Disqus - Latest Comments for willwilkinson

Re: Test

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 11:44:39 -0000

Okay. The comments are here.

Re: Shut Up and Listen: Intersectional Identity and the Value of Multi-Perspectival Diversity

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 28 Apr 2018 14:25:22 -0000

Searching for the lowest possible motive for members of any group but one's own is not actually a good way to understand anyone or anything.

Re: Social Justice as an Essentially Contested Political Concept

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 11:03:16 -0000

Absolutely.

Re: Wilkinson on libertarian principles and welfare policy

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 29 Mar 2016 14:28:03 -0000

Zwolinskiism it is!

Re: On Feasibility

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 12:26:43 -0000

That is to say, ought doesn't imply can, but a function of oughts is to make it more likely that you can.

Re: On Feasibility

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 12:23:35 -0000

Everything you say could be true and it could still be true (it is) that minarchy is even *less* probable.

Re: On Feasibility

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 12:21:55 -0000

YES!

Re: On Feasibility

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 12:21:11 -0000

Lots of dubious empirical assumptions about motivation and moral agency here. IMO, it's just false that everyone everywhere under all conditions has the power to voluntarily refrain from free-riding. One point of a norm against free-riding is that it helps stack the motivational deck. That is to say, we ought to affirm the norm because without it people are even less likely to be *able* to comply with it.

Re: On Feasibility

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 12:10:33 -0000

Feasibility obviously matters to strategy. I'd like to hear you talk about the relationship between ideal theory and practical reform, as you see it.

We can ask what the world might look like if people are being as good as they can be. But I don't know how to answer that question. I don't think rationality and morality need to coincide, but I do think that if morality and rationality come apart *too* much, such that acting morally reliably harms our interests, then it's not so clear what it *means* to be as good as we can be. I don't think that the facts about what's moral can be fixed entirely in isolation from what's rational. The trouble is that what's rational depends on external institutional/social facts--the structure of the incentives we face. I don't think it's clearly immoral to act like you're in a dire zero-sum game when you're in a dire zero-sum game. Yet there are more and less moral ways of acting like you're in a dire zero-sum game. Which is to say, our moral reasons aren't *as* dependent on the lay of the land as our instrumental reason are, but neither are they wholly independent of them. One account of good institutions is that they're good because they make it rational to be good, which does require that we have a relatively independent idea of what it means to be good. But I think the best account of our ideas/intuitions about what's good is that they're conditioned by the institutions we find ourselves already inhabiting. So they can't really serve as a fully independent standard for evaluating institutions. Because we inconsistently apply our immanent moral standards, it's pretty easy to spot possibilities for incremental reform. And it's reasonable to see these judgments as more or less reliable, since we're not calling for a radical shift of the institutional ground of our moral sensibilities. But using our immanent moral standards to assess institutional possibilities very tenuously or not at all continuous with the status quo seems dodgy in the extreme, and prone to category-like errors, like the sort you get when you evaluate the quality of music in one tonal scale according to the implicit standards of another tonal scale.

Re: On Feasibility

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 11:24:02 -0000

Artist working on a sculpture with a hunk of clay.

Artist: Ideal standards of beauty require that I make a floating orb out of you.

Clay: I don't float. You know, gravity.

Artist: That's a totally contingent fact about the mass of the Earth. Elsewhere you float.

Clay: But we're here on Earth.

Artists: I don't see what that has to do with the demands of beauty.

Clay: I guess I can try harder.

Artist: Yes, please work harder at what beauty requires of you.

Clay: WANT. TO. BE. BEAUTIFUL. UNNNNNNNGGGHHH...

Artist releases clay into the air.

<splat!>

THE END

Re: PredictIt | Who will win the 2016 Republican Iowa caucus?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 01 Feb 2016 13:21:03 -0000

lol. No, the point is that the polls systematically underestimate the candidate evangelicals coalesce around. Cruz will do better than he polls, for sure. Question is whether it's enough.

Re: PredictIt | Who will win the 2016 Republican Iowa caucus?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 01 Feb 2016 12:48:02 -0000

Look at what Santorum ended up with relative to the final DSM Register poll in 2012.

Re: My Circus Sideshow

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 26 Jan 2016 18:15:27 -0000

What a great sport you are, Robin! Can't wait for the book.

Re: Why Are Libertarians Mostly Men?

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 13:25:21 -0000

I LOLed! Good work, Matt.

Re: Ayn Rand’s “Philosophy: Who Needs It?” Is Bullshit

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 11:14:50 -0000

This reminds me a bit of this old post... http://www.willwilkinson.ne...

Re: http://bigthink.com/the-moral-sciences-club/diagnostic-inflation-do-you-really-have-a-mental-disorder

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 23:11:34 -0000

The file must have been moved. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/wat...

Re: How Krugman Dehumanizes

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:48:40 -0000

I think I come down somewhere between you guys. Like Jason, I think political irrationality is more or less inevitable, for rational ignorance and rational signalling reasons. I also think that there is no feasible institutional alternative superior to party-based representative democracy, which is inherently adversarial, and makes the sort of moral peace Kevin envisions fanciful. That said, culture matters a lot, and norms of moral open-mindedness and respect for those with whom we disagree can and ought to be strongly promoted. The strong version of Jason's sort of view I think facilitates passionate political enmity by seeing it as an inevitable part of the ugly stupidity of politics, which is therefore pointless to resist. There's a tendency to point at blinkered Krugman-like partisan vehemence and say, fatalistically, "See! Politics makes us stupid!" Meanwhile, the strong version of Kevin's public reason view is so airy-fairy can't-we-all-get-along idealistic that it isn't really very useful as way of discouraging disrespectful politicized enmity. Public reason ideal theory I think really does usefully identify an ideal that we should try to move toward, and can play a role in arguments for the moderation of partisan passion and an ethos of mutual respect. But I don't think it helps to deny that politics is warlike. Remember that there are rules of war and that wars can be more or less humane and more or less vicious.

Re: There is no Second Law

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:24:19 -0000

Far be it from me to deny that politicians are asshats, but some places are better governed than others. It would be nice to be able to understand how it is that some asshats at some times and some places, in the teeth of the incentives that ensure they will be asshats, still manage to make relatively decent decisions. One worries that Skwire's First Law breeds a sort of fatalism that facilitates rather than resists the asshattery of the asshats.

Re: Understanding Observer Narration

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 21:29:51 -0000

I never have. Thanks for the tip!

Re: Libertarianism and the Politics of Everything

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 15 May 2015 23:08:39 -0000

Spell check is for the weak.

Re: Is the Adjuncts’ Rights Movement Anti-Adjunct?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 23:51:27 -0000

Thanks, Jen! Really helpful points. It just seems obvious to me that if somebody tries to give you a shitty deal for doing something you'd like to do, assuming the terms are fair, you should go ahead and try to get a better deal--try to negotiate fair terms. Sometimes whole classes of people are offered a shitty deal, and its more effective for them to negotiate fair terms if the whole class does it at as a class.

The argument I'm seeing here that people ought to just walk away rather than even try to get a better deal is mystifying to me. The "don't bother because it won't work" argument may be right, but it's not obvious that it is. People succeed in negotiating better terms all the time. The teaching fellows in my department negotiated better terms for ALL the grad student TAs in the school of liberal arts by sitting-in at the president's office and making a stink for a week. A WEEK! That's all it took. There have been zero perverse or unintended consequences for us, except that the department has done better in recruiting top students because it now can offer better-paying TF-ships.

Re: Is the Adjuncts’ Rights Movement Anti-Adjunct?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 23:36:42 -0000

That's great! But seriously, why not just support adjuncts in their effort to organize? It's not any harder or any less productive than writing blog posts about why they shouldn't bother, and it won't stop you from continuing to help people getting post-docs, etc. Be more helpful all around. It's okay to try! Forget about their revealed preferences, since you really believe a lot of them would be better off at GEICO. So do I! Don't you think it would be better if fewer adjuncts got paid significantly more? So why not help them make that happen?

Re: Is the Adjuncts’ Rights Movement Anti-Adjunct?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 13:59:31 -0000

I agree that it's hard to adjust on many of the margins that might be adjusted because they are too well-defended. I said that if that's Jason's argument, he ought to make it, because it's better than the one he made. Since Jason agrees that the system is corrupt, I think he'd agree that the entrenched interests preventing reform are a part of that corruption. But then he also seem *very* blase about doing anything about it, and this fatalism seems to me precisely how corruption and injustice persist in institutions. His smug rhetoric suggests that adjuncts are just getting what they deserve, but seems to me of a piece with the corruption that stands in the way of fairer distribution.

Re: Is the Adjuncts’ Rights Movement Anti-Adjunct?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 11:43:46 -0000

Yes. One should adopt a public-choice analysis of competitive rent-seeking within political institutions such as universities.

Re: Is the Adjuncts’ Rights Movement Anti-Adjunct?

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 11:29:27 -0000

I'm sympathetic to this line of reasoning, but the very big problem with your analysis, Jason, is that you're assuming that the distributive shares are fixed. But it's not the case that there's a pre-determined amount of money with which to pay adjuncts, such that if adjuncts get paid more, fewer adjuncts can get paid at all. The size of the adjunct bucket is not fixed, and neither are size of the administrative or TT buckets. It's possible to raise adjunct wages by making the administration smaller, reducing administrative wages, paying TT faculty less, closing TT lines, opening fewer new TT lines, raising tuition, etc. Who gets what is to a great extent a function of bargaining power. Adjunct bargaining power is extremely weak because supply exceeds demand and adjuncts accept low wages. It seems perverse, however, to criticize adjuncts for trying to increase their bargaining power and organizing to get a bigger piece of the pie. Insofar as that's what "adjunct's rights" people see themselves as doing, you're just begging the question by asserting that the size of the slices is fixed.

Imagine adjuncts organize and manage to triple the average per-course rate. Well, you're right, that money has to come from somewhere. It's also true that TT university faculty are notorious hypocrites, pretending to care about equality while rabidly protecting their massively larger shares against the incursions of contingent faculty who are, in many case, equally or more qualified. And we all know administrators are a predatory class plundering the American university due to, for the most part, the disorganized complacency of TT faculties. So that doesn't look good for the adjuncts. But suppose they do triple their per-course rate. There are *many* margins that can adjust. If your argument is that the attempt to get a bigger piece of the pie is bound to fail, because all of the margins that could adjust, other than hiring fewer adjuncts, are too well-defended, you need to make that argument. This argument is bad and is emblematic of shitty libertarian habits of mind about collective bargaining. It's shitty to tell people in a weak bargaining position to shut up and take what they're getting, or else get a job at Geico. Why not help them organize, improve their bargaining position, and negotiate better terms, preferably out of the hide of administrators?

Now, some universities are already moving somewhat away from adjuncts toward full-time non-TT lecturers or "clinical" professors on renewable contracts. Raising adjunct wages would probably accelerate this move toward creating a better-compensated, less precarious tier of non-TT instructors who are more fully integrated into the faculty and the governance of the university. This would both reduce the number of adjunct positions and the palpable injustice in the distribution of burdens and benefits among university teachers. Your "revealed preference" argument is glib about the psychology at work here. Adjunct positions often give people a false sense of hope of rising into a better position. And moving toward a system that largely eliminates adjuncts in favor of decently-paid contract-based non-TT faculty is I think what most adjuncts really want, even if that means that some people who are now adjuncting will get bounced from academia. Don't forget to think about dynamic effects. A lot of grad students think, "if worse comes to worse, I can always adjunct." But if that becomes untenable, and the worst you can do in academia is a stable untentured lectureship or clinical professorship, much harder to come by than a string of shitty adjunct gigs, it will become clearer to a lot of people a lot earlier that academia isn't in the cards for them, and get a gig at Geico or whatever before they've wasted five or ten years of their lives on a pipe dream. This will reduce future labor market supply, shoring up the bargaining power of new grads and the contingent faculty who already made it over the new, higher bar. Which is to say, a version of the scenario you're laying out as anti-adjunct is I think what a lot of adjuncts want. They see it not so much as anti-adjunct as anti-exploitation. If there's both fewer adjuncts and less exploitation, I think a lot of these folks would be happy with that.

Of course, there's a ton of people who are just idiots and want the world to cater to their sense of entitlement and give them ponies ponies ponies, but the principle of charity requires us not to simply assume that that's all "adjunct rights" amounts to.