I just read this interesting review by Patrick Redford of the new book by journalist Michael Lewis on Sam Bankman-Fried, the notorious crypto fraudster.
We discussed earlier how the news media, including those such as Michael Lewis and Tyler Cowen who play the roles of skeptics in the media ecosystem, were not just reporters of the crypto fraud; they also played an important part in promoting and sustaining the bubble. As I wrote when all this came out, the infrastructure of elite journalism was, I think, crucial to keeping the bubble afloat. Sure, crypto had lots of potential just from rich guys selling to each other and throwing venture capital at it, and suckers watching Alex Jones or whatever investing their life savings, but elite media promotion took it to the next level.
We’ve talked earlier about the Chestertonian principle that extreme skepticism is a form of credulity, an idea that seems particularly relevant to the comedian and political commentator Joe Rogan, whose twin stances of deep skepticism and deep credulity are inextricably intertwined. To be skeptical about the moon landing or the 2020 election requires belief in all sorts of ridiculous theories and discredited evidence. Skepticism and credulity here are not opposites—we’re not talking “horseshoe theory”—; rather, they’re the same thing. Skepticism of the accepted official view that the moon landings actually happened, or that the laws of physics are correct and ghosts don’t exist, or that UFOs are not space aliens, or that Joe Biden won the 2020 election by 7 million votes, is intimately tied to active belief in some wacky theory or unsubstantiated or refuted empirical claim.
I’m not saying that skepticism is always a form of credulity, just that sometimes it is. When I was skeptical of the Freakonomics-endorsed claim that beautiful parents are 36% more likely to have girls, no credulity was required, just some background in sex-ratio statistics and some basic understanding of statistics. Similarly if you want to be skeptical of the claim that UFOs are space aliens etc. There’s ordinary skepticism and credulous skepticism. Ordinary skepticism, though, it easy to come by. Credulous skepticism, by its nature, is a more unstable quantity and requires continuing effort—you have to carefully protect your skeptical beliefs and keep them away from any stray bits of truth that might contaminate them. Which I guess is one reason that people such as Rogan who have the ability to do this with a straight face are so well compensated.
But what about Michael Lewis? Like everybody else, I’m a fan of Moneyball. I haven’t read any of his other books—I guess a lot of his books are about rich financial guys, and, while I know the topic is important, it’s never interested me so much—but then last year he interviewed me for a podcast! I was kinda scared at first—my previous experiences with journalists reporting on scientific controversies have been mixed, and I didn’t want to be walking into a trap—but it worked out just fine. Lewis was straightforward, with no hidden agenda. The podcast worked out just fine. Here’s a link to the podcast, and here’s an article with some background. Perhaps I should’ve been more suspicious given that the podcast is produced by a company founded by plagiarism-defender
Of Lewis’s new book, Redford writes:
A common thematic thread, perhaps the common thread, wending throughout Michael Lewis’s bibliography is the limits of conventional wisdom. His oeuvre is stuffed with stories about the moments at which certain bedrock ideas—ones about finance, or baseball, or electoral politics—crumble under their own contradictions. This is helped along, often, by visionary seers—like Michael Burry, Billy Beane, or John McCain—who put themselves in position to take advantage of those who are either too blinkered or too afraid to see the unfamiliar future taking shape in front of them.
That describes Moneyball pretty accurately, and at first it would seem to fit a podcast called “Against the Rules,” but actually that podcast was all about how there was existing expertise, settled enough to be considered “conventional wisdom,” that was swept aside in a wave of confusion. In particular, Lewis talked about the Stanford covid crew, a group of well-connected iconoclasts in the Billy Beane mode, but he showered them with criticism, not praise. Maybe that podcast worked because he was going against type? I don’t know.
Just speaking in general terms, we shouldn’t ignore the visionary seers—Bill James, imperfect though he may have been, was really on to something, and even his missteps are often interesting. But we can’t assume the off-the-beaten-path thinkers are always right: that way lies Freakonomics-style madness, as here and here.
It’s too bad what happened to Lewis with the Bankman-Fried thing, but I wouldn’t attribute it to a general problem with his take on conventional wisdom. It’s more of an omnipresent risk of journalism, which is to frame a story around a hero, which creates problems if the hero isn’t even a plausible anti-hero. (Recall that an “anti-hero” is not the opposite of a hero; rather, he’s someone who doesn’t look or act like a conventional hero but still is a hero in some sense.)