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From New Yorker

From Vox

You find this in a whole bunch of areas where the expertise is complicated and the understanding is probabilistic. Think about medicine. Doctors knew this before Covid, but now it’s so obvious. Doctors will tell you they know so much more than they did 30 years ago as a profession. They are much more useful to patients. But every day more and more people are walking into the office after reading something on WedMD and they think they know what they’re talking about.

It’s not a full answer, but there’s something about our information environment and our ability to understand people who are making probabilistic judgments that make it difficult to evaluate expertise.

Sean Illing

I’ve said a bunch over the years that I think we’re a society that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and maybe that’s part of the reason why we don’t recognize expertise when we see it.

Michael Lewis

I think that’s right. Let me tell you a story that dramatizes what you just said. I wrote a book about the federal government called The Fifth Risk, where I just wandered into the federal government and looked at it as a risk-management enterprise and kept meeting these unbelievably impressive, passionate, mission-driven experts who were just trying to save us from ourselves.

After I finished that book, we had our government shutdown in December 2018 and it lasted for over 30 days. [Hundreds of thousands of federal workers were furloughed] as inessential workers and sent home without pay. And I thought of those people I’d met. I asked for a list of people who’d been sent home from an organization in Washington that was monitoring the situation, called the Partnership for Public Service. It was not a random sample of federal employees. It was federal employees who’d been nominated for one of the awards they gave out every year by someone who thought they’d done something good.

So I took this list and picked someone at random. It was a guy whose name was on the top of the list: Arthur A. Allen. He won the alphabet contest. So I call him up and asked him if I could come visit him and just see what he’s doing. He had nothing else to do. He was sitting at home with nothing to do.

This is a guy who spent his whole career as the lone oceanographer in the Coast Guard search-and-rescue division, where he’d started in the late ’70s. There was a particular problem he was working on by himself, and the problem was costing a lot of American lives. It was people being lost at sea. The Coast Guard didn’t know how they drifted in the ocean. And Americans have this unbelievable talent for getting lost at sea, which is a whole other thing. On average, every day, the Coast Guard is saving 10 people who are lost in the sea and losing three. So you’re talking about thousands of people who are getting in this situation every year.

The problem is that if you fall off a boat into the ocean, you’re going to drift differently than if you are in a life raft, or if you’re on top of an overturned sailboat, or if you have a life vest on — you get the point. So if the Coast Guard knows where and when you started, as they often do, they should be able to predict where you are in the ocean four hours later, knowing the currents and the wind and your drift. But they didn’t know the drift, until Arthur A. Allen figured it all out. He spent years of his own free time tossing objects into the Long Island Sound, where he lives, measuring the specific drift of like 80 different categories of objects.

That all sounds boring and tedious, I know. But he reduced the drift to mathematical equations and embedded them in the search-and-rescue software program, and instantly they were able to find people they never would’ve found before. Thousands of Americans are alive because of Arthur A. Allen. And thousands of people are alive around the world because of the work he did here. No one knows who he is. No one pays any attention to him. They furloughed him as if he’s useless.

The punchline to all of this, to your point about the way we treat these experts who save our tails over and over again, is that when I went to go see Arthur to talk to him about what he had done with his life, I spent three days with him, interviewing his family, going to see his old office, going to the Long Island Sound to see where he dropped his objects, asking him every which way the story of his career.

After the three days, I’m going back to the airport to head home and he calls me and says, with real wonder in his voice, “Hey, you’re a published author.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m a published author.” He says, “You’re like a real deal. You’re a real writer.” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Are you going to be writing about me?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s why I spent three days learning how objects drift. Yes. I’m going to be writing about you.” He goes, “Wow. I didn’t expect to get any attention for this.” And I said, “Well, what did you think I was doing for those three days?” He said, “I just thought you were really interested in how objects drift.”

This is the mental world of the government expert. They’re so used to nobody caring about what they do, even when what they do is mission-critical, that they can’t imagine us even taking an interest in them. We so don’t value them that they don’t value themselves.

Sean Illing

You make an offhand comment in one of the early shows about the arbitrariness of social status and how that has a way of obscuring someone’s real value, and I can’t help but think of it now.

Michael Lewis

I really think that we exaggerate status differences and create inequality at our peril. These people we end up shoving into lower-status roles actually know things.

We have these big complicated organizations and agencies and corporations, and when some crisis pops up it usually has a very specific solution, and it’s really unlikely that that specific solution is going to be in the heads of the people who are at the top of the organization. It’s going to be something nitty-gritty and the person is going to be six levels down in the organization. And if you’ve created these barriers between the levels, so that someone who’s six levels down will never be heard by someone at the top, you’re essentially saying, we’re never going to surface the expertise that we need to deal with the problem.

Something like this happened in the pandemic. We had this apparatus for dealing with communicable disease. It was called local public health. That’s who did it, local public health officers. Their status was so low. They were so socially powerless. They still haven’t stepped front and center stage and taken over the thing.

But if I were a television producer booking guests who can explain to America what’s going on with Covid, that’s who I’d book. But you don’t see them because they’re invisible because they’re low-status. You see some fancy-pants person who worked in the White House who doesn’t actually know anything. And this is a broader problem that has been exacerbated by the structure of our society, by these widening chasms, between level one and level two, and level two and level three, and level three and level four, and so on.

Sean Illing

A certain amount of skepticism of expertise and authority is healthy, but at what point do you think that skepticism becomes pathological?

Michael Lewis

That’s an unanswerable question, but I’ll give it a whirl.

It becomes pathological when your unwillingness to take in what the putative authority or expert is saying kills you. It’s pathological when you turn up in the emergency room as a 45-year-old healthy police officer with Covid, as someone in one of our stories does, and he’s circling the drain and refuses to be intubated because, in his view, hospitals are trying to kill people in the ICU — that’s pathological.

It’s pathological when you are running a big Wall Street firm and you’re unable to distinguish between the trader, who’s making a lot of money in your firm, making really dumb bets on the subprime mortgage market, and the person who has actually got a bead on how the subprime mortgage market is working and can explain it to you, but you don’t want to hear it — and so your firm blows up.

You can get away with ignoring a lot of expertise in your life as you move through the world. And I agree that you never want to lose your ability to question the things you’re being told, but it’s also not true that everybody has a right to an opinion about everything. I don’t have a right to an opinion about climate change. Neither does Donald Trump. There are people who study this stuff, their whole lives are devoted to trying to understand it. They are state of the art. It is a scientific consensus. My opinion shouldn’t exist, but people think they have a right to an opinion about it.

Sean Illing

Do you think, on some level, that the world has become so big and so complex that it’s too much for people to make sense of, and the temptation to retreat into conspiracy theory or tribalism is just too irresistible?

Michael Lewis

To default into a narrative that’s fueled by anecdote that happens to come from the small circle of people in your world — I’ve seen this. I’ve been amazed with people I admire and who I think are intelligent who will sit down with me and tell me they’re not getting vaccinated because the vaccine is making people sick.

And they’re not wrong in one way. They know somebody who got sick, but that’s the thing that they pay attention to as opposed to the 1 billion studies that show that you were just so much better off being vaccinated. It’s like you walked into the casino for the first time in your life, looked at all the games, and you saw someone pull a slot machine and they hit the jackpot, and you decide, “Oh, well, the slot machines are the smart game to play here.”

It’s people organizing a complicated world with stories that are basically not true stories. They’re not representative stories. They just happen to be the stories they hear. And if you made me God and said, “Michael, how do you fix this problem?” — if I could do anything, I’d probably start with making everyone take a basic course in statistics. Everybody would have to learn a little bit about data and probabilities, just so they understand the notion of a small sample size, especially a sample size of one.

Sean Illing

Do you have any sense at all of what it would take to rebuild trust in our society?

Michael Lewis

I tend to think of this stuff on such a personal, micro level and not as a broader social thing. Again, if you’re handing me God-like powers, one of the things I’d do is, maybe not create some kind of mandatory national service, but at least strongly incentivize people, when they’re 18 or 19, to spend a year or a year and a half working in some government service where they’re all mixed up with other kinds of people.

Part of the problem is we’re not mixed up enough. It’s much easier to think of “us” and “them” if you’re in Berkeley, California, and you’ve never met anybody from Alabama, or if you’re in Alabama and you’ve never met anybody from Berkeley, California. Or if you are poor and you’ve never met a rich person, or if you’re rich and you’ve never had to do anything with a poor person.

It’s amazing how helpful it is when people have personal experience doing something together, trying to achieve something together with people entirely different from themselves. Then we have a living sense that we’re not all that different. There’s no us and them. We don’t belong in these tribes. It’s not the natural order of things. So mixing up the society more in various ways is one answer I would give.

My own personal answer is what I do with my time. I’ve been trying to write about this in ways that invite people who might be deeply skeptical that anything in the government is good for them to see this in a different light. Like, this thing exists to keep you safe. Think about it that way. This is the thing that storytellers can do to help.

To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

But even before the Taliban took over the Afghan government for a second time this past August, there have been a number of attacks on Shias, and specifically Hazaras. Last May, for example, a vicious attack on a girls’ school in a predominantly Hazara section of Kabul killed at least 90; the Taliban denied responsibility for the bombing. But even before the Taliban came back into power, minority groups lacked protection from the government; protection that — despite a history of targeting Shia minorities during its first period of rule in the 1990s — the Taliban said it would provide, particularly following a number of attacks on Hazara communities by ISIS-K.

However, while the Taliban has said it would not interfere with Shia worship and will protect all ethnic groups, the group is responsible for the deaths of dozens of Hazara over the past eight months, as well as mass forced displacements of Hazara people.

Not only is the Taliban government directly threatening Hazara people, it’s either unable or unwilling to protect them and other minorities against the attacks of other groups, namely ISIS-K, Asfandyar Mir, a senior expert at the US Institute of Peace focusing on extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, told Vox via email. “When the Taliban are pushed on issues of rights and economic well-being of the Afghan people, they push back by touting their ability to provide security for all Afghans, including minorities,” he said. “Yet under the Taliban, vulnerable minorities — in particular the Hazara — continue to be one of the main targets of violence. This is a source of enormous insecurity and raises questions about the Taliban’s ability to provide security in general and against minorities in particular.”

Though the Taliban has instituted a crackdown of sorts on ISIS-K since coming to power, Mir said, “the range of ISIS-K’s violence — from parts of the north to Kabul to eastern border regions — suggests that the Taliban’s months-long crackdown against ISIS-K and supposed sympathizers of the group has not been able to meaningfully curtail the group’s underground activity in most parts of the country where it was based and operational before the Taliban’s takeover.”

This crackdown — in which the Taliban framed innocent people as ISIS-K members and engaged in targeted repression of the Salafi communities from which many ISIS-K recruits hail — may have actually backfired and pushed people toward ISIS-K, Mir said. And, with no real political alternative to the Taliban, ISIS-K may be the only viable option of belonging or exercising a sense of power to many Afghans.

The ultimate goal is to erode Taliban legitimacy, such as it is

Mir told Vox in a separate phone interview on Saturday that, in his estimation, the attack on the Kunduz mosque was likely the work of ISIS-K as well due to its Sufi-oriented practice of Sunni Islam — the end result is further destabilization. This follows ISIS-K taking responsibility mosque attack in Mazar-e-Sharif, indicating such tragedies have only ramped up since there was a bit of a lull in terror attacks in the winter.

Mir told Vox that was likely a “deliberate decision” on the part of ISIS-K leadership, as they felt out the new government for its security weaknesses. Furthermore, “spring is traditionally fighting season” in Afghanistan, Mir said; this past week’s attacks can be read as an announcement of that, and an indication that there is only more violence to come.

“ISIS-K is likely to go after two sets of targets: One set is of minorities, [that] includes Shia, includes Hazara Shias, and then the ‘wrong’ kind of Sunnis,” like those worshiping at the Khanaqa-e-Malawi Sekandar Sufi mosque and madrassa in Kunduz Friday. The other, Mir said, are high-profile Taliban officials, particularly in the eastern provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar, where ISIS-K’s base of support is located. “In order to make a big point, my sense is that ISIS-K will try to target someone high up in the Taliban,” he said, hammering home the Taliban’s poor leadership and its inability to protect even its own officials.

Those attacks, if indeed they are carried out, would further ISIS-K’s possible goal of establishing a branch of the ISIS caliphate in Afghanistan — although that’s presently difficult to imagine, given that they didn’t control any significant territory after the US withdrawal. “The group also wants to topple the Pakistani government, [and] punish the Iranian government for being a vanguard of Shias,” he said, hence recent attacks and threats in Pakistan.

But the end goal of ISIS-K “is hard to pinpoint,” Mir said. “A closer read of their materials also suggests ISIS-K is obsessed with punishing civilians and those they deem to be non-believers in mass- casualty attacks for their supposed apostasy — almost as an end in of itself.”

However, the fact remains that they are locked in an ideological battle with the Taliban, and if the point is to use terror to create further instability, chaos, doubt, and violence to delegitimize the Taliban government, the attacks on civilians this past week could certainly have that effect — whether or not they were all perpetrated by ISIS-K.

The conflict between DeSantis and Disney arose after Disney denounced Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, an unconstitutional law which allows parents to sue their local school district if topics such as sexual orientation or gender identity are mentioned in the classroom. The law is unconstitutional because it is so vaguely drafted that teachers cannot determine what kinds of instruction are permitted and what kinds are forbidden — although it remains to be seen whether a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees will strike the law down.

Florida plans to strip Disney of an extraordinarily unusual benefit it receives from the state. Walt Disney World is located in a nearly 40-square-mile area that Florida has designated the “Reedy Creek Improvement District.” Within this district, Disney essentially functions as the primary landowner and the local government.

This provides Disney with several advantages — among other things, if it wants to build a road or a new hotel, it can approve that project itself rather than going through the ordinary permitting process run by local Florida governments, though Disney still must comply with state building codes. This Reedy Creek arrangement also allows Disney to tax itself at a higher rate to pay for governmental services like sewage and a fire department — according to one analysis, property taxes on non-Disney landowners in Florida’s Orange County could go up by as much as 25 percent if Disney loses its ability to tax itself.

Few Floridians, and, indeed, few major companies, receive this kind of benefit from their state. But the fact that Florida only plans to strip a special benefit from Disney — rather than, say, tossing its executives in prison — does not mean that it can punish Disney for its protected speech.

Think of it this way: Imagine that José owns a bar in Orlando. One day, José tells the local paper that he dislikes Ron DeSantis and plans to vote for DeSantis’s opponent in the upcoming election. The next day, the state sends him a letter informing him that “because you disparaged our great governor, we are stripping your business of its liquor license.”

José does not have a constitutional right to sell liquor for profit. And the overwhelming majority of Florida businesses do not have a license permitting them to do so. But if Florida strips José of his liquor license because the government disapproves of José’s First Amendment-protected speech, it violates the Constitution.

Disney’s ability to govern the Reedy Creek Improvement District is no different from Florida’s hypothetical decision to take away José’s liquor license. If Florida has a legitimate reason to strip away this benefit from Disney, the Constitution most likely would permit it to do so.

But no one can be punished because they express a political opinion.

Florida’s best defense is to pretend they are punishing Disney for legitimate reasons

While existing law is crystal clear that the government may not sanction someone because it disagrees with their political views, First Amendment retaliation cases are often difficult to win because the plaintiff must prove that they were targeted because of their speech. As the Court explained in Hartman, such a plaintiff “must show a causal connection between a defendant’s retaliatory animus and subsequent injury in any sort of retaliation action.”

But in this case, the evidence that Florida targeted Disney because of its protected speech is overwhelming. DeSantis called upon Florida lawmakers to consider “termination” of Reedy Creek on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he sent a fundraising email to supporters where he denounced Disney for being “woke” and for criticizing him personally.

The email was explicit that DeSantis wants to punish Disney for its political views and because the governor believes that Disney is too close to the opposition party. “Disney and other woke corporations won’t get away with peddling their unchecked pressure campaigns any longer,” DeSantis said in his email. “If we want to keep the Democrat machine and their corporate lapdogs accountable, we have to stand together now.”

By Thursday, both houses of the Florida legislature had passed legislation retaliating against Disney. That’s also the same day that DeSantis’s lieutenant governor, Jeanette Nunez, told Newsmax’s Eric Bolling that the state could reverse course if Disney stopped producing art that the Florida government finds objectionable.

Newsmax host Eric Bolling: “Is there an opportunity for Disney to change their mind and say we will disregard this whole ‘woke’ agenda…and would the governor then say, ‘fine, you can keep your status but we’re gonna keep an eye on you now’?”

Florida Lt. Gov: “Sure!” pic.twitter.com/5E8UKGDVjF

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 21, 2022

Disney, Florida’s second-highest-ranking government official informed Bolling, is being targeted because it has “changed what they really espouse.” Nunez complained that Disney used to support “family values” but that it now produces art that emphasizes topics that Nunez deems “very inappropriate.’

And yet, despite this and other evidence indicating that the Florida government is retaliating against Disney because it criticized the governor’s policies and produced works of art that high-ranking government officials find objectionable, there is a possibility that the Republican-controlled federal judiciary will give DeSantis a pass — much as it did when former President Donald Trump committed a similar violation of the First Amendment.

As a presidential candidate, Trump bragged about his plans to bring about a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Such a proposal violates the First Amendment’s safeguards against religious discrimination.

After Trump was criticized for this unconstitutional proposal, he changed his rhetoric slightly. Instead of calling for an explicit ban on Muslim migration to the United States, Trump said he would disguise the ban by targeting countries with large Islamic populations. “People were so upset when I used the word Muslim,” Trump told NBC’s Meet the Press in 2016, “and I’m okay with that, because I’m talking territory instead of Muslim.”

And yet, in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the Court’s Republican majority permitted Trump to ban travel from several majority-Muslim nations — even after Trump confessed his plans to give his Muslim ban a patina of legitimacy by presenting it as a ban on travel from certain foreign nations. The majority opinion in Hawaii leaned heavily into the fact that the Trump administration offered a national security justification for the policy that “says nothing about religion.”

The Trump administration’s proclamation announcing this travel ban, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Court’s Republicans, “is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be adequately vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices.” And the Court accepted this national security justification for the policy, despite considerable evidence that the Trump administration came up with this justification as a pretext to justify religious discrimination.

In the likely event that Disney raises a First Amendment challenge against Florida, Florida’s lawyers will undoubtedly spin a similar narrative to the one that the Trump administration came up with in Hawaii. Though those lawyers won’t be able to claim that abolishing Reedy Creek is justified by national security concerns, their brief will undoubtedly offer legitimate-sounding policy justifications for punishing Disney — some of which may actually be persuasive. There are, after all, plenty of legitimate reasons why a for-profit corporation shouldn’t be allowed to exercise governmental authority.

A Republican judiciary may uphold DeSantis’s attacks on Disney by claiming that Florida’s government was motivated by legitimate concerns about giving Disney so much control over the Reedy Creek Improvement District, much as the Supreme Court thumbed its nose at the evidence in Hawaii that Trump was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.

But, again, if the courts follow what the law says, it doesn’t matter if there are legitimate reasons why Florida could have chosen to strip Disney of a valuable government benefit. What matters is whether Florida targeted Disney because it disapproves of the company’s First Amendment-protected speech.

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