We are supportive of Bari Weiss and her efforts on free speech but we recently took issue with her comment that she wanted to have gatekeepers. When she was summarizing the Intellectual Dark Web (I.D.W.) she said:
I get the appeal of the I.D.W. I share the belief that our institutional gatekeepers need to crack the gates open much more. I don’t, however, want to live in a culture where there are no gatekeepers at all. Given how influential this group is becoming, I can’t be alone in hoping the I.D.W. finds a way to eschew the cranks, grifters and bigots and sticks to the truth-seeking.
We think that this paragraph could be interpreted in several different ways but Bari seems explicit on supporting the need for gatekeepers. Before we propose a theory we have some information on Bari, some current examples, and some information about us.
David French at NRO provides information about how Bari got started in the opinion business around 2004. She was a student at Columbia and David was president of FIRE (consider donating). There was a dustup at Columbia between the professors and the students. Read the whole thing but David’s summary is:
In other words, Bari is doing exactly what she did in 2004 and 2005. She perceived intolerance and called it out. She decried an unwillingness to debate and a university that seemed closed off to dissenting ideas. It is not censorship to critique censorship. It’s not bullying to criticize bullying. And it’s most definitely not “racism” to raise credible concerns about anti-Semitism.
She has dealt with bullies before. It has long been a goal of folks on the left to limit the speech of others. There are some recent examples. The WSJ covers the trashing of George Mason University. Here is part of it:
All of this UnKoch nonsense is part of the left’s attempt to stifle conservative ideas in the guise of an attack on “dark money.” The Kochs are so “dark” that the progressives decided to use their name. And speaking of dark money, UnKoch My Campus isn’t a nonprofit and doesn’t file regular financial disclosures.
In addition, several of the folks in Bari’s story on the I.D.W. are attempts by the left to silence dissent. We worry about meeting our standards in putting forth a theory on gatekeepers. Expertise is important and we can’t be expert in all the areas necessary for our theory. Still, that is the nature of theories. They can be falsified or supported by empirical evidence. Let’s give it a try.
Our theory is that we can compare political information to economic information. No individual can deal with the either set of information but somehow the market can distill it. We doubt that the market for political information is as efficient as the market for economic information but we think it is a reasonable description. Let’s call it the Nearly Efficient Market for Political Information (NEMPI).
Thus, there are an extraordinarily large number of gatekeepers in NEMPI. Some have large influence and others have close to no influence but enough folks are aware of their history and most of the gatekeepers worry about their history. Their history causes their influence to wax and wane. The I.D.W. is waxing in the NEMPI.
Free speech is the key attribute of the NEMPI. With reasonably free speech we get NEMPI. Folks want to reduce free speech or designate gatekeepers in order to eliminate the NEMPI.
The one difference we see between financial markets and NEMPI is timing. Financial markets react quickly while the NEMPI takes more time. We think that is OK because elections only happen every so often.
So our NEMPI theory is that everybody is a gatekeeper and the influence of each gatekeeper varies over time. No individual can evaluate all the gatekeepers but free speech allows different individuals with different talents and points of view to provide information over time. Bari, the I.D.W., legacy media, and all the others contribute information that informs politics. NEMPI, let’s test it.
menwithgloves 