In a second court ruling on the NSA’s metadata collection program, Judge Pauley rejected virtually all of the arguments raised by the ACLU and other plaintiffs against the program. This opinion thus stands opposed to Judge Leon’s ruling of a few weeks before (my analysis of that is here). Here I want to look at Judge Pauley’s opinion, in the context of my original question about data and information as concepts in thinking about privacy in the era of big data.
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As a card-carrying Deleuzean, I'm supposed to be scornful of the concept of "ideology."* But it does have its uses, and here's a great example of ideology qua naturalizing the social.
Fatal traffic accidents occurred in New York, Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. Authorities said a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease froze to death after she wandered away from her rural western New York home. And in suburban Philadelphia, as the storm approached, a worker at a salt storage facility was killed when a 100-foot-tall pile of road salt fell and crushed him. Falls Township police said the man was trapped while operating a backhoe.
I'd rewrite that this way:
A cruelly insufficient social safety net (the Alzheimer's patient) and dangerous work conditions caused by cuts to public workforce (the backhoe operator — I wouldn't be surprised if he was working for a private contractor; at the very best he was probably pulling a double shift, hence exhausted) plus the grossly insufficient public transport system and poorly maintained roads, coupled with economic desperation (the car drivers — dollars to donuts they were trying to get to a crappy service job, but don't worry, the Walmart where they worked will put out a collection basket) continued its reign of terror today, with the winter storm being the proximate cause that only a fool, knave, gull, or ideologue would blame for the social conditions that exposed these people to its effects.
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(Cross-posted at M-Phi)
Formal/mathematical philosophy is a well-established approach within philosophical inquiry, having its friends as well as its foes. Now, even though I am very much a formal-approaches-enthusiast, I believe that fundamental methodological questions tend not to receive as much attention as they deserve within this tradition. In particular, a key question which is unfortunately not asked often enough is: what counts as a ‘good’ formalization? How do we know that a given proposed formalization is adequate, so that the insights provided by it are indeed insights about the target phenomenon in question? In recent years, the question of what counts as adequate formalization seems to be for the most part a ‘Swiss obsession’, with the thought-provoking work of Georg Brun, and Michael Baumgartner & Timm Lampert. But even these authors seem to me to restrict the question to a limited notion of formalization, as translation of pieces of natural language into some formalism. (I argued in chapter 3 of my book Formal Languages in Logic that this is not the best way to think about formalization.)
However, some of the pioneers in formal/mathematical approaches to philosophical questions did pay at least some attention to the issue of what counts as an adequate formalization. In this post, I want to discuss how Tarski and Carnap approached the issue, hoping to convince more ‘formal philosophers’ to go back to these questions. (I also find the ‘squeezing argument’ framework developed by Kreisel particularly illuminating, but will leave it out for now, for reasons of space.)
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In a recent FB status update, Justin E. H. Smith cites James Scott approvingly:
As the anthropologist James C. Scott has compellingly argued, it is a fool's game to attempt to learn about human nature from 'isolated' or 'primitive' tribes, since every human group about which we have any knowledge has existed in some relation to a broader network of other human groups, and usually of states and empires. In this respect the idea of homogeneous national cultures attaching stably to territories is not only an illusion, to the extent that the homogeneity was initially imposed by a concerted campaign, but also to the extent that influence and goods are always flowing in from outside, even if in certain places and times foreign faces and foreign tongues are an unfamiliar occurrence. James C. Scott, "Crops, Towns, Government," London Review of Books, Vol. 35, No. 22, 21 November, 2013, pgs. 13-15.
While I agree grosso modo with Scott's point about skepticism about direct and naive conclusions from existing foragers back to pre-State times, I think we can make some reasonable, modest, and always open to re-interpretation, guesses (or if you want, hypotheses) for pre-State forager bands. When we do that we have to remember that claims that inter-group war was the dominant form of inter-group relation are themselves prone to illegitimate analogies with nation-state behavior (that is, society as boot camp: impose a homogeneous culture to better ensure success in war through loyalty to the group, etc).
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Nearly everyone with whom I find myself having long conversations* has at some time fallen into a kind of holidays era depression strong enough to take the comic edge off of Philip Larkin's "This be the Verse" (NSFW). The inevitable clash between promise and experienced reality is exacerbated by difficult family dynamics (even with respect to those we've lost) that seem to generally be our lot as rather depraved sentient beings.
But there is grace too, and every Christmas I find that watching the following** comforts my inner Larkinism.
Anyhow, here's a late wish to anyone reading this blog for a Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Saturnalia/Festivus/Winter Break/Solstice etc. etc. etc. filled with genuine grace.
[Notes:
*Selection bias!
**I know it's schmaltzy, but I don't care. Beauty and truth just are sometimes schmaltzy and we ignore this in our own aesthetic practice at great peril. Johnny Cash himself in fact knew and lived much of his life in that schmaltz and anyone listening to his albums gains insight into the value of schmaltz.]
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I’m still waiting for Rolling Stone Brasil to publish their ‘Best of 2013’ lists, which often give me good ideas of music to post here at BMoF. But for now, let me post a 2013 song by one of the most experimental of all experimental musicians in Brazil, Tom Zé. He is relatively well known outside Brazil in alternative, world music circles, after having become of one of David Byrne’s protégés in the 1990s (he was an iconic figure in the Tropicália movement in the 1960s, but was then by and large ‘forgotten’ for many years). But one of the remarkable things about Tom Zé is that he continues to make music exactly as he sees fit, completely ignoring any ‘market pressure’ and not trying to please anyone with facile tricks.
The song below is ‘Tribunal do Feicebuqui’ (‘Feicebuqui’ being a transliteration of ‘Facebook’), a song that shows not only that Tom Zé keeps up with current social phenomena (recall that he is 78 years old), but also that he looks at these phenomena with astute, critical eyes. I’m also posting ‘Curiosidade’, from his great 1998 concept album Com Defeito de Fabricação. There is much more memorable music by Tom Zé one should listen to, but these two give at least an idea of the work of one of the most creative, independent musicians currently in activity in Brazil.
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Taking off from a Facebook discussion on US high school philosophy programs, I thought I would propose an open thread asking for comments and / or links to programs.
Here's a start, to PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), and to the APA's committee on Pre-College Teaching, and to their page "So you want to teach pre-college philosophy?"
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After a recent move and going through my storage facility, I came across the following memo (below the fold–click to enlarge) among some of my late mother’s things. The date is February 19th, 1958, and the author is Nobel Prize winner Polykarp Kush. My mother was then a graduate student in Physics at Columbia University. Do read it for yourself in all its blue mimeographed glory, but the money line is, of course, “If your personal lives are of such complexity that they require a continuing contact with family and friends in time that should be devoted to a serious concern with physics, I very much doubt that you have the makings of a good physicist.” I heard my mother joke about seeing this memo posted in her lab at least a half-dozen times, but I never knew she kept a copy of the memo for fifty years! She left physics with a Masters degree and returned to graduate school to get her PhD in data analysis in the late 70s. She always told the memo-story as if it were a knee-slapper (“Physicists in those days were such characters!”) and she never really mentioned the climate for women as a reason why she left Physics.
New APPS 