MacGregor The Bridge Builder

A man at the bar is complaining.

You see that bridge there? I built it with my own hands.

But do they call me McGregor the bridge builder? No.

And I raised five beautiful children.

But do they call me McGregor the child raiser? No.

But you fuck one sheep.

End quote.

Has McGregor been treated unfairly? This was my complaint in The Beauty of Settled Science.

Psychology laid bare the secrets of the brain.

It performs computations through a neural network communicating via electrical impulses intermediated by neurotransmitters crossing synaptic gaps.

But do they call it Psychology the Brain Secret Revealer? Its concepts have turned into the categories that ordinary people use to interpret the world.

Extroverts, in-groups, the unconscious, IQ, Pavlovian conditioning.

But do they call it psychology the useful concept creator? But you do one, thousand, bad social priming studies...

I had the same complaint in In Continued Defense of Effective Altruism.

Nobody has the slightest interest in the first-order effects of effective altruism, the hundreds of thousands of lives saved.

But you buy one castle! Even capitalism is a sort of McGregor.

The average kid these days seems to think of it as centrally about Mark Zuckerberg stealing your data, rather than about whether you have electricity at all, or whether you die from cholera at age three because your country is too poor to afford healthcare.

Someone or something spends years, decades, or centuries doing amazing work, winning victory after victory, and it all fades into noise, leaving the topic to be identified entirely with last week's tawdry scandal.

On a more personal level, this is the essence of cancel culture.

You judge someone by their single worst and most embarrassing action.

At its worst, the victim gets fired, but that part is hardly necessary.

For a while, the culture enforced conformity just by making sure that the Write 100 great blog posts on technical topics, 100 orthodox liberal blog posts, and one blog post expressing where you disagreed with feminism, and for the rest of your life the media would introduce you as so-and-so known for his anti-feminist blogging.

Everyone knew this would happen, and it was more than enough to produce chilling effects even without the immediate job loss.

One time we invited Richard Hanania to a prediction market conference.

There were five or six news articles about it, and I can't remember whether any of them mentioned the word prediction.