Nadia Asparouhova: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I just started reading the book about the Ford Foundation. I haven't gotten that far but it's so fascinating. That raises an interesting question. There is the problem of value drift in charities, but it's a very particular kind of value drift. There's famously Conquest’s second law, that any institution that is not constitutionally and explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing over time. And this seems especially true of NGOs and charitable organizations. What's the explanation? Why does Conquest's Second law seem true in this arena? I’d have to ask Curtis that. [Laughter] I think we can observe that that is maybe what is happening, I don't think I have an amazing answer to that. My best guess if I had to come up with an answer is I think that there's a set of pacifying social values like democracy, peace, and freedom, that are very hard to disagree with so there's always this natural drift towards that. There is a strong intellectual conservative movement but I think people that love nuance, where there is no there is no mindless playbook that you can use, the answer is not always direct democracy or peace or whatever. If that's not your guiding star and you are actually interested in a fair bit of nuance, you're not going to really run institutions and I say that as someone who is much more on the nuance side. But I think the trade off of that is it just doesn't necessarily have mainstream appeal always because you don't have these really simplified messages. If you think that Institutions need to have simplified messages that they pass on to people and those simplified messages work much better when they're things that make people feel good about themselves, you're always going to have that kind of word drift more or less. Yeah. It's like the two monarchs problem of, you need somebody who's a good director, but then you also need him to be able to appoint somebody who's a good director. Next question is, do you think this new funding for science and thinkers is going to lead to a resurgence of the gentleman's collar category? Or has the nature of science just become too different and science has just gotten much more specialized now that that's no longer possible?…

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