This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… About Larry Summers…
I confess that I did not see this as a “defense”. I saw, it, rather as a statement of plain reality. Consider the 2010s. In the 2010s Larry was a major pusher of two ideas that I think were very important, and that had they been listened to and registered by more people would have made the world a much better place than it turned out to be:
The world would have been a much better place had more people listened to Larry in the 2010s. A much better place indeed. In my email inbox right now there is an email from a very respected elder economist stating that Larry’s intelligence in the think-quickly-and-accurately-about-complex-situations evokes “awe”. In fact, his I am somewhat in awe of his intelligence. IQs may fall on a normal curve, but Larry’s ability to think at unmatched speed, then lay out his conclusions clearly and coherently—without a single note—is unmatched. The way I think of it is that I if I start engaging 45 minutes before a meeting with Larry to talk about an issue, after 15 minutes he will have caught up to me, and after that I will be struggling hard to keep him in sight in terms of understanding the nuances of what he is thinking. Thus when I find Arsenault quoting Jeff Hauser:
My view is that, charitably, Jeff Hauser does not know what he is talking about. My view is that, uncharitably, Jeff Hauser wants to make left-of-center causes and arguments in America today weaker. Because it is a fact that in America today Larry is left-of-center. He is a unique source of reliable insight in his wheelhouse. Yes, among 8.4 billion people. Not having him in the mix makes me, and all of us, stupider. I do not think it is wise to make us less effective in my intellectual struggles with conservatives on various matters. And, no, Hauser does not have good people to recommend to replace Larry in intellectual networks. He places his trust in “the media” to find “new expert voices to elevate”. Right. We know how that is going to work out. Plain reality: If you like playing with ideas, to get to hang with Larry is enormous fun and an enormous privilege. He is like a crow—give him a shiny idea, and he focuses on it, wants to play with it, is filled with glee about it, and is very grateful that you brought it to his attention. And is then very eager to propose that you work on it together, as long as he judges that you are quick enough to keep up with him and that your meetings with him will not be frustrating and boring. And if you get Larry on your side and engaged, the chances that the intellectual project will be a win and a big win go way up. If you have good arguments, with him agreeing and alongside you you will find you have much stronger and truer arguments. And if he disagrees with you, having him probe your ideas will make yours stronger and thus more likely to win as well—provided he doesn’t engage publicly on the other side, in which case your trouble quotient goes up. But you have to be comfortable with his first reaction is likely to be to challenge it, and you—”here are nine reasons why that idea is probably wrong”; and that he has little social intelligence about how he is coming across. But with respect to human solidarity—look: the last time I saw Larry it was for what was supposed to be a thirty-minute coffee at Harvard’s Science Center Café. We had three things to cover: the macro situation, what needed to be done so I could finish my next *@&$% book, and how OpenAI should try to identity and help people who had good ideas about the likely impact of Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models but who were not getting resources to develop and publicize their ideas. So when I get this report from Irin Carmon:
I side with the guy taking the class here. I do not side with the course-crasher coming to make and post Instagram videos. All that is the context in which I find Arsenault’s framing here simply bizarre:
Summers like Epstein? Like Trump? Even like Clinton? In his treatment of women? One of these things is not like the others: Summers. (And, in the remaining group of three, one of these things is not like the others: Clinton.) I really do not get it. But that I see Larry as a very valuable contributor to and asset for the causes of public rationality—that is not a “defense” of Larry’s making an infatuated fool of himself by trying to hit on the extremely capable Keyu Jin, whose book I was going to review… last year… and never got around to it. As somebody else said to me recently, there’s a lot of nobility in the role of the Old Lion, with well-earned glory, surrounded by the colleagues, family, home, and achievements they’ve built over the decades. To throw that away by behaving very badly indeed is pathetic and foolish indeed. However, failure modes to which each of us is vulnerable vary, and that makes us incapable, foolish, incompetent, and destructive in different ways:
None of us are ever our best selves. All of us are frequently far from our better selves, in various ways. For:
The failure mode of the old (or young!) man who becomes a hopelessly infatuated fool and does massively self-destructive things—that is not uncommon. The spectrum runs from the malevolent and truly destructive character of Baron Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca:  to the—fortunately for him—extremely foolish but very easily outwitted character of the Conte d’Almaviva in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro:  This failure mode of human social behavior is a substantial problem in our society. Victims of this kind of thing have to try to figure out how to just make him go away, without leading him to do damage in some way to her standing in society and in its social networks. It is deeply unfair to put anyone in this position. because of your infatuation looks and is a cruel thing to do. However, one has one’s friends. And one’s duty to one’s friends is to support them, and help each of them become their better self, and more of a net-positive participant-asset for society. If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…#larry-summers |
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