"A major influence on Jimmy Wales’s conception of [Wikipedia] was an essay by Friedrich Hayek called 'The Use of Knowledge in Society'..."

"... published in 1945, and Hayek is virtually the father of postwar neoliberalism.... Hayek’s argument about knowledge is... markets are self-optimizing mechanisms.... This theory of knowledge is not unrelated to the wisdom-of-crowds scenario in which a group of people are guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. The greater the number of guesses, the closer the mean of all guesses will come to the true number of jelly beans. A crucial part of crowdsourcing knowledge is not to exclude any guesses. This is why Wales, in his role as Wikipedia’s grand arbiter, is notoriously permissive about allowing access to the site’s editing function, and why he doesn’t care whether some of the editors are discovered to be impostors, people pretending to expertise that they don’t really have. For, when you are calculating the mean, the outliers are as important as the numbers that cluster around the average. The only way for the articles to be self-correcting is not to correct, to let the invisible hand do its job. Wikipedia is neoliberalism applied to knowledge...." 

 From "Wikipedia, 'Jeopardy!,' and the Fate of the Fact/In the Internet age, it can seem as if there’s no reason to remember anything. But information doesn’t always amount to knowledge" by Louis Menard (The New Yorker).

"Sen. Rand Paul doesn’t much care what Anthony Fauci has to say. The Kentucky Republican gets his public health advice from Friedrich Hayek."

"Hayek, the Austrian-born economist and libertarian hero, died in 1992. But Paul, an ophthalmologist before he took up politics, still takes medical guidance from the 20th-century philosopher. 'Hayek had it right!' Paul proclaimed at Tuesday’s Senate health committee hearing on the coronavirus pandemic. 'Only decentralized power and decision-making based on millions of individualized situations can arrive at what risks and behaviors each individual should choose.' Paul focused his wrath on Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease official. 'Virtually every day we seem to hear from you things we can’t do,' Paul complained. 'All I hear is, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we can’t play baseball.' Fauci assured Paul that 'I never said we can’t play a certain sport.' Unsatisfied, Paul demanded: 'We just need more optimism.'"

From "Could America’s pandemic response be any more medieval?" by Dana Milbank (WaPo).

Medieval?! If you're like me, you're thinking, what is medieval about looking at the big picture that includes maintaining psychological well-being and willingness to keep going through hard times and to invest in the future?

Milbank says "it feels" — feels!! — "as though 21st-century America is 14th-century Europe, reacting with all manner of useless countermeasures to the plague: balancing ill 'humors' and dispelling evil 'vapors' caused by planetary misalignment, religious marches and public self-flagellation, cures involving live chickens and unicorns, and the wearing of amulets and reciting of 'abracadabra.'"

It's Milbank who is having an emotional reaction. He's telling us how "it feels" — reacting to Rand Paul's rational consideration of the psychological element of enduring the pandemic and maintaining our sanity and character. Milbank is simply freaking out and wildly insulting Paul.

Milbank proceeds to rant about anti-virus measures — requiring masks, etc. — but avoids Paul's main point, which is that top-down, centralized regulation isn't the answer: "Only decentralized power and decision-making based on millions of individualized situations can arrive at what risks and behaviors each individual should choose."

"Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge..."

"... because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it—or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs."

Wrote F.A. Hayek in "Why I Am Not a Conservative," quoted by Jonathan Adler at The Volokh conspiracy in a post titled "What does it take to convince libertarians and conservatives that climate change is a problem?"

Cass Sunstein on Friedrich Hayek on the effect of Harriet Taylor on John Stuart Mill.

An essay in The New York Review of Books. Excerpt:

[I]t is crucial to see that in contending that people may be restrained only to prevent “harm to others,” Mill was speaking of the effects of social norms and conventions, not merely of government. Much of his attack was on the oppressive quality of public opinion.... His particular case for liberty emphasized the immense importance of allowing “experiments of living.” In his view, “the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them. It is desirable, in short, that in things which do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself.”

"The Dutch experiment in legalised prostitution has been a disaster..."

What have we learned from this experiment — that can never work at all or that the Dutch did it wrong? 

The Dutch government hoped to play the role of the honourable pimp, taking its share in the proceeds of prostitution through taxation. But only 5 per cent of the women registered for tax, because no one wants to be known as a whore — however legal it may be. Illegality has simply taken a new form, with an increase in trafficking, unlicensed brothels and pimping; with policing completely out of the picture, it was easier to break the laws that remained. To pimp out women from non-EU countries, desperate for a new life, remains illegal. But it’s never been easier.

Legalisation has imposed brothels on areas all over Holland, whether they want them or not. Even if a city or town opposes establishing a brothel, it must allow at least one — not doing so is contrary to the basic federal right to work. To many Dutch, legality and decency have been irreconcilably divorced. It has been a social, legal and economic failure — and the madness, finally, is coming to an end.

The brothel boom is over. A third of Amsterdam’s bordellos have been closed due to the involvement of organised criminals and drug dealers and the increase in trafficking of women. Police now acknowledge that the red-light district has mutated into a global hub for human trafficking and money laundering. The streets have been infiltrated by grooming gangs seeking out young, vulnerable girls and marketing them to men as virgins who will do whatever they are told. Many of those involved in Amsterdam’s regular tourist trade — the museums and canals — fear that their visitors are vanishing along with the city’s reputation.

That reminds me: How's the marijuana legalization experiment going? Because that's the Dutch experiment that's catching on in the U.S. It's appealing to think that if we legalize something, we can regulate it and tax it, and the bad people will withdraw and cede the commerce to upstanding entrepreneurs who will abide by the regulations and pay their taxes punctiliously.

I got to that article via David Frum, who quotes Friedrich Hayek: "To say we cannot turn back the clock is to say that human beings cannot learn from experience."

"What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? K. was living in a free country, after all..."

"... everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home?"

A Kafka quote begins Roger Kimball's op-ed "This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit/Sandy wrecked our house, but bureaucrats are keeping it broken."

Kimball also quotes Hayek:

[T]he power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.

And Tocqueville:

"[A] network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules"... reduces citizens "to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."

Books:

Franz Kafka, "The Trial"
F.A. Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"
Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America"
Roger Kimball, "The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia"

The high cost of hot chocolate ... and the joys and anxieties of speaking without notes.

Jeremy explains "why a hot chocolate at starbucks is $3, while a hot chocolate at borders is $133," with suitable photographic illustration. And scroll down for the harrowing tale of how he reconfirmed his belief in the proposition: "go with only minimal or no notes for any talk of 30 minutes or less." Hmm ... I have a 15 minute talk I need to do next Friday .... Note: he doesn't say go with minimal preparation, just minimal notes.

Anyone worth listening to speak at all is much better to listen to when they are speaking straight from their head not their notes. (Which is why closed book exams are better, by the way.) You just have to get over the anxiety of worrying that the pressure of the occasion will cut off your access to the place in your head where the relevant information resides. Too bad politicians have to read their speeches: they have to worry that one misstatement or misguided locution will cause them trouble. That's why my plan for the campaign is: submit it in writing. If it's already in writing, let me read it. I can do that in less than half the time it will take you to deliver it as a speech.

That reminds me of an anecdote about F.A. Hayek that I just heard this morning on C-Span--yes, I watch C-Span while getting ready in the morning!--told by the author Gregory Nash. After adding the word "serfdom" to my Google search when the whole first page came up Salma Hayek, I found the anecdote told by another author (here). The C-Span version of the anecdote included the additional detail that Hayek had never given a public speech before and was told he would need to do so only the night before, but here's the key part:

After The Road to Serfdom (1944) became a bestseller, the University of Chicago Press rushed the author F.A. Hayek into the lecture circuit, a new experience for him.  He told an interviewer,  “When I was picked up at my hotel [in New York]...I asked, 'What sort of audience do you expect?'  They said, 'The hall holds 3,000 but there's an overflow meeting.'  Dear God, I hadn't an idea what I was going to say.  'How have you announced it?'  'Oh, we have called it 'The Rule of Law in International Affairs.'  My God, I had never thought about that problem in my life…I asked the chairman if three-quarters of an hour would be enough.  'Oh, no, it must be exactly an hour...you are on the radio." 

It turns out, the talk was a big success. Was that because Hayek was so brilliant he was able to do well even with shocking disadvantages, or did all of these nightmarish problems make him better? He was no doubt shocked into a very energetic state and he was forced to be spontaneous and tap straight into his inner resources. But who with fair warning could plan to do things this way? We hear the anecdote about the time it worked, but many speakers have fallen disastrously when unprepared. Still, many overprepared speakers are horrible. Yet they are never horribly exposed and humiliated as they experience their failure. Notice that no one ever has a real nightmare about standing at a lectern reading a prepared speech that is very dull. (Yes, I know that might be because it is impossible to read in a dream).