Odds and Ends (3)

I get an idea for a post, start it, put it aside to see if more ideas accumulate around it. If not then eventually, when I have enough too short posts, I put them together and post them.

Who Pays the Piper

Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong met with anxious faculty over the weekend in an effort to generate support, warn of the jeopardy the school faces and play down concerns that the deal the school cut with the government on Friday undermined its academic independence.

In meetings with about 75 faculty leaders, Armstrong and her team said six federal agencies are investigating the school and could pull all federal support from it. The Trump administration has already canceled $400 million in grants and contracts over concerns Columbia failed to protect Jewish students from harassment.

“The ability of the federal administration to leverage other forms of federal funding in an immediate fashion is really potentially devastating to our students in particular,” Armstrong said, according to a transcript of the meetings reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “I think it is a really critical risk for us to understand.” (Columbia’s President Faces Angry Faculty in Closed-Door Meetings, WSJ, March 24, 2025)

There is nothing new about the ability of the federal government to leverage its funding of universities to control them. Previous administrations repeatedly used their interpretation of Title IX to control how universities police their students, including student speech, later to compel universities to allow mtf transsexuals to play on women’s sports teams. All that has changed is that it is now being done by an administration with political views that the faculty and administration disagree with.

The fit between what the federal government wanted to make university administrators do and what the administrators wanted to be made to do was in part accidental, due to the shared political views of academics and the Democratic party, but only in part. In a world where elite universities get a substantial fraction of their income from the federal government the ability to get federal money was a key qualification for an administrator; it helped to have the same political views as the people handing out the money. If the current conservative control of the federal government lasts beyond the next four years, it will be interesting to see if the academic bureaucracy adapts.

How To Know If A Source of Information Can Be Trusted

In a post some time back I offered evidence that Noah Smith should not be trusted as a source of information, did not much care whether what he posted was true. One commenter disagreed, reported that “having read a good bit of @noahpinion I believe your claim that he doesn't care about truth is very much incorrect.”

That raised for me the question of how he could know, how anyone could know, whether someone was honest. Refuting my argument, which the commenter thought (and I didn’t) that he had done, would be a reason to be agnostic about whether Smith could be trusted but it would take more than that to justify a positive belief that he could be. What would do it is a question not only for the commenter but for me, a question both about how to decide what sources of information I can trust and how to show my readers that I can be trusted.

That I have never seen someone say anything I know to be false is only weak evidence — perhaps he had no reason to lie. What I want is evidence that he told the truth when he had good reason not to, reason to say something not true, to avoid saying something he knew to be true or avoid checking the truth of something he wanted to claim. As I put it in my response to the commenter, “can you point to examples of his reporting something that most of his readers did not know that was evidence against his political views?”

That would be positive evidence that he was honest.

For evidence that I am, I offer Libertarian Problems and Less Bad Arguments for Protectionism.

Spam Tells

“I am from your utility company …”

If they were from my utility company they would know what its name was.

Similarly for “I am from your phone company.”

Another tell is several seconds of silence after you pick up the phone, sometimes followed by a few clicks before the recorded voice starts.

A strong Indian accent is another tell, not perfectly reliable but pretty close.

One person I asked for suggestions told me that when he gets a dubious call he googles the phone number to see if it is on a list of scam numbers. On the rare occasions when I am not sure of the person calling me is really from the organization he claims my usual approach it to ask for a way of contacting him through the organization — and don’t get one.

Should I?

Should I offer a paid subscription option? Relevant facts:

Most of my writing is available for free online from my web page; I write to spread ideas not as a source of income. There are two reasons why I might nonetheless offer readers the option of paying for my posts. One is that I would enjoy discovering that I can make enough by my writing to support myself even if I do not have to. The other is that some readers might want to pay even if they don’t have to.

That sounds odd coming from an economist but back when Slate Star Codex was a going concern, available for free, I arranged to pay for it via Scott’s Patreon. I was spending more than half my time online reading Scott’s posts and reading and participating in the comment threads they spawned; it was at the time one of my chief sources of both recreation and intellectual simulation. Given the large value Scott was providing me I wanted to pay him for it. Some of my readers may have similar feelings.

The one reason not to offer a paid subscription is that its existence might offend some present readers, discourage some new readers. If I do offer it, the paid and free subscriptions would be identical.

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