Status, class, and the crisis of expertise

While I appreciate someone willing to touch on some of the issues of elitism and populism, much of this article reads through the clear lens of the author. The author assumes much about human behavior, because this is how they interpret or how they feel about many of the issues. Or perhaps it is how they imagine someone who isn't them interprets it. It's quite clear that much of this is jumping to conclusions - the first clear sign of this is imagining that humans would resemble homo economicus if we were "solitary animals". This is an absurd proposition - homo economicus is a fictional idea based on purely logical reasoning with a capacity for infinite and perfect thought. Even solitary animals do not act this way. Most of homo economicus's futility has been disproven by behavioral economics, a field driven by an understanding of psyche, or how humans and many animals react given the environment of nature and an optimization for survival and reproduction on this planet. Many behaviors which disprove homo economicus are inherently selfish rather than cooperative.

But even if we ignore the odd choice to bring up homo economicus and juxtaposing it against humanity and being social in an in incorrect way, the author continues to jump to odd conclusions throughout the article. Acts of charity are described through the lens of "reputation and honor" and acts are solely selfish and designed to advertise one's "superiority". This is flawed, narcissistic thinking. Even animals have an innate sense of fairness which can be described with a much simpler concept which the author already mentioned but failed to tie to their central thesis - it's entirely driven by the evolutionary pressures of being a social animal. It turns out that social animals naturally exhibit behavior which is socially beneficial, or to state it otherwise, behavior which benefits the many is preferential to that which benefits the individual.

The framing of social behavior as inherently selfish is an incorrect one, and one which behavioral sciences has proven is incorrect time and time again. On average, humans and other social animals almost always exhibit behavior which benefits the many over the few. Yes, there are individuals who game the system, something which should be unsurprising to anyone even mildly familiar with the concept of evolution, but they are the exception not the norm. Unfortunately the author, like many others, has been mislead by a popular theoretical idea that humans are inherently narcissistic at their core, despite it being a rare personality trait. While I've never seen a paper or musings on this idea, I suspect this idea mostly comes from a number of prominent philosophers who've proposed such an idea, perhaps a reflection of their own mental state or a focus on a particular problem they have observed in human behavior (attention to problematic outliers, so to speak).

With all that being said I do think there are many nuggets of truth and conclusions which have been jumped to which are more than likely at least partially true or contributing factors to a more muddled and complicated reality. I do think that the concept of prestige being something you can fight, or the desire and need to feel informed and correct about one's worldview are both important in the current political environment. Being "woke" has absolutely become an attack the right uses on the left, and an aversion to status meaning something being displayed by the working class is hardly a new thing. However, I don't think you can tie this neatly to the current democratic party, as workers movements in the early 1900s (arguably revolts by the peasantry going back through the middle ages as well) also displayed markedly similar viewpoints of class and status, a reflection of discontent with a ruling party which was treating them unfairly. This is a clear reflection, however, on how social animals can recognize and reject unfair treatment in a social context, and not a reflection on how the democratic party has conducted themselves or some new concept of class status emerging - the explanation is much more simply rooted in animal behavior. But even if the root cause is simple, untangling it from the complexity of our current environment and notably the social circles that we run in, is much more complicated.

Something the author fails to touch upon, is social signaling and social values. An inextricable part of this particular problem lies within how social groups signal who they are, what they value (what grants you a high or low status), and what can cause one to be included or excluded. Social norms directly drive social values through the inclusion or exclusion of individuals based on their signaled or displayed values. In the social sciences there is the idea of a "tipping point" in social dynamics, or a point at which holding a particular value will start to exclude you from social bubbles, which rapidly leads to the adoption of a new social dynamic. A common example of this is the fight for rights by various minorities - there was a point at which being racist was socially acceptable, however, once it was not acceptable in enough groups, social dynamics change quickly and people adopt a new stance in order to maintain their existing social connections. With the hyper-polarization being driven today by algorithmic platforms optimized on engagement, I suspect these social norms have rapidly diverged among groups of individuals and is behind some of this seemingly giant divide between the left and the right's social dynamics. I believe the issue is simultaneously one of social inclusion and exclusion - that there is no way to bridge the gap anymore or for folks to walk simultaneously between several social groups because so many of them have diverged so far from each other.

All of this is crucially important to the idea presented near the end of the article, that one cannot "fact-check your way out of status competition". I think this is both a true and misleading statement. The author is correct to point out that status in the subgroup of populism they highlight does not value fact-checking and doing so will not win you status in that group (I also think that it's important to note that there are many progressive populists, they just do not happen to currently be in power in this corrupt system of governance in the united states). I once again, however, think it is shortsighted to think that it is the fact-checking itself that is at the heart of the issue. It is possible to appeal to the values that they hold while simultaneously seeking solutions which are "fact-checked" - that is merely an issue of framing and understanding social dynamics. It is also entirely possible to move the values of an entire group's values this way, it just takes a long time and a lot of effort and sometimes a modicum of luck. I think it's kind of ironic that the author then backs this up by saying that "Institutions dominated by a single social class and political tribe will inevitably face resistance and backlash in broader society, regardless of their technical competence." despite the very group they are referring to attempting to re-dominate institutions with a single social class and political tribe. They are correct that diversity is important, and crucially important when it comes to moving social dynamics across groups (the only way for a pressure to cross groups, such as in the case of racial dynamics is for the social groups to have individuals who simultaneously exist in more than one social group), but they are failing to recognize that the modern online environment has given individuals the ability to stop existing in social groups they used to have to deal with and withdraw into online echo chambers or find like-minded individuals despite their scarcity in a world which allows finding and connecting with similar people in a way unprecedented in history.

In short, I don't think there's such a nice clear answer to our problems that can be summed up by saying "stop acting elitist" or whatever. The dynamics are much more complex, and the author is distilling complicated social dynamics down through a lens of selfishness which, while convenient, misses the larger picture. Social dynamics are much more complex, and involve many individuals who aren't acting out of selfishness on all sides. Economic pressures are forcing more folks into selfish views, tech companies drive for engagement has rapidly hyper-polarized social norms and applied new difficult to understand and deal with social pressures (which may warrant an entirely new model of social dynamics), individuals communities are shrinking and disappearing (accelerated by the loss of third spaces), and a number of other complicated changing social dynamics have all lead to our current crises. This problem is much more vast than the author wishes to grapple with or has considered.