The Melting Pot That Isn’t

  Data is data. Turns out that what we melt is purely scientific, legal, and commercial; and what doesn’t melt is family, morality, metaphysics, and therefore politics. Or, what I would describe in Propertarian terms, as “explicitly calculable” implicit knowledge vs “inexplicitly calculable” tacit knowledge. We can structure formal institutions only for a subset of knowledge. Myth, tradition, ritual, family, morals, ethics, and manners are something that can also be institutionalized. And that us the conservative vision: formal institutions are not enough.