Category: Philosophy
Five case studies in politicization
This is a fascinating Scott Alexander take on tribalism and how political issues are framed, starting with Ebola. As Robin Hanson would say, “politics isn’t about policy.” Here is the segment on how climate change issues might be marketed to the Right:
Global warming has already gotten inextricably tied up in the Blue Tribe narrative: Global warming proves that unrestrained capitalism is destroying the planet. Global warming disproportionately affects poor countries and minorities. Global warming could have been prevented with multilateral action, but we were too dumb to participate because of stupid American cowboy diplomacy. Global warming is an important cause that activists and NGOs should be lauded for highlighting. Global warming shows that Republicans are science denialists and probably all creationists. Two lousy sentences on “patriotism” aren’t going to break through that.
If I were in charge of convincing the Red Tribe to line up behind fighting global warming, here’s what I’d say:
In the 1950s, brave American scientists shunned by the climate establishment of the day discovered that the Earth was warming as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, leading to potentially devastating natural disasters that could destroy American agriculture and flood American cities. As a result, the country mobilized against the threat. Strong government action by the Bush administration outlawed the worst of these gases, and brilliant entrepreneurs were able to discover and manufacture new cleaner energy sources. As a result of these brave decisions, our emissions stabilized and are currently declining.
Unfortunately, even as we do our part, the authoritarian governments of Russia and China continue to industralize and militarize rapidly as part of their bid to challenge American supremacy. As a result, Communist China is now by far the world’s largest greenhouse gas producer, with the Russians close behind. Many analysts believe Putin secretly welcomes global warming as a way to gain access to frozen Siberian resources and weaken the more temperate United States at the same time. These countries blow off huge disgusting globs of toxic gas, which effortlessly cross American borders and disrupt the climate of the United States. Although we have asked them to stop several times, they refuse, perhaps egged on by major oil producers like Iran and Venezuela who have the most to gain by keeping the world dependent on the fossil fuels they produce and sell to prop up their dictatorships.
We need to take immediate action. While we cannot rule out the threat of military force, we should start by using our diplomatic muscle to push for firm action at top-level summits like the Kyoto Protocol. Second, we should fight back against the liberals who are trying to hold up this important work, from big government bureaucrats trying to regulate clean energy to celebrities accusing people who believe in global warming of being ‘racist’. Third, we need to continue working with American industries to set an example for the world by decreasing our own emissions in order to protect ourselves and our allies. Finally, we need to punish people and institutions who, instead of cleaning up their own carbon, try to parasitize off the rest of us and expect the federal government to do it for them.
Please join our brave men and women in uniform in pushing for an end to climate change now.
The piece is interesting throughout, hat tip goes to MR commentator Macrojams.
Which famous Chinese leader said this in 1943?
[China] must adopt a planned economy and social legislation to secure the livelihood and survival of every citizen, and it is imperative that we eventually accomplish the objective of “transforming [all] capital into state capital [nationalization of capital], and transforming [all] enjoyment into enjoyment of the masses.”
The answer is here.
That is from Morris L. Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change, p.205. This book is useful for showing early Chinese moves in the direction of state planning and state-owned enterprises.
The cryonics culture that is China
A US-based cryonics company that stores people’s bodies at ultra-low temperatures in the hope that one day technology will be able to bring them back to life says it has attracted customers from China.
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, said it had held discussions about setting up a team in China.
Another firm, the Cryonics Institute in the state of Michigan, said it had held similar discussions about operating in China.
Observers said the interest from wealthy Chinese may be because they are worried about bans on burial in favour of cremation in many places.
Traditional Chinese culture rules that the body must be intact to prepare for the afterlife.
Professor Huang Wei , a historian at Sichuan University in Chengdu , said: “Chinese people have always been interested in body preservation and life extension. Cryonics is a new option from the West which will certainly interest those who can afford it.”
There is more here, via the excellent Mark Thorson.
How to shout a pro-democracy slogan in Hong Kong
Other good photos, with different subjects, are here.
“Big Data” is going to raise some awkward normative questions
From Joe Palazzolo at the WSJ:
There is no research yet on whether the use of risk evaluations in sentencing has aggravated, for example, the gap between sentences for black and white men for similar crimes.
Ms. Starr said the disparities created by risk measures are evident. “When it comes down to it, these assessments stand for the proposition that judges should sentence people longer because they were in foster care as children or had too many bouts of unemployment,” she said.
Christopher Slobogin, a Vanderbilt University law professor, said the alternative was potentially worse. “At least these risk-assessment instruments don’t explicitly focus on race or poverty, unlike what might occur in a sentencing regime where judges are making risk assessments based on seat-of-the-pants evaluations,” he said.
Some observers, such as U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf in Nebraska, say age or race should be considered if doing so yields a more accurate measurement of risk. He wrote in a blog post last month: “If race, gender or age are predictive as validated by good empirical analysis, and we truly care about public safety while at the same time depopulating our prisons, why wouldn’t a rational sentencing system freely use race, gender or age as predictor of future criminality?”
There is more here.
Should we hope to live to very ripe old ages?
I say yes. A number of you have been asking me for comments on this now-famous Atlantic piece by Ezekiel Emanuel. You should read his whole argument, but here is one bit:
…here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.
Ezekiel basically wishes not to live beyond age 75. Not that he will do himself in, but he regards that as a limit past which it is probably not desirable to go. Just to be clear, I don’t read Emanuel as wishing to impose or even “nudge” this view on others, he is stating a personal vision. Still, it strikes me as a somewhat strange approach to understanding the value of a life or estimating when that value ends. The value of an individual life is to be sure somewhat ineffable, but for that same reason it is difficult for a life to lose so much of its value.
It is easy for me to see how a person could be a valuable role model for others past the age of seventy-five. I expect Ezekiel in particular to fulfill this function superbly. I still think frequently of the late Marvin Becker, the Princeton (later UM) Renaissance historian, who for me was an important role model at the age of seventy-seven. Marvin often used to say “Oh, to be seventy again!” He had more than his share of aches and pains, but he was always a comfort and joy to his wife Betty, and most likely to his children and grandchildren as well.
Or visit the list of words in Emanuel’s paragraph, cited above. Many people are “disabled” to begin with, and many other lives are “deprived” to begin with, for one thing most of the lives in the world’s poorer countries. But they are still, on the whole, extremely valuable lives. I don’t just mean that external parties should respect the rights and lives of those persons, but rather internally and individually those lives are of great value.
To pick another word from that paragraph, “creativity” is overrated and most of us do not have it in the first place. And if one does have it, perhaps its passing is in some ways a liberation rather than a personal tragedy.
I would rather be remembered as “that really old guy who hung on forever because he loved life so much” than as vibrant. At some points I felt this piece needed a…marginal revolution.
And to sound petty for a moment, I don’t want to pass away during the opening moments of a Carlsen-Caruana match, or before an NBA season has finished (well, it depends on the season), or before the final volumes of Knausgaard are translated into English. And this is a never-ending supply. The world is a fascinating place and I fully expect to appreciate it at the age of eighty, albeit with some faculties less sharp. What if the Fermi Paradox is resolved, or a good theory of quantum gravity developed? What else might be worth waiting for?
I cannot help but feel that Emanuel is overrating some key aspects of what are supposed to be making his current life valuable, and thus undervaluing his future life past age seventy-five. (See David Henderson too on that point.)
It was Dan Quisenberry who once said: “The future is much like the present, only longer.”
More to the point, and coming from the marginalist camp, there is Art Buchwald, who noted: “Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got.”
Jeremy Waldron on Nudge
Waldron is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, here is one bit from his NYRoB essay:
More reassuring, I think, would be a candid assessment of what might go wrong with nudging. One of Sunstein’s many books (from before his time in the White House) is entitled Worst-Case Scenarios. Could we please have something like that as a companion to Nudge?
I am afraid there is very little awareness in these books about the problem of trust. Every day we are bombarded with offers whose choice architecture is manipulated, not necessarily in our favor. The latest deal from the phone company is designed to bamboozle us, and we may well want such blandishments regulated. But it is not clear whether the regulators themselves are trustworthy. Governments don’t just make mistakes; they sometimes set out deliberately to mislead us. The mendacity of elected officials is legendary and claims on our trust and credulity have often been squandered. It is against this background that we have to consider how nudging might be abused.
The full piece is here. By the way, there is a new Cass Sunstein book out, which I have not yet read, Valuing Life: Humanizing the Regulatory State.
The Twitter pointer is from Michael Clemens.
Partyism in America is getting worse
In 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent. Republicans have been found to like Democrats less than they like people on welfare or gays and lesbians. Democrats dislike Republicans more than they dislike big business.
And this:
To test for political prejudice, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, political scientists at Stanford University, conducted a large-scale implicit association test with 2,000 adults. They found people’s political bias to be much larger than their racial bias. When Democrats see “joy,” it’s much easier for them to click on a corner that says “Democratic” and “good” than on one that says “Republican” and “good.”
To find out whether such attitudes predict behavior, Iyengar and Westwood undertook a follow-up study. They asked more than 1,000 people to look at the resumes of several high-school seniors and say which ones should be awarded a scholarship. Some of these resumes contained racial cues (“president of the African American Student Association”) while others had political ones (“president of the Young Republicans”).
Race mattered. African-American participants preferred the African-American candidates 73 percent to 27 percent. Whites showed a modest preference for African-American candidates, as well, though by a significantly smaller margin. But partisanship made a much bigger difference. Both Democrats and Republicans selected their in-party candidate about 80 percent of the time.
That is from Cass Sunstein.
*Philosophy Between the Lines*
This is the new and fantastic book by Arthur M. Melzer and the subtitle is The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. It is the best book I know on esoteric writing and its history and furthermore it is clear and to the point! (I think)
Melzer starts his chapter eight with this quotation from John Toland’s eighteenth century Pantheisticon:
[Esotericism is] practiced not by the Ancients alone; for to declare the Truth, it is more in Use among the Moderns.
Here is another bit from the book:
To begin with, we need an author who, in his interpretations, is willing to follow the very un-Straussian injunction — often found on mathematics exams — “show all work.” We need to see, once or twice, how the sausage is made. The best writing for this purpose that I am familiar with comes from an appropriately un-Straussian source: Stanley Fish. His “Georgics of the Mind: The Experience of Bacon’s Essays” is a brilliant and nuanced exercise in textual analysis that openly displays, at every stage of Fish’s encounter with the text, what he thinks and why he thinks it.
…Another excellent and highly communicative reader…is Robert Connor. His Thucydides is a very sensitive reading of Thucydides’s great history, a reading openly arrived at and clearly conveyed. In conjunction with this, one should also read Clifford Orwin’s superb The Humanity of Thucydides.
Recommended.
Do I wish to revise my time management tips?
Here are my suggestions:
1. There is always time to do more, most people, even the productive, have a day that is at least forty percent slack.
2. Do the most important things first in the day and don’t let anybody stop you. Estimate “most important” using a zero discount rate. Don’t make exceptions. The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.
3. Some tasks (drawing up outlines?) expand or contract to fill the time you give them. Shove all these into times when you are pressed to do something else very soon.
4. Each day stop writing just a bit before you have said everything you want to. Better to approach your next writing day “hungry” than to feel “written out.” Your biggest enemy is a day spent not writing, not a day spent writing too little.
5. Blogging builds up good work habits; the deadline is always “now.”
Rahul R. asks me if I would like to revise the list. I’ll add these:
6. Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t take drugs.
7. At any point in your life, do not be watching more than one television show on a regular basis.
8. Don’t feel you have to finish a book or movie if you don’t want to. I cover that point at length in my book Discover Your Inner Economist.
I think I would take back my old #5, since I observe some bloggers who have gone years, ten years in fact, without being so productive.
What I’ve been reading
1. Michael Ignatieff, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics. A genuinely interesting book about why someone with tenure at Harvard might be crazy enough to run for high public office, and then what it is like to lose somewhat ignominiously.
2. Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User’s Guide. A genuinely humble and pluralistic introduction to the economic way of thinking, from a “developmentalist,” linkages are important for economic growth, anti-free trade point of view.
I disagree with both Ignatieff and Chang pretty thoroughly, but of the last few dozen books I read, these are the two which are truly philosophical, in the best sense of that word. There is no need to list the others, except there is Umberto Eco on Peanuts, scroll down about four paragraphs to start reading.
Very good sentences
The point is that as a society changes, as what’s held sacred and who’s empowered shifts, so do the paths through which evil enters in, the prejudices and blind spots it exploits.
So don’t expect tomorrow’s predators to look like yesterday’s. Don’t expect them to look like the figures your ideology or philosophy or faith would lead you to associate with exploitation.
Expect them, instead, to look like the people whom you yourself would be most likely to respect, most afraid to challenge publicly, or least eager to vilify and hate.
Because your assumptions and pieties are evil’s best opportunity, and your conventional wisdom is what’s most likely to condemn victims to their fate.
That is from Ross Douthat, on the general lessons of Rotherham.
Neil Harbisson is a cyborg
Or should that title read “Is Neil Harbisson a cyborg?”
Protruding from the back of Harbisson’s skull is a metal antenna that allows him to convert the frequencies for color into frequencies for sound and vice versa. He was born colorblind and the appendage has essentially given him a sixth sense to make up for what his vision lacks.
…Harbisson gets visibly dizzy when his antenna is off center. Moving it slightly to the left, he closed his eyes and said, “If I do this, I feel unbalanced…it does feel like a body part, an extension of a bone or something.” Even though the antenna is metal and has no nerve endings, Harbisson says he can feel when someone touches it, the same as a natural body part.
There is more:
Moon Ribas, Harbisson’s partner, has an extension she wears on her arm that makes her body vibrate when there’s an earthquake. (She plans to one day have it implanted under her skin.) As a choreographer, Ribas takes inspiration from nature and thought the extension would enhance her creativity. It syncs with an app that collects data on earthquakes around the world to make her body vibrate when there’s seismic activity (it happens frequently enough that she vibrated once during our interview).
But the appendage cannot be submerged in water, and neither can Neil’s. They are both hoping to update their devices so that in the future they can go swimming. “Then I will be able to perceive the colors in the ocean,” Harbisson says.
There is more here, including a photo. It is noted that security guards are sometimes unsympathetic to Harbisson, who is moving from Spain to New York, where he feels he will be seen as less unusual.
For a related pointer, I thank Samir Varma.
Sentences to ponder
“Always assume that there is one silent student in your class who is by far superior to you in head and in heart.” This is the counsel Leo Strauss, among the most consequential teachers and scholars of political philosophy in the 20th century, offered an advanced graduate student who had asked for a general rule about teaching.
In a short essay published in the early 1960s, “Liberal Education and Responsibility” (based on a public lecture he gave), Strauss elaborated on his exquisite advice. “Do not have too high an opinion of your importance,” he said, “and have the highest opinion of your duty, your responsibility.”
How to look smart?
Perhaps these results are speculative all around, but I am happy to report them for your consideration:
Another strategy identified by the survey, wearing glasses, appears to be surprisingly effective. Figures released in 2011 by the College of Optometrists, in the U.K., show that 43 percent of the people it surveyed believe glasses make a person look more intelligent.
But you may not need glasses if you’re beautiful. A Czech study found that certain facial features—narrow faces, long noses, and thin chins—correlated with both perceived intelligence and attractiveness. Interestingly, men who were considered smart-looking actually tended to have higher IQs; the same was not true for women.
Other ways to signal intelligence without opening your mouth include walking at the same pace as those around you. Subjects in one study rated a person moving faster or slower than “normal human walking speed” as less competent and intelligent. Speaking of incompetence: don’t drink in public, at least not at work functions. The perceived association between alcohol and stupid behavior is so strong, according to a 2013 study, that merely holding a beer makes you appear dumber.
How you write matters, too—particularly how you write your name. Middle initials apparently lend a person a certain cachet. Participants in a study published this year rated writing samples more favorably when the author’s name included a middle initial; they also presumed people with middle initials to be of higher social status than their uninitialed peers. Typing your initial in the Comic Sans font, though, could ruin the whole thing: a Princeton researcher found that a hard-to-read font made an author seem dumber, while a clean, simple typeface (Times New Roman, in the study) made him or her seem more intelligent.
The same researcher also looked at how using big words (a classic strategy for impressing others) affects perceived intelligence. Counterintuitively, grandiose vocabulary diminished participants’ impressions of authors’ cerebral capacity. Put another way: simpler writing seems smarter.
The full link is here, with footnotes and sourcing, hat tip goes to Catherine Rampell.