.
It won’t necessarily be bad.
Decades ago, Straus and Howe’s postulated a multi-geherational cycle of social tendencies; by their model, we are in the “Fourth Turning”, effectively tbe winter of the age, an age of crisis and incompetent, unaware leaders unprepared to deal with the actual threats of the day.
But the cycle moves on and people by and large adapt–some purposefully and properly, others less so–and the new age takes shape.
To paraphrase a popular frase of the day: Spring is coming. It won’t be fluffy bunnies, sunshine and roses, but it will be better than what is extant.
We just need to prepare and for that information is essential.
Unless one enjoys getting steamrolled.
$0.02
(Rant mode off.)
One up on you, Felix, as I believe a javelina counts as a hog. But two down, as I don’t think a rowboat on a New Hampshire lake can be counted as a “ship,” and even horrible poetry escapes me…
Like you, I always felt the last requirement is rather too far. (I was acquainted with at least two people who only managed that one – and I honor them.)
Aw, so much for the pedal boat in the lake…
(Rats!)