1. A sort of follow up to my tweet on Tucker Carlson yesterday, following on a private conversation with someone and some friendly pushback from @snlester . So what I wanted to say in that tweet was _not_ that anyone in Tucker Carlson's shoes would have behaved as he did.
2. He seems to be an unusually amoral person from all accounts (I've never met him, though I have suffered once in an indirect and glancing way from his amorality). What I wanted to say instead was that people like Carlson aren't particularly interesting _as people._
3. There are people whose changes of perspective over time are really worth understanding, because they reflect genuine and complex moral struggles to reconcile worldviews with a world that resists them.
4. There are also people who aren’t as interesting, but where one can at least discern a worldview that is worth elucidating. Finally there are monsters, whose monstrosity is sufficiently idiosyncratic and important that its sources are worth exploring and explaining.
5. Beck and Carlson don't seem to me to fit into any of those categories. Their changes over time can be explained as responses to changes in the material incentive structures that they face, or learning about what those material incentives actually are through experimentation,
6. In other words, their personal qualities seems exactly as relevant to understanding their actions as the qualities of a rationally Bayesian game theoretic agent would be, which is to say not at all. Slot another agent into the same situation, and they will behave just the same
7. Randall Jarrell's crack about how "President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins" applies aptly to people like Beck and Tucker.
8. So I don't think that the standard tropes of personal biography are particularly useful in explaining how people like Carlson operate. They don't visibly evolve through internal moral struggle, or change in notably interesting ways.
9. Instead, they respond to perceived changes in their environment, so that a sociological or political science lens discerns close to everything about them that is worth discerning, in a way that isn't true for people who are morally complex.
10. Their stories aren't personally interesting stories - they reduce easily to a story of the incentives created by the ecological-level corruption of the conservative media system over the last few decades. Doubtless, there _are_ personally interesting stories about others ...
11. who have struggled with this ecology, or who have shaped it (as Gabriel Sherman's book on Fox demonstrates, Roger Ailes was a fascinating grotesque). But Carlson is no more than a symptom of the broader system that he works with.
12. If the system were different, so too would he be, to just the extent needed to succeed in it. Finis.
