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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89247568098710543362015-07-31T19:25:53.238-07:00Rust Belt PhilosophyOffering fact-based philosophy and constructive pedantry since 2007Eli Horowitzhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-79345135852390665732015-07-31T14:20:00.002-07:002015-07-31T14:20:38.451-07:00On "the secular life," again contrasting quilts and blanketsOh, look - David Brooks has discovered concern-trolling.

"I can't avoid the conclusion that the secular writers are so eager to make the case for their creed [that] they are minimizing the struggle required to live by it. Consider the tasks a person would have to perform to live secularism well:

Secular individuals have to build their own moral philosophies. Religious people inherit creeds that have evolved over centuries. Autonomous secular people are called upon to settle on their own individual sacred convictions.

Secular individuals have to build their own communities. Religions come equipped with covenantal rituals that bind people together, sacred practices that are beyond individual choice. Secular people have to choose their own communities and come up with their own practices to make them meaningful.

Secular individuals have to build their own Sabbaths. Religious people are commanded to drop worldly concerns. Secular people have to create their own set times for when to pull back and reflect on spiritual matters.

Secular people have to fashion their own moral motivation. It's not enough to want to be a decent person. You have to be powerfully motivated to behave well. Religious people are motivated by their love for God and their fervent desire to please Him. Secularists have to come up with their own powerful drive that will compel sacrifice and service.

The point is not that secular people should become religious. You either believe in God or you don't. Neither is the point that religious people are better than secular people. That defies social science evidence and common observation. The point is that an age of mass secularization is an age in which millions of people have put unprecedented moral burdens upon themselves."
He doesn't want irreligious people to change, necessarily. He doesn't think that they're bad. He's just worried, is all. Y'know, for our sakes. And isn't it awfully thoughtful of him to point out all of these supposed "burdens" of secularism that the rest of us haven't noticed? Really, for Brooks, an outsider, to come in and define secularism for us is such a generous, caring thing to do. Still, though, as they say, it's the thought that counts, and in this case Brooks's thinking is in need of some major overhauls.

And those overhauls aren't the usual ones, either. Yes, Brooks plays up the standard horseshit about how an individual is less likely to "be a decent person" without religion; and, yes, he repeats the ludicrous idea that "individuals" have to do things on "their own" rather than learning from others, following others, or adapting something that already exists; and so on. Those errors, however, require only minor corrections. Brooks's biggest problem is his tacit assumption that even the typical religious person has a centralized source for their "moral philosophies," "creeds," "sacred convictions," "communities," "covenantal rituals," "practices" ("sacred" or otherwise), "set times for when to pull back," and "moral motivation."

It's this assumption that allows Brooks's point of view to function, as it implies that, because the typical believer has a centralized wellspring of meaning and purpose, secular people (i.e., people who lack such a thing) must find it hard to "live...well." Absent this distinction between religious life and secular life, Brooks would have no reason whatsoever to think that there must be any particular "struggle required to live" the latter. But, of course, this assumption is one that falls apart under even modest scrutiny. Take, for example, this somewhat silly but very revealing article about watching a bad baseball team.

"Mariners baseball right now is a tough sell. I get that. The season is off the rails for the 14th straight year, the buzzards are circling the general manager's office, and talk will soon turn once again to the future of the franchise rather than its inglorious present. But my phone died at Tuesday's game and it gave me time to think.

So, the point of all this is that the present exists, practically begging to be looked at. And baseball is the sporting manifestation of the challenge of mindfulness. Staying present with mediocrity allows one to see the world for what it really is. By gazing upon the paint-drying tedium of late-season Mariners baseball, we can see the illusions of modern life for what they are. By distracting ourselves with a distraction that does not distract, we can get closer to inner peace.

If you want 'good sports' or 'good art' you can always go to CenturyLink Field and watch whatever excellence Paul Allen will allow you to indulge in. But if you want a to look in the mirror and find beauty in your frailty, cross the street, buy a hot dog, and watch the Mariners."
Notwithstanding the inherent ridiculousness of being really into baseball for any reason, let alone that reason, it should be easy to observe that some people find Mariners baseball to be a source of some of the things that Brooks mentions - some, that is, but not all. And, of course, this is true not only of nonbelievers (of which, for all I know, Spike Friedman may be one) but of believers as well (likewise): Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Scientologists, Taoists, and the rest of them get up for the seventh inning stretch and sing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" just like we secular folks do, they belong to the community of (insert-team-here) fans just as much as secular fans do, and so on. (For his part, Friedman also seems to enjoy the sport for the way that it offers a "set time...to pull back and reflect.") Yet, at the absolute most, there are precious few people of any belief system who turn to baseball for their "moral philosophies" or "moral motivation."

Nor is this point limited to baseball. Think of the family as another example. Families almost always have their own rituals, and they're usually close-knit enough to count as (very small) communities, but they don't typically offer all of the things that Brooks has in mind. Even if there are some families that are run strictly and entirely by religious principle, such that the family is really more of a subsection of the religion in question rather than an independent entity, those families surely comprise only a tiny fraction of the religious families out there.* Likewise, most religious people must surely participate meaningfully in something like a nonreligious polity (by celebrating the Fourth of July, say), a nonreligious service organization, a nonreligious hobbyist community, a nonreligious business, or some such thing. Maybe there are some believers out there who really are committed through-and-through to their religion of choice - maybe. But even granting the existence of such people for the sake of argument, neither Brooks nor anyone else can sanely pretend that the hardest of hardcore believers are the norm. As Brooks himself might say, that idea "defies social science evidence and common observation."

In other words, even most religious believers marshal a plurality of support systems to help them meet the "moral burdens" that Brooks discusses. Relative to the "burdens" that Brooks lists, their lives look much more like quilts than like blankets - which, naturally, is true of secular people as well. Any square in that quilt might be more or less significant, in that it might offer more or fewer of the items on Brooks's list or in that those items might matter more or less to the individual whose quilt it is. Nevertheless, even taking into account the whole of human history, it must be extremely rare to find a fabric of a human life that more closely resembles the homogeneous uniformity of a blanket than the variegated diversity of a quilt. Any activity or community can contribute a way of living, and some can obviously offer ways of living that are relatively all-encompassing, but it must surely be extremely uncommon for any person to have only one way of life.

Seen in this way, religion is comparable to any other human pastime that you care to name (although that does not imply that those other pastimes are religions or become religions when taken seriously enough). More importantly, once it's understood that religions don't usually offer the integrated lifestyle that they appear to** - and, therefore, that blanket-like unity isn't a terribly useful or realistic standard to which to hold secular or any other people. At most, someone like Brooks might be able to say that religions help by giving people the illusion of a unified way of life,*** but even that would raise some very difficult and uncomfortable questions about the downstream effects of that illusion. At any rate, for the time being there should be no doubt that Brooks is barking up the wrong tree by suggesting that it's harder to live well without religion. To within a rounding error, all of us are already living and always have lived the kind of pieced-together life that Brooks describes as "secular." Maybe the religious among us have been lying to themselves about that fact - and, for that matter, maybe that's also true of most secular people. (It is, after all, awfully easy to choose communities, beliefs, rituals, or whatever unthinkingly, which then can produce the false impression that one hasn't really "chosen" at all.) Either way, though, the underlying fact of the matter remains the same: as an absolute minimum, almost everybody who has ever lived has lived a patchwork life of their own selection. Using the word "unprecedented" to describe that situation is, therefore, laughably ignorant at best and maliciously dishonest at worst.

*Also, families that are exclusively religious in that way tend to be creepy as fuck. Just sayin'.
**To see this same thing coming from the other direction, remember that religious people also get depressed or despondent or strung-out when the important secular parts of their quilts are damaged or destroyed.
***It'd be important to figure out why such an illusion might be helpful, if indeed it is. Consider, as a start, these two posts.Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-86641573490568681612015-07-31T06:52:00.000-07:002015-07-31T06:52:03.270-07:00Weekly webcomic: a reading from Matthew 4:20

Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-6420006332018862692015-07-30T12:59:00.001-07:002015-07-30T12:59:38.541-07:00DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNNWell, that's it, everybody. Society is coming to an end. Again.

"Listen, it's great that we're aiming to be an anti-racist society. That's very, very good! But it's bad that we are slowly forgetting how to dislike something without seeking its utter destruction."
Yep, that's right: according to Mollie Hemingway, things are going downhill fast. Pretty soon we'll all be hunting down the members of Nickleback for their scalps and torching Subway franchises* like some kind of culture-only version of The Purge, so enjoy your civilized life while it lasts.

But wait - now that I stop to think about it, what the fuck is Hemingway talking about, exactly?

"Stars and Stripes is polling people on whether to rename military bases named after Confederates."
Uhh.

"Even Texas is experiencing some of the frenzy. The Texas Tribune reports, 'Momentum Builds to Remove UT Confederate Statue.'"
Uhhhhh.

"Basically it's just such a hysterical atmosphere at this point, that no one can conceive of a person who is against something but also willing to tolerate the expression of that thing. Can we be against Jeff Davis — and also against destroying art and monuments and history just because they involve Jeff Davis?

Symbols are tremendously important, and state sponsorship of symbols is very much worth fighting about. But there are ways to express disapproval of art, monuments and aspects of history without taking the approach of, say, blowing up the Buddhas, to take one recent example.

And how we manage these processes of disapproval truly is important for civil society. To quote Heinrich Heine, a man who definitely knew of what he spoke, 'Where they have burned books, they will end in burning men.'"
Well, for one thing, I had no idea that Hemingway and "Jeff" Davis were on a first-name basis. That's pretty cool. For another, though, it seems a little disingenuous to say that anybody is "destroying art and monuments and history just because they involve" the guy. A statue of Jefferson Davis certainly does "involve" him, but that verb makes the situation sound much more equivocal than it really is. Also, the last time I checked, Jefferson Davis and the Buddha aren't particularly comparable. Also also, the last time I checked, nobody was "destroying...history," as if such a thing were even possible.** Also also also, the last time I checked, "remov[ing]" was not the same as "blowing up." Also also also also, the last time I checked, books were not statues.*** And last, for the record, I have not the slightest fucking clue how it would be possible to be "against" Jefferson Davis while "also [being] willing to tolerate the expression of" Jefferson Davis. I just don't know what "the expression of" a person is, and I sincerely doubt that Hemingway knows, either.

Setting all of that aside, though, let me take a moment to illustrate Hemingway's folly by providing the more nuanced, more complex political picture of Davis that she's evidently so eager to see (but that, for mysterious reasons, she completely fails to provide herself). Ready? Here goes: Davis wanted to annex Cuba because of "the security implications of a Spanish holding lying relatively close to the coast of Florida" (and also because of slavery, but whatever). He supported such large-scale public works projects as the transcontinental railroad and the Washington aqueduct.**** As president of the Confederacy, he tried and failed to build a cabinet that would be diverse enough to reflect his commitment to states' rights. As a diplomat, commander-in-chief, political leader, and economic manager, he was evidently nothing short of abysmal. After the Civil War, he somehow managed to advocate reconciliation without admitting wrongdoing. And that's about all.

Given that picture - which, to reiterate, I've taken pains to make as devoid of Davis's racial politics as possible - what, exactly, are we at risk of missing out on? That is, even if we go well out of our way to depict Davis as a politician whose legacy has nothing to do with slavery and sustained racial oppression, that legacy is still not worth celebrating or venerating to any significant degree. Why, then, would we want to name so much shit after this guy? Why would we want to have so many statues of him? Excluding his racial politics from his legacy means reducing his legacy to something that isn't even worthy of the name. Even in our short history, we've had plenty of politicians with similarly mixed records of achievement and failure, and we certainly don't grace all of those people with the attention that we've reserved for Davis.

In truth, the only thing that makes Davis notable at all is the very thing that makes it impossible "to teach children debates and not just propaganda," as Hemingway suggests. We can have all the debates we want about military geopolitics (although we probably don't know enough to have smart debates about that, quite frankly), social engineering, populism, or whatever else, but there simply can't be any legitimate debate about his total failure to fulfill the most essential governmental function, namely, the protection of the basic human rights of everybody within that government's territory. Of course, we could still have a debate about Davis's legacy. Yet whether that debate is held openly as a matter of racial dominance or cloaked in the intentionally misleading language of "states' rights," it will not be a legitimate debate. At best, it will be a show-debate; at worst, it will be an extension of the very racist project to which Davis dedicated his life. Either way, that "debate" would be a propaganda tool of its own, which means that our only real options are to propagandize against racial dominance or to propagandize in its favor. Judging by her response to this whole situation, we can make a very accurate guess about which of those two Hemingway would prefer.

The problem, then, is not that "we are slowly forgetting how to dislike something without seeking its utter destruction." The problem is just the usual one: that white supremacists and their enablers have yet to figure out what it means to dislike racism. In the abstract, it makes some sense to counsel tolerance for some things that one might dislike. When it comes to the specific matter of the US's history of racial oppression, however, there is just no reasonable leeway for those who want "to tolerate the expression of that thing."

*Nobody likes those things, right? I mean, I feel fairly confident in assuming that nobody likes those things.
**One could, of course, rewrite history, but the only people who are doing that in this case are conservatives, soooooo...
***In particular, one typically doesn't put up a book in a conspicuous public place in order to honor that book, thereby creating a public environment in which every passerby must at least tolerate that aforesaid show of honor regardless of their own personal feelings on or connection to the subject.
****One wonders whether Hemingway would be so eager to carry forward those aspects of Davis's legacy. After all, in this very same article, she gripes about "more government control" of things like guns and - in a moment of amazing irony - Amtrak.Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-30186168942244393402015-07-30T09:49:00.001-07:002015-07-30T09:49:11.531-07:00More evidence that I'm not particularly originalFirst it was the afterlife, then it was philosophical charity, and now it's the up-your-game theory of meta-philosophy. Apparently academics call that theory "the adversary method," and apparently it's been officially critiqued at least twice, first by Janice Moulton in 1983 and then by Nicholas Dixon in 1999. And, now that I know which phrase to look for, it's actually fairly easy to find examples of people who've been doing good work on this subject. Moulton is, of course, one example:

"Moulton uses 'the adversary method' to refer to the view of philosophy in which the philosopher's task is to develop general claims, produce counterexamples to each other's general claims, and use only deductive reasoning. If this is the paradigm of philosophy rather than simply one strategy among many, then the discipline excludes many fruitful kinds of exploration and development, distorts the history of philosophy, and (because it works best in well-defined areas, even isolated arguments) greatly narrows the scope of philosophical concerns."
Eric Schliesser is another:

"First, I doubt that a 'dialogue of people disagreeing with each other' is 'precisely what makes' philosophy 'a worthwhile enterprise.' I believe it's the searching after certain ends (truth, illumination, liberation, beauty, good, etc.) and the various to-be-expected by-products it generates (wonder, joy, insight, self-doubt, critical stance, etc.) that make philosophy a worthwhile enterprise. Second, [this adversarial position relies on] an origin-myth of philosophy that is quite plausible if we focus on Platonic dialogues, but less so if we take a more expansive view of the origins of philosophy."
Note, incidentally, that this dimension of the conversation ties back into the whole Socrates-Man canon; note also how well Moulton's description of adversarial philosophy matches the private-insight style of philosophy; and, just to round things out, consider the idea that philosophical charity exists less for its own sake than as a means of facilitating the adversary method. Really, Moulton's work seems to tie a lot of things together very nicely - which, alas, makes it all the more frustrating that so few people seem to be aware of her even as so many people continue to operate in and argue in favor of the adversary model.

Adversarial competitions to concoct the greatest display of deductive prowess do have their place, and there are certain arguers or ideas whose relationships could only sensibly be defined as adversarial. (And, for the record, Moulton admits as much.) Likewise for all the other bad theories of meta-philosophy or reasoning ethics that we've encountered. It's only when these things are taken out of their proper context - that is, out of the context of morally guided truth-seeking - that we run into trouble. Unfortunately, given the truly rudimentary state of what passes for general knowledge about reasoning ethics, people tend to operate outside of that proper context more than they operate inside of it. I'm still optimistic enough to think that that'll change one day, but it certainly isn't going to help if we continue to ignore and even directly contravene the few people who have demonstrated some real reasoning-ethical knowledge.Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-6658964616327146872015-07-29T11:28:00.000-07:002015-07-29T11:28:00.212-07:00Links!Proportionality
It seems to be missing here.

"We feminists should consider our premises if we find ourselves on the same side as those who would micromanage people's private choices, if only because we have had it done so often to us. Arguments about trying 'to save people from their own objectively bad choices' – smoking, say, or drinking, or watching porn or playing GTA V – come perilously close to the Catholic Church's denunciation of people like me [i.e., queer people] as 'objectively disordered.'

I do not need laws saving me from myself, laws for my own good. Most of the time, nor do you."
And people wonder why libertarians aren't taken seriously. Here's a hint: maybe it's because they do stupid shit like comparing anti-smoking efforts to anti-gay discrimination.

Oh can we please not
Unbelievable.

"For every phenomenon there is an indefinite, if not infinite, number of both continuities and discontinuities with what came before. To assert continuity, therefore, could not possibly exclude discontinuity altogether—or vice versa. It is only to assert what truth deserves our attention in the mix of overwhelmingly trivial relationships. The only arguments that matter, therefore, are why continuities or discontinuities are important, or interesting, or both."
Let me get this straight: something can "deserve[] our attention" just by being "interesting"? That is, by being interesting but not "important"? Even in academia, where people are paid large sums of money to study and to discover truths, interesting trivialities are no less deserving of attention than important findings? Bullshit. Bullshit. There is no way that that's true. There is no cogent theory of reasoning ethics that could possibly support such an idea.

Building a Satanist statue is "playing with fire"
Rod Dreher, ladies and gentlemen.

There is such a thing as law school, right?

You don't just, like, start practicing law out of nowhere, do you?

"Michael Cohen, special counsel at The Trump Organization, defended his boss, saying, 'You're talking about the frontrunner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as a private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can't rape your spouse.'

'It is true,' Cohen added. 'You cannot rape your spouse. And there's very clear case law.'"
Or, I dunno, is a special counsel "special" because it's allowed to be someone who doesn't have the first fucking clue about the law? Or is it just that everything associated with Trump is an abomination?
Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-8713148234523365332015-07-29T09:08:00.001-07:002015-07-29T09:08:45.347-07:00The revolution will not smell like freshly-melted plasticJust about two months ago, I posted about Guy Rundle's (exceptionally optimistic) theory that 3D printing would become "radically competitive with industrial, privately controlled processes," even to the point where it would "defeat capitalist strategies to recuperate and re-enclose, because it inherently undermines the preconditions of capitalist value relations." Now, far be it from me to run away from something that will "defeat capitalist" anything, but it would be nice to have some reason to think that Rundle's medicine will actually work before we start popping his pills. So, to help assess the likely effectiveness of Rundle's prescription, I turn now to Chris Anderson's take on the subject.

"THE DESIRE TO make things with our hands is deeply rooted. But during the past century, the era of mass production, our tinkering in workshops and garages and kitchens was a solitary hobby rather than a true economic force. That is changing. The world of do-it-yourself has gone digital, and like everything else that goes digital, it's been transformed...

It's still early days—to continue the PC analogy, desktop manufacturing is about where desktop publishing was in 1984, with the Mac and first consumer laser printers—but the potential is immense.

Manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in the world. Since the first industrial revolution, the power to make things at scale has belonged to those who own the means of production, which has meant big factories, big companies, and the mass-market goods they were built for. But the same was true for mass media in the 20th century, and we've seen what the Internet and its long tail of content has done to that. Now imagine a long tail of things: physical goods created with the web's digital innovation model. That's the maker movement."
Both men are certainly right to point out the technology's relative youth. Accordingly, it would indeed be premature to judge 3D printing solely on the basis of its current capabilities and limitations. Even so, though, just look at the way that Anderson describes the wondrous 3D-printed future that allegedly awaits us: it'll be just like "mass media," he says. Because, yeah, just look at how that turned out.

On the one hand, the web has made it possible for people like me to yell angrily into a very large room populated by very few people, and hooray for that. On the other hand, though, we have in no way defeated capitalism or eliminated "the power to make things at scale" that's primarily enjoyed by "big companies." I can produce all the content that I want, but that content won't be distributed in anywhere near the same way that it will for giant organizations like CNN or Fox or ESPN or insert-your-favorite-example-here. I don't have their marketing and sales resources; I don't have their production values; I don't have their industry connections; and on and on the list goes. (Also, I would probably suffer horrendously if I had that many readers, but that's another story.) The net may have changed the way that we consume media, but it would be a terrible mistake to think that it revolutionized anything.

And, sure, there are some individuals who've made a name for themselves or who've struck it rich by blogging, but (a) they typically had to play the capitalist game to get there (either by starting off at a big company, a la Andrew Sullivan, or by blogging about capitalist bullshit, like most of these people), (b) a similar phenomenon existed before the web (see e.g. local columnists who got nationally syndicated or indie filmmakers who struck it rich), and (c) they're the exception rather than the rule. In short, then, we haven't even come close to building a media system that's "radically competitive" with capitalism. It just hasn't happened. And, what's worse, in the meantime we've witnessed the near-death of print media, a mini-crisis in employment for actual journalists, and the transformation of major news articles from things that roughly resemble reporting to things that unmistakably resemble clickbait.

So if we're supposed to compare 3D printing to things like blogger and YouTube, then we have to admit that the comparison is far from glowing. Not only have we not defeated or overthrown capitalism by any stretch, we also haven't entered a golden age of mass media. Expecting anything more from the (near) future of 3D printing is, I fear, utterly irrational and unrealistic.Eli Horowitzhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-91927296051078058552015-07-28T12:15:00.002-07:002015-07-28T12:20:05.372-07:00Irony, thy name is Carl TruemanListen, everyone, Carl Trueman is upset. He thinks that words have meanings and that those meanings should correspond to reality - which, in practice, means that he's grumpy about gender nonconformity and similar unusual acts of self-identification.

"Some white people now identify as African Americans. Somewhere out there someone who did not die on St. Helena in 1821 might nevertheless still identify as Napoleon. Is it now the case that we will not be able to talk about race or about the history of nineteenth century France without some equivalent caveat? One might translate [transgender talk] as 'the concept of being a woman is now utterly meaningless but we have decided to preserve the fiction at those points where it is politically convenient for us to do so.'"
Now, notwithstanding the fact that Trueman really has no idea what he's talking about, this made me wonder: might there be any cases that Trueman is overlooking in which the relevant language is at odds with or orthogonal to the material reality that exists outside of our heads? So I complied a partial list.

Some people say that bread and wine are "meat" and "blood."

Some people believe that "they have been given direct access to God," whatever that could even mean.

Some people believe that a single-celled organism with no brain is a "person."

Some people believe that, for example, hares are somehow inherently "unclean."

Lots and lots of people refer to the "borders" of things called "nations," despite there being no natural evidence for the existence of any such thing.

Some people evidently believe that alcohol has some connection to someone named "Satan," whoever that is.

Some people believe in...I dunno, whatever the fuck this is, I don't even want to try to explain all of that shit.

People very often do act as though other people are historical figures who've died centuries ago, even going so far as to dress as those figures and talk with affected accents and conspicuously display this entire charade in front of large crowds of observers.

Now, it's important to remember that these represent a diverse variety of examples. It would not, therefore, be correct to assume that any one of these examples is similar to any other, except insofar as they all involve the use of words and phrases to refer to something that either doesn't exist or doesn't have the characteristics implied by those words and phrases. In particular, while some of the examples on the list are relatively straightforward and others are very complex, we won't be able to say anything intelligent about any of them (or any other examples that someone might want to include on the list) until we have a good high-level understanding of the very complicated relationship between language, social construction, identity, reference frames, and truth values.

Given his almost childlike crankiness, it should be fairly clear that Trueman just doesn't have that kind of understanding. And, given his role as a pastor and "professor of historical theology and church history," it should be fairly clear that he has precious little authority to pretend to distance himself from that aforementioned complicated relationship in order to lecture us about the proper care and handling of words and concepts.
Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-83964851331851227282015-07-28T08:20:00.001-07:002015-07-28T08:20:23.388-07:00Three scarecrows for your TuesdayListed in decreasing order of stupidity, starting with the clumsiest political attack I've seen in quite some time.

"Add this one to the 'imagine if she were a Republican' files: old white lady expresses fear of young black men, political funeral details to come."
The claim here is, obviously, that someone "expresse[d] fear of young black men." But what actually happened? Not quite that:

"During a campaign speech on Thursday, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton touched on race, saying that even 'open-minded white people' are sometimes afraid of hoodie-wearing black people...

Hillary's statement raises a number of questions, first of which is: does Hillary Clinton feel a twinge of fear at the sight of a young black man in a hoodie?

Or, if you want to come at the issue from a different angle: Is she 'honest?' What about 'well-meaning?' Does Hillary Clinton view herself as being 'open-minded?' If so, her remarks seem to very clearly suggest that she may in fact feel a twinge of fear at the sight of a young black man in a hoodie."
Yeah, sorry, idiots, but you'll have to try a lot harder than that. "Some open-minded white people harbor racist fears" doesn't mean "all open-minded people harbor racist fears."

Moving slightly up the intelligence ladder, we encounter James Schall.

"Geir Asheim, at the World Bank in 1994, defined sustainability thus: 'A requirement of our generation to manage the resource base such that the average quality of life that we ensure ourselves can potentially be shared by all future generations. . . .Development is sustainable if it involves a non-decreasing quality of life.'

That is quite a definition. The key concept, besides 'requirement,' is that 'our generation' is to manage future generations. For what end? That 'future generations' will 'potentially' be able to live as the average 'we' lives today.

Let us suppose that the generation of 1800 or 1200 'responsibly' acted on the same philosophical premises. We would still be happily enjoying life as they did in 1800 or 1200 (AD or BC)."
In Schall's mind, "non-decreasing" evidently also means "non-increasing," which is rather impressive given that "decreasing" and "increasing" are opposites. So that's fun.

But now, to end on a slightly more serious note, let's look at David Graeber's aversion to bureaucracy.

"In Graeber's conception, the best path seems to be revolution: bureaucracy is impeding what technological progress we do have, or using it to extend bureaucratic dominion and uphold the interests of bureaucracy, which are explicitly not the interests of society at large. Graeber notes 'a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control' (his italics). He is right to focus on the ways in which many information technologies have been used to exert greater control over labor – e.g., some companies track their employees' locations – but he is wrong to see this control as intrinsic to information technologies. As Graeber himself points out, 'Technological change is simply not an independent variable. Technology will advance, and often in surprising and unexpected ways. But the overall direction it takes depends on social factors.' If we view bureaucracy itself as a kind of information technology, then we can understand its current problems not as inherent to all bureaucratic systems, but as the results of the social factors that have guided the development of this bureaucratic system. Graeber describes such a situation in the case of the US postal system, which a century ago was a model of human efficiency, but is now largely viewed as ineffective and wasteful, not because of its inherent failings, but as a 'result of intentional policy choices.' Intentional policy choices, of course, can be undone. Or, to put it another way: there might be hope yet for bureaucracy."
I have very little to add to Timothy Kennett's analysis. So far as I can see, Kennett is right and Graeber is wrong (which would not be the first time for him). It's important that we understand things like bureaucracies as social technologies, complete with all of the theoretical baggage that comes along with such a classification. It may be easy and popular to depict any random bureaucracy as a bumbling, self-ensnaring entity that smothers any input under an avalanche of paperwork, but that doesn't fit with reality. Whatever problems bureaucracies have, it'll be hard to find them and fix them if we insist on directing our attention instead to straw bureaucracies of our own imagination.Eli Horowitzhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-86909756474986486772015-07-27T11:19:00.004-07:002015-07-27T13:48:25.652-07:00SAAAAAAAAY IIIIIIIIITAs you may or may not have heard, another woman of color was (very probably) murdered by cops recently.

"The video of the July 10 arrest of the black American woman, Sandra Bland, who died on July 13 in a Texas jail cell, shows a testy cop confronting a driver who absolutely cannot understand why she has been pulled over for not signaling while changing lanes. She explains that he was approaching quickly from behind so she was just getting out of his way.

When Bland refuses to comply with Encinia's arbitrary order to put out her cigarette, the cop explodes into a full-blown bully, tells her he's going to pull her out of her car, tries and fails to pull her out with his hands, then brandishes his taser. At taser-point, he forces her out of the camera's field of vision."
But what really happened? How can we explain this event? And by "we," I of course mean "white liberals," because white liberals are the ones who tend to get published and white conservatives don't seem to care in the slightest. So, white liberals, what say you? Joseph Pomianowski, what's your take on the subject?

"For decades, police officers have enjoyed an unbridled right to order motorists out of their vehicles for no reason at all during routine traffic stops. The violent arrest and death of 28-year-old Sandra Bland provides just the latest example of why that rule—and the 1977 Supreme Court case that established the rule—must be revisited...

One straightforward solution would be to enact laws that require an officer to reasonably perceive a threat to his safety or the commission of a crime before ordering an occupant out of a vehicle for a minor traffic offense. At a minimum, officers could be required to provide motorists a brief explanation for the order and their intent. By passing sensible laws that preserve appropriate boundaries between police and citizens, legislators can prevent petty, noncriminal infractions from ending up like Bland's did."
Well, that certainly couldn't hurt, I suppose - although there are plenty of stories of police officers targeting people of color who were biking or walking, not to mention the stories of police officers who fabricated or exaggerated the "threat" posed by a person of color (edit to add: as if on cue...). Still, though, it would be smart to require (and train) police officers to behave calmly and peaceably whenever possible.

Which other white liberals have an idea? How about Susan Grigsby?

"What happened to Sandra Bland during her traffic stop happens all over the country every day. Did officer behavior, on the street or in the jail, have anything to do with the use of steroids? And why don't we know this? How hard would it be to test an officer who is involved in any aggression against a citizen? Or the death of anyone whom they are charged with protecting while in custody? Why are they not being tested?...

No, testing for anabolic steroids will not reveal racist assholes, nor will it change the increasingly militaristic culture that infests our law enforcement or the entitlement attitude that is so pervasive."
Y'know, as recommendations go, that's not terribly persuasive: "We don't know whether this was a problem and we do know about other problems that I'm now ignoring." Again, it probably couldn't hurt to require or at least encourage police officers not to use steroids, so it's not like this is a totally useless idea. I guess.

At this point, though, maybe we should try to find ideas that meet a higher standard than "not totally useless." Not to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything, but maybe we should be aiming to find and address an explanation that covers more, rather than fewer, of these problematic events and that has more, rather than less, evidence in its favor. That other explanation might turn out to be uncomfortable for white people and it will certainly be hard for chickenshit liberals who'd rather nibble at the dry peripheral issues, but it sure will improve things in a faster and more permanent way, and isn't that the point? Rather than relegating racism to a closing, round-out-my-argument paragraph or failing to mention it at all, maybe we can, y'know, talk about it? At the very least? Please?Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-87145881121243725442015-07-27T08:21:00.000-07:002015-07-27T08:21:29.118-07:00Transformative dialogue: go ahead, make my dayWell, here we go again.

"[A]greeing to disagree marks the arrival at some sort of bedrock beyond which our dialogue cannot continue. This has a finality: the conversation is over. I agree with the hermeneutic thinker Hans-Georg Gadamer here. There are no 'undiscussable' assumptions. In Gadamer's view, agreeing to disagree here ends the dialogue at precisely the point where what is really at issue is beginning to emerge. The assumptions revealed at this point are often deeply held beliefs that are central to our identity. Things become raw and exposed. But this is precisely why dialogue must continue. We do our interlocutor no favours by avoiding conversation because we have begun to talk about the very things that we care deeply about. At this point, Gadamer argues, to suggest that we agree to disagree 'excludes the other person in his positive function.' It is to assert that we are no longer prepared to be transformed by our interlocutor's differing view on the truth, and that we are no longer therefore prepared to learn from their difference. We should think very carefully about what might motivate a move to be the first interlocutor in a dialogue to offer, or even impose, the possibility of agreeing to disagree."

David Aldridge - no, not that David Aldridge; I like that one better - is so cute. Just look at him! He thinks he's a reasoning ethicist, which is just adorable. The good news, though, is that he evidently believes in debating at all costs, so maybe we can teach him a few things.

To start with, let's leave the abstract realm of theoretical considerations and find ourselves a nice, concrete example from the real world. Here's one that I find particularly useful, albeit in a perverse way: Donald Trump.

"Considered the ultimate wildcard, Donald Trump is complicating debate strategy for Republican presidential candidates now scrambling to prepare for their first face-to-face meeting on national television...

His supporters love him because he's willing to say what others only think. But that makes him dangerous in a debate setting, says Charlie Black, a leading GOP strategist who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns.

'Just try to ignore him,' Black said. 'The less attention you give him the better. I wouldn't even look at him.'"
Now, in fairness, Aldridge appears to be a Brit, and it's unlikely that they (or anyone else in the world) has to deal with a situation that's anywhere near the situation that the GOP (and, by tragic extension, the US at large) now finds itself in. But, seriously, what are we - what is anyone - supposed to do with Trump? Certainly it would be a surprise if Trump himself decided to agree to disagree with any person under any circumstances, so it isn't as if we can trust him to back down or leave well enough alone. The onus, then, is on us to either continue debating him or else make the conscious decision to actively ignore him, as Black suggests. Which of those options, I wonder, would Aldridge go for?

The latter would, of course, amount to an agreement to disagree, so ostensibly we can rule that out. But that implies that Aldridge would knowingly choose to debate Donald Trump until they found some way of agreeing with one another, which in turn implies that Aldridge is even capable of agreeing with Trump, which should be a frankly terrifying prospect for Aldridge. Honestly, we can talk all we want about the "positive function" of some hypothetical debate partner, but it would be sadly and dangerously naive to pretend that Trump has any functions other than negative ones. Similarly, being "prepared to be transformed by" Donald Trump's "differing view on the truth" is an idea on the order of being prepared to be transformed by e. coli's differing effect on your digestive tract: the transformation is certainly possible and is even likely if you go out of your way to make yourself vulnerable, but it's hard to see how it's a transformation that would be helpful in any way. Aldridge is an adult, so he's free to make that choice for himself if it's what he truly wants, but it would be irresponsible in the extreme for him to say that everybody else has to follow suit.

And, okay - following the analogy out a little bit further, maybe Aldridge could get away with this if his intellectual immune system were strong enough. Maybe, theoretically, he could safely interact with Trump all day long if he had some flawless system that screened out all of Trump's inanity and left behind only the few trace elements of rationality that exist in Trump's thinking (assuming, that is, that there are any such elements). Realistically, though, there's simply no way that Aldridge is that good. Nobody is that good, just as nobody is immune from all disease. So even if it's only for self-protection - and there are more good reasons, so in the end it's not only for that - our reasoning ethic has to allow people to agree to disagree. If we want to "think very carefully" about the conditions in which we allow that to occur, fine - but then let's not start off by immediately replacing the real world with a world of idealized, toy scenarios. Careful behavior is, by definition, behavior that takes proper account of the dangers, so we can't possibly behave carefully in this case if we act like the Donald Trumps of the world don't exist.
Eli Horowitzhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-38713341268199385132015-07-24T08:49:00.000-07:002015-07-24T08:49:47.242-07:00Waaaaaaaaait a minuteImagine my surprise when, towards the end of the summary of a recent Heritage Foundation report, I read the following:

"Correctly diagnosing the root causes of our social challenges is crucial. The typical liberal diagnosis of social and economic problems is that they are caused by 'the system,' and their preferred solutions hinge on more government intervention through increased spending and greater regulation. However, failing to address the true sources of a problem is likely only to exacerbate it.

Take the alleviation of poverty, for example. In the War on Poverty, rather than focusing on incentives that would address family breakdown and non-work, the government opted for spending as its primary strategy. Decades of expanding government antipoverty programs and trillions of dollars later, poverty has not declined significantly."
Not sure where the surprise came from? Allow me, in that case, to remind you of the way in which the Heritage Foundation viewed poverty a mere four years ago:

"There is a vast gap between poverty as understood by the American public and poverty as currently measured by the government. Sadly, President Barack Obama plans to make this situation worse by creating a new 'poverty' measure that deliberately severs all connection between 'poverty' and actual deprivation. This new measure will serve as a propaganda tool in Obama's endless quest to 'spread the wealth' and will eventually displace the current poverty measure.

Under the new measure, a family will be judged poor if its income falls below certain specified income thresholds or standards. There is nothing new in this, but unlike the current poverty income standards, the new income thresholds will have a built-in escalator clause. They will rise automatically in direct proportion to any rise in the living standards of the average American...

The new poverty measure will produce very odd results. For example, if the real income of every single American were to triple magically overnight, the new poverty measure would show no drop in poverty because the poverty income standards would also triple. Under the Obama system, poverty can be reduced only if the incomes of the 'poor' are rising faster than the incomes of everyone else. Another paradox of the new poverty measure is that countries such as Bangladesh and Albania will have lower poverty rates than the U.S.—even though the actual living conditions in those countries are extremely low—simply because they have narrower distribution of incomes, albeit very low incomes...

In plain English, Obama's new poverty-measure system will measure income 'inequality,' not 'poverty.' But he cannot call it an inequality index because the American voter is unwilling to support massive welfare increases, soaring deficits, and tax increases just to equalize incomes. However, if the goal of income leveling is camouflaged as a desperate struggle against poverty, malnutrition, hunger, and dire deprivation, then the political prospects improve...

Poverty as traditionally defined by the Census Bureau has little connection with poverty as understood by the average American. The new Obama poverty measure will stretch this semantic gap, artificially swelling the number of poor Americans and severing any link between the government's concept of poverty and even modest deprivation. It will make grappling with the real deprivation that does exist even more difficult."
Curious, is it not? Back then, "poverty" meant "deprivation" ("real," "actual," or "dire") and anybody who said otherwise was only "artificially swelling the number of poor Americans" through the insidious use of "a propaganda tool" that would defy "plain English" and "produce very odd results." To do things properly according to the Heritage people of the year two thousand and eleven, poverty measures had to account for "actual living conditions" and "real income" and "the living standards of the average American." Any other way of talking about the situation, they said, would "make grappling with the real deprivation that does exist even more difficult."

Now return to the present day. According to today's Heritage people, "poverty has not significantly declined" since the '60s, which is to say that it hasn't significantly declined in the past fifty years. This is a rather incredible claim for them to now make, because only four years ago it was their contention that "[t]he poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago." Given all of this, we're left with only a few possibilities. Either things in the US have really gone downhill in the past four years, such that we've regressed all the way back to where we were in the middle or beginning of the 20th century; or almost all of the gains that we've seen in the past century occurred between 1915 and 1965, such that we've improved over the century but stagnated over the half-century; or else the Heritage people are utterly dishonest sophists who will insist on whichever meaning of whichever word allows them to support their predetermined ideological policies (namely, crippling the government so as to allow for more capitalism), for example by saying at first that the government has no need to provide for "poor" people who have cool toys and then later by pointedly ignoring the cool toys in order to reach the conclusion that the government is bad at providing for "poor" people.

At this point, I would normally provide at least some token research about the relative levels of material poverty ("deprivation") and social poverty ("inequality") around 1915, 1965, and now. In this case, however, it seems safe to save myself the effort and just skip to the punchline: fuck the Heritage Foundation.Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-34719718017270091152015-07-24T08:46:00.002-07:002015-07-24T08:46:54.624-07:00Weekly webcomic: applied epistemology

Eli Horowitzhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-59282151465895503442015-07-23T12:33:00.000-07:002015-07-23T12:33:44.899-07:00I second that emotionSo apparently something or other is happening with Gawker. I think I might know what that thing is, but it actually doesn't matter all that much, because the thing itself is going to be gone and forgotten within a month whereas Gawker itself will be around for much, much longer. And, as Aaron Bady notes, Gawker's continued existence (and the meaning thereof) is the real story in all of this.

"Who the hell knows what is really happening at Gawker, and who the hell cares? Answer: Gawker and Gawker...Which is to say, simply: this is how 'the news' is made. Not 'reported,' which would imply that it was already news before news-media decided it was, but 'made': news is news because the news says it is. This is why [Gawker founder] Nick Denton gets points for admitting that his litmus test for a story's newsworthiness is whether it's 'interesting': he is interesting in publishing stories, primarily, that he is interested in publishing, and this tautology is the thing itself. How do you know if a thing is newsworthy? Well, if it's on the news, then it must be news. There can therefore be no question of ever taking down a post, once the editorial collective has decided to put it up, because publishing is a self-fulfilling prophecy: having declared it to be news, it becomes news. This must be what takes the place of 'the public interest' for a media organization that does not derive its sense of journalistic ethics from that sense of its social constituency. Gawker is because Gawker is: the purest of pure media, speech as a good absent other considerations...

[T]he question 'What is Gawker for?' could never have an answer. If Gawker had a purpose, it wouldn't be Gawker. Gawker is for Gawker, world without end, amen, and the end of all our gawking will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
As far as his own writing goes, Bady is simply lighting up Gawker for having an ethically nihilistic approach to the journalistic meta-game. (Or, in English: he's criticizing them for their complete lack of standards.) But, disturbingly, it's incredibly easy to extend this reasoning to the world of professional philosophy. Watch:

Who the hell knows what is really happening in academic philosophy, and who the hell cares? Answer: academic philosophers and academic philosophers. This is to say, simply: this is how philosophy is made. Not "discovered" or "researched," which would imply that it was already there before the academy decided it was, but "made": philosophy is philosophy because philosophers say it is. This is why philosophers get points for admitting that their litmus test for an argument's or idea's worthiness is whether it's "interesting": philosophers are interested in publishing things, primarily, that philosophers are interested in publishing, and this tautology is the thing itself. How do you know if a thing is worthy of professional philosophical study? Well, if it's studied by philosophers, then it must be philosophy. There can therefore be no question of ever excising a subject once the academic collective has decided to study it, because publishing is a self-fulfilling prophecy: having declared it to be philosophy, it becomes philosophy. This must be what takes the place of "constructiveness" or "rationality" for an academic organization that does not derive its sense of reasoning ethics either from a value system or from empirical reality. Academic philosophy is because academic philosophy is: the purest form of pure academia, speech as a good absent other considerations.

The question "What is academic philosophy for?" could never have an answer. If academic philosophy had a purpose, it wouldn't be academic philosophy. It would, instead, be academic anthropology or psychology or sociology or economics or physics or biology or take-your-pick. Academic philosophy is for academic philosophy, world without end, amen, and the end of all our philosophizing will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
And, remember, we're talking about a field populated by folks who will happily engage with any idea that they find "interesting" and "difficult"; who encourage atheists to argue about "the Trinity" because it might be "really interesting" to do so; who explicitly deny the validity of ethical constraints on reasoning; who believe that greatness is better measured by the controversy that a thinker generates rather than the rigor of that thinker's work; who very much promote debate "as a good absent other considerations" on the asinine grounds that "philosophy is killed by too much consensus"; who encourage dissent even if it's "largely or even totally mistaken" (emphasis mine, because c'mon); who believe that "a rational discussion is never closed"; and so on. In short, philosophy is to academia what Gawker is to journalism, and in neither context is that a good thing.

So well done, Aaron Bady, and keep up the good work. May your skeptical approach to "interesting" topics spread far and wide, that one day we might be able to seek out the advice of a working philosopher without first having to determine whether that person cares more about the truth or merely about their own enjoyment.Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-59922801531028986712015-07-23T10:20:00.003-07:002015-07-23T10:20:46.116-07:00Domestic terraforming: species managementAs we learned (or, more probably, didn't learn but were reminded of) a couple weeks back, things generally go well when the people in charge of those things exercise conscious control over those things and know what they're doing. With that idea in mind, let's return to the subject of domestic terraforming.

"We must make choices about what from the wild world we save, because it has become impossible to protect every species from untimely extinction. We can choose to save a portion of rainforest or a type of bee or shark. Or we can allow them to go extinct in favor of saving something else. How we make these decisions will set our relationship with the natural world for decades to come.

So what should win in the lottery of life: cute and cuddly; exotic and unusual; useful to humanity; useful to their ecosystem? People around the globe are grappling with the dilemma in different ways. The Edge of Existence program, for example, favors saving those that are evolutionarily one-of-a-kind species, whereas the general public prefers to save cute animals."
Gaia Vince doesn't seem to have any broader terraforming effort in mind, but her recommendation fits right in with the rest of the terraforming-esque ideas that we've encountered. Whether we're talking about exercising conscious, competent control over Earth's land and topology, its ocean chemistry, its light/dark cycles, its atmosphere and climate, or, as above, the macro-level part of its biosphere, we're essentially talking about one dimension of what turns out to be a fairly robust and exhaustive (if also very piecemeal) domestic terraforming program.

Moreover, in every case, the operative question is not whether we can do or are doing those things but whether we'll ever decide to start doing them according to some well-thought-out plan rather than doing them either accidentally or nonchalantly. Indeed, I would go (and, y'know, have been going) one step further and say that the even better question is whether we'll ever decide to unify all of our currently disconnected terraforming projects under one umbrella. Even if we never quite get to that point, however, we now have little choice but to acknowledge our terraforming behaviors so as to at least try to bring them under our intelligent direction. By talking about this stuff openly and directly, Vince is moving us that much closer to where we need to be. The rest of us need to step up and join her.Eli Horowitzhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-25438204123426839732015-07-22T13:47:00.003-07:002015-07-22T13:47:58.534-07:00Review review: Dope (with, as usual, spoilers)I'm torn about Dope. From a strictly aesthetic standpoint, it earns maybe a C+ or a B-, which makes it a perfectly enjoyable flick but not necessarily something to go out of your way for. On the other hand, as Ijeoma Oluo points out in her review, it'd be a mistake to look at the movie as a purely aesthetic exercise.

"This is a decidedly black film, but in 2015, it's been expanded to a more modern definition of blackness. Mixed-race kids, queer brown kids, light-skinned kids–their blackness is never questioned...This diversity expands the appeal of this movie to black people who were decidedly left out (or demonized) in Tyler Perry films."
Without taking into account Dope's politics, it's impossible to see the film for what it is, let alone to review or grade it properly. And, while I have to confess to an entirely unembarrassing lack of knowledge about what happens in Tyler Perry's movies, there are at least two moments in Dope that stand out as occasions on which the main character, Malcolm, was portrayed sympathetically despite acting in ways that would have either excluded him from other movies or had him cast in a very different kind of role.

(This is where the spoilers start to happen, incidentally.)

The main plotline of Dope is kinda the reverse of what happens in heist movies: rather than going through a series of complicated hijinks in order to acquire some goods, the protagonists go through a series of complicated hijinks in order to dispose of some goods. The series terminates with Malcolm receiving a bag containing the cash that he'll use to get himself out of the trouble that he semi-culpably landed himself in. But, within moments of acquiring the money, some bullies from Malcolm's school show up (what a coincidence, right?) and take the bag (and money, obviously) from him. It's at this point that he cracks a little, pulling out the last remaining illicit item that he accidentally came to possess: a handgun. He threatens the bullies, the bullies return the bag, and the main plot is allowed to wrap itself up in a fairly standard heist-movie-esque sort of way.

In a normal movie, the part with the gun would've been the point at which Malcolm's character was tarnished. He is, after all, supposed to be the good guy: the harmless nerd, the virgin, the honest kid, and so on. In short, and in one of the movie's recurring phrases, he's not "one of those niggas." Nevertheless, when push comes to shove, Malcolm does pull a gun on his his tormentors - and, after he does so, his friends support him rather than chastising him or pulling one of those "I don't know who you are anymore" scenes. Importantly, they do this not because they approve of his one moment of brutish aggression but because they're (relatively) realistic depictions of people who grew up in a bad neighborhood and who therefore understand the stakes in a visceral, immediate way. By having Malcolm's friends offer a show of support in that moment, the movie sends the message that his actions are not just reasonable but are actually within the boundaries of what a "good guy" from a bad neighborhood might do. In other words, this is one way in which the movie uses the tropes of its genre to communicate one of its core messages, namely, that the situation for people like Malcolm isn't as simple as the good guy/bad guy distinction that operates in most sectors of our culture.

A similar moment occurs in the movie's main subplot, which is, of course, a boy-meets-girl story. Again, this plot arc progresses in a fairly standard way for most of the movie: Malcolm meets a girl while she's involved with another, lesser man; he wins her away from said man; his dark secret (i.e., the events of the main plotline) leads him to attack her in a moment of paranoia; and then he has the opportunity to win her back. Fairly standard, right?

The difference, again, comes in the last phases of plot's resolution. When he apologizes to her and tries to explain that he wasn't himself in that one moment of paranoia, Malcolm's love interest replies that he was himself and that he's simply a complicated individual. As in the gun scene, she does this as a way of accepting him, not demonizing or judging him. While this act of forgiveness on her part might make her seem a little two-dimensional and unrealistic, it again pays to remember that she, too, grew up in a bad neighborhood. Just as "complicated" is the best that the audience can hope for when it comes to a hero like Malcolm, there's a real chance that "complicated" is the best that a single woman in that situation can hope for when it comes to a partner. (It's also worth noting that this goes both ways; Malcolm accepts her despite her flaws, too, just not in such a front-and-center way.) Like Malcolm's friends, she realizes that, in poor and crime-ridden places, rare moments of bad behavior don't suffice to prove that someone is a bad person, even if that bad behavior would be disqualifying for someone of a different background.

Now, obviously, that whole idea is a delicate one, and it's easy to misinterpret it or take it too far or fuck it up in about a million other ways. And, if you pressed hard enough on the movie, you could probably make the case that it, I dunno, glamorizes drug dealing too much or some such thing. Even so, it's about damn time that somebody tried to do what the filmmakers tried to do in Dope. At some point, our society is going to have to develop a moral compass that has more options than just "good guy" and "bad guy," and we're also going to have to develop the ability to operate that compass in such a way that we can at least start to tease apart personality from circumstance. Despite its flaws, Dope puts us marginally closer to those goals, and that makes it more than the sum of its aesthetic parts.Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-15893412385773868042015-07-22T09:45:00.000-07:002015-07-22T09:45:28.244-07:00Guns, guns everywhereGot a problem? Solve it with guns!

"Armed men have taken up self-appointed sentry duty outside military recruitment centers after another armed man opened fire on a recruiting center and killed five in Chattanooga, Tennessee last week.

The military has asked they not do so."
Wanna get elected? Get elected with guns!

Bored? Do some dumb shit with guns!

"The US Federal Aviation Administration says it is investigating an online video that shows an alleged home-made 'drone' firing a handgun in the Connecticut countryside."

By golly, this is the good ol' US of A, and nobody gets to decide for us how stupidly we behave with weapons that are made for the express purpose of killing humans!
Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-16559555322881244942015-07-21T13:35:00.003-07:002015-07-21T13:35:56.212-07:00"The reporters themselves were not as sensitive to ethical questions as they should have been or would be today"So apparently journalism is a highly ethically questionable endeavor. It seemed that way when I was reading Tokyo Vice, but that book was largely about the Japanese mafia, so, between the cultural difference with respect to gift-giving and the trickiness inherent in dealing with any organized crime group, I sorta wrote that off. But Jack Germond's Fat Man In A Middle Seat reinforces the same idea, and that one is written about US politics, so now I'm wondering whether it's just journalism in general.

Germond starts the book by describing his time in the military, which he says "was a marvelous, transforming experience that made me a lifelong advocate of universal military training immediately after high school" (7). On my reading, at least, that experience seems to have prepared Germond for a life of ethical dubiousness:

"When a particularly obnoxious first sergeant kept giving me extra duty on kitchen patrol (KP) - he didn't have much use for 'college boys' playing soldier - I spilled ink on his name on the payroll so he had to wait for a supplemental roll ten days later, as the regulations required. When the KP continued, damned if the ink didn't spill again until old Russ got the idea. I was putting through his allotments to his wife and I was paying his insurance, but he wasn't getting any cash for his beer and cigarettes until the KP stopped. When pilots flew from Greenland to Gander, Newfoundland, or Goose Bay, Labrador, and spend a night in what were much more civilized surroundings than we enjoyed in Greenland, I had some discretion about how quickly to approve their per diem payments. After a while they learned the process moved faster if they brought back a steak or a couple of lobsters or maybe some fresh milk for the boys in the finance office. I had a part-time job on the side keeping the books for the officers' club, although I had no idea how to do it as the Army regulations required. So when a team from the inspector general arrived for an audit, I found that a case of Scotch did wonders in passing their inspection. My behavior wasn't something I would recommend to my children, but it made my stint in the Air Corps a lot more comfortable than it might have been." (8)
Although he claims that this "[b]orderline criminal behavior was not the principal lesson of my military career" (8), this sort of chicanery reappears all over the place in his career as a journalist. Sometimes it was just a matter of the standard capitalist one-upmanship that we see in (almost?) every industry:

"We particularly enjoyed finding ways to beat the Democrat & Chronicle, our corporate brother a few blocks up Main Street. A year or so after Ringle and I had first written about Hanover Houses, I heard one Thursday night that the D&C had prepared a series of articles on things that had gone wrong in the project...So shortly after seven [the next] morning, with three or four hours at our disposal, Bert Reisman and I arrived at the Baden Street Settlement House, a social agency that served the project...and I demanded that [its director] show us 'everything you showed those guys'...By late morning Reisman and I returned to the office convinced we had found the juicy stuff, and we quickly cranked out two columns of type for a Page One story that stole the heart out of the D&C series - to the point that it had to be cut back and toned down. It was not the kind of thoughtful journalism to which readers are probably entitled. But in the T-U newsroom, we enjoyed it immensely." (22-23)
But, in his role as a journalist, Germond was also fairly quick to accept gifts and favors from the politicians that he was covering. For example:

"[W]e were pleasantly surprised when we boarded in Buffalo one midnight to learn that [New York governor W.] Harriman had dispatched his press secretary, Walter Mordaunt, to buy a bottle of Dewar's for the cross-state ride home...Weaver and I played gin rummy...and as we lumbered across the state we passed the bottle back and forth." (29)
And again:

"On one occasion I put myself in a position that seemed certain to invite [Harriman's] wrath...I was holding forth about the comparison of the popular reaction to the two campaigns, the point being that, counter to the conventional wisdom at the moment, I thought Rockefeller was going to bury Harriman. It was just barroom talk, not something I felt confident enough about to write for my papers. But when I came downstairs for breakfast early the next morning, there was a story in the Elmira Star-Gazette about how I was predicting that Rockefeller would bury Harriman. The local reporter had written the story...I knew that if Harriman saw it I would be a dead man with him for the rest of the campaign. I bought all the copies of the paper in the hotel newsstand, then called the press secretary traveling with the governor. He had seen the story, he said, but the governor had not and he would try to keep it that way. I owe you one, I told him. You owe me a big one, he replied." (30-31)
Nor were these problems limited to Germond himself or to the (relatively) small-time politics of governors and other state-level officials. He also implicates his colleagues, sometimes even at the national level, as in this discussion about one of his coworker's relationships with Richard Nixon:

"In his own time in Washington, [Paul] Miller had been particularly close to the young senator from California and later, in his [Miller's] days as president of the Associated Press and chairman of Gannett, to him [Nixon] as vice president and as president. So it may not have been surprising that he was one of the last prominent figures in American journalism to accept the reality of Nixon's personal culpability in the [Watergate] scandal. His attitude was the classic defense - that is, that Nixon hadn't done anything wrong, but even if he had, it was no big deal. This was, after all, a man with whom he played golf at Burning Tree and a president who would accept his phone calls. What was the point in being part of the establishment if you didn't defend it to the death - or at least to the point at which you became the object of ridicule." (108-109)
Honestly, I'm not too sure what to make of all of this. To reiterate, it kinda looks as though this is endemic in journalism, and it's far from likely that Germond is the worst of the bunch. (I mean, at least he acknowledges that it's going on, as in the title of this post.) Moreover, it's not clear how to fix this. Journalists need information to do their jobs, and that information is often (if not usually) contained in the private resources of the people who are covered by those journalists, which means that the journalists can't feasibly* write their stories unless their subjects voluntarily give up that information. And that, of course, isn't particularly liable to happen unless the journalists give the subjects something in return, which is precisely where the ethical picture begins to blur.

So, I dunno, I don't have a big takeaway here. But at least now you know.

*I guess they could in theory hack into people's stuff or hypnotize them or something, but I'm ruling those sorts of fantastical scenarios out.Eli Horowitzhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-3254128608273209072015-07-21T08:43:00.002-07:002015-07-21T08:43:25.330-07:00Links!Australians sure are nice, apparently
I shudder to think of the emails that, say, Philadelphians would send in this scenario. Also, though, check out that one person who asked if a willow tree should be addressed with a masculine or a feminine title. If that doesn't speak to the importance of studying gender, I dunno what would.

YES PLEASE
I WOULD LIKE MY HOLODECK NOW, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

"A scientist flicks on a switch. Like magic, a small, delicate image of a fairy appears, suspended in the air. The scientist then reaches out to touch the floating figure: it feels rough, like sandpaper. This might sound like it's been taken straight out of science fiction, but think again, because this is the reality for Yoichi Ochiai and his fellow researchers at Digital Nature Group.

The team has been using a host of lasers, lenses and mirrors to create holograms suspended in the air that humans can touch."
Although, on second thought, it probably won't be as much fun if everything in the holodeck feels like sandpaper.

A step towards having a minimum income, maybe?

Did you all know about "reporting pay"? I didn't.

"Eight states and the District of Columbia already have 'reporting pay' laws. These require the employer to pay a minimum number of hours to workers even if they are sent home early. For example, New York State requires employers to pay a minimum of four hours per shift."
The article describes these laws in more detail and provides some useful context for them, but the thing that's curious to me is that this seems to be a very limited, very wonky way to achieve a basic income (i.e., a guaranteed stipend for every adult citizen). Reporting pay laws still seem to operate on the assumption that my basic income should be contingent on my participation in the economy, whereas a true basic income system wouldn't have such a requirement; and, as a result, those laws only cover a portion of the population; but it's still interesting to think that these laws might be the embryonic form of a future basic income regime.

Don't trust the scientists?
Maybe you'll trust the capitalists.

"The Arctic, which covers 8 percent of the Earth's surface, is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. With all that ice melting, the region is in danger of becoming a 21st-century Wild West—a free-for-all for power and riches opening up at the top of the planet...

Warmer conditions are also opening up once-blocked trade routes and areas for drilling or mining, and with so much at stake, Arctic nations hope the current peace will keep but are arming up, planning for a harsher outcome, with Russia making the most aggressive moves."
Although, on the other hand, why would you trust the capitalists? Those fuckers are unabashed liars.

"ExxonMobil, the world's biggest oil company, knew as early as 1981 of climate change – seven years before it became a public issue, according to a newly discovered email from one of the firm's own scientists. Despite this the firm spent millions over the next 27 years to promote climate denial."
Gee - thanks, ExxonMobil! That sure was helpful of you.

Forget Reed Richards
Wanna see someone tie themselves up in knots? Check out Beth Haile's attempts to work around the Vatican's prohibition against birth control. Only rare have I seen someone work so hard to achieve so little in an effort they knew to be futile before they even began.
Eli Horowitzhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-69949924849904556862015-07-20T12:10:00.001-07:002015-07-20T12:10:15.858-07:00Just because you can look up doesn't mean you can fly (so keep your feet on the ground)While reading journalist Jack Germond's memoir, Fat Man In A Middle Seat, I ran across the following short tale:

"In retrospect, it is clear we [i.e., the press] were never entirely fair to [George] Romney. By insisting on seeing his [1968 presidential] candidacy only through the prism of the most newsworthy issue of the moment, the [Vietnam] war, we had given too little attention to his proposals, for example, for improving conditions in the inner cities, then called slums or ghettos. Nor had we ever given our readers and viewers a clear enough picture of his personal qualities, although he was a politician many of us liked and even admired." (73-74)
This admission concerns a very basic meta-game lesson that I think I've somehow neglected to post about thus far, that being the fact that you can overplay the meta-game. As Germond says, it's possible (and, really, by no means uncommon) to see a certain game situation "only through the prism of" the current meta-game (or your perception thereof), which in turn can lead to a weird sort of tunnel vision in which your play becomes overly one-dimensional.* This needn't imply that your play has become gimmicky; indeed, it would hardly be fair to say that Germond's concern with the war was in any way journalistically gimmicky or unsound. At the very least, though, chasing too hard after the meta-game means restricting the range of fundamentals that you allow yourself to use, just as Germond and his colleagues wrongly restricted themselves from reporting on Romney's other policies and his personality.

And, yes, the usual caveat does apply: it's not always easy to tell the difference between following an improved meta-game and wandering off of the correct path. Theory, as always, is not the same as practice. Nevertheless, it is important to at least try to look out for instances in which you might have over-committed yourself to a certain interpretation of the meta-game.

*As a possibly clearer example that comes from a more traditional game, think of someone who, while playing Street Fighter, counterpicks a character that they actually don't know how to play. The character choice might be correct in the meta-game - that is, the counterpick might be a good one - but no character choice will work in the game itself unless the player can actually use that character.Eli Horowitzhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-31514473185291389862015-07-20T10:58:00.002-07:002015-07-20T10:58:14.087-07:00Two magical humanities stories for your MondayTo begin, and to add another chapter to the (excessively) ongoing adventures of Plato-Man and Socrates-Man (see also 1, 2, 3), I turn now to Will Durant.

"We love [Plato] for his unstinted energy, for the wild nomadic play of his fancy, for the joy which he found in life in all its unredeemed and adventurous complexity. We love him because he was alive every minute of his life, and never ceased to grow; such a man can be forgiven for whatever errors he has made."
For those who aren't up on their ancient Greek biographies, let me fill you in on a little secret: Will Durant cannot possibly know what he's talking about here. Per wiki, "[l]ittle can be known about Plato's early life and education, due to very few accounts"; "[t]he precise relationship between Plato and Socrates remains an area of contention"; we don't know exactly when he was born; and we don't know exactly when or how he died. So given that we don't have good evidence about basically any phase of Plato's life, we sure as fuck don't know enough to rhapsodize about "the wild nomadic play of his fancy" or how "he was alive every minute of his life" (except, of course, in the vacuous, literal sense of the word "alive"). It will be easier, I think, to dispense with the magical humanities if we can first dispense with this type of magical humanities role model.

And for a reminder of why we might want to dispense with the magical humanities, I turn to Steven Alschuler.

"The prevailing wisdom seems to be that if something offends us, or even causes unpleasant thoughts, we shouldn't have to be exposed to it...Perhaps that's why nine of 10 employers told the American Association of Colleges and Universities that recent college graduates are poorly prepared for the workforce in such areas as critical thinking, communication and problem solving. Perhaps that's why the Council for Aid to Education recently found that 40 percent of graduates lacked skills such as the ability to construct a cohesive argument or identify a logical fallacy."
Here Alschuler tosses a bunch of ideas against the wall on the assumption that one of them will stick. Some of those ideas make some sense, especially the idea that the humanities teach people how to communicate well. Teaching someone how to use a language is more akin to teaching them how to use a hammer than teaching them about the laws of physics, and so, insofar as language is a tool that's used with humans (as opposed to hammers, which are hopefully not), it makes sense to classify communication as a humanities subject and to promote it as an example of what the humanities are good for.

But there are other ideas that make less sense, namely, the stuff about "critical thinking" and "problem solving." In fact, that line of thought is so bad that I don't even have to debunk it myself. Just a few lines later, Alschuler does it for me:

"How are young people expected to learn to navigate real life, with situations that are messy, problems that are truly hard and people who are unreasonable or even offensive? In the real world, we all need to deal with abusive supervisors, unrealistic deadlines and impossible demands."
If you're having trouble seeing it, the relevant question is this: where did those "unrealistic deadlines and impossible demands" come from, exactly? How did those "abusive superiors" and "unreasonable or even offensive" people come to hold their power? The inevitable answer is that, somewhere along the line, somebody screwed up - that is, someone failed to think critically and/or to come up with a good solution to the problem at hand and/or relied on loose and/or fallacious reasoning. But now remember that these screwups belong to the older generations, i.e., those generations who were exposed to the humanities classes that Alschuler recommends. This, obviously, is a huge problem for him, because he has now tacitly admitted that his own policy has consistently failed to prevent the exact problem that he's trying to solve.

Now, admittedly, it's possible that we would be wrong to simply eliminate the humanities without bothering to replace them. (Which, for the record, is not and has never been my position, but might be the position of somebody somewhere.) That is, while the humanities aren't doing a great job at teaching people how to be humane leaders and effective problem-solvers and whatnot, maybe they're at least doing a job, such that we'd be worse off if we simply ditched them. But even if that's the case - which, so far as I can tell, is far from a sure thing - it would still make sense for us to look for a better alternative. And should we decide that we are going to look for a better alternative, it would make a lot of sense to start by taking a hard, honest look at what the current system is doing wrong. That particular line of critical thinking may not appeal to Alschuler, who seems more content to hype up the humanities without even beginning to assess them in a critical way, but to the rest of us it should serve as yet another reminder that the humanities a way to go before they even qualify for their own PR.

"teaches us about power and leadership, about career strategy and class conflict, about treachery and human nature, about war and about love"Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-6125741910798541132015-07-17T07:02:00.002-07:002015-07-18T14:03:50.242-07:00IT IS UPON USI was thinking of writing a serious post today, but who am I kidding? Evo starts in just over an hour and there's no way that I'll have enough time to do both that and serious blogging. So, yeah - Evo it is! Below are some brief previews before the action starts, to which I'll be live-blogging my thoughts as the day goes along.

5:02pm
After the power went out for a couple hours (here, not there), we're back. Unfortunately, all of the interesting characters are out of Smash 4 and we're left only with two Sheiks and a Zero Suit Samus. Back to watching Marvel, I guess...

1:12pm (Saturday)
Two different Phoenix Wright players have won on-stream already. Surely I must be hallucinating.

2:28am
PR Rog survives. I think I may be hallucinating.

1:43am
We have no more players in the winners' bracket. Well played, world. Well played.

12:59am
The US has 16 of the top 32 players, but only 3 of those entered via the winners' side of the bracket. Japan only has 14 of the top 32, 8 of whom had survived in the winners' bracket up to that point. Our odds could be better.

12:42am(?!)
Snake Eyez survives. Hamad loses. XSK Samurai and Ricki Ortiz face each other, necessitating a loss for the US. NuckleDu clutches it out against Fuudo. We're walking on the razor's edge.

9:56pm
Dieminiom defeats Luffy! USA! USA! (Let's just ignore the Smug loss...)

9:36pm
Okay, never mind. Alex Valle beats last year's second-place finisher Bonchan. Keen the hair, Alex.

9:30pm
Alex Valle needs a haircut.

9:19pm
What the fuck - the first two quarterfinals (quarterfinals!) matches are Valmaster vs. Momochi and Fuudo vs. Poongko. Because, I guess, quarterfinals is now top 8?

8:57pm
Took a bit of a break there in the middle to watch Dope, which I'll probably post about next week. Catching up with the brackets, it seems like the US is faring somewhere in between terribly and amazingly. Unfortunately, we missed a lot of opportunities to beat top-level foreign players, so once again it's going to come down to our ability to navigate a semifinals and a finals round that are both full of foreign threats. So...we're fucked, I guess.

3:09pm
A Bowser takes one round from a Diddy Kong and then gets murdered. Nintendo please.

2:37pm
US players dropping left and right. Valmaster destroys BJ Unchained, Dafeetlee hangs himself against some Japanese Akuma, and the early buzz from LI Joe was long worn off. Shout outs to Sherryjenix, though, for doing her part to defend our home country.

1:19pm
Well, I tried to switch over to Smash 4 for a while, and everything is tier-based. Some brave soul played Dedede and lost. Another, equally brave soul played the Mii Brawler and lost. It's so anticlimactic. Fix your shit, Nintendo.

12:42pm
...meanwhile, two US players take one around off of two Japanese players and then choke. Yay regression to the mean.

12:20pm
Well, all the streams are down, so I guess Evo is over. Good games, all, and we'll see you again next year.

11:37am
Long Island Joe beats Gonzales (who, contrary to the impression you might have gotten from his name, is Japanese), and we begin to set ourselves up for the inevitable disappointment later on in the bracket. Still, though, hype!

11:22am
Welcome to the FGC, where your first on-stream matchup is one of the US's best players against...

...a child. RIP child.

10:47am
Evidently I'm not even patient enough to wait for Evo to actually start before I start live-blogging. Here's a pretty hype Smash 4 set from last night. You won't have enough time to watch it before the real deal kicks off, but it'll be more than enough to fill the 13 minutes.

Street Fighter
First off, as I fucking said would happen, Capcom's decision to release SFV next year is going to end up truncating SFIV's competitive lifespan, which in turn will truncate its meta-game. I'm pissed. I'd better see a whole fucking lot of the Ultra characters (Hugo, Elena, Rolento, Decapre, Poison) this time around or else I'll be extremely disappointed.

Also, speaking of extremely disappointed, there's practically no chance of a US player winning the title. It ain't happening. We'll do our usual thing and have a couple of players make top 8 and then flame out. Still, though, I expect to have an extremely good time watching this tournament, as the level of competition will be through the roof.

Marvel
Marvel pools are going to be awesome. Unlike the process that will soon unfold with SFIV, people have stuck with Marvel for so long now that the meta-game is finally starting to gain some real richness and depth. I don't think that we're all the way there quite yet - that is, I still think that one of the high-tier teams will probably win - but the beginning and middle stages of the tournament will certainly be surprising and edifying. Plus, who knows, maybe I'm wrong about the predictability of the eventual winner. That'd be nice.

Smash 4
I am so excited for this. Nobody has any idea what's going to happen with custom moves. I really hope that something absolutely stupid and gimmicky ends up winning. If it just turns out to be Diddy Kong again, I swear I'll break something.Eli Horowitzhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-79011941924510340402015-07-17T06:38:00.000-07:002015-07-17T06:38:05.415-07:00Weekly webcomic: as opposed to those depressing, soul-killing cartoons, obviously

Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-62923289666930456592015-07-16T14:05:00.002-07:002015-07-16T14:05:31.240-07:00Something that could turn out to be completely wrongThis excerpt from an article about infrastructures caught my attention because it resonates with a theory that I've been kicking around for a while:

"[W]hile the panopticon prison was first described by Jeremy Bentham, it was inspired by a factory layout conceived by Jeremy's brother Samuel, a mechanical engineer. Thus the original panopticon or 'inspection house' was meant to watch not prisoners but workers, solving the problem of supervisory-enforced efficiency among skilled laborers. This surveillance task must be as old as capitalism itself, extending not just between the boss' eye and the employee's hand, but to the entire infrastructure of the body. Consider, for example, the 'bathroom break,' a fundamental right now guaranteed by US labor law (but only as recently as 1998) insomuch as it is defined exactly when, how, and for how long a human being might service their own internal infrastructure for the sake of their health, while not encroaching too much upon an employer's right to demand the worker remain part of the functional workplace line...

The employer considers the worker's body to be a part of the factory infrastructure, and it attempts to maintain oversight over even its most hidden functions. Visibility, and the control it allows, defines all work sites, regardless of what is being manufactured or supplied.

It just so happens that Samuel Bentham built his inspection house while under the employ of Prince Potemkin, namesake of the famous 'Potemkin Villages.' A perhaps-apocryphal story describes a counterfeit model village orchestrated by the prince, moved to different areas of the countryside at night, for the purpose of keeping up appearances for the visiting czar. Bentham watched his workers, out of worry for his factory's appearance to his boss, just as the prince was said to be worried about the observing eye of Catherine the Great. Vision is power, and infrastructure is built for and by a world that believes in this philosophy: its image is carefully controlled and constructed, and the capacity for watching and being watched becomes its own infrastructure."
However useful all of this is in the context of economics, I actually have a rather different subject in mind. My idea is that attention in general (rather than vision in particular) is the salient characteristic in this sort of situation - and that, moreover, attention deserves much more philosophical...well...attention than it seems to have received thus far.

Now, of course, attention and vision are closely related in the human species because vision is by far our best sense. This perhaps explains why wiki's article on attention spends so much time on the relationship between attention and vision. Either way, though, what I'm interested in is the connection between attention and control (or, to use Adam Rothstein's vocabulary from above, the relationship between attention and power). This relationship seems to be, shall we say, not exactly at the forefront of scientific research on attention, but there are some examples of people who (inadvertently?) study it. From that same wiki article:

"The vast majority of current research on human multitasking is based on performance of doing two tasks simultaneously, usually that involves driving while performing another task, such as texting, eating, or even speaking to passengers in the vehicle, or with a friend over a cellphone. This research reveals that the human attentional system has limits for what it can process: driving performance is worse while engaged in other tasks; drivers make more mistakes, brake harder and later, get into more accidents, veer into other lanes, and/or are less aware of their surroundings when engaged in the previously discussed tasks.

There has been little difference found between speaking on a hands-free cell phone or a hand-held cell phone, which suggests that it is the strain of attentional system that causes problems, rather than what the driver is doing with his or her hands."
Another way of phrasing these findings would be to say that drivers have less control over their vehicles when they pay less attention to those vehicles - at least, for certain levels of attention. This sort of individual-level research, together with Rothstein's more abstract idea about the social effects and uses of attention, suggest that attention might be a very significant subject indeed.

To start with a more concrete set of examples, let's return to the idea of trying to dance. I first invoked the difference between dancing and trying to dance as a way of explaining something about politics, but that image only works because directing a certain kind of attention to your own body is disruptive to your ability to dance. As wiki's article on flow* says, the flow state involves a "[m]erging of action and awareness" and "[a] loss of reflective self-consciousness." The further you move away from those things - that is, the more attention you direct to yourself, the more that you mentally isolate your actions in order to pay attention to them - the further away you get from the flow state and the closer you get to a clumsy-arrhythmic-awkward-high-school-prom kind of dancing. Similarly, I've noticed that, while shooting hoops, I sometimes fixate on something that (I think) I'm doing wrong and then my jump shot goes from bad-enough-to-warrant-fixing to so-bad-I-question-my-very-presence-on-the-court. Typically, people refer to this phenomenon as "overthinking it," but that might be slightly inaccurate. The problem, I think, isn't one of thought but one of attention (which, even if you classify it as a subspecies of thought, is at least a more specific category).

But this now raises the question: why, when driving a car, does a decrease in attention lead to bad results even though an increase in attention seems to lead to bad results with things like dancing and basketball? The answer, I think, partly goes back to the idea of control and how the brain develops the capability to control. Obviously, some of the driving thing is related to the fact that you get fewer and lower-quality inputs when you aren't paying attention to the road, which in turn makes it harder to know which action to take and when to take it. Nevertheless, that doesn't totally explain why the driving actions themselves (braking, steering, etc.) are worse once the driver starts to perform one. So here's my guess: cognitively, it seems to me that attention is related to access, such that the more you pay attention to your actions (i.e., the mental routines that fall under Drive A Car or Dance or Shoot A Jump Shot), the more access you have to those stored cognitive processes. If so, we need to spend some attention just to be able to do anything with any degree of competence at all.

If that seems banal, don't worry - we're now moving on to the other part of the question. Naively, we might think that paying more and more attention should lead to better and better results. After all, surely it would be better to have more conscious access to the skills that are stored in our memories, right? But now remember that read access is not the only type of access. As any good computer expert will be able to tell you, there's also write access - that is, the ability to change (or, in another word, control) the content of the information that you're accessing. And, as any good computer expert will also be able to tell you, it's not always a great idea to try to read from and write to the same source at the same time. Do that with the wrong file and you might really fuck something up, which is why some systems lock you out of editing something while a save operation is occurring. Perhaps, then, that's similar to what happens when you pay too much attention to dancing (or playing basketball, etc.); perhaps, in other words, you end up inadvertently entering edit mode on the skill in question, to which your brain responds by locking you out of (or, at least, severely limiting your access to) read mode.

So there's one interesting and at least potentially true connection between attention and control. To move up several levels of abstraction, we can also think of attention and control as social phenomena, a la Rothstein. Take the example of reasoning ethics. As I've said probably about thirty thousand times before, there's very little reason for a society to engage in a debate when most people and institutions in that society already believe the truth of the matter. Or, to put that another way, there's a very good reason to stop debating something once we arrive at the truth. Since debate is a form of group attention, this situation fits very well with my attention/control theory: except in very specific circumstances,** we should only have a debate about some subject X when we want to control what people think about X. When people are already thinking the right thing about X, there's no need to exert any further control and so no need to direct attention to X,*** either through debate or through any other means.

Similarly, with my attention/control theory, we can give some support to certain complaints that social justice folks direct against certain kinds of news stories. When the media responds to the police killing of an unarmed, nonthreatening person of color by directing its attention to the victim's personal history, anti-racism activists are correct to see that as a problem - or, at least, they are if humans often attend to things as a way of controlling them, as I'm proposing. For one thing, oppressed populations are oppressed largely in virtue of the ways in which they're controlled by others; as such, my theory says that attention can signal the presence of such invidious control. To look at the other side of the coin, the lack of attention paid to police might also signal the fact that our society isn't trying to control them. This same type of reasoning applies to other situations and other social justice efforts as well.

By now, hopefully you're getting the idea. The only problem, of course, is that I'm skating on thin ice here - as I said way back at the beginning of this post, there's basically no scientific research to back up what I'm saying. Still, though, I think that the connections are strong enough that somebody ought to at least check it out.

*Quite interestingly, they use the same image for that article as they do in their article on attention.
**Basically, when the debate is a form of training or practice or something, as happens in e.g. forensics clubs.
***Note that X-itself is different from what-to-do-about-X. So, for instance, you might say that there's an activist reason to bring up the subject of global warming even with people who already believe in global warming - that is, you might want to get people off their asses - but I'm treating those as two different subjects. If anything, the complication shows up when you realize that attention isn't laser-precise, so that a valid X ("global warming exists") might end up receiving some spillover attention when we debate a related but invalid Y ("there's no need to do anything about it").Eli Horowitzhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-84808753520152686382015-07-16T11:37:00.000-07:002015-07-16T11:37:01.807-07:00Ah,arguments from imagination, how I didn't miss youThis just in: conservatives don't understand racism.

"[A]t the outset of [his recent New York Magazine profile], we are shown that [Ta-Nehisi] Coates, for all the adulation he receives, is actually a remarkably narrow-minded and unpleasant person, as we find at the end of the article's third paragraph: 'When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised,' Coates said. 'I don't know if it's my low expectations for white people or what'...

Imagine, for a minute, if a white writer—for the sake of argument, say, a guy named Daniel Payne, at, say, a fictional publication called the Federalist—expressed surprise that 'people who are not white' ever read his work: 'I don't know if it's my low expectations for black people or what,' he would remark. Would you be impressed at the jaded profundity of such a statement? Or would you think, 'Gee, Daniel Payne sounds like a racist jerk?'

Your response would obviously and correctly be the latter. So it is worth wondering why we are willing to let a very visible, very popular writer like Coates off the hook for an identical statement."
Also just in: conservatives don't understand the meanings of common words like "identical." Tomorrow I expect we'll learn that the pope wears a silly hat and that bears shit in the woods.Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8924756809871054336.post-12278424807384364952015-07-15T11:30:00.001-07:002015-07-15T11:30:35.962-07:00Taxation is a jokeYou wanna get upset about someone stealing something from you? Try worrying about your attention instead.

"Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.

Two problems result from this. The solution to both requires legal recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention."
Or your sleep.

"Noise is an underestimated threat that can cause a number of short- and long-term health problems, such as for example sleep disturbance, cardiovascular effects, poorer work and school performance, hearing impairment, etc."
See, there's a whole political movement out there that'll tell you that ownership matters. You own yourself, or so the theory goes, and that self-ownership extends out into the world so that you own other things as well, and all of this is (again, allegedly) so important that no person or group has the right to take the stuff you own without your permission. And then this political movement will try to rile you up about taxes and fuel efficiency standards and stuff.

But the more we learn about ourselves as conscious entities whose consciousnesses are limited by the specific material layouts of (specific parts of) our bodies, the more we learn that self-ownership is an idea that has never truly been practiced on a social level because it's something that we still barely even understand. To place that idea at the center of a political philosophy is, therefore, to court consequences that we're literally to ignorant to even guess at. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad idea - I mean, I dunno about you, but I wouldn't object to having fewer distractions and more sleep - but it does mean that it's an idea that's still in its infancy. We should not, therefore, treat it as if it was already all grown-up.Eli Horowitzhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com