The passion of Jonah Lehrer, and a people addicted to Insights

October 30, 2012  Eric Garland

A few weeks ago I fielded an interview request from Boris Kachka at New York Magazine to discuss my essay about Jonah Lehrer, Malcolm Gladwell, and the culture of glib intellectual superstars. It was a great conversation, getting right to the root of the matter – why do we seek easy answers from faux-experts? Why do we fall for slick over substantive time and time again? And is this why our leadership is so poor these days?

The article in question has finally seen the light of day, and as the kids say, it’s pretty epic. Entitled “Proust Wasn’t a Neuroscientist. Neither was Jonah Lehrer,” Kachka moves quickly beyond the sins of one purveyor of gossamer wisdom over another, right to the real issue – the cultural infrastructure around which our wise men of the age conspire to seduce us.

In the world of magazines, of course, none of us is immune to slickness or oversimplification—New York included. But two things make Lehrer’s glibness especially problematic, and especially representative. First, conferences and corporate speaking gigs have helped replace the ­journalist-as-translator with the journalist-as-sage; in a magazine profile, the scientist stands out, but in a TED talk, the speaker does. And second, the scientific fields that are the most exciting to today’s writers—neuroscience, evolutionary biology, behavioral economics—are fashionable despite, or perhaps because of, their newness, which makes breakthrough findings both thrilling and unreliable. In these fields, in which shiny new insights so rarely pan out, every popularizer must be, almost by definition, a huckster. When science doesn’t give us the answers we want, we find someone who will.

Ours is a culture of people staring at tiny devices, enraptured by constant BREAKING NEWS and bons mots and LOLZ and memes and updates and celebrity epic fails and a million other distractions to keep us from sitting still and considering who we are and what we are doing. Led by people who grew up in the 20th century, which was constantly upended by disruptive technologies and historical events, we cannot abide that some things simply do not change fast enough to matter in our lifetimes.
Witness the Singulatarians and their Baby Boomer high priest, Ray Kurzweil, who believe that biotechnology will “merge” with nanotechnology and information technology in our lifetimes to do nothing less than deliver us from the inconvenience of dying. Not just that we might significantly alter how humans age at the cellular level someday, with enough technology and scientific progress, but that we will experience the end of death in the lifetime of any given Boomer.
When you are expecting that kind of return on scientific wisdom, surely it isn’t too much to ask for our best science journalists to give us a glimpse into how neuroscience is changing how we eat, drive cars, learn musical instruments, work, develop websites or something? Come on, that Human Genome Project happened twelve years ago and we still have friggin’ cancer – can’t somebody give us an update on how we’re learning the secrets of the universe (minus, naturally, the unfathomable complexity of what scientists actually are uncovering)? And, as Kachka concludes, if the scientists won’t jack up and hit the lecture circuit, we’ll supplant them with journalists who are more than willing to play the sage on the stage.
Kachka then gets down to business and indicts the whole business model:

Lehrer was the first of the Millennials to follow his elders into the dubious promised land of the convention hall, where the book, blog, TED talk, and article are merely delivery systems for a core commodity, the Insight.
The Insight is less of an idea than a conceit, a bit of alchemy that transforms minor studies into news, data into magic. Once the Insight is in place—Blink, Nudge, Free, The World Is Flat—the data becomes scaffolding. It can go in the book, along with any caveats, but it’s secondary. The purpose is not to substantiate but to enchant.

He quotes me a bit later as an “unlikely” source of criticism, given that I am in fact in the same business as Messieurs Gladwell, Lehrer, Surowiecki, et al. But then again, I’m not. The key value of these writers has been to provide a plausible narrative that will give the audience that all-important feeling of control, of having a sophisticated view of the world. I may be just as full of shit (your mileage may vary) but my background in competitive analysis in support of billion-dollar decisions imbued me with a sense that if your work isn’t completely backed up with rigor, people will ultimately find out that you are bullshitting, and destroy your reputation. You see, actual strategic decisions aren’t (well, shouldn’t be) about intellectual palliation, but about getting the best information possible and then launching yourself into an uncertain future. Oh, and if you’re working with scientists or engineers, they will peel the skin off you if you obviously screw up the important details of their work – your credibility is toast. There simply isn’t room for cheap anecdotes and high-falootin’ analysis. That, sadly, has been relegated to the conference hall, the TV studio, the pedestal on which we seat our Serious People.
It’s an idea whose time has passed. If there is crushing pressure bearing down on our current cadre of thought leaders, that’s probably because, in the words of Justin Fox, they aren’t doing a very good job of leading our thoughts. The leaders of the world need to reapply for their jobs. Let us make sure that we judge them on merit and not mediagenic charisma.

Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people

November 9, 2012 Eric Garland

To whom it may concern regarding the United States federal elections of 2014, 2016 and beyond:
Allow me to introduce myself to you, the existing (or aspiring!) strategist for the Republican Party. My name is Eric Arnold Garland and I am a White Man. Boy, am I ever – you need sunglasses just to look at my photo!
If I read the news correctly, I fit a profile that is of extreme importance to the GOP, as I embody the archetype that fits your narrative of Real Americans. Just how much should my profile interest you? Are you sitting down?

• My family lineage goes back to the MAYFLOWER, BOAT ONE!!! (Garland family of New England-> John Adams -> Howard Alden -> Plymouth colony ->KINGS OF MUTHAF***IN’ ENGLAND)
• I am a heterosexual, married to the super Caucasian mother of my two beautiful children who are, inexplicably, EVEN WHITER THAN I AM.
• I am college educated (Master’s degree!) and affluent.
• I am a job creator and small businessman.
• We pay a lot of taxes! Every year!
• I grew up in a rural area and despise laziness!
• Having started my own business, I have complained at length about the insanity of federal, state and local bureaucracy – and its deleterious impact on the innovative small businessman.
• I currently live in the suburbs in a historically Red state.

HOLY WHITE PEOPLE, BATMAN!!! Wow, you’re thinking – this is not some Mexirican in the Sun Belt we need to attract via harsh anti-Castro policies or appeals to “valores de familia” - this is the BREAD AND BUTTER OF THE GRAND OLD PARTY, a Mayflower-descended small business owner, burdened by taxation, looking out for his beautiful White family in the suburbs of a city (St Louis) surrounded by racial tension and urban blight!
How can I put this gently? My wife and I are not sensitive to your messaging, nor did we vote for the candidates you proposed for us this past Tuesday.
B-b-but, what? Aren’t we investors, hard-workin’ white folk surrounded by same in a manicured cul-de-sac, scared by a vision of economic collapse amidst the takers in a land of fewer givers? Didn’t Mitt Romney’s strong family, wealth, leadership history and chiseled chin give us the uncontrollable urge to high-five him into the White House?
No.
May I explain why not, purely for your education, such that you might be interested in winning an election on the national level at some point in the future? It bears pointing out that I should be your Low Hanging Fruit, the easy vote to get as opposed to, say, African-Americans, Latinos, or Asians – and you’re not even speaking well to me. The reasons why ought to concern you deeply.
As a Card-Carrying White Male I love expressing my opinion irrespective of whether people care to hear it, so let’s get started.
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Science - One of the reasons my family is affluent is that my wife and I have a collective fifteen years of university education between us. I have a Masters degree in Science and Technology Policy, and my wife is a physician who holds degrees in medicine as well as cell and molecular biology. We are really quite unimpressed with Congressional representatives such as Todd Akin and Paul Broun who actually serve on the House science committee and who believe, respectively, that rape does not cause pregnancy and that evolution and astrophysics are lies straight from Satan’s butt cheeks. These are, sadly, only two of innumerable assaults that the Republican Party has made against hard science – with nothing to say of logic in general. Please understand the unbearable tension this might create between us and your candidates.
Climate - Within just the past 18 months the following events have come to our attention: a record-breaking drought that sent temperatures over 100 degrees for weeks, killing half the corn in the Midwest and half the TREES on our suburban property – AND – a hurricane that drowned not New Orleans or Tampa or North Carolina but my native state of VERMONT. As an encore, a second hurricane drowned lower Manhattan, New Jersey and Long Island. The shouted views of decrepit mental fossil Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma that this is a fraud perpetrated on the American people by evil, conspiring climate scientists is belied by such events and is looking irresponsible to even the most skeptical.
Healthcare - My wife and I are quite familiar with America’s healthcare system due to our professions, and having lived abroad extensively, also very aware of comparable systems. Your party’s insistence on declaring the private U.S. healthcare system “the best in the world” fails nearly every factual measure available to any curious mind. We watch our country piss away 60% more expenditures than the next most expensive system (Switzerland) for health outcomes that rival former Soviet bloc nations. On a personal scale, my wife watches poor WORKING people show up in emergency rooms with fourth-stage cancer because they were unable to afford primary care visits. I have watched countless small businesses unable to attract talented workers because of the outrageous and climbing cost of private insurance. And I watch European and Asian businesses outpace American companies because they can attract that talent without asking people to risk bankruptcy and death. That you think this state of affairs is somehow preferable to “Obamacare,” which you compared ludicrously to Trotskyite Russian communism, is a sign of deficient minds unfit to guide health policy in America.
War - Nations do have to go to war sometimes, but that Iraq thing was pretty bad, to put it mildly. Somebody should have been, I dunno – FIRED for bad performance. Aren’t you the party of good corporate managers or something? This topic could get 10,000 words on its own. Let’s just leave it at: You guys suck at running wars.
Deficits and debt - Whenever the GOP is out of power, it immediately appeals to the imagination of voters who remember the Lyndon Baines Johnson (!) administration and claim that the Republican alternative is the party of “cutting spending” and “reducing the deficit.” The only problem with your claim is that Republican governments throughout my entire 38 year life (Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43) have failed to cut spending and deficit and debt EVEN ONCE. I hope you understand that your credibility suffers every time you promise one thing for three decades and do the EXACT OPPOSITE. Egads – if you actually were the party of fiscal responsibility – you might win our votes despite your 13th century view of science!
Gay marriage - As the child of Baby Boomers who got divorced (as was the fashion!) in the 80s and 90s, and for whom 50% of my friends had their homes broken by divorce in the critical years before age 18, I sure am unsympathetic to your caterwauling bullshit that “gays will destroy the sanctity of marriage.” Perhaps if everyone in your generation didn’t take the period of 1978 – 1995 to start surreptitiously banging their neighbors and coworkers, only to abandon their kids because “they just weren’t happy,” I would take your defense of marriage more seriously. The institution of Middle Class suburban marriage was broken by the generation of aging white Baby Boomers who populate what is left of the Republican Party, so your defense is wrongheaded and disingenuous. And moreover, as someone who got called “faggot” about 127 times a day from the years 1985 through 1991 – guess what – I grew up to be pretty good friends with actual homosexuals, whose sexual orientation is usually the least significant thing about them. The Republican perseveration on homosexuals as any sort of threat consigns them to history’s trough of intellectual pig dung.
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That’s quite enough for one essay, wouldn’t you say? Now, given my initial description as a wealthy, hard-working, job creating, heterosexual, married suburban White Male – doesn’t your current platform look woefully insufficient to the task of gaining my vote? This doesn’t even get into the demographic tensions that show that people of my exact profile are going away permanently in America. You can’t even win on what you perceive to be “home field advantage.”
Uh oh, wait, I can already hear you through the web browser, dismissing all of my above points because THAT GUY WAS NEVER GONNA BE A REPUBLICAN ANYHOW, CUZ HE’S A LIBRUL WHO HATES AMERICA AND…
All right, let’s do one last point:
Meanness- Your party is really mean, mocking and demonizing everyone who does not follow you into the pits of hell. You constantly imply – as Mitt Romney did in his “47% speech” – that anybody who disagrees with you does so not by logic or moral conviction, but because they are shiftless, lazy parasites who want “free stuff” from “traditional Americans.” Wow, you guys managed to follow up a stunning electoral defeat with insulting the very people you wish to attract for a majority in the political system! Brilliant! You are losing elections because being angry and defensive and just-plain-mean is more important than being smart and winning elections – and thus you deserve everything happening to you.
If you want to know exactly where you failed in 2012, and will continue to fail, here it is. Look you assholes, I’m as traditional an American as it gets, and I do not “want free stuff.” I am a taxpayer, and ALWAYS HAVE BEEN. I got my first job – dragging bags of cow manure, horse feed and fertilizer around a farm store – when I was 12. I started my first company when I was 28. I have followed the vast majority of the rules set out for middle class white males (for good and for ill.) And if it weren’t bad enough that your policy positions are a complete clusterfuck for the reasons I lay out in great detail, you manage to follow up the whole exercise with insulting me, my wife, and my friends of every stripe who didn’t vote for your political party – all of whom are hard-working, taxpaying, job creating, law abiding, great AMERICANS of EVERY COLOR AND CREED.
From this white, Mayflower-descended strategic analyst, allow me to offer you the three strategic options you have before you:
1. You drastically moderate your platform to harmonize with the policy positions I present above
2. You disband the party and reorganize it to reflect current realities
3. You kick and scream and stamp your feet and call me and my friends names – and submit to several decades of one party rule
While I do not want a one-party system, I also don’t particularly care which of these options you choose. If you look carefully at the numbers on Tuesday, nobody else cares, either.
Just a word to the wise from one White Man to (presumably) another.

Bernie Sanders Slams the GOP Plan to Reduce the Deficit by Cutting Veterans Benefits

By: Jason EasleyNovember 9th, 2012

In a conference call with reporters today, Sen. Bernie Sanders alerted the American people to the Republican (and some Democrat support) plan to reduce the deficit by cutting veterans benefits.
The change that would bring about the cuts would be a switch in the calculation of COLAs for federal benefit programs like Social Security from the current system to a chained Consumer Price Index (CPI). On the surface, the change seems small. Business Insider explained the Chained CPI, “The C-CPI assumes that consumers are making different choices right now. Because of the economic down-turn, they’re substituting cheaper products for the ones they used to buy (say, going for the cheaper apple versus a more expensive peach at the supermarket, or buying cat food instead of ground beef). It presumes that consumers are effectively changing the real CPI number. Using the C-CPI, rates would re-calibrate every two years according to a reading of consumer spending. And since Social Security is linked to the CPI, it has the potential to reduce social security payments…Since spending on government programs (like social security) will be calculated based on C-CPI (as they are now on CPI), their cost will go down, and people’s benefits will be cut.”

In short, Republicans are trying to push through a benefit cut to veterans, the disabled, and seniors by disguising it as a tweak to the system. Sen, Sanders told reporters, “We do not honor our disabled veterans by cutting their benefits. In my view in this country means anything it means we keep the promises we make to the people who put their lives on the line to defend us.”
Sanders pointed out that under the CPI, a disabled veteran who starts receiving benefits at age 30 would see those benefits reduced by $1,300 a year by the time they reach age 45. This isn’t a one time cut. The cuts would build on each other and get deeper as the recipient ages. To put it another way, people who already have their earning potential limited by age or disability would see their only or main source of income erode over time. The vast majority of these individuals won’t have the ability to make up their lost income through work, so they will sink deeper into poverty.
The move to a Chained CPI is part of Simpson-Bowles and it is being championed by right wing billionaire/anti-Social Security zealot Pete Peterson.
Sen. Sanders said that 99% of Americans have no clue that a Chained CPI would lead to cuts for veterans and Social Security. The good news is that Sen. Sanders has picked up a powerful ally in this fight. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has already warned Republicans and a few Senate Democrats not to mess with Social Security. Reid said Social Security should not be part of any deficit reduction plan.

Since the Republicans lost the election, they are going to try to kill earned benefits by seniors and veterans through back door cuts like the Chained CPI.

First, Senate Republicans voted against a job creation program for veterans, before sneaking out of town. After a break for the election, these same Republicans are getting set to return to Washington to resume their fiscal assault on veterans through more deceptive means.
As Sen. Sanders put it, we shouldn’t balance the deficit on the backs of people who lost an arm or a leg and risked their lives for their country. The people who serve our country too often come home with their lives forever changed by war. Our promise to them must be kept. We also made a promise to seniors and the disabled that the benefits that they have paid into, will be there for them.
There are better ways to cut the deficit than on the backs of the veterans, the disabled, and seniors. Romney and Ryan may have lost the election, but the idea that the rich should be asked to do nothing while the poorest among us gives more lives on the Republican congressional caucus.
Even though the election is over, the battle rages on. The fight to keep our promises has just begun. The victory that was achieved in the ballot box must be transformed into a defense and expansion of the values that are held dear.

Congratulations, on winning an election.  The corporate billionaires and plutocrats haven’t rested, so the people must come together once again to stop them.