tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54992172432849373662024-03-18T07:44:27.390-04:00TKIN: Philosopher Encounters Modern LifePatricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.comBlogger468125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-25663534872585618382024-03-15T08:02:00.000-04:002024-03-15T08:02:34.516-04:00The Fragile Connection Between Liking And Wanting Is Crucial To Our Survival <p>The most interesting thing I learned this week is that <a href=" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine ">animals whose dopamine system has been rendered inactive will fail to seek food, and will starve to death if left to themselves," but will eat and swallow with pleasure if food is placed in their mouths.</a><br /><br />I'm not always an animal-lover type person, but I found it a bit crushing to picture an animal whose life force had been so sapped that food was something they just couldn't be bothered with. Something about the poor little critter chomping gratefully if someone took the trouble, but unable to rouse itself for action struck me as the bleakest metaphor for existence ever. <br /><br />I found that fact on Wikipedia when I went down a looking-up-dopamine rabbit-hole. I looked up dopamine because I was reflecting on how my motivation or mood seems to change in the evenings, even when I'm not feeling especially fatigued. Why would the sunset cause a mood change? Posing that question made me think of "sundowning," where people with dementia become agitated at sunset. Looking up "sundowning," I learned that one hypothesis is about hormone changes, and that hormones standardly change in accordance with circadian rhythms. One of those changes is that dopamine goes down in the evening.<br /><br />If I understand correctly, the standard dopamine scheme is that pleasure causes a release of dopamine, which then reinforces the motivation to seek the behavior. In the framework, the “wanting” and the "liking" systems are distinct: pleasure is one thing, and motivation is another, and dopamine is the contingently existing link between the two. Pleasure from a reward and the motivation to seek it thus emerge from separate biological pathways.<br /><br />I don’t know about you, but I feel like this explains a lot. A lot of our cultural "common sense" encodes a set-up in which the reason you seek out a thing is because you anticipate the thing will bring you pleasure. If it’s true about how dopamine works, things aren’t quite so simple. You can anticipate the pleasure and not have the drive, or you can have the drive without anticipating the pleasure. And the concept of a "reason" barely fits in there at all.<br /><br />I was surprised to learn that drugs like meth and cocaine mainly hit the "wanting" while opiates activate both wanting and liking. Not surprisingly, addiction can mean elevated "wanting" alongside decreased "liking," if you’ve built up a tolerance for the thing you’re addicted to. So they really are distinct systems. <br /><br />Distinct systems fits my experience better than the common sense/pleasure anticipation theory does. It’s often opaque to me why I have or lack the motivations that I do. I enjoy running outside once I get going, but frequently I have to push and drag myself out there. I’ve always wondered: shouldn’t my mind update via a feedback mechanism, where liking would cause motivation? Why wouldn’t it? Well — I still don’t know, but it’s a bit less mysterious now.<br /><br />Obviously the next question is how you might improve your dopamine function so you can enjoy the resulting motivation and Life Force. A person doesn’t live by pleasure alone. Obviously, if you want to increase your pleasure/liking, you can do things you enjoy. But if you want to increase your dopamine/wanting you can … ? <br /><br />Weirdly, official advice on the internet about increasing your dopamine is that if you want to increase your dopamine, you should — do things you enjoy. The thinking seems to be that since pleasure experiences release dopamine, a way to increase your dopamine is to do the things you enjoy. I get it, but like a lot of official advice, it doesn’t quite add up. If your dopamine system isn’t working well, all the pleasure in the world won’t help you, because it won’t create the motivation. <br /><br />Other things you can do to increase your dopamine include exercising, eating healthy food, and getting enough sleep and sunshine. So I guess where all this ends up is that while you might think the reasons you do things have to do with your thoughts, plans, and intentions, a lot of it also comes down to animal nature. </p><p>We humans and that starving critter are all in the same boat, just praying that our fragile dopamine connection between liking and wanting isn't wantonly destroyed, rudely hijacked, or just left to desiccate and decay.</p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-33555853957652658292024-03-08T08:32:00.000-05:002024-03-08T08:32:26.961-05:00I Think A Lot About The Marshmallow Test. Why? <p>A thing about me is that I often think about the marshmallow test. The marshmallow test is a test of delayed gratification abilities in which little kids are given a small treat, like a marshmallow, and told that if they wait a bit, they can have extra. One marshmallow now, or two later. <br /><br />The test is famous because researchers said there were correlations between choosing “two marshmallows later” and, years after, getting the good things of modern capitalism like career success, academic achievement, and better SAT scores. Endless variations on the main study have been undertaken since the 1930s; the standard conclusion is that having the self-control to delay gratification is a useful and virtuous. <br /><br />I’ve always been a skeptic about the marshmallow test. I was a shy, somewhat nervous kid, eager to please the adults around me. If I’d been given the test, I expect I would have been more motivated by social pressure than actual marshmallows. As I <a href="https://thekramerisnow.blogspot.com/2009/05/i-have-no-self-control.html">wrote on this blog</a> in 2009, the original test set up was that kids who wanted the first marshmallow right away would have to ring a bell to summon a researcher. Are you kidding?! There is no way at four years old I would have rung a bell to summon a strange adult, even if 50 marshmallows had been on the line.<br /><br />Also, is it even obvious that more later is better than less now? The thing about now is that it’s now: if you have your treat immediately, you are virtually guaranteed satisfaction: you’re having it at the moment that it looks delicious, there’s no risk of some diabolical behavior or random obstacles blocking your treat, and you can move on with your life rather than sitting there in the painful condition of "waiting for a treat."<br /><br />Color me unsurprised, therefore, that as the years went on, studies showed the marshmallow test was more complicated than it may have appeared. As with the young Patricia, researchers found that children engage in “<a href=" https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-09-marshmallow-revisited.html ">reputation management</a>,” and were more likely to delay if a teacher knew their choices. <br /><br />Furthermore, kids from wealthier socio-economic backgrounds were <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-research-marshmallow-test-suggests-delayed-gratification-doesnt-equal-success-180969234/">found to do better</a> on the test. It was pointed out that one reason for that could be that if you’re from a richer family, the likelihood of “more later” was more likely to actually materialize. If the adults around you have more resources, they are more able to provide in a stable and predictable way, and to prevent unexpected diabolical behavior or random obstacles from interrupting your treat.<br /><br />The socio-economic explanation obviously leads to a hypothesis almost diametrically opposed to the original one: that it’s not your inner character that matters, it’s your environment. The potential significance is huge. A few years ago the <i>New Yorker</i> had an <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/18/dont-2 ">article</a> about the test, including how whole schools were being designed to promote learning self-control and delaying gratification. If it’s more the external environment than that intervention is a major investment in a completely wrong direction.<br /><br />Since this is a blog post and not a philosophy article I will leave aside correlation versus causation and how-do-we-really-know-anything, and get straight to the personal: Patricia, why do you think so often about the marshmallow test?<br /><br />I think one reason is that I am often amazed by the contrast class between things I can do and things I cannot get myself to do, which makes me wonder: if self-control makes me able to do the first things, why can’t I do the second things? <br /><br />I do a fair number of things that appear to require self-control: I work by myself on large unstructured research projects with no deadlines; I go to the gym even when it’s freezing outside and cozy at home; in the course of my life, I have quit smoking, Diet Coke, and a range of other things we won’t get into here.<br /><br />On the other hand, the things I cannot get myself to do is mystifying. I have never been able to prepare lunch at home to eat later during the day — now I can afford to buy lunch, but even when I had no money, I would eat like one donut or just skip lunch. I am trying to learn Italian, and I found this great site with <a href="https://easyitaliannews.com/">Easy Italian News </a>for practice: listening to it is reasonably fun, but am I doing it? No. I’ve been trying to form a new habit of bringing my own silverware from my office to the lunch place on campus, so I can avoid using all that plastic. Easy, but my success rate? Just reaching toward 20 percent.<br /><br />I’m forced into the conclusion that for me, it's less like there is a self-control part that I direct at one activity or another and more like some habits take and some don't. It’s a confusing mix why. Partly, some things are engaging despite being difficult and some things are just boring and annoying. Partly, a habit is different from self-control. Partly, behavior is social not individual, which is why nagging the people you love is actually an important thing to do. <br /><br />So I guess that’s why I think about the marshmallow test so often. It seems to test for a quality I feel I don’t really have. I don’t know if y’all have a similar experience, but that’s what’s going on with me.<br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-9917491870820621562024-03-01T08:32:00.000-05:002024-03-01T08:32:03.436-05:00The Tyranny of the Majority in Advanced Consumer Economies <p>In 2017<a href="https://thekramerisnow.blogspot.com/2017/10/i-went-down-ethical-cell-phone-rabbit.html "> I went down the ethical cell phone rabbit hole</a>. I didn’t do anything like buy a phone — mostly I just reacquainted myself with the ways the elements of a phone are embedded in dysfunctional, oppressive, and murderous global systems.<br /><br />I learned there is a phone called a Fairphone that considers itself an “ethical cellphone.” I guessed immediately it wouldn’t be available in my area, and I was correct. The main reason is obvious: insufficient local demand.<br /><br />“Tyranny of the majority” is a phrase in political philosophy usually meant to indicate the possibility that in contexts of majority-rule, minority interests will get steamrolled. <br /><br />Conceptually, advanced consumer economies should be consumer paradises where it’s the opposite of majority rule. Everything we might need or want would be for sale, because the existence of people wanting and needing is what causes the market to provide. <br /><br />So I’m always a bit surprised to crash into the obstacles created by the fact that I often want what other people do not want, and do not want what other people want, which tends to lead to my things being simply unavailable.</p><p>The fairphone is a sanctimonious example — mostly I’m talking about garden variety things people spend money on. I would like a portable way to listen to high quality terrestrial radio — surprisingly difficult to access beyond the context of a car. I would like to hail a taxi on the street — in my city, this used to work great, and now it doesn’t, because obviously. I would like clothes that have a bit of stretchy fabric for my body shape but aren’t athleisure-wear — not easy to find. I would like to go out dancing at like 6:30pm, not midnight, but that is evidently not something enough other people want to do. <br /><br />In the 90s, I noticed that there were TVs available for under $100 and I thought OK great, when my mom’s TV gets old that won’t be a problem. But by the time her TV got old, capitalism had moved on: now the only TVs available had some new and better tech than the old “cathode ray” and now they all cost hundreds of dollars.</p><p>It’s always striking to me when the law of supply and demand is held up as one of the more fundamental, universal, or well-established laws of economics and human behavior, because we are surrounded by things — especially in technology — that get less expensive the more people want them. If everyone wants a laptop, laptop prices will go down.<br /><br />Note that I do not mean that examples falsity the law of supply and demand. It’s the presence of what Mill called “disturbing causes”: the more people want a thing, the more money the producers of the thing can invest in new methods and technologies and the more affordable the thing can be. Except - as with the TVs — when “the thing” becomes a different thing altogether, and everyone buys that, so that is what’s available. <br /><br />Anyway, I’m not saying there is any problem to be fixed, and I’m not complaining. I’m just saying that from an abstract point of view, it’s striking that a system based on the idea that each person should be able to choose what they want for themselves is also a system where “what everyone else is doing” determines a lot of the texture of your experience. <br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-39205438930892654782024-02-23T08:57:00.002-05:002024-02-23T08:57:24.899-05:00Directing Your Attention Versus Experiencing Whatever Happens to be Happening <p> Like a lot of people, I often feel like my mind is running in the wrong gear. There’s too much whirring and burbling in situations where that isn’t needed. I usually self-medicate with exercise, alcohol, novels, and plenty of down time — all of which work great for me, so please, no advice in the comments. <br /><br />We all know the <i>Psychiatric Help: Five Cents </i>answer to this problem: meditation. In putting it that way, I don’t mean to imply that meditation wouldn’t help me. It probably would. I am, however, implying that where we are in the culture is a rare moment when gurus of science, wellness, therapy and fitness all agree: really, you should meditate.<br /><br />My experience with mediation is limited. I go to yoga classes, but they’re usually at the gym, so while we’re “meditating” at the end, there’s often like one person bustling around leaving early, wrecking the vibe, and weirdly sad music on the playlist, making me ponder whether I’m the only one thinking “wait, isn’t music distracting?” and then wondering if I’m missing the point.<br /><br />To learn more about meditation, I recently downloaded one of the mediation apps and selected a “beginner” series. During the second instalment, I was surprised to hear the narrator make a case for the importance of directing your attention. He said that concentration — being able to direct your attention — is like a muscle, and strengthening that muscle gives you the power to choose what to pay attention to. And nothing is more important than the fundamental ability to pay attention, he said — because what you pay attention to becomes your life.<br /><br />I realize I’m engaging in the kind of overthinking philosophers are trained and socialized into, but I couldn’t stop myself from being weirded out by the idea that you can always choose what to pay attention to. Because it does seem true, in a way, that what you pay attention to becomes your life. But in that case the idea that you are choosing and directing it seems disturbing. It seems like then you would have to constantly decide what to pay attention to, which is dangerously close to constantly deciding what is worth your attention, which seems overwhelming, overly rationalistic, and in some way just wrong. <br /><br />I don’t really know anything about eastern philosophy and the general traditions in which meditation is a central activity. So I’m sure there are people who know more than I do about how attention and meditation and focus all fit together and how I may by misinterpreting the fundamentals. <br /><br />What I want to discuss instead is how the idea of choosing what to pay attention to got me thinking of the cultural expansion of the category “things we control and determine” and the shrivelling of the category “experiencing of whatever happens to be happening.” <br /><br />I actively enjoy experiencing whatever happens to be happening for its happening part, even when the thing itself is not my fave. For example, I used to love listening to the radio. Part of what I loved about it was listening to “what’s on.” What’s on the radio is on now, and we’re all listening to it. We didn’t choose it, but we’re all out here experiencing it. Because it’s what’s on. I have the same feeling about the NYT crossword. I like to do today’s puzzle. Because it’s today’s puzzle. I don’t want to go into the archive and find a puzzle on a theme I might prefer. I want to do today’s, because today’s puzzle is what’s on now, and we’re all doing it.<br /><br />Obviously it’s still possible to enjoy experiencing whatever happens to be happening, but I feel like it’s become culturally more challenging — like there’s more friction to it, and it’s harder to opt into, because everyone else is opting out of it — people are crafting their playlists, following their followees, editing their photos, etc. etc. Even friendship has been infiltrated by the power of control: what are you adding to my life, or should I just drop you?<br /><br />Recently I was in an audio store, and I tried to explain that I wanted a stereo component where I could listen to the radio. No — not through the internet, where I can choose any of a million feeds, just in the regular way of listening to whatever happened to be happening in the area where I can get a radio signal.<br /><br />I learned this is called “terrestrial radio.” I also learned someone asking for terrestrial radio will be treated as ignorant. The salespeople kept explaining to me again and again that over the internet is better: better sound quality, you can choose any station, it’s the same, only better, was I really so stupid and stubborn as to want the technology of the 1950s? <br /><br />The good news is I got my terrestrial radio stereo component. The bad news is, my favorite station <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/8625699/flow-93-5-changes-20-years-toronto-airwaves/ ">folded</a> — because no one is listening to terrestrial radio, because don’t you know it’s better over the internet?<br /><br />Anyway, I’ll have to stick with it meditation-wise, so I can better understand the relationship between directing your attention and still being open to experiencing whatever happens to be happening. Because experiencing whatever happens to be happening is great, and sometimes feels more like relinquishing control than it does like an active choice.<br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-28561939711402850892024-02-16T08:18:00.000-05:002024-02-16T08:18:33.560-05:00If Human Emotions Are Based On Rationality, I Feel Like An Alien<p><i> Content warning: suicide.</i><br /><br />When I was in graduate school, I TAed a course on Contemporary Moral Problems. I can’t remember what the “Problem” was that we were discussing, but at some point our textbook author made the argument that whether or not to kill yourself was a question that could be approached in a rational manner. For example, he said, there are good reasons to kill yourself and bad reasons: a toothache is <i>obviously not a reason to kill yourself.</i><br /><br />I remember being taken aback, because in my experience, a toothache is just the kind of thing that makes you want to kill yourself. In saying this, I do not mean to be treating suicide lightly or simply. I just mean that my own moments of despair most often occur in response to the kind of relentless, slow-burn, non-dramatic things that make life seem grim and pointless. Things like toothaches. <br /><br />I didn’t study philosophy as an undergrad, so this textbook passage may have been my first time face to face with the philosophical idea that emotions could be objectively appropriate or inappropriate to a situation. It’s an idea that struck me as bizarre, and, to some extent, still strikes me as bizarre. If being a well-functioning person means being sad when bad things happen and happy when good ones do — well, that makes me feel like a bit like an alien.<br /><br />I mean, of course I want good things and conversely, but for most of everyday life I am much more likely to be influenced by a mood than a thing in the world to which there is an appropriate response. My moods are highly influenced by things like exercise and fresh air and the right mix of people-time and alone-time — things that seem ambient and animalistic and not rationally assessable as causes. <br /><br />For some emotions like fear, I suppose I can see it: if you are afraid of a shark attack while walking around downtown, I guess you could say the fear is misplaced and inappropriate to a situation. But I feel like when you try to make a theory out it, things get weird. <br /><br />For example, speaking of philosophers who believe that emotions are a form of cognitive judgments, the <i>Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</i> <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/">says</a> “On a common interpretation of their view, my anger at someone is the judgment that I have been wronged by that person.” Then you might be correct or not about that. <br /><br />Wow, because this seems to say the emotion <b><i>is </i></b>a judgment and I would almost say it feels like the opposite: that my feelings of anger and my judgments about whether I have been wronged run on two separate tracks with occasional but obscure points of intersection. Often, I’m not clear whether I feel anger, irritation, hurt feelings or some other negative emotion, and frankly, I often don’t care. In a vast range of cases, there’s no point to doing anything. In those case, I am much more likely to pursue a strategy of emotion-dissipation through distraction. When there is something to be done, the thought process of what that would be barely feels like it engages the original emotion. <br /><br />I also don’t get how emotions could be “appropriate” in an everyday way to our global situation of climate disaster and injustice on a truly massive scale. I suppose you could say that certain emotions are inappropriate to our situation — people who know what’s up, but just don’t care, aren’t they doing something wrong? Yes — but to me that seems more like a failing than a miscalculation.<br /><br />Anyway, maybe my textbook author was thinking of a toothache in middle-class US terms — as a temporary problem you can easily address by spending some money and having some short-term pain. Obviously, I also do not want people to kill themselves over temporary, solvable problems. What a person needs in that situation is partly other people who love them and can say “don’t worry, it won’t last forever!” And even more importantly: good universal health benefits for everyone.<br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-50515732103244358752024-02-09T09:18:00.005-05:002024-02-09T09:18:58.390-05:00Duelling Metaphors Of Our Time: Optimize and Balance <p> It really bothers me that the two fundamental metaphors of how to live life right now are “optimize” and “balance.” How can this be, I ask myself, when optimizing and balancing are like opposite activities? <br /><br />“Optimize” is like finding the crucial quantity or aspect or thing and then taking it to its logical extreme. Go as far as you can; get to the max endpoint. “Balance” is anti-extreme. Please avoid the max endpoints; please find an appropriate and moderate middle ground. <br /><br />If you’re looking for advice on how to live your life and make decisions in the 21st century, you can’t get away from optimize. It’s there under every life hack, every productivity app, morsel of input on improving your health, your wealth, your time, your relationships. It’s there every time we do a cost-benefit analysis or think about the greatest good for the greatest number. <br /><br />If you’re looking for advice on how to live your life and make decisions in the 21st century, you can’t get away from balance. It crowds in from the ether when you try to think about the relationship between work and family, or how much time you should put into your various projects, or what should be your ratio of cocktails and cake now to trying to avoid cancer later.<br /><br />From my perspective, the history of philosophy is full of the dead ends of people trying to harmonize optimize and balance. The crucial theoretical move would be to find a quantity X that if you maximize it, would yield the perfect balance for all your various life concerns. <br /><br />In philosophy, the early utilitarians of the 19th century got themselves tied into knots over whether “pleasure” or “happiness” could be the name for X, the thing that when you maximize it you get the right balance. On the pleasure side, you may know about how Jeremy Bentham said “Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry” — by which he meant that a dumb game like Candy Crush is just as good as any other activity as long as the pleasure you get out of it is the same. <br /><br />To which Mill pointed out that having been raised on that principle as a child, he then had a nervous breakdown and could only be revived through the arts and sciences of music and poetry, so no. And 21st century optimizers are not using pleasure as their X: a life of just the right amount of Candy Crush — or opiates, for that matter — is not what the life hack team are preaching. <br /><br />Mill then developed his doctrine of “higher pleasures” — you should maximize happiness, but recognize that in happiness some pleasures are better than others. To which people said: that makes no sense, how can there be one metric but it’s made up of lots of little different metrics?<br /><br />I’m flying irresponsibly over a hundred plus years of debate, but my sense is that the best answer to this question involves working back from the answer: try to figure out what is best overall, then calculate the mix of things that would form X; now maximizing X is the answer to how to live your life. If you’re a utilitarian, you could call X “utility” and just divorce it from any particular sensation like pleasure. <br /><br />In economics, the typical science-y approach to the puzzle of how to find X is to say that X is satisfaction of your personal preferences, which can be deduced from your behaviour. If you chose the cocktail it must be because you preferred it, because it brought you more utility (whatever that is), so ultimately when you choose it, you’re maximizing your utility so, when you balance well, you are acting optimally.<br /><br />Even setting aside the ambiguity of “because” (is that a definition of utility or a substantive claim about human psychology?) the success of this formulation as a useful idealization does little to help us figure out what to do next on an individual level. The life pattern in which you work out your utility from your past choices then apply that to the future is the one in which you do the same thing over and over, simply because you’ve done that before. No life hacker or balance influencer is suggesting this, and it would be a dumb way to life your life. <br /><br />And all of these puzzles arise just for one person’s optimality! We haven’t even talked about the question of how what is best overall for you individually could be best overall from a community-based perspective, which is an even harder problem. <br /><br />My own take on the situation is that there is no X. There is just a made-up concept corresponding to the thing that if you were to maximize it, you’d get the best thing to do overall, with the proper balance of all your different things. <br /><br />Made-up concepts are OK in some contexts, but they’re not useful for figuring out life’s practicalities. So I think "optimize" in this sense is a scam. There’s only balance. </p><p>The problem is that the balance metaphor sounds like there is no right answer, which people find destabilizing, but which I also think is true. There’s no algorithm, there are just people muddling through and trying to figure things out.<br /><br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-81261204556385626532024-02-02T09:03:00.001-05:002024-02-02T09:05:29.317-05:00The Modern Capitalist Categorical Imperative: You Shall Rate, And You Shall Be Rated<p>The other day I took a taxi ride in which the driver complained about local politics, vented his anger about Uber, and used the phrase “snot-nosed” in a context I won’t explain further. It felt to me like the 1970s. <i>But in kind of a good way. </i><br /><br />For a while now, I have been trying to support the taxi industry. I have the same obvious reasons as everyone else: concern about the gig economy, worry that rideshare will drive out competition then monopolistically raise prices, indignation that private companies can just avoid passengers they find inconvenient for some reason. I mix it up, though, for various reasons. <br /><br />It took me a while to glom onto the fact that so many of the differences in the textural experience could be traced to the ubiquitous rideshare rating system. In modern capitalism, rating is the new categorial imperative: you shall rate, and you shall be rated. And you shall all be judged on your ratings. <br /><br />The more experience I have with Uber, the more I’ve tuned in to the implications of mutual rating. In my rides, many Uber drivers are quiet and deferential. At first I was really into it. No chit chat. Driver making sure I’m comfortable and not unnecessarily irritated. Clean car. Smells nice. What a great consumer experience!<br /><br />Over time, though, I started to get weirded out about it. People spend all day working. Constant surveillance at work sucks. It means you have to be not only competent but also constrained: hyper-efficient, or charming, or whatever. Perhaps because I have a bit of social anxiety, sitting in an Uber car, I start to wonder: are they being quiet and deferential to get a good rating? Does that suck for them? To be that way all the time? Does it suck in ways I can’t imagine because I’m not an Uber driver? <br /><br />Conversely, as time has gone one, I’ve become more and more aware of my own customer rating and how it turns a bit of awkwardness into a federal case. I follow all the usual principles of being a good capitalist citizen, but sometimes things come up. Once, an Uber driver picking me up from my university circled the ring road — all the way around— then was about to circle it again. I found myself unable to say nothing. Dude. You’re going in circles. He insisted he was following his GPS. Awkward. Did it get me down-rated? <br /><br />Another time a driver said he couldn’t pick me up on the my side of the road, because the street was a one-way street, so he couldn’t come down the other direction to pull over on the other side. The practicality of that mistake is one thing, but the illogic of it made me CRAZY. It’s a one-way street! You can pull over on either side! Reader, yes, I said something about it, and, yes, the driver thought I was wrong and annoying. I instantly regretted it. Would I get down-rated?<br /><br />The taxi experience is a surprisingly sharp contrast, because not only is there no rating, there is no boss near by. Drivers vary obviously, but for some it feels like getting paid for a ride is almost secondary to the entertainment value I’m providing. I get rants and complaints, I get unsolicited, sometimes problematic opinions, and I get intrusive questions: “Coming from Toronto, huh? Do you live there?” “Coming from the gym, are you? Do you lift weights?” “Going to BeerTown, eh? Going to get drunk?” <br /><br />For a long time it got me down. But then the rating system started to seem so much more depressing, it gave me like a gestalt switch. I started to see the unrated interaction as a mini free-range relief-zone. The driver can be a bit strange or annoying. I can be a bit strange or annoying. And as long as I get there and I give them the money, it’s all OK. <br /><br />I wouldn’t say it’s more pleasant, exactly, but it’s something. </p><p>Anyway, if you want to read about Uber versus taxis from the driver’s point of view, I highly recommend <a href="https://therideshareguy.com/my-week-as-a-taxi-driver/">this discussion</a> by an Uber driver who switched for one week to driving a taxi. Relevant part: taxi riding more enjoyable (due partly to camaraderie), but less lucrative (due partly to lower demand). Camaraderie! Not something I had even thought of before reading this piece.<br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-64783543569635308582024-01-26T09:00:00.001-05:002024-01-26T10:44:05.943-05:00The “Eerie” Feeling Of Math <p>I studied math before I studied philosophy and in my youth I was always that person who liked math. I’ve been re-engaging with math after a long hiatus and it has so great — fun, interesting, awe-inspiring. One thing I had forgotten is how math engenders so many different emotions in people: anxiety and fear about not being “good at math,” comfort and calm about being in a place with a “right answer,” curiosity and indignation about whether math is perceived to be discovered or invented. <br /><br />One of the emotions of math that gets talked about less is what the physicist Eugene Wigner calls an “eerie” feeling. In the 1950s, Wigner gave a lecture on “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences">The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Science.</a>” It’s a miracle, he says, that math works. Math concepts are developed by mathematicians according to aesthetic criteria, including “look at me, I’m so ingenious!”-based considerations. Yet these same concepts are massively useful in physics. It’s strange; it’s surprising; It’s a miracle we neither understand nor deserve. <br /><br />Wigner’s paper is either famous or infamous, depending on how you feel about his topic. In philosophy, there are whole cottage industries devoted to “is it really surprising, though?” and “maybe you only notice the successful ones?” and “no, it actually is a miracle.”<br /><br />I don’t want to talk philosophy, though, I want to talk feelings. I love the way Wigner opens his paper with the simple story of a statistician and his old classmate from school days. The statistician shows a paper on population trends to his friend, a paper full of complex and sophisticated mathematics. The friend looks at the complex symbolism and is like “wait, what”? … Then the friend points to π and says “and what is this symbol here?” “Oh,” says the statistician, “that is π” —“the ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter.” “Now you are pushing your joke too far!” says the classmate, “surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle.” <br /><br />Wigner says the story gives him an “eerie” feeling. Surely, the reaction of the classmate betrays “only plain common sense.” Like: yeah, what <i>does</i> the ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter have to do with population statistics? <br /><br />I have this eerie feeling about math all the time. I get it about the application of math in science, and I also get it about the application of math to other math. You’ll be going along learning some thing, and suddenly a concept from some completely different concept not only pops up, but turns out to be exactly the thing for situation. <br /><br />Just look at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant) ">Wikipedia page for the constant <i>e</i></a> and the bewildering array of seemingly unrelated applications: compound interest, probability theory, optimization using calculus, number theory, etc. etc. <br /><br />In connection with the eeriness of math, I only recently learned more about the emergence and significance of the complex numbers — numbers like a+b<i>i </i>where <i>i</i> is the “imaginary” square root of minus one. They appear in Cardano’s work in the sixteenth century in connection with finding the solutions to polynomial equations — equations like x^2+1=0. If you try to find two numbers that add to 10 and multiply to 40 — that is, solutions to x^2-10x+40=0 — you find that there are no such real numbers, but that 5+√–15 and 5-√–15 work just fine. <br /><br />While the square roots of negative numbers are not ordinary numbers, Cardano wasn’t uncomfortable with them: “<a href="https://nautil.us/imaginary-numbers-are-reality-238427/ ">√–9,” he wrote, “is neither +3 or –3 but is some recondite third sort of thing</a>.” <br /><br />Complex numbers were essentially thought up to solve mathematical problems, not practical or physics problems. And as Wigner himself says, if you ask a mathematician to justify their interest in complex numbers, they will point (“with some indignation”) to their many uses in “beautiful” theorems in the theory of equations and other branches of math. So it is a bit weird when you find out later on that complex analysis is one of the most directly applied parts of math there is and that imaginary numbers are everywhere in physics and other applications.<br /><br />A thing I wondered about for many years was why complex numbers were ubiquitous and other analogous ways of extending the real number structure less so. If you’re thinking abstractly, the addition of “<i>i</i>” according to certain principles is just an extension of real numbers with a new symbol according to calculation rules regarding how that symbol works with the existing numbers and relations. So — I never understood: why are we always studying that one extension of the real numbers and not some other one? Why not add multiple new symbols instead of just one? </p><p> Then a few months ago I read <i><a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/382">Numbers: A Very Short Introduction</a></i>, and I learned that “it is not possible to construct an augmented number system that contains [the complex numbers] and also retains all the normal laws of algebra.” Aha! That is a clear explanation of the specialness of the complex numbers: you can’t go bigger and still keep the rules you want to keep.<br /><br />Of course, it’s a clear mathematical explanation. It explains how the complex numbers are mathematically special. But then the complex numbers are also special in applications of math — so much so that while you can take a “pure math” course on “Complex Analysis,” there are also courses on “Applied Complex Analysis.” Does the mathematical specialness of the complex numbers somehow carry over to the scientific context? <br /><br />It is strange! For me, the deeper I go, the eerier it gets.<br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-77671514949399906142024-01-19T09:10:00.004-05:002024-01-19T09:11:20.293-05:00Yes, But What If Novel-Reading Is Also Mind-Numbing Pointless Distraction?<p>Every so often it comes up that reading — especially fiction — used to be considered the kind of mind-numbing, character-destroying, pointless distraction that we now take social media to be. But I feel like we never get to the next step: in that world view, what doesn’t count as pointless distraction? <br /><br />I ask this not in the sense of “those people of the past, so wacky!” but rather in practical advice-seeking mode. If you know me, you know that I read novels pretty regularly. I don’t consider myself a big reader — there are always people out there who are reading like a book a day or even two books a week and that is never me. But I enjoy reading and I don’t enjoy most watching so yeah, for fun I often read.<br /> <br />In my experience, if there is something else you are hoping to do instead, novel reading is incredibly distracting. The other day I broke one my most inflexible rules for myself and I dipped into novel reading in the middle of the day. I was on the subway for like ten minutes and near the end of a chapter. “What’s the harm?” I asked myself.<br /> <br />That was a crash course in why I have that rule. After experiencing the easy, frictionless, pleasure of being swept along by narrative and crafted characters, the idea of turning to my philosophy writing — which is what I was supposed to be doing for the next few hours — seemed impossible — dull, dry, and difficult. What a disaster. I spent most of that afternoon as one of the many zombies in the university library: scrolling, scrolling, scrolling — all the while trying to find my way out of my browser and back to my word processing program.<br /> <br />That reminded me of the distracting power of reading, which reminded me that in our cultural moment, novel reading is often held up as the opposite of distraction — the model of sustained attention that people are getting distracted from. Those seduced by the internet get down on themselves because they can’t read books, because they get one or two pages in and they get that fidgety feeling. <br /> <br />I have experienced this phenomenon as well. If I’ve been too much on the internet, I can’t even read, never mind write, work, or do other things. But when I get back to being able to read, instead of “yay,” I’m more like “uh, what am I doing with my life?” <br /> <br />Maybe this kind of overthinking is why doing philosophy is bad for my mental health, but I find the question seriously disturbing, Like, I’m losing myself in a novel. Shouldn’t I be spending my time doing something? Being productive? Making things happen? At least being active, instead of just lying there passively absorbing someone else’s little stories?<br /> <br />Obviously, some people have had ideas about what we should really be doing, what the meaningful activities are that are not reading. How do I know this? Well - in part I know it from novels. The novels I learned this from include Victorian novels by authors like Trollope. From these books I have learned that the anti-novel people are often the pro-Christianity people: novel reading is flaky and distracting and bad for your character because what you should really be doing is Bible study or contemplation of God.<br /> <br />I am an atheist and for that reason and many others, those answers for life’s purposes aren’t going to work for me. Still, the nagging feeling persists. Why am I rereading Jane Smiley’s <i>Moo</i> when I could be doing something with my life?</p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-51465570773415275012024-01-12T09:41:00.000-05:002024-01-12T09:41:52.481-05:00Ethical Math And Sex With Random Strangers <p>When I was a frosh in college in the 80s, a guy friend tried to talk me into having sex with him by pointing out that the benefit to him would be much greater than the cost to me. That is, he argued that even if I wasn’t attracted to him — which I wasn’t — I should agree to have sex with him just on principle, the way you’d do any other thing to be nice, kind, or generous to a friend.<br /><br />I declined to have sex with him. It’s not that a disagreed with his premises. He was a young guy, and didn’t know many people socially; I wouldn’t be surprised that he’d want to have sex, that having sex would not only be pleasurable but would also add a lot to his medium-term, overall happiness with his life. While I wasn’t attracted to him, I’ve always been a bit of a free spirit sex-wise and he was, after all, a friend, a nice person etc. etc.<br /><br />I didn’t have the philosophical sophistication to explain what was wrong with his point of view; I think I just said “that’s not how that works” — which I still think is basically the right answer. While I believe there can be good reasons to decide to have sex even if you’re not exactly feeling it in the moment, and that even altruism is not always misplaced as a sexual motive, there’s no obligation to have sex with someone just because the happiness numbers add up higher on the one side than they do on the other.<br /><br />Years later, in philosophy graduate school, I encountered the theory of ethical utilitarianism, which says that you should do that act that will bring about the most happiness or well-being overall. It’s the greatest good for the greatest number, which means you have to do the ethical math -- which action will bring about the most well-being or pleasure overall, where everyone counts the same amount? -- and do the one on top of your spreadsheet. And I started to wonder: if ethical utilitarianism were true, would I be ethically obligated to have sex with my friend — and, really, any other random stranger who would really enjoy it? <br /><br />If so, that strikes me like a bizarre conclusion. I am not a utilitarian, so I am not worried about the implications for my life. But I am curious about whether other people share my sense that if the theory entails these obligations, the theory must be wrong in some way. <br /><br />My understanding of the general relationship of utilitarianism and sexual ethics is that an important component is sexual liberty — or open-minded free choice. In the late 19th century, the British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham advocated for gay rights at a time when gay sex was illegal in Britain. In contemporary theory, utilitarians may argue that generally speaking, the most pleasure and happiness are produced when each person chooses what sexual activity they want and prefer, which aligns with many modern western views about sexual ethics. It’s your choice, so do what you want.<br /><br />As a general principle, that does seem to follow from the utilitarian calculations. But if you think the right action in specific circumstances is the specific one that brings about the most happiness, that seems to imply that there can be occasions when one person is obligated to have sex with another even when they don’t really want to — at least, assuming the suffering or pain of doing so is less than the happiness or pleasure on the other side. That wouldn’t be a violation of the consent framework, it would be saying “here is a situation when you should (are obligated to) consent.” <br /><br />Again, this conclusion doesn’t fit with my sense of sexual ethics. You <i>could</i> choose to have sex to be nice, but the pleasure calculations shouldn’t entail that you’re required to.<br /><br />A utilitarian might want to deny that the numbers could ever shake out like this. Maybe they would say that choosing to have sex when you don’t want to, out of a sense of duty, would be psychologically bad for a person, so that the benefits of doing so could never outweigh the relevant costs. Like, in the case of my friend, they may say maybe I <i>thought</i> it wouldn’t be a big deal to me to say yes despite not wanting to, but I was wrong: saying yes would lead to damage of my sexual identity or well-being. <br /><br />But that’s not how I experience my psychology. I can have sex with people even if I am not really attracted to them, and it doesn’t feel like that big of a deal. Like I said at the start, I think my friend’s premises were sound — it’s the reasoning that doesn’t work. <br /><br />In any case, I know these kinds of objections to utilitarianism are a dime-a-dozen: the theory says X, but people believe not-X. Many of those Xs have to do with values like justice, fairness, and equity. But the sex context seems to me to be differently interesting, because sexual ethics is usually understood in such a personalized way — and the utilitarian calculations are obviously anything but personal. <br /><br />When it comes to why the utilitarianism answer is the wrong answer to the sexual consent question, I still think “that’s not how that works” is roughly correct — even if people don’t agree, and even if they can’t explain, why it is correct.</p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-51411945761298659902024-01-02T10:10:00.000-05:002024-01-02T10:10:15.931-05:00Rationality Bros, Expected Value (EV) Calculations, and The Real Woo-Woo<p>There’s a certain type of person who considers it “objective rationality” if they can enter measurable quantities into a formula and just “vibes” or even “stupidity” when decisions are made using other methods. The implication is that we’re out here, doing woo-woo and getting the world into trouble, while they’re in there, heroically calculating. <br /><br />But in reality, even the most rationality-lover’s rationality theory says you should base decisions on what you want and care about. Those “measurable quantities” is where the real woo-woo is actually happening. <br /><br />My most recent encounter with magical rationality thinking was reading about Sam Bankman-Fried in Zeke Faux’s cryptomania romp <i><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711959/number-go-up-by-zeke-faux/ ">Number Go Up</a></i>. Like a lot of people, I got obsessed with SBF while he was in the news. It had never occurred to me that I would see the ins and outs of utilitarian ethical theory debated in the popular press, but right there in the middle the trial, his ex-girlfriend said “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/13/caroline-ellison-testimony-sam-bankman-fried-trial-takeaways ">he believed that the ways that people tried to justify rules like ‘don’t lie’ and ‘don’t steal’ within utilitarianism didn’t work</a>.” <br /><br />Ha, because me too! But I decided utilitarian ethical theory is wrong, while I guess SBF went more in the pro- lying and stealing direction.<br /><br />To extract more entertainment from the trial, I read <i>Number Go Up</i>. Toward the end, Faux spends some quality time with SBF and they talk about decision-making. SBF invokes the concept of “Expected Value” or “EV”. EV is like a weighted average: in a bet, it reflects the average amount you’d expect to win or lose if you played the same game over and over. SBF likes to make decisions that are EV+ — that is, the expected value is positive. <br /><br />There are contexts where this is straightforward. If you’re trying to decide whether to take a bet where you put up a dollar and 50-50 odds you lose and 50-50 odds you win three dollars, the expected value for the bet is (-1)(.5)+3(.5) = +1 dollar. On average, you’ll gain a dollar each time you play. Since this is positive, it’s a good bet. If your only goal is to maximize your dollars, you should go ahead and take it. <br /><br />But there are difficulties applying EV to life, because the V in EV — “value” — represents outcomes, and is not the same as the U in utility, which represents how desirable or good outcomes are. And it’s the U you need when you’re trying to make decisions. That’s why the standard decision-theory concept is called “<a href="https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/expected-utility-theory/ ">expected UTILITY theory</a>.” <br /><br />U and V are not the same, because how good things are is a judgment call and varies from one situation to another. Suppose you have a million dollars and someone offers you a bet with 50-50 odds where if you win, you get two million more dollars, but if you lose, you lose all you have. If the “V” is measured in money, this bet is strongly EV+: in the average weighted outcome, you are up (-1,000,000)*.5+(2,00,000)*.5= $500,000. <br /><br />But utility-wise, taking the bet could be wildly irrational. If that million is all your money, and it’s earmarked for your family’s well-being, you’d care way more about keeping it than about failing to gain more. Your personal utility of losing $1,000,000 is that it is destitution and disaster, something you’d do anything to avoid. Your utility of failing to gain another $2,000,000 is that it is too bad not to have more, but not even comparable to the badness of the difference between having your $1,000,000 and having nothing. If your U is what matters, it’s a terrible bet. <br /><br />You don’t have to take my word for it. “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_utility_hypothesis">The Expected Utility Hypothesis is that rational agents maximize utility, meaning the subjective desirability of their actions</a>.” Desirability — i. e., how much you want or care about a thing. Bernoulli <a href=" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationality-normative-utility/ ">argued in 1738</a> that different bets are rational for rich people and poor people. <br /><br />At one point, SBV tells Faux that when starting up his business, he estimated an 80 percent chance of financial failure. But the magnitude of the potential financial gain was so great, he said, that even with the smallish 20 percent chance of success, the decision overall was “EV positive.” He describes this perspective as “risk neutral,” which I guess means each dollar counts for the same amount, whether it is lost or gained. <br /><br />Faux says that to a normal person, such calculations lead to decisions that “normal people” would find “insane.” “Normal people” find these decisions make no sense because most people do not value their millionth dollar as much as their first — the utility money brings varies from person to person and depends how much you have. SBF says the calculations make sense within “effective altruism” — that is, he is considering not his own personal utility but rather what utility it would hypothetically bring if he hypothetically gave it away to a cause that would hypothetically make the world a better place proportionally to the hypothetical dollar amount. There may be something to that, depending on how you interpret all those hypotheticals. But it doesn’t mean you’re being objective or rational if you just count up the dollars and ignore why the dollars matter. <br /><br />Later, it gets weirder: SBF is quoted as saying he’d take a bet in which “51 percent you double the earth out somewhere else, forty-nine percent it all disappears.” Now instead of maximizing “dollars” you’re maximizing “earths.” Using standard decision theory, that is a rational perspective only if you have roughly as much positive feeling about having an extra earth as you do negative feelings about having no earths. How is that state of mind possible? I’m not even sure I want two earths.<br /><br />My point is that rational decision making always rests on evaluation, either of your subjective utility or, if you’re someone who believes in objective value, of your assessment of that value. Yes, you can try to quantify your evaluations, and then you can use EV (or, rather, EU) theory to hone your decision-making if you are good at that kind of quantification. But putting in numbers that correspond to the desirability of the outcomes is the hard part. Just mapping the numbers over — “two earths is twice as good as one earth” — ignores the most important pieces of information. With respect to money, to say that your millionth dollar is as important as your first requires assuming that money has some fixed inherent value and thus denying basic economic principles like the law of diminishing marginal utility. <br /><br />In a scientific approach to the world, it’s people who value things. Our valuing of them determines their worth. This is how all of contemporary economics operates. So acting like you can just count up the obvious numbers, and set aside your personal evaluations — that is magical rationality thinking and the real woo-woo. Underneath any calculation, it’s utility — desirability and goodness — that makes decisions rational or not.<br /><br />Of course, people evaluate the desirability of outcomes in different ways, which makes different decisions rational from different points of view. This is one reason social and public decision-making is so fraught and complicated and living together is hard. But we’re not going to make it easier by being more hard-headed about numbers — especially if the numbers themselves don’t make any sense.<br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-90586805379882760542022-04-13T09:02:00.000-04:002022-04-13T09:02:13.057-04:00The Fictional Evil Utilitarian N.I.C.E. And The Actual Utilitarian U. K. N.I.C.E. WTF?I was talking with my partner one morning about the vexing modern problem of putting numbers on amorphous things so you can measure the unmeasurable. And because I've been immersed in a research project on philosophical issues in Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, I brought up the example of quantification in health care resource allocation.<br /><br />I said something like "They quantify health through QALYs, which evaluate the burdensomeness of health states on a scale from 0 to 1, to prioritize potential treatments according to how many QALYs they produce per dollar. Or sometimes they use a threshold: a specific cost-per-QALY value -- say, $30,000 per QALY. Treatments producing too few QALYs per dollar won't be funded." <br /><p>My partner, being an interesting person and not a philosopher, said "Hold on, who is 'they?'"<br /><br />And I said, "Oh, well in the UK it's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_for_Health_and_Care_Excellence">N.I.C.E.</a>" The National Institute for something something. Care and Excellence. Or something." <br /><br />"Did you say "N.I.C.E"? Because N.I.C.E. is also the name of the dystopian evil utilitarian organization in C. S. Lewis's <i>That Hideous Strength</i>."<br /><br />Wait. What? Are you telling me that an actual utilitarian U. K. organization founded in the late 20th century has the same acronymic name as a fiction evil utilitarian organization in a 1945 book by a famous U.K. author? How is that possible? <br /><br />At the time we had this conversation, I had never read <i>That Hideous Strength</i>, but it had long figured in our family imaginary. For my partner and his daughter, it occupied a space in the overlap zone between "brilliant" and "problematic" -- problematic because sexist, homophobic, and shot through with imperialism. Despite their warnings, of course I had to read the book immediately.</p><p> The author, C. S. Lewis, is the British Christian fantasy writer who also produced the Narnia chronicles. So when I say that N.I.C.E. in Lewis's book is "evil," that's not an exaggerating synonym for "committing bad acts." They're literally evil. <br /><br />In the novel, N.I.C.E. -- "The National Institute of Coordinated Experiments" -- is publicly a scientific and social planning agency weaning us from sentimental attachments to usher in an era of objective social improvements. Behind the scenes, N.I.C.E. is <a href="https://infogalactic.com/info/That_Hideous_Strength" target="_blank">furtively pursuing its evil program for the exploitation of nature and the annihilation of humanity</a>. <br /><br />If you've ever encountered the arguments utilitarians use to defend their idea that the right action is the one that rationally brings about the best consequences, passages from (fictional) N.I.C.E.'s representatives will sound eerily familiar. Their aim is "the scientific reconstruction of the human race in the direction of increased efficiency." Other value judgments based on justice, beauty, or love are "essentially subjective and instinctive." Ethical beliefs turn out on inspection "to be simply an expression of emotion." <br /><br />Readers of Peter Singer's 1995 "<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10892-005-3508-y">Ethics and Intuitions</a>" may be reminded of his idea that common moral judgements conflicting with utilitarian outcomes are a "biological residue of our evolutionary history." We evolved to have "intuitions" about justice only because punishing wrongdoers was an evolutionary success. <br /><br />As Singer explains, the status of moral judgments -- especially those reflecting justice -- is significant because these judgments have long been used to discredit utilitarianism. "H. J. McCloskey, writing at a time when lynchings in the U.S. South were still a possibility, thought it a decisive objection to utilitarianism that the theory might direct a sheriff to frame an innocent man in order to prevent a white mob lynching half a dozen innocents in revenge for a rape" (Singer 343-345). That is, our judgment is that framing an innocent person is wrong, regardless of the consequences, because it is unjust. But "bringing about the best consequences" seems to entail that preventing the riot could be the right thing to do. Thus judgments based on justice seem to undermine utilitarianism.<br /><br />But Singer says not so. Unlike utilitarian judgments like "five deaths is worse than one," which is "rational," our justice-based "intuitions" should have no standing in our figuring out what is right. As with the fictional N.I.C.E., Singer urges that they reflect an "instinctive" sense of reciprocity -- and should be discarded. <br /><br />In retrospect, it's not surprising that Lewis would put into the mouths of N.I.C.E.'s representatives talking points familiar from utilitarianism. The rough idea Singer is presenting goes back at least to the British philosopher Sidgwick in the late 19th century. And it's obvious why a Christian ethics would be deeply at odds with utilitarian thinking and why Lewis would be tempted to depict utilitarianism as a manifestation of evil. <br /><br />The U.K.'s actual real life N.I.C.E. <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33568251/" target="_blank">isn't exactly utilitarian</a>, but it does use the utilitarian principles of Cost-Effectiveness Analysis to decide which treatments should be publicly funded. Proposed treatments are evaluated according to how many QALYs they are likely to produce per unit cost: decisions are thus based on bringing about aggregated good consequences. </p><p>Like utilitarianism, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/disability-care-rationing/">CEA leads to outcomes conflicting with our moral judgments</a>. The process can lead to discrimination against people with disabilities, as people with disabilities are often judged to have a lower quality of life than non-disabled people; thus interventions extending their lives may be seen as less effective. Since "a QALY is a QALY," the process is insensitive to distribution and equity, with no priority for younger people or the worse off, and no amelioration of existing health inequities. Because of aggregation, low-cost interventions that benefit many people may be more cost-effective than those bringing enormous benefits to small numbers of people: in one famous example, the state of Oregon carried out a large-scale CEA that resulted in part in the conclusion that paying for capping teeth would be more cost-effective than paying for appendectomies. <br /><br />How to respond to these problems with CEA is part of my current research project on Cost-Benefit Analysis and its offshoots, but this post isn't about that, it's about ACRONYMS. Who thought it was a good idea for an actual utilitarian U. K. organization promoting social progress and rationality to have the same name as a fictional evil utilitarian organization promoting social progress and rationality?<br /><br />Did no one on the original board of directions pipe up and say "Hey, I know we're not the evil kind of utilitarians. But don't you think it's going to look weird if we say we're N.I.C.E, for progress, science, and rationality, and that other N.I.C.E. also says it's for science, progress, and rationality -- and the other one is <b>EVIL</b>?" <br /><br />The only discussion of the acronym issue I could find on the internet was from "<a href="https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/commentary-britains-nice-think-tank-not-so-nice-cs-lewis-prophesy-comes-eer/">LifeSite</a>," describing the case of Leslie Burke, a man with degenerative motor neurone disease who sued the UK government for the right not to be denied nutrition and hydration when his illness rendered him unable to swallow or communicate. The U.K. government <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-english-patient/">appealed</a> an initial ruling in his favor, with a representative for the government explaining that N.I.C.E. guidelines combine considerations of efficacy, quality of life judgments, and economics. "If the principle that "clinicians should be able to follow NICE guidelines without being obliged to accede to patient demands" were undermined, the government argued, then "there would be considerable risk of inefficient use of NHS resources."<br /><br />Describing the principles of the fictional, evil N.I.C.E. as "a mechanistic and ultra-utilitarian, anti-life philosophy that regards human beings as merely a disposable means to an end," LifeSite says "it seems beyond a coincidental irony that a real-life, government-funded organization that bases its decisions on the same utilitarian principles, could be known by the same acronym: N.I.C.E." With this last part, I agree. It does seem beyond a coincidental irony.<br /><br />As to the broader question of the status of moral judgments or "intuitions," in his article Singer doesn't say what he thinks about framing an innocent person to prevent a riot -- whether he thinks there is some way that contrary to first appearances framing the innocent person actually doesn't produce the best consequences, or whether he thinks framing an innocent person could be the ethical right action. <br /><br />As a non-utilitarian, I can say more simply that framing an innocent person is wrong, because it's unjust, and I think that is true partly because moral judgments reflect what we care about, which can include values like justice. <br /><br />In the spirit of <a href="https://thekramerisnow.blogspot.com/2020/07/trade-offs-versus-optimization-is.html">this post</a> you may be wondering: could you modify CEA so that instead of measuring QALYs it quantifies and takes into account these other values and thus becomes a new and improved decision-making method? I am so glad you asked! That is what I am working on. It's complicated, but the short answer seems to be "no." <br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-41094138632916943082021-07-13T10:09:00.004-04:002021-07-13T10:09:42.972-04:00The Subjectivity Of Everything: Music And Math Edition <p>Recently from a combination of world-weariness, pandemic-weariness, and me-weariness, I was seized by a desire to think about something abstract, useless, inert, and intellectually challenging. "I know what I'll do," I thought. "<i>I'll buy a book about math.</i>" <br /><br />I went to a small bookstore and asked, "Do you have a math section?" No. But there among the science books I came upon <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176901/music-by-the-numbers" target="_blank"><i>Music By the Numbers</i> </a>by math historian Eli Maor. I thought it would be about music theory and the mathematical underpinnings of classical music structures -- something I vaguely remember being interested in when I read about it in <i>Gödel, Escher, Bach</i> as a teenager forty years ago. But it was more about the fundamental mechanics of western music's organization of sound. Where did all these notes come from? <br /><br />I knew that with a string, half as long means an octave higher. What I learned first is that the Pythagoreans and their followers based an entire scale on their idea of pleasing fractional intervals. The full story is <a href="http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Music/pythag.html" target="_blank">a bit complicated</a>, but taking fourths and fifths as a starting point, you can create a scale with a version of the "whole tone" interval we're familiar with (C to D, for example) based on a 9/8 ratio of a note to its predecessor (and a half-tone with ratio 256/243). <br /><br />Maor says that while this way of creating a scale is mathematically elegant, it is out of step with the pitches produced in harmonic overtones -- and thus with the fundamentals of acoustics itself. From a philosophical point of view, Maor argues that their obsession with formal beauty led Pythagorean followers into a self-circular mathematical maze: by insisting on mathematical simplicity, pleasing ratios, and no irrational numbers, they "subject[ed] the laws of nature to their ideals of beauty."<br /><br />But the more amazing moment for me came later, when I learned about tempering. As I kid, I knew about Bach's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier" target="_blank"><i>Well-Tempered Clavier</i></a>, and I used to enjoy imagining that the well-tempered clavier had replaced a sour and irritable keyboard instrument known as "the ill-tempered clavier." But in all these years, I never learned what tempering is.<br /><br />The background for tempering in the Western context happened around 1550, when a new scale was created bringing in intervals of thirds and their inversions. This <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation" target="_blank">"just-intonation" scale</a> has intervals close to the ones we'd find on a modern piano. Maor argues that as it is based on the first six members of the natural harmonic series, and has pitches corresponding to the natural harmonics of musical instruments, it is acoustically and empirically superior to the Pythagorean scale. You could say that it has formalism that is not so much mathematical but rather musical. <br /><br />However: a crucial feature of the just-intonation scale is that not all the tone ratios are the same. For example, in a C-major scale, the ratio of C to D would be 9/8 and from D to E, 10/9. <br /><br />From a musical point of view, Maor argues, this is as it should be. It's from the practical and social point of view that these differences became a problem. For instruments with keyboards and fixed holes, a just-intonation tuning in one key will have notes at slightly different pitches from those in another key. Increasingly, people wanted to play together, with multiple instruments all at once. What if a group wants to play one piece in one key and another in another? The workarounds were complicated: early harpsichords had multiple keyboards, each tuned to a different key, for pieces written in different key signatures. <br /><br />"Tempering," then, is creating a scale with even divisions, all the same. You just divide the octave into 12 equal semitones. Now all the instruments can play together, and playing in C is the same set of notes as playing in any other key. <br /><br />Math people may already see that, unlike the just-intonation scale, the ratio of a note to its predecessor in the tempered scale is based on irrational numbers -- numbers that cannot be expressed as fractions. Having even divisions requires dividing the scale into equal parts -- in this case, 12 equal half-tones -- and to be equal, each ratio between a note and its predecessor in the sale would have to be the twelfth root of 2 to 1. <br /><br />Maor: "This irrational number would have been regarded with horror by the Pythagoreans, as it cannot be written as a ratio of integers." !!!<br /><br />Leaving aside Pythagorean worries, Maor describes tempering as "an acceptable compromise" between "the dictates of musical harmony" and "the practicality of playing a piece on the keyboard." The difference between the tempered semi-tone and the just-intonation semi-tone is just barely within what human ears can discern, a difference "most musicians were willing to live with." Maor alludes to a suggestion that Bach's <i>Well-Tempered Clavier </i>was partly PR: written to convince his fellow musicians of the benefits of this sociable way of organizing everything. <br /><br />I found myself astonished by idea that the structural simplicity I associate with piano keys is the result of an "acceptable compromise" to solve practical problems of musicians playing together. <br /><br />From a personal point of view, I guess I thought that the Western division of the octave into 12 equal semitones was somehow linked to the fundamental structure of music and sound. Not that it was the only way to exploit that structure -- I've always known that non-Western music was organized differently -- but that it was one way. Now this book says not only is that not so, but it's even weirder: there is structure of music and sound, and those equal piano divisions are really, deeply, not it.<br /><br />From a philosophical point of view, the analysis provides an interesting reminder about the subjectivity of concepts like simplicity and elegance. For the Pythagoreans, these concepts translated to rationality. For the just-intonation fans, they relate to harmonics and ratios. For the temperers, it's like brute force to make it work -- hey, make 12 that are exactly the same, whether they are rational or not.<br /><br />From a mathematical point of view, it's striking to see how slippery the difference between natural numbers and other numbers can be. The nineteenth-century mathematician Leopold Kroeneker is famous for having said "God made the integers; all else is the work of man." But when you can describe the tempered scale in terms of "12 equal divisions" or "12 irrational tone ratios" -- well, things start to seem less clear. Even in math, simplicity and elegance can mean one thing in one context and another in another. <br /><br />From a sociological point of view, I found myself wondering: did books like this used to be more common, or more talked about, or something? I feel like <i>Gödel, Escher Bach </i>was a bit splash of a book, right around the time of other math books like the Gleick book <i>Chaos</i>. But now my bookstore doesn't even have a math section. Did the world change, or is it something about me that's different?<br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-26579043850628718402021-06-22T07:59:00.006-04:002021-06-22T08:08:56.958-04:00Advice Of The Pandemic, Ranked!<p>Among the by-products of the pandemic has been a tsunami of advice, especially about living your best life in lockdown. Was it any good? <br /><b><br />Advice: if you're working from home, keep your routines</b><br />Early on, the news reports were that people working from home were flailing: cleaning the kitchen when they should be working, bingeing shows when they should be eating, eating when they should be cleaning the kitchen. Was this ever true, or was it just irresistible to imagine people collectively unable to get their shit together?<br /><br />The advice was predictable and perfectly capitalistic. Keep your routines, they said. If you usually dress up and wear full make-up to work, get up in time to dress up and do your make-up, they said. If you usually commute to work, walk around the apartment for 30 minutes before you sit down at your desk. Take a virtual coffee break with your co-workers. <br /><br />I thought to myself: who would be so stupid as to add the old burdens of their old life to the new burdens of their new life? Me, I worked in my exercise clothes and took naps over lunch. Did this advice work for anyone? </p><p>Verdict: terrible.<br /><br /><b>Advice: go easy on yourself </b><br />This one is complicated because clearly, for some people, "go easy on yourself" was the perfect advice. I'm here to tell you about the rest of us. <br /><br />As for so many people, in March 2020 my job became an endless series of Zoom-style meetings, unanticipated problems, and difficult conversations. Early on, I thought "I'll go easy on myself" -- instead of trying to do things during weekends or early evenings, I'd spend the time "resting" or "hanging out." <br /><br />Three weeks of this and I was mired in despair. My always-present sense of my life drifting away and passing me by intensified; thoughts in the "what am I doing and what is the point anyway" category buzzed around my brain like a bunch of gnats. I felt the mold between the bathroom tiles mocking me. With extra free time, my irrational body self-criticism meter ramped up from the blue <a href="https://www.activistpost.com/2015/10/dhs-wants-to-bring-back-asinine-color-coded-terror-alerts.html" target="_blank">"Guarded" category into the orange "High Alert!" range</a>. <br /><br />The advice to go easy often reminds me of some advice my mother once gave me about cleaning. I was complaining that on the occasions when I was on my own and cooking, I hated having to cook *and* having to clean up, which does feel to me like an outrageous burden at the end of a long day. My mom -- whose motto in life was "If you don't want to, you don't have to" -- told me I should clean up the dishes in the morning, and that if I didn't want to wake up to a messy kitchen, I should just "put the dishes in the oven" after dinner. I'm sorry, but dirty dishes in the oven? What kind of a bizarre suggestion is this? <br /><br />Anyway, to stay sane in the pandemic, I switched into "mental discipline" mode. I scrubbed the floors. I did a zillion live-stream workout, yoga, and ballet classes. I made an elaborate system of calendar alerts. I recommitted to Duolingo. <br /><br />Obviously, for some people this particular challenge didn't arise, because they were working massive hours or juggling child care or whatever, and obviously "go easy on yourself" makes total sense in that context. For other people, "go easy on yourself" was just what they needed to hear for whatever reason. It just didn't work for me. <br /><br />I feel like there's a lot of pointless social aggression out there between the "go easy" people and the "mental discipline" people. Can we please have a détente on this issue?<br /><br />Verdict: variable.<br /><b><br />Advice: create a Zoom social spot </b><br />This is the idea that if your job is virtual meetings and your social life is virtual meetings, you should do those two things in two different physical spaces in your home. <br /><br />I love this advice, because it is geared toward people with lizard brains and I am 100 percent a person with lizard brain. <br /><br />Virtual interactions give me a special kind of social anxiety. I'm not sure why, but one possibility is that when I'm with people, I'm used to relying a lot on subtle physical and facial cues in figuring out how to interact. Also, I feel like in a room with people, I enjoy the small pauses and silences -- I've always been good at being together and being quiet -- but somehow on a screen, I feel like I have to fill the air with talk, like some kind of demented TV show host. Ugh.<br /><br />Because I have lizard brain, the layers of Zoom-social-anxiety particular to work-Zoom are queued right up for me when I'm in my work spot -- the chair, the wall behind me appearing on my own screen, the light bouncing off the desk in just such a way. What a relief to take the laptop to the dinner table for the friend-Zoom!<br /><br />Verdict: the best.<br /> </p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-41744074128168332922021-04-12T09:07:00.006-04:002021-04-12T09:36:12.279-04:00Why Do I Care About The Gender Of Elena Ferrante?<p>When I first encountered the kerfuffle around the true identity of the novelist Elena Ferrante, I had two immediate and diametrically opposed reactions. First, smugness: I never concern myself with the autobiographical details of authors I love. So who cares? Second, freak out: wait, "Elena Ferrante" might not be a woman?<br /><br />Normally I use mental discipline to avoid finding out about fiction writers. If I love a novel, thinking about which parts might be based on real life leads me down a mental rabbit hole of pointless philosophical questions. "If that part is real, did it really happen like that? Or is the author changing the details to manipulate me into feeling one way or another about a thing?" Then I'm like "What do you mean, 'manipulating,' anyway"? Talk about pointless and dumb.<br /><br />However, I have also been shaken to learn certain facts about books I love, especially books representing the experience of women, especially books representing the experience of women and sexuality.<br /><br />As a young person, I fell in love with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colette">Colette</a>, the early twentieth-century French writer whose work and life challenged gender norms and all other kinds of conventions. Colette is best known now for the book that inspired the movie Gigi, but if that's all you know about Colette then you have the wrong idea -- as so often happens, the novel is darker, weirder, and more interesting. Colette is also famous for her many short stories. But the books I feel hardest for were the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudine_(book_series)" target="_blank">Claudine series</a>. <br /><br />Over the course of the four Claudine books, Claudine grows from a precocious and rambunctious fifteen-year-old into a comfortably bourgeois but also free-thinking and unconventional adult. The first book,<i> Claudine at School,</i> gives an amusing side-on look at French social life in the provinces and the complex emotions of mid-adolescent feminine life. Among other complexities, Claudine has a massive crush on her young school teacher Aimée; they have a budding sensual romance when Aimée throws her over for the head schoolmistress, mystifying Claudine and giving her minor heartbreak. Aimée's younger sister Luce develops an unreciprocated love for Claudine, who doesn't understand her own desire to hurt Luce and cause her pain.<br /><br />The way Claudine has romantic feelings for women and men and the way at fifteen she is both highly sensual and also a child both profoundly resonate with me. So I was disturbed to learn that the first version of <i>Claudine at School </i>may have been a more chaste and childlike story, and that Claudine's husband -- the writer Willy, who first told her to write up her memories and initially published the Claudine books under his own name (!), may have told her to tart them up, to liven them up with sex. I don't have sophisticated thoughts about this, but the idea that my favorite things were in there because some guy wanted them in there made me feel sad and weird.<br /><br />Then a similar thing happened with erotic novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_O"><i>Story of O</i></a>. That's not a book I loved (and the kind of submission/dominance thing in that book is not my kind of thing), but I always appreciated <i>Story of O </i>as a frank and explicit presentation of a certain version of positive sexuality from a woman's point of view. How many stories depict a woman being sexually adventurous and just basically enjoying it and having a great time? It's not a lot. <br /><br />So, again, I was unsettled to learn late in life that while the author is a woman, the book may have been originally written for a man. That is, the author was in a relationship with a man, and wanted to get his attention, to turn him on, and to flirt with him. Again, I don't have sophisticated thoughts about this, but I find it disappointing to think that this, too, like so many things depicting women's sexuality, was ultimately crafted to appeal to a man's taste.<br /><br />I loved Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, and I found <i>The Days of Abandonment </i>conveyed vividly what if feels like to be trapped in your life and in despair. Like <i>Claudine at School</i>, <i>The</i> <i>Lying Life of Adults</i> shows a textured experience of girlhood-womanhood adolescence. <br /><br />It's been suggested that Ferrante may be a woman, or may not be a woman, or may be a woman and a man writing together. I feel like there's some sense in which I shouldn't care: the books are the books whoever the author is, and Ferrante herself has suggested that it's misogyny and sexism that makes people want to know. <br /><br />But I also can't shake the feeling that the thoughts and feelings of people who aren't women so often affect what gets presented as the truth about women. It happens in pornography, it happens in movies, and it happens in books; given the way social gender norms work, it probably happens whenever there is an audience. While the books are the books whoever the author is, I also don't want the books by Elena Ferrante to be another example where the tastes, attitudes, and feelings of people who are not women are shaping narratives of our woman- and girl-hood experience. <br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-21768979487291287532021-02-22T08:01:00.001-05:002021-02-22T08:15:16.396-05:00What Compelled Me to Reread Dracula During Lockdown?<p>I don't know how it started, but I think it was something in the NYT crossword, something to do with Keanu Reeves. My partner said, "Keanu Reeves was in <i>Dracula</i>." Wait, what? From the miracle of modern self-surveillance, I know that I looked it up and learned that Keanu Reeves did not play Dracula (thank god) but rather Jonathan Harker, the lawyer. Whether Gary Oldman is any less WTF as Dracula I leave as an exercise to the reader.<br /><br />I have a long history with <i>Dracula</i>, a book that obsessed my father when I was a kid. My father was the kind of guy where a lot of things were like 80 percent jokes and 20 percent serious and others were 20 percent jokes and 80 percent serious and it was always a little murky, probably even in his own mind, where we stood on things. After his annual rereading, my father would sleep with garlic under his pillow out of fear. You might think that's the 80 percent joke, but this was a man whose nightmares tended to actual devils actually chasing him, so I'm not so sure.<br /><br />Later, I had the widely shared adolescent girl experience of being "into" vampires, whatever that means. I watched the movie <i>The Hunger</i> over and over, and read a lot of Anne Rice. My first reading of <i>Dracula</i>, around that time, I had a vivid sense of the erotic in the vampires' ways -- you may not remember this, but these are literally described as "voluptuous" in the book. Poor Jonathan Harker, on meeting the women in the castle who want to drink his blood, describes their voluptuousness as "both thrilling and repulsive." I remembered the book as basically anti-vampire, but not in any particular way.<br /><br />On this rereading, by contrast, I felt the full weight of the Christian anti-sex moralizing. As Lucy's appearance begins to shift toward the vampiric zone, her friends are disgusted by the new sensuality of her face; after they destroy her body to free her from Dracula's spell, they're thrilled to see her previous sweet, pure expression and physiognomy return. A "diabolical sweetness" allows vampires to express love and desire to seduce new recruits. I guess I'm as against killing people and sucking their blood as anyone else, but this framing struck me as depressing and dumb.<br /><br />Rereading <i>Dracula</i> during lockdown, I couldn't help but notice that it's partly a travel book. The best part of the story is when Jonathan Harker first goes to Transylvania, ostensibly to help the Count with some clerical matters, and slowly gets caught up in Dracula's web. There are trains, and ships, and transfers to carriages, and rides on horses. I was like, "Oh yeah -- <i>travel</i>!" Of course, so much of that late nineteenth-century mode, of going to truly unknown places and being completely cut off from anything familiar, is totally lost to us now. These days, Jonathan Harker could read on Yelp, "Castle looks interesting but they will kill you and drink your blood. One star."<br /><br />The most melancholy aspect of my reading experience was the way that it was stupidly mediated by all the ridiculous parodies, take-offs, and remakes of the Dracula story that I've encountered in my time. Chief among these was the 1979 film <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_at_First_Bite" target="_blank">Love at First Bite</a>, which as a kid I saw on TV multiple times and found hilarious and awesome. How could I not love a vampire movie that featured the classic disco song "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_the_Nightlife" target="_blank">I Love the Nightlife</a>"? There's also Young Frankenstein, which takes place at a castle in Transylvania for who knows what reasons. Memories of those films made me see Renfield as an annoying twerp, the horses and wolves under Dracula's command as side-shows, and even the Count himself in the light of a ridiculous show-boater. <br /><br />Overall, the whole thing was a sadder and less fun affair than I'd hoped it would be, though whether that's because I'm old, or because of lockdown, or because the book isn't really that good is totally unclear. <br /></p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-70233408071366973872020-10-15T09:19:00.003-04:002020-10-15T09:19:57.006-04:00Enraged by Irritations: Human Nature Or Aristocratic Problem? <p>I don't know if you've read <i>The Leopard </i>-- the 1958 book by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that tells a story of social change and the decline of the nobility in 19th-century Sicily through the narrative of the Salina family and its patriarch Don Fabrizio. <br /><br />I love <i>The Leopard</i>. I love the sensuality of the narrative and of Don Fabrizio himself. I love the way Don Fabrizio admires and supports his nephew Tancredi, even though Tancredi represents the decline of the Salina's social class. I love the way that Don Fabrizio's real interest, and true comfort, lies in astronomy and mathematics.<br /><br />At one point in the story, Father Pirrone - a priest who lives with the Salina family -- is asked to reflect on what the aristocrats think about then coming shifts in social equality. And he tries to answer, he gets caught up in a long and rambling response because he doesn't know how to explain how the nobility see the world and how different it is. <br /><br />In trying to express the incomprehensibility what the nobility care about and what they don't, he says "I've seen Don Fabrizio get quite testy, wise and serious though he is, because of a badly ironed collar to his shirt; and I know for certain that the Prince of Làscari didn't sleep for a whole night from rage because he was wrongly placed at one of the Viceroy's dinners." <br /><br />Encountering that passage always gives me a shock of recognition in an uncomfortable way. Because I, too, am frequently thrown by small irritations. I went through a phase where if I was chopping vegetables and a small piece of something would fall on the floor, I would flip out, feel the world was against me. The problem of price stickers leaving sticky residue on elegant objects sends me into a tailspin. Sometimes I get dressed to go out, and realize my shoes won't work with the weather, and realize my outfit won't work with different shoes, and I get a complete feeling of despair come over me. Yesterday morning, my clothes hangers got tangled up and I was like OK, that's it, we're done. <br /><br />I don't think I'm alone. I've seen friends in a rage because of coffee spilled on a shirt, or a glass dropped on the floor. <br /><br />I used to buy into the orthodoxy of "underlying mood": that this kind of thing happens because there is an undercurrent of stress and anxiety so intense that the seeming OKness of the surface is a superficial layer, a paint job over roiling chaos. Sometimes that's true. You can always describe it that way if you want to. But often it doesn't feel that way to me. To me, it feels more like a plunge into the essential pointlessness and harrassingness of human existence, a plunge caused by the irritation itself, not requiring unusual life stress as a background condition.<br /><br />At first, I was inclined to draw the conclusion that Father Pirrone's association of this experience with aristocracy was questionable. I'm not an aristocrat, and neither are my friends. But then I started wondering if maybe just being middle-class and white in North America was a kind of experience of aristocracy -- I mean, that the relevant background needs and social comforts are met at such a high general high level that our idea of what is a "problem" would be more similar to that of the Salina family than to the non-aristocrats of 19th century Sicily.<br /><br />But then -- "on the third hand," as my mother liked to say -- I got to thinking, maybe Father Pirrone is wrong about it after all -- because what does Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa know about it? He was the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Tomasi_di_Lampedusa" target="_blank">last Prince of Lampedusa</a> and owner of a hereditary agricultural estate. He has no special insights into whether being enraged by irritations is a special aristocrat thing or more a general human thing.<br /><br />I used to have a lot less money than I do now, and for a time I was in difficult circumstances. I've been trying to remember whether I was just enraged by small irritations then as I am now. But I can't quite sort it out. In my mind's eye of that time, I'm just smoking a lot of cigarettes. I do remember that when I worked as a waitress, one of my tasks was to break cold feta cheese into crumbled feta cheese with my hands, and I hated the feeling so badly, I swore I'd never do that by choice. To this day, I use a knife to chop feta into little cubes. <br /><br />So: enraged by irritations: human nature or aristocratic problem? I'm really not sure. Or -- maybe it's just me?</p>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-55469273103376317882020-07-27T08:50:00.001-04:002020-07-27T08:50:45.063-04:00Trade-Offs Versus Optimization: Is Everything An Optimization Problem?In my work on ethics, I'm what I think of as a "trade-off" person rather than an "optimize" person. In the informal sense, this means that I see conflicting and competing considerations and values all around, and I think the ethical task is often to figure out how to prioritize among various considerations, instead of thinking that the ethical task is to figure out what is good and then bring about as much of that as possible.<br /><br />If your first thought is "Wait, how are those really different?" then you are right in lock step with what a lot of other people are thinking.<br />
<br /> To me, on the face of it they seem very different. For example: when the pandemic led to conditions where not everyone could be treated because there weren't enough resources, ventilators, and so on, one system of decision-making would be to "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/upshot/coronavirus-rationing-decisions-ethicists.html">maximize overall health by directing care toward those most likely to benefit the most from it</a>." For example, give the resources you have to the people most likely to survive, in ways that maximize the additional healthy years they will live. This is an optimizing strategy as it identifies a good -- healthy years of life to come -- and frames choices as maximizing that good. <br /><br />A problem with this optimizing strategy is that <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-04-25/triage-rules-priority-ventilators">it leads to discriminatory effects</a>. "Health years" of life is usually understood as meaning years of life without a disability, so other things being equal, a person with a disability would be less likely to be treated than a non-disabled person. Because of social injustice and oppression, Black people in the US often have worse health than white people; if they were therefore less likely to have good outcomes, they would be less prioritized for treatment. Poor people are much more likely to have underlying health conditions and thus would be less likely to be treated. <br /><br />The "trade-off" perspective, on the other hand, frames the problem as one in which there are a variety of considerations that have to be weighed and balanced. Producing good effects in the sense of future years of life might be one consideration, but fairness and justice would also be a consideration. You might decide to use subjective measures of quality of life in which having a disability does not make a life less good; you might explicitly bring-anti-racism into the picture. You have to come up with a way of proceeding that weighs multiple considerations against one another. It might be complicated, and you might have to use your judgment.<br /><br />When I have talked about these issues in classes or at conferences, defending a trade-off approach, occasionally someone will say to me: "If you frame it properly, everything is an optimization problem." I take it they mean something like this: while maximizing healthy years is one way of optimizing, it is not the only way; whatever value you think is good you can run a maximizing strategy on it. For instance, if you think future years of life, fairness, justice and equality are all important, you can create some concept like "overall goodness" that incorporates all of these. Then you can just maximize that. So there isn't really any difference; trading-off is not a separate and different kind of thing; it's more just what you're trying to maximize. <br /><br />In harmony with this idea, there is a technical result that any set of ethical judgements can be "consequentialized" -- that is, expressed as the result of an optimizing procedure. <br /><br />So if you were thinking, "Wait, how are those really different?" the answer is that in some deep conceptual sense, maybe they are not really different.<br /><br />OK. But then I think: what about the other senses -- the ones that are not the deep conceptual senses? Even if you *can* frame your approach in optimizing terms-- should you?<br /><br />I think the answer to this question is often "No." The details are tricky and probably boring for most people, but here is a short version: <br /><br />1) Both methods require moral judgment, in the sense of figuring out what is important and how important it is, but "optimizing" has a veneer of objectivity to it, like we're just number-crunching. News flash: we're never just number-crunching. Talking about "trade-offs" reminds us constantly that we're using our human judgment and our values to figure out what to do. <br /><br />2) "Trade-off" reminds you immediately that no matter what you do, you may have lost something, so that even if you get the right balance something bad happened. The language of "optimizing," however, has unsettling connotation of "everything is all for the best." If you have to prioritize one person over another, and you make a good decision, but the other person dies, do you really want to say "well, that was optimal"? In fact, <a href="https://rdcu.be/b5RTs">noticing that it wasn't optimal may prompt you to think or plan differently in the future</a> -- e. g., trying to prevent people from getting sick in the first place. <br /><br />3) "Optimization" lends itself to methodologies where the inputs are easily measurable. Yes, you can optimize for things like justice and fairness and anti-oppression, in the sense that you can come to a judgment about what to do that honors those values in the way you think best in the circumstances. But, especially given 1), once you're in the optimization frame of mind, it's natural to start thinking that you're going to be more objective, precise, and accurate if you have numbers to put in -- something like, I don't know, estimates of "healthy future years lived." When those don't reflect the values you wanted to use, you'll end up coming to the wrong answer.<br /><br />The pandemic and our responses to it are full of massively complex challenging questions: How should we balance protecting our health with the losses that come from lockdowns? How should we express our valuing of children's schooling with protecting everyone from harm? How far should we go in trying to eliminate COVID as opposed to just flattening the curve?<br /><br />These questions have no easy answers and that's one reason we're all in dismay and disagreement about them. Talk of optimizing, even if conceptually sound, makes it seem like some of us are right and some of us are stupid, and makes us want to invest in computer science. Talk of trade-offs reminds us: honoring multiple values in complex circumstances is difficult and fraught, and it's values all the way down. Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-82054253627853569212020-06-29T08:11:00.002-04:002020-06-29T08:11:15.637-04:00Anti-Racist Values And Decision-Making On Campus Like a lot of other universities around North America, my university has been talking over the last few weeks about anti-racism and what universities need to do to do better. Among other things, events included a workshop I attended last week. I've been thinking about an important point that the speaker made, which is if you say that you have anti-racist values (which universities do), then you have to put those values into practice, otherwise it's just talk. Success at putting those values into practice is manifested in practical outcomes, and can thus be seen and measured.<br /><br />This point got me to thinking about the different ways that university systems work to create the outcomes that we do, in fact, experience and see. One thing that happens a lot in universities, to one degree or another, is that decisions are driven by undergraduate enrolment statistics. Departments and faculties get resources if they attract more students and majors. Departments and faculties die if they fail to attract students and majors. Individual classes run, or don't run, based on whether they attract students. As you can imagine, this can influence big decisions, like who gets hired to do what, and vast numbers of smaller decisions, like what gets on a syllabus. <br /><br />This way of proceeding has always seemed to me a bit bizarre. Are we really going to let the decisions of a bunch of 18-22 year-olds -- and, the narrow slice of them who happen to go to university -- determine the direction of scholarly research and the ideas that a community invests in? This is nothing against young people -- it's just weird to have this tiny cross-section of society wield this enormous power over something that is quite important and complicated.<br /><br />And even from an abstract point of view, you can see how this way of proceeding might tend away from, rather than toward, teaching and research focused on anti-racism and anti-oppression. Young white people may not want to confront their place in an unjust system. Almost all young people are pressured to study practical subjects. In universities without breadth requirements, students in STEM majors may feel they don't have time in their course schedule for other things. These pressures don't come just from anxious parents, they also come from the way our world is -- hyper competitive, capitalistic, etc. etc. <br /><br />If I understand correctly, one way of framing decision-making based on enrolment goes something like this: undergraduate tuition pays the bills, so that is the income; a sensible organization of a system lines up the income and the expenses so that the one pays for the other in some linear kind of way. I've even heard of universities where they say "you eat what you kill": the idea being that self-sufficiency market-based norms coordinating input and output should undergird university decision-making.<br /><br />There is much to say about this, but what I want to focus on here is the veneer of objectivity and neutrality sometimes placed on this framing. Apportioning resources in a way that seems to line up supply with demand can seem like you are avoiding these problematic value-laden judgments. It may seem like you're taking a step back -- *<b>we</b>* aren't the ones making these decisions. It's just how things shake out when you look at the numbers. <br /><br />But all ways of making decisions are value-laden and non-neutral. If you do a cost-benefit analysis, you're making judgments about how to weigh everyone's choices and what other values -- like justice -- you're ignoring. If you base everything on consent and individual liberty, you're making judgments that privilege the status quo, and that rule out rectification of historical injustice. The metaphor of the market rests on assumptions that what your customers want and need is what should be created, and that their sense of worth should inform yours. <br /><br />As racialized people have been saying for a long time, the social structures in place that feel neutral or objective to those in the dominant social group are anything but, and often work to reinforce the injustices of the past.<br /><br />Of course universities should factor into their decision-making what students are looking for. When they do so, they pay respect to certain values, including respect for student needs and student autonomy. The point here is just that other values matter too -- values that are distinct from these, and may conflict with them. If you say you care about these other values, you have to find a way to make room for them in practical decision-making at various levels, which can mean bringing judgment calls back into the picture.Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-26673991690466221102020-06-15T07:21:00.000-04:002020-06-15T07:21:39.782-04:00Science, Judgment, And Authority In The Time Of Pandemic The Coronavirus moment is reminding us all of the problems with the way we normally do things. Some of these problems have to do with the place of science in our practices, the way we talk to one another, and why we do what we do. These are just a few items that I have found extra personally irritating. <br /><br /><b>Masks of confusion</b><br />I know a lot of people are irritated by the way that we were told not to wear masks, because they were pointless and we'd all fuck it up and wear them wrong and cause mayhem, only to learn later that wearing masks actually works. And sure, I can spare a thought for that annoyance. <br /><br />But for me, this been massively eclipsed by my feelings about the bizarre communication style about masks right now. Almost everything I read says something like "Here's what to do about masks" or "Here's where masks are mandatory" or "Here is the updated health policy on masks -- <i>without explaining the reason people are being asked to wear masks</i>.<br /><br />Every public communication about masks should include a basic explanation that the use of basic non-fancy masks works because it prevents asymptomatic infected people from spreading the disease around. People do not know whether they are asymptomatic. So if they're going to be near people, they should wear a mask. Sure, it might help you avoid infection yourself, but that is not the main point. <br /><br />There still seems to be massive basic confusion about this. I keep seeing people in comment sections saying how it's their choice how much they want to protect themselves, or that they're personally not worried about getting sick, or that only infected people should have to wear masks. Are health communicators being deliberately obscure about the collective responsibility angle, because they think people will assume it's self-interest and thus follow the rules? Are they leaving out the explanation because they think people will just follow the rule? Bad news for you, guys.<br /><br /><b>"Listen to the science"</b><br />This one is trickier, because of course, yes, I think we should base our decisions on the best scientific information that we have. But science alone tells you almost nothing about what to do in a pandemic, because everything you do is going to have complex ripple effects and you have to trade those off against one another. BCE (before Coronavirus era), I used to constantly bore people talking about how many people die every year from car crashes -- in 2016 alone, around <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate">1.35 worldwide</a> and over <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year">37,000 in the US</a>. But no one ever seriously suggests giving up driving.<br /><br />Please note that I am not saying that the virus is comparable to driving! Clearly, it is much more dangerous. The point is just that structurally, we're always making collective and personal judgments about how much risk is OK for the things we want to do. One thing that's challenging in the Coronavirus case is that different people have different risk tolerance, and yet in the nature of a pandemic, we have to act together. That is a very difficult situation, but it's also one that isn't helped by saying "listen to the science."<br /><b><br />Amateur epidemiologists around every corner</b><br />These fall into two categories: the data watchers and the microbiology obsessives. The data watchers are checking out the Johns Hopkins site to follow the numbers and see whether their preferred policy response is working and whether countries with leaders they hate are suffering. I'm guilty of this myself, relying on <a href="http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/">this cool visualization site</a> to compare stats, form hypotheses, and rationalize my existing prejudices. As <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/30/coronavirus-deaths-how-does-britain-compare-with-other-countries">this Guardian article</a> reminds us, though, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics: massive variation in how cases are counted, and when they are counted, and what counts as "dying from Coronavirus" means it will be years before we have any clear picture of what is happening. <br /><br />Then there are the people who keep up to date on things like what size of particle travels by aerosol transmission. Whatever floats your boat, I guess -- but, as with most science, a few papers you download from a preprint server is probably not enough for a non-expert to make an informed opinion.<br /><br />While these are my personal irritations, I will say one thing they have in common is that science, while crucial, is never the whole story: the world still needs judgment, communication, shared deliberation, and all those murky things you find over in the Arts and Humanities departments. So please, please don't destroy us and leave everything to the STEM people.Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-34404375024502858532020-06-08T08:09:00.004-04:002020-06-08T08:09:58.619-04:00Policing Practices, Law and Economics, And The Values Of Justice And Efficiency
<br />
In the full story of how things in American policing became so completely fucked up, I would like to read an analysis that explores connections among 1) theoretical issues in the framework known as "law and economics," 2) local legal structures that appear to use policing to generate revenue, 3) policing practices, and 4) racism.<br /><br />For those not up on these things, law and economics is a legal framework that understands laws through the lens of efficiency: good laws bring about good consequences. For example, laws related to civil wrongs could be crafted with an eye toward what would work most productively moving forward, rather than thinking about background rights and values like fairness. This framework emerged around the mid-twentieth century out of work by neo-classical economists (many at the University of Chicago) and legal theorists like the influential Richard Posner, and has a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_economics#Applications">wide range of contemporary applications</a>. <br /><br />"Positive law and economics" is about explaining and predicting laws, with the hypothesis that, other things being equal, laws that produce efficiency will be adopted. "Normative law and economics" says that such laws not only would be adopted but should be adopted -- so that existing laws can be improved by being made more efficient.<br /><br />What "efficiency" means here can be complex; it can be the maximizing efficiency of utilitarianism, in which the thing to do is the thing that brings about the best consequences overall, but more typically it is "Pareto efficiency" that is used -- a set up is Pareto efficient when there is no way to one person better off without making another person worse off. (I wrote about various forms of efficiency <a href="https://thekramerisnow.blogspot.com/2017/02/economics-policies-have-losers-and.html">here</a> and <a href="https://thekramerisnow.blogspot.com/2016/02/economic-efficiency-is-ethically.html">here</a>.) <br /><br />You might be thinking that it's odd to have a legal framework based on efficient future consequences rather than justice and fairness. I do too, though we won't have time to get into that here. If you're interested I recommend <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=388460">this excellent book review</a>. <br /><br />One can apply the theoretical approach of law and economics in a wide range of ways: even when it comes to something like "efficiency" and the "good" in "good consequences," for instance, you might be trying to promote preference-satisfaction or well-being or you might be trying to create, you know, actual money.<br /><br />This last bit brings us to 2): legal structures that appear to use policing to generate revenue. <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/article/16422/the_divide_judges_blind_to_justice">This book review</a> by the always brilliant Moe Tkacik explains the idea in vivid detail: the sanctions for crimes are set up so the accused have to pay; the state then raises money while leaders claim not to raise taxes. Judges become like tax-collectors whose subjects are in no position to complain. <br /><br />The theoretical connections can be a bit complex, but as I understand it, the reasoning goes something like: if the fine for driving without a license is X dollars and you drive without a license, you must have in some sense preferred to drive over losing X dollars; the state can set the fine in such a way that it reaps more from the fine than it lost from the crime being committed. In this way the crime is disincentivized but the interaction is kind of a win-win, and is efficient all around. <br /><br />And thus to 3: I remember after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, I kept seeing references to the ways that the over-policing of the citizens there could be traced partly to policing as a way to raise revenue. <a href="https://lpeblog.org/2018/05/23/law-political-economy-and-municipal-finance-in-keilee-fant-v-city-of-ferguson-missouri/#more-698">This post gives a great overview and explains</a>: "In its 2015 report on policing in Ferguson following the killing of Michael Brown, the Civil Rights Division of the United States Justice Department concluded: “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community.”<br /><br />And 4) now you add both individual and structural racism into the mix. Because of structural racism, Black people are much more likely to be poor and powerless than white people. The poorer and less powerful people are then over-policed and abused into becoming ATMs for the government's revenue needs. Among other things, modern algorithms for crime prediction and sentencing actually factor in past arrests so that the original injustice is perpetuated further. And, of course, individual racist police then have a framework for their abusive actions.<br /><br />I don't know how all of these interrelate -- theoretical law and economics is complicated and I don't know how its theoretical development has impacted practices of policing-as-revenue. But I hope to have shown here why I see them as conceptually interconnected and mutually supporting. <br /><br />Anyway, if you want to read something else on racialized impacts of framing laws in terms of future consequences instead of past actions, I cannot recommend enough <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/24/the-life-of-a-south-central-statistic">this searing personal essay</a> by classicist and political scientist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danielle_Allen">Danielle Allen</a> about her cousin Michael, who enters the criminal justice system as a result of minor crimes at age 15, gets derailed in life, and ends up dead -- murdered at a young age. <br /><br />From a theoretical point of view, proponents of efficiency-based reasoning sometimes cast "justice" as a kind of artificial virtue, something to be explained away, something that reflects prejudices of an evolutionary past, where punishments were needed to keep people in line and bring about good consequences. The implication is that once we see this, we can go right to the consequences and skip the justice part altogether. I don't know all the ways that 1)-4) interrelate, but I'm sure the part about skipping justice altogether must be wrong.<br /><style>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style>Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-69297867402101842802020-06-01T11:02:00.000-04:002020-06-01T11:02:01.234-04:00In Which I Venture Into The Thickets Of Data Science And Hume's Problem Of InductionOne of the things I started doing in the middle of lockdown was courses at <a href="https://www.datacamp.com/" target="_blank">Data Camp</a>. I started with Machine Learning for Everyone, then moved on to Python for Beginners. In case this isn't your universe, Python is a programming language that is often used for data science.<br /><br />I want to emphasize that I did not do this because I suddenly had "extra time" on my hands or because I was casting around for something to do. There are different lockdown experiences out there, and the "extra time" experience has not been my experience. For one thing, everything to do with my work seems to take four times as long as it did before.<br /><br />Rather, the way my emotional life works, I often have a background sadness that I keep at bay through doing things. In normal life, the bustle of activity and the feeling of accomplishment are central to that process. With lockdown, there is no "bustle of activity." So accomplishing things -- or feeling like I am accomplishing things -- has become a huge thing. So why not learn something about data science?<br /><br />The classes are excellent, with lots of examples and exercises. On encountering these, I immediately started thinking about data science and Hume's problem of induction. <br /><br />One of the first examples that my course used to illustrate machine learning concepts had to do with predicting how much money a movie would make based on input factors like star power, budget, advertising, and so on. And I was like, "Wait, what"? Is the idea supposed to be using the data of the past to predict earnings in the future? But isn't the popularity of works of art always shifting and changing? Isn't art frequently based on novel ideas? Also, I thought the popularity of films was regarded as wildly unpredictable. <br /><br />If you've studied philosophy, you won't be surprised to hear that my next thought was, "What about Hume's problem of induction"? <br /><br />If you haven't: briefly, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/" target="_blank">Hume's problem of induction</a> is that inductive reasoning -- in which we go from past cases to generalities and the future -- always rests implicitly on an assumption that the future is going to be like the past. And yet we have no logical reason to believe that the future is going to be like the past. So inductive reasoning, which is at the core of basically all empirical science, has no justification. You might try saying "Hey, but the future has always been like the past." But to use that to solve the problem would mean applying the past to the future, and so would be induction, and so would be circular. <br /><br />You can see right off the bat that these are deep waters we are getting into, and I have to warn you that this is going to be the Phil 101 level version of things because I'm not a specialist in this area, I'm just a person thinking about data science. But I do remember from teaching Phil 101 that the point with Hume isn't just about a lack of certainty. It's no help to say that while we're not sure the future will be exactly like the past, we have reason to believe it will probably be like the past. Because whatever version of "probably" you come to, that judgment relies on thinking that in the future, things will occur with the likelihood that they did in the past. In other words, we're back with the circularity problem.<br /><br />Anyway, I'd been wondering vaguely for a long time about social science and the problem of induction, and then I started thinking about data science and the problem of induction. In the context of social reality, Hume's problem starts to take on a practical urgency. Because when it comes to people, when is the future ever like the past? Our current moment seems designed to hammer this point home. Ha ha, you thought the future was going to be like the past? Guess again, suckers. <br /><br />So like anyone else, I then googled "data science," and "Hume" and "problem of induction." (This is where I have to admit that my usual searching via Duck Duck Go got me nowhere and so I was forced to recall to mind the superiority of Google as a search engine). <br /><br />I found<a href="https://bigdata-madesimple.com/the-metaphysics-of-big-data-the-problem-of-induction/" target="_blank"> this discussion</a>, which gives a good overview, but which ends by saying that "instead of strictly rejecting or accepting, we can use inductive reasoning in a probable manner." But I didn't understand this, as I thought the problem applied to probabilistic reasoning as described above. <br /><br />I also found <a href="https://www.explainablestartup.com/2018/05/one-problem-to-explain-why-ai-works.html" target="_blank">this piece</a>, which covers a lot of interesting territory but which concludes that AI works because "the problem of induction can be managed," which again, I didn't understand. <br /><br />So then I was like, Do I not know what is going on? So I went to the <i>Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</i> <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/" target="_blank">entry</a> on the Problem of Induction. Yes, there are attempts to get around the problem of induction via "<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#ArguForProbConc" target="_blank">Arguing for a Probable Conclusion</a>." Not surprisingly, the matter turns out to be very complicated, though I note that each subsection seems to end with the author of the article basically saying "this is why that doesn't really work."<br /><br />Noticing that the entry points the reader also to "<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/statistics/" target="_blank">Philosophy of Statistics,</a>" I went there, and was fascinated to see in the first section: "Arguably, much of the philosophy of statistics is about coping with this challenge [of the problem of induction], by providing a foundation of the procedures that statistics offers, or else by reinterpreting what statistics delivers so as to evade the challenge... It is debatable that philosophers of statistics are ultimately concerned with the delicate, even ethereal issue of the justification of induction. In fact, many philosophers and scientists accept the fallibility of statistics, and find it more important that statistical methods are understood and applied correctly." <br /><br />So at this point, I guess figuring out what I think about data science and the problem of induction will require some intense intellectual effort. I think it will be worth it though. The most interesting <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/a-philosophical-quandary-for-inductive-learning-a4ffbd63c3d2" target="_blank">item</a> I found in my searching argues that the real challenge that the problem of induction poses for data science is that people "<a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/a-philosophical-quandary-for-inductive-learning-a4ffbd63c3d2" target="_blank">change and grow morally and socially in non-transitive, non-linear ways</a>." <br /><br />I agree, and I would add that social institutions and practices also change in complicated ways. We now get into the debate over whether there are simple and uniform laws that lie beneath what looks like social chaos, or whether people and their doings create novelty in ways that are inherently impossible to pin down. You may not be surprised to hear I tend toward the latter view, not because I think free will lies outside the laws of the universe, but more because the creativity and complexity of humans isn't susceptible to that kind of generalizing thinking.<br /><br />The topic is complex. But on my side can I present the wild success of Parasite, surely a film whose budget and star power would never have led to predictions for its success? Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-6849132314400985152020-05-25T07:54:00.000-04:002020-05-25T07:54:12.694-04:00Guest Post: The Ulysses S. Grant Of Lockdown <i>This guest post is by my former co-blogger at <a href="http://commonwealthandcommonwealth.blogspot.ca/">Commonwealth and Commonwealth</a>, <a href="https://felixkent.org/">Felix Kent.</a></i><br />
<br />
The first time I ever made waffles was in the beginning of what
California calls shelter-in-place. It was the very beginning and my work
hadn't yet figured out how we could telework, so I was officially off
the hook, although I couldn’t stop checking email and trying to return
voicemails, normally tasks that I avoid. But also I was staying up as
late as I wanted and one mid-morning still in my pajamas and with that
weird milky morning smell still around me I for the first time used the
waffle attachment for the Cuisinart griddle I bought my husband for his
birthday a few years ago. I made the batter at Martha Stewart's
direction in a big white porcelain bowl. At first the waffles didn’t
cook at all, but then I figured out the knobs were improperly
calibrated, and I deduced the right temperature, and the waffles rose
into fluffy piles, and they were good with blackberry jam, at least as
good as an Eggo.<br />
<br />
The whole thing had that feeling I
only normally get when I go to my mother's house for Christmas, which I
haven't done in years and years, a kind of relinquishment of moving
forward. It was great, I loved it. I took more baths than I took
showers. Once a week I had to go into the office and the lack of cars on
the road would make me cry, would remind me that people were dying, but
then I would come home and I would read in a way that it felt like I
hadn’t read since I was a kid on summer vacation, a total abandon, a
loss of self. It was so messed up. Last summer something went wrong in
my back and for months and months the nerve that goes down my right leg
had been shrieking in pain anytime I stood up and I had been kind of
desperate to be at home and then all of a sudden the world closed down
and I was home all the time and I loved it.<br />
<br />
I had this
English teacher in junior high who was one of those well-known great
teachers except that I hated her and I don’t think she liked me very
much, but at one point in the class she asked us how to treat other
people well and I, believing myself both smart and good, raised my hand
and said that we should think about what we would want in their
situation and she whirled around and looked at me and said, no, people
are different from each other. And no other teacher that I’ve had has
ever told me anything as useful as that. I joked a lot during the
beginning of the pandemic about how this was my
Winston-Churchill-in-World-War-II moment, my
Ulysses-S.-Grant-plucked-from-his-hardware-store. I was made for this
historical moment. I like staying at home; I like not seeing people. A
decade ago I flew all the way across country to a friend’s wedding and
the night before the wedding this group of friends I hadn’t seen in
years -- some of my closest friends -- tried to lure me out of my hotel
room until finally the one of them that was closest to me said, are you
kidding? The hotel room is her favorite thing. And he was right and I
went to sleep and I felt a little bad about it but not really.<br />
<br />
It
was a cozy apocalypse; my bedsheets were clean and I wore my
comfortable stretchy clothes around the house and the CalTrans signs on
the freeway told me not to go anywhere and mostly I didn't. And I didn’t
know an apocalypse could be cozy in that way, but the other thing I
didn’t know, even though I should have known, even though that terrible
John Cusack movie tried to tell me, is that the apocalypse would be
nicer to people with more money.<br />
<br />
The apocalypse was
cozy for me. Because I had a job where I didn’t have to go in and
because I had a house that is comfortable and because I had a car and
because I was still getting paid. This was not the human condition; this
was my condition. It was messed up. The internet in my home was
super-fast; I bought expensive maple syrup to put on the waffles.
Probably I was doing the most useful thing I could do at that particular
moment. I could have been just as characterologically well-equipped to
stay home and if I were poorer my historical moment for greatness would
have passed me by. It wouldn’t have been less unfair if I had hated
sheltering in place, but maybe it would have been better in another way.
I don't know.<br />
Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-8419201761081395622020-05-18T11:33:00.000-04:002020-05-19T09:16:08.764-04:00In Which My Colleague And I Read Classic Pandemic LiteratureWhen the lockdown started, my colleague <a href="https://uwaterloo.ca/philosophy/people-profiles/doreen-fraser" target="_blank">Doreen Fraser</a> and I were both
seized by the same impulse: to read classic historical pandemic
literature. <br />
<br />
Doreen, seeking a sense of historical perspective that is absent from panicked news stories, picked up Daniel Defoe’s <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Journal_of_the_Plague_Year" target="_blank">A Journal of the Plague Year</a></i>.
Defoe's book was written in 1721 when the plague was spreading across
Europe, but describes the earlier 1665 outbreak. Defoe was only five
years old when that happened; he wrote the Journal as fiction intended
to be historically accurate -- and written as a warning and practical
guide to preparations for Londoners. <br />
<br />
For myself, I'd happened to read a think-piece that mentioned Alessandro Manzoni's novel <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Betrothed_%28Manzoni_novel%29" target="_blank">The Betrothed</a></i>, a 19th-century classic of Italian literature that takes place in the early 1600s as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1629%E2%80%931631_Italian_plague" target="_blank">Great Plague of Milan</a> plague swept through the Lombardy region. I had read <i>The Betrothed </i>years
ago, and while I had remembered that the plot involved a man and a
woman who want to marry and encounter endless obstacles, I had
forgotten about the plague. Like Defoe, Manzoni drew on primary sources
for accuracy; he also isn't shy about inserting his opinions about the
massive failures of information and planning that made things so much
worse than they had to be -- and resulted in the death of 25% of the
population. <br />
<br />
Doreen and I were struck by commonalities of
practical advice, fascinated by other parallels, and amused by peculiar
philosophical takes. So we wrote this piece together.<br />
<b><br />Commonalities of practical advice: </b><br />
<br />
While
these events took place well before the development of the germ theory of
disease, everyone knew that people in proximity spread the plague.
Doreen says that we learn from Defoe that the best thing to do to
preserve your family from the distemper was to lay in as many provisions
as you could and lock yourself up in your abode. Defoe warns his
readers that the "necessity of going out of our houses to buy provisions
was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city, for the people
catched the distemper on these occasions one of another, and even the
provisions themselves were often tainted."<br />
<br />
In London,
self-isolation was initially practiced by merchants from the
Netherlands, who had experienced the plague there the previous year.
Defoe reports that more than ten thousand people shut themselves up in
their ships on the Thames. He describes (presumably based on his uncle's
journals) how he himself bought two sacks of meal for baking bread and
"laid in a quantity of salt butter and Cheshire cheese." And crucially:
"I bought malt and brewed as much beer as all the casks I had would
hold, and which seemed enough to serve my house for five or six weeks."
No flesh-meat, "for the plague raged so violently among the butchers and
slaughterhouses on the other side of our street … that it was not
advisable so much as to go over the street among them." (Which has an
<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/conestoga-meats-75-confirmed-cases-1.5571525" target="_blank">echo in the current pandemic</a>.)<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0vwJ2HqPGkcg568frwxwiuazZ1ksDN9mImcuZ1xvn0QM1K3jTCjSJnC5HJEL15FU9truXu1s_jnLNUC9b5IR6oZZgRs-MuVLheQG8gGsM2JnjtLBOE4SqpnxF8FXFU-GtUsmm4NeSvKQ/s1600/the-plague_image-musuem-of-london.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="577" data-original-width="996" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0vwJ2HqPGkcg568frwxwiuazZ1ksDN9mImcuZ1xvn0QM1K3jTCjSJnC5HJEL15FU9truXu1s_jnLNUC9b5IR6oZZgRs-MuVLheQG8gGsM2JnjtLBOE4SqpnxF8FXFU-GtUsmm4NeSvKQ/s400/the-plague_image-musuem-of-london.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Great Plague of 1665-1666 in London <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/great-plague/" target="_blank">from the National Archives</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Manzoni
also talks about the importance of shutting yourself up. Also, he talks
about how rich people went out to their country houses, travelers were
required to quarantine themselves on arrival in a new place, and plague
survivors went around acting like they had immunity passports. As in our
own society, poorer people were much more adversely affected: they
could not afford to escape plague-ridden areas, they often had to work
and could not self-isolate, and they were seen as dirty and dangerous by
wealthier people. The inequality of horrible pandemic effects isn't a
new or unforeseen happening. <br />
<br />
On a lighter, more practical note,
while we moderns tend to think we're so clever, both books describe
17th-century food practices that would be very familiar to us. Defoe
talks about how when you bought your joint of meat from the butcher, you
would take it directly from the hooks and you would put your money
directly in the butcher's jar of vinegar. When Renzo, the hero of <i>The
Betrothed</i>, went to a bakery, "The baker signed to him not to come in,
and held out a small dish filled with water and vinegar on the blade of
shovel, telling him to drop the money in there. Then he passed the two
loaves over to Renzo one after the other, with a pair of tongs." I
thought: this is just like when I go for take-out and they have a table
set out with the food and a sign saying "no cash please."<br />
<br />
I was
also touched by many small details. Manzoni talks about how all the men
ended up with weird long hair and beards, and how friends would greet
one another from across the road to chat. When two old friends met up
after a long absence, one said to the other, "Now let's go find an open
space, out of doors, where we can talk comfortably, without any danger."
This made me feel the Lombardians of 1630 were like my old friends.
Plague people: they're just like us!<br />
<b><br />Other interesting parallels:</b><br />
<br />
Doreen
noticed that the people of London were watching the numbers as closely
as we are and that statistics were the same source of obsession and
uncertainty for citizens of 1665 as they are for us. In particular,
everyone carefully attended to the weekly bills of mortality. These
bills listed the number of burials in each parish broken down by cause
of death. This allowed Londoners to gauge which parts of the city and
suburbs were currently worst affected. Increases in the numbers
occasioned fear and sometimes "inexpressible confusion"; when the
numbers decreased people were greatly relieved. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/30/coronavirus-deaths-how-does-britain-compare-with-other-countries" target="_blank">As we are seeing right now</a>,
effective counting became challenging and maybe impossible. Defoe says
that initially, deaths due to plague were underreported by individuals
due to the stigma attached, as we also see now. However, numbers of dead
significantly higher than average indicated the presence of the plague
anyway, as we suspect today. At the height of the plague in the city, a
prodigious number of deaths were recorded in the bills, but the true
extent of the devastation was still underreported. The accounting system
broke down under the strain -- drivers of the dead-carts either died or
fled before their dead were buried, the drivers did not trouble
themselves to keep account of the numbers because they were too busy
clearing the streets, the parish statisticians died, or entire
households perished and the bodies were not found until later.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE3YN6vJrTjbJEVmqHR4H8S3JOhowEQWCfPnaIbZ3rchxRhbCECWcJZeydp3pk4zVvlE4Tojsmt4R9C3Yp1rAPyw3MBEx5YCyv0bgheOJus5hefY9xQxhv0SdZ9ErN0_9Uvbo5C4cMBPM/s1600/BillofMort_September16652_0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="581" data-original-width="750" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE3YN6vJrTjbJEVmqHR4H8S3JOhowEQWCfPnaIbZ3rchxRhbCECWcJZeydp3pk4zVvlE4Tojsmt4R9C3Yp1rAPyw3MBEx5YCyv0bgheOJus5hefY9xQxhv0SdZ9ErN0_9Uvbo5C4cMBPM/s400/BillofMort_September16652_0.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bills of mortality, from <a href="https://www.historytoday.com/great-plague-1665-case-closed" target="_blank">History Today</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFd3KsmOxDDEq9QlUhrntAfnfkN7fDKIB2r0HEx6PdhERJn8F0Rno580dc3-VspmKBMrhVRowEEEOnvHWLVAB6bto4dwzsOhFMBLQBVfZ1rphoT3bSUjmXtZeqLSpfZaBs_kQY9Z80rWU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2020-05-18+at+11.07.02+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="985" data-original-width="1460" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFd3KsmOxDDEq9QlUhrntAfnfkN7fDKIB2r0HEx6PdhERJn8F0Rno580dc3-VspmKBMrhVRowEEEOnvHWLVAB6bto4dwzsOhFMBLQBVfZ1rphoT3bSUjmXtZeqLSpfZaBs_kQY9Z80rWU/s400/Screen+Shot+2020-05-18+at+11.07.02+AM.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The modern day <a href="https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html" target="_blank">JHU</a> tracker </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
Meanwhile,
we learn from Manzoni that the citizens of Milan had the same problems that we do with plague-deniers, a desire to confer blame, and bizarre conspiracy
theories. I couldn't help but think about modern scapegoating
and 5G conspiracy theories when I read about the Lombardians' belief in
the "anointers." The belief had taken hold in Milan that the plague was
being intentionally spread by evil-doers who would spread onto surfaces
some substance that would cause the illness. <br />
<br />
While the theory
was completely false and absolutely without evidence, the desire to
blame was so strong that gangs of people would attack and kill anyone
suspected of being an anointer. Manzoni describes a case of an old man
who wiped off a church bench before kneeling on it. And then "all the
people in church (in church, I repeat!) dashed at the old man, seized
him by the hair, white as it was, and loaded him with blows and kicks.
Some pushing, some pulling, they hustled him to the door. If they spared
his life for the moment, it was only so that they could drag him in
that battered state to prison, to judgement, to the torture." Manzoni
describes his amazement that even the most educated and most skeptical
people believed in the anointers: the most they could bring themselves
to say was that their role was minimal compared to the effect of the
actual plague.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6ds9msgzEC242ZrJAHLT3G43fGb4kxJi5kr7oJrdpW-2AxhnIMcWCvMO2FG30H_H_OOanIoRYeVdo9JI7VupBsbbZwIszNfWW1VXgqfww6aDYUPDlv0SFyfFNiAh4S8LSBeKs3okzYpg/s1600/Accusing_the_anointers_in_the_great_plague_of_Milan_in_1630%253B_Wellcome_V0010581.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1210" data-original-width="1600" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6ds9msgzEC242ZrJAHLT3G43fGb4kxJi5kr7oJrdpW-2AxhnIMcWCvMO2FG30H_H_OOanIoRYeVdo9JI7VupBsbbZwIszNfWW1VXgqfww6aDYUPDlv0SFyfFNiAh4S8LSBeKs3okzYpg/s400/Accusing_the_anointers_in_the_great_plague_of_Milan_in_1630%253B_Wellcome_V0010581.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Accusing_the_anointers_in_the_great_plague_of_Milan_in_1630%3B_Wellcome_V0010581.jpg" target="_blank">Accusing the Anointers in the Great Plague of Milan</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Manzoni vividly
describes his dismay at the mistreatment of the officials who were
acting to prevent the spread of the plague. They had the best
information and actual plans to prevent the spread of disease, but because of
misinformation and misplaced blame, were seen as the source of the
problem itself. As Monzoni puts it, these people who "saw a terrible
catastrophe coming nearer and nearer, and did everything they could to
avert it; and at the same time encountered obstacles where they looked
for help, became the butt of popular indignation and were regarded as
enemies of their country -- '<i>pro patriae hostibus</i>' in the words of
Ripamonti." <br />
<b><br />Peculiar philosophical takes: </b><br />
<br />
Alongside the
belief in the anointers, Manzoni describes a deep and widespread
reluctance to believe that the plague was the plague. People wanted to
think that the illness was some other kind of illness, or that people
were exaggerating, or that it was all a big scam. Educated people saw
the cause of the sickness in a comet that appeared in 1628, together
with a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. <br />
<br />
Philosophically-minded
scholars, always eager to play their part, contributed to these efforts
by proving by syllogism that the plague could not exist. The man of
letters Don Ferrante goes about it this way: "'In the nature of things,'
he would say, 'there are only two kinds of entity -- substances and
accidents. If I prove that contagion cannot be either the one or the
other, I shall have proved that it does not exist, that it is a mirage.
And here I am to do that very thing.'" To his critics, Don Ferrante says
"I'd like to hear them deny that fatal conjunction of Saturn with
Jupiter!" Insert your own jokes about philosophy making progress or not.
<br />
<br />
<b>The end of the story: </b><br />
<br />
Overall, the ending of the <i>Journal</i>
was satisfying. (The plague ends!) But there is also a disappointing
deus ex machina. Throughout the book, Defoe is scathing in his criticism
of miraculous cures, quackery, and charlatans. He offers a sustained
defense of the plague having natural causes. (With the tremendous
effectiveness of transmission by contact and through the air, why would
God need to resort to supernatural means?) But Defoe attributes the
lifting of the plague to God’s intervention: "when the condition of the
city of London was truly calamitous, just then it pleased God, as it
were, by His immediate hand." However, it is worth noting that this view
was not universally shared. (No prize for guessing who the contrarians
were!) According to Defoe, physicians acknowledged that a natural
account of the end of the outbreak could not be given, but the
philosophers were hung up on searching for natural causes. <br />
<br />
As
for Manzoni, you won't be surprised to hear that the story has a happy
ending. Well -- obviously not for the massive number of people who died
of the plague, but definitely for betrothed themselves, who do finally
get to get married and live happily ever after. Interestingly, the chief
obstacle that sets the plot in motion is that a rich and corrupt
nobleman, Don Rodrigo, is doing everything he can to prevent the
marriage because he wants Renzo's bride Lucia for himself. So in
addition to being a plague book, <i>The Betrothed </i>is also a #metoo book,
showing again how the problems of modern life are often the same
problems of everyone. Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5499217243284937366.post-31031900336027705122020-05-11T08:01:00.000-04:002020-05-11T08:01:23.733-04:00Lockdown, The Singularity, And The Idea of Post-Humanism Back in 2010, when we were younger and more naive, a bunch of people were excited about something they called The Singularity, a time in the not-so-distant future when humanity would be replaced with ... something else. Post-humanity. A "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html" target="_blank">superior intelligence that will dominate</a>," so that life will take on a radically altered form that we cannot see and predict now.<br />
<br />
Here at TKIN, <a href="https://thekramerisnow.blogspot.com/2010/07/post-human-nature.html" target="_blank">I expressed my skepticism</a>. Sure -- if you want to make an artificial liver or bionic limbs or whatever, awesome, I love it! But that's not post-humanity. It's the human experience, just somewhat improved. Longer, more fun, less painful, whatever. Beyond the human-upgrades interpretation, the suggestions get more radical but also more vague. We're going to meld minds and machines. We're going to upload your consciousness into a computer. You'll live forever, in some unforeseen Venn diagram overlap zone between virtual and real. <br />
<br />
When I pondered this in 2010, I was like WTF, and now that we're in lockdown I feel even more like WTF. Aren't most the best pleasures of life embodied? In 2010 I listed sex, food, wine, sports, music, and dancing as things we like to do that are embodied, seemingly inaccessible to the computer-based post-human. And what's on the other side, on the post-human, singularity playlist? Math? Most people don't even like thinking about math. <br />
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I don't think I'm alone when I say that lockdown has made the importance of the embodied life even more vivid to me. We're sick of interacting through screens. We long for the touch of our family and friends. People are flocking to bake bread, grow plants, and acquire pets; the concept of "going for a walk to get some fresh air," at one time a symbol of a life lived quietly and meditatively, is now essential to the happiness of millions of people. I myself have taken care to notice the minute daily progress of leaves coming out on trees in my neighborhood. <br />
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I was mentally reviewing all the internet think-pieces I've read about what people are experiencing in lockdown, and the one disembodied activity now flourishing that I could spot was online chess. Touchingly, the New York <i>Times</i> places <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/sports/coronavirus-chess-online-tournament.html" target="_blank">this news</a> in the Sports section, where they are clearly dying for content.<br />
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Anyway, after writing that post in 2010, I expressed my doubts to some guys who were roughly in the robot-biz, and they smiled that guy-smile that comes up when a woman says something they think is stupid. It's not computer-based in that sense, they explained slowly to me. You'll still be able to do all the fun things. It's just that the whole system will be artificial, and therefore more permanent, less flawed, and better.<br />
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Fine, but as I've already said, I don't think that's post-humanity -- that's more like keeping your human self while being less susceptible to the world's problems: less vulnerable to injury, less in need of food and medical care, less dependent on others for your well-being. Our desires for life to be less difficult, less painful, less scary and less mortal are very human, and like the embodied pleasures, they have been intensified by the lockdown and the pandemic itself -- as we have all been reminded how vulnerable we are to illness and death, how challenging it is to care for others, and how fragile our little systems are.<br />
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Of course, in our radically unequal world, these things bear more heavily on some people than others, and awareness of our shared situation and our interdependence has been a bit of a wake-up call to some people who maybe used to imagine themselves as self-sufficient tech-oriented rich people. <br />
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I don't know what those people are dreaming of now, and whether it's still something like The Singularity or whether it's more like a walled city in New Zealand with a stockpile of ventilators. But whatever it is, I hope they'll remember it's not really post-humanism that they're hankering after. It's more like human life made less difficult and scary. And that dream is not only shared by everyone, it's also about the most human thing you could possibly have.Patricia Marinohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16087880431696831634noreply@blogger.com0