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    • What Happens to Democracy When the Experts Can’t Be Both Factual and Balanced?

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      Yesterday Stephen Bannon, one of Trump’s closest advisors, called the media “the opposition party“. My op-ed piece in today’s Los Angeles Times is my response to that type of thinking.

      What Happens to Democracy When the Experts Can’t Be Both Factual and Balanced?


      Does democracy require journalists and educators to strive for political balance? I’m hardly alone in thinking the answer is “yes.” But it also requires them to present the facts as they understand them — and when it is not possible to be factual and balanced at the same time, democratic institutions risk collapse.

      Consider the problem abstractly. Democracy X is dominated by two parties, Y and Z. Party Y is committed to the truth of propositions A, B and C, while Party Z is committed to the falsity of A, B and C. Slowly the evidence mounts: A, B and C look very likely to be false. Observers in the media and experts in the education system begin to see this, but the evidence isn’t quite plain enough for non-experts, especially if those non-experts are aligned with Party Y and already committed to A, B and C….

      [continued here]

      [Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind]

    • Some facts (Updated 1/15/17)

      There have been numerous news stories about packages I and others received this past summer. I am not sure that any of them capture just how troubled I have been by this. I have been so troubled, in part, because of its apparent connection with what I take to be a campaign of harassment by Brian Leiter. I think it is best if I turn my energies away from these events, and back to both my philosophical work and my efforts to improve the profession, but, first, I think it is worthwhile being clear about some facts:

      1) I was sent a package of feces in the mail this summer, as were three other philosophers. This package arrived at my place of work with no postmark or return address. I discovered that this happened to the three other philosophers on October 6th.

      2) The four of us are connected only in that we were entangled in a dispute with Brian Leiter two years previous. We had not met prior to Brian Leiter's attack on my work in July 2014. To this day, I have only met one of the four.

      3) At least one of those packages was sent from the 60666 zip code, which is the zip code for O'Hare International Airport.

      4) All of the packages were sent with excessive postage and no postmark. 

      5) One package, sent internationally, had an undated customs form filled out incorrectly with fictional information, which some have claimed is linked to Brian Leiter. As it was filled out, it would not likely have been accepted over the counter at a post office.

      6) That package was tracked for the first time at O'Hare International Airport around midday on June 23rd. 

      7) Brian Leiter had a flight that left O'Hare International Airport on the afternoon of June 22nd. 

      (more…)

    • Agency Biopower: The Juridical Force Awakens

      One of the most prominent features of biopolitics is the emergence of administrative law.  Created by statutory authority, numerous governmental agencies engage in rulemaking at a very granular level to interpret and apply broad statutory provisions.  For example, if a statute says that “banks” are to be regulated in the context of lending, an administrative agency might be asked to issue rules on whether payday lenders should be considered “banks” under the statutory definition.  Or, to adopt an example well-known from philosophy of law, suppose a federal law were to say “no vehicles in parks.”  The Park Service would be tasked with deciding what, exactly, constitutes a “vehicle.”  Is a skateboard a vehicle?  How about an actual jeep, minus its engine, to be used as part of a sculpture to honor veterans?  As the example illustrates, most of the actual regulatory power the statute has arises not in its vague provisions, but in the rules that interpret and apply those provisions.

      Perhaps the best-known, recent real-world examples concern the Clean Air Act (CAA).  In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had the authority to – and was required to – regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the CAA.  The core question was whether carbon dioxide was a pollutant as defined by the CAA, which stipulates that the EPA has rulemaking authority to regulate emission of “any air pollution agent … , including any physical, chemical, … substance … emitted into … the ambient air,” and ought to do so when the pollutant  “cause[s], or contribute[s] to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”  If the EPA decides not to regulate such a pollutant, it needs to come up with a good reason why not, which the Court in this case concluded it had not.  The EPA was thus required to come up with rules about carbon emission for new vehicles.  More recently, in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA exceeded its regulatory authority in restricting various emissions from coal plants because it failed to consider the cost of implementing those regulations.  These cases point to the rise of biopower as a form of governance, as administrative agencies grow in power relative to other kinds of governance, and become the locus of the sorts of micro-regulations that Foucault identified as the “police” function.

      (more…)

    • Worst. Legislature. Ever.

      UPDATE (12/24). Don't take it from me.  The Electoral Integrity Project, which monitors and rates elections internationally, scored North Carolina.  It wasn't pretty.  A sample from the report, as cited in the linked article:

      "On the measures of legal framework and voter registration … on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project."

      As Nietzsche said, "that which does not kill me, makes me stronger."  The late  poet and diarist Jim Carroll added that "my version is, that which does not kill me, makes me sleep until 3:30 the next afternoon."  We can add now: "that which does not kill me makes me cheat until well into the evening of a special session."

      ORIGINAL POST: I had been going to do a post called “If You Think You’re Going to Lose, Cheat.  If you Lose Anyway, Cheat Some More” in response to last week’s special NC legislative session, which was enough to cement the NC GOP as one of the worst governing bodies in the country.  Today, however, they surpassed themselves.  A quick review is in order, as the NC legislature makes Wisconsin look well and transparently governed.  For that matter, the level of shenanigans and corruption is starting to make Zimbabwe look well-governed.

      (more…)

    • Is Most of the Intelligence in the Universe Non-Conscious AI?

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      In a series of fascinating recent articles, philosopher Susan Schneider argues that

      (1.) Most of the intelligent beings in the universe might be Artificial Intelligences rather than biological life forms.

      (2.) These AIs might entirely lack conscious experiences.

      Schneider’s argument for (1) is simple and plausible: Once a species develops sufficient intelligence to create Artificial General Intelligence (as human beings appear to be on the cusp of doing), biological life forms are likely to be outcompeted, due to AGI’s probable advantages in processing speed, durability, repairability, and environmental tolerance (including deep space). I’m inclined to agree. For a catastrophic perspective on this issue see Nick Bostrom. For a polyannish perspective, see Ray Kurzweil.

      The argument for (2) is trickier, partly because we don’t yet have a consensus theory of consciousness. Here’s how Schneider expresses the central argument in her recent Nautilus article:

      (more…)

    • Shameless Self-Promotion Dept: Papers on Foucault, and on Spinoza

      I've just uploaded a (relatively minor) revision of my SPEP paper from this fall in Salt Lake City to SSRN.  The paper is ""Confessing Preferences: What Foucault’s Government of the Living can tell us about Neoliberalism and Big Data," and the abstract is:

      Foucault’s 1979-80 Collège de France lectures, On the Government of the Living, offer one way to situate the development of his later work, and in particular to understand his supposed turn away from biopolitics and governmentality to ethics and subjectivity.  In this paper, I argue that (1) a unifying thread in most of Foucault’s work from the late 1970s onward is an increasing concern with the centrality of confession as a primary technology of power in the Christian West; and (2) Neoliberalism is deeply confessional, and therefore highly suspect from a Foucauldian standpoint.  (3) These connections are particularly evident in a Foucauldian reading of data analytics (“big data”).

       

      I've also uploaded a somewhat older paper on Spinoza and finitude.  The  paper is "Of Suicide and Falling Stones: Finitude, Contingency, and Corporeal Vulnerability in (Judith Butler’s) Spinoza," and the abstract is:

      This paper juxtaposes Judith Butler's reading of Spinoza with the commonly-received, originally Deleuzian, presentation of Spinoza as the "anti-Hegel" or as the presentation of "positivity" against Hegelian "negativity." Working via the key commentary by Pierre Macherey in Hegel ou Spinoza, I argue that, once we no longer are compelled to read Spinoza as Hegel's negation or opposite, the way is open to see a Spinoza who is profoundly concerned with human fragility and finitude. the Spinoza that emerges presents a more cautious, but also potentially more generous, approach to emancipatory politics.

      To put the point too schematically, readings of the affirmative Spinoza tend to develop the importance of conatus as resistance, at the expense of developing an understanding of the importance of limitations imposed by our own finitude. It seems to me that much of Butler’s thought can be read as bringing those elements together. How do we understand conatus, and marshal it as resistance, given the inevitability of finitude and constraint as factors that structure the desires through which we actually live?

       

    • More on the Troubling Neoliberal Privatization of Health Care

      Developments this week highlight the problems with the neoliberal decision to privatize medicine in the U.S.  Certainly the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which entrenches responsibility for access to healthcare to private insurance companies and then attempts to contrive a market for patients to shop between insurance plans as some sort of proxy for shopping for doctors, is the most famous recent example of this decision.  Never mind that in market terms medicine is a classic credence good: you may not know either before or after purchase whether you are getting a good deal, and the barriers to knowing this are nearly insuperable owing to the inherent complexity of medicine and the inherent uncertainty behind most medical judgment, even perfectly executed by brilliant practitioners.  Medical care just isn’t one of those things that works well as a market good. 

      Meantime, this week, President Obama signed the 21st Century Cures Act.  This bipartisan bill makes an enormous investment in research into urgent health problems from Alzheimer’s, to opiate addition, to cancer, and continues to fund the promising developments in “precision medicine.”  This is an obvious good.  What could be wrong?  The tradeoff, beyond the now stale point that there is no investment in the social determinants of health – like urban infrastructure – is that it loosens regulatory requirements for drug approval even further.  As the Washington Post reports:

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    • Trump and Neoliberalism

      What does the Trump election mean for neoliberalism as a doctrine?  Adam Kotsko over at An und für sich has some interesting thoughts on the matter; what follows is intended as a constructive engagement.  As I posted last week, I think Trump’s victory is inseparable from what Foucault calls state racism, and the appointment of Steve Bannon and nomination of Jeff Sessions certainly adds evidence to the theory that his will be a government of White Supremacy (I am not going to engage in the parlor game of distinguishing “white nationalism,” “white supremacy,” and so on.  It’s a parlor game that requires white privilege even to play, and all the iterations mean the same basic thing: white people should be in charge).  One of my points there is that the system is structurally rigged against cities and other places where non-Trump voters live.  At current count, Clinton – garden variety neoliberal – is up by nearly 1.7 million votes in the popular vote count, and that number is growing.  This means that more people who voted want neoliberalism than want Trumpism, for what that’s worth.  At the very least, it means that we need to think about neoliberalism as a dispositif of biopolitics, and how that intersects with the 1930s version that Foucault’s remarks on state racism address and that Trump seems to channel.

      Kotsko thinks that we should grant that Trump isn’t a neoliberal, and think about the ramifications for neoliberalism.  All of this is thus necessarily a speculative exercise.  Still, I think a couple of points are worth noting, beyond the more general one that if neoliberalism can survive the financial crisis intact, then we should always be skeptical about reports of its death.  Here are two reasons I’m not convinced that Trump and Trumpism aren’t neoliberal in a fundamental way.

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    • The 2016 Election and Racism, Soft and Structural

      Foucault famously proposed that biopolitics – the power to foster life, or allow it to die – tended to produce its own outside in the form of state racism: not only might life be allowed to die, but there might be those who must die, literally or metaphorically, so an inside “we” could live. That is, it is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (Society must be Defended, 254).  Note the subtle elision: there is life that is allowed to die, and then there is also life that must die.  Thus, “if you want to live, they must die” (255) becomes the message.  In other words, biopolitics produces two forms, almost simultaneously.  Foucault is thinking of 1930s fascism, where (for example), the German emphasis on the health of the ethnically-German population was coupled with the extermination of European Jews.

      But there’s an analogue, however imprecise, in the Presidential election last week.  In it, we saw two versions of biopolitics.  On the one hand, Clinton ran on a campaign of building a better life together, with a particular emphasis on fostering the lives of children and families.  The Affordable Care Act would be improved.  Paid leave for working parents.  And so on.  Even her negative ads against Trump emphasized the positive biopolitics: our children are watching.  What kind of President do you want them to see? On the Trump side, we saw nothing but Herrenvolk biopolitics: Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans and women were taking over, making America not great.  This had to stop.  Law and Order.  Our country is at its nadir, thanks to an ineffective, losing President who was probably born in deepest, darkest Kenya anyway.  He also somehow founded ISIS, which by the way is winning. China is winning.  Everyone but America is winning.  But if we keep the Mexican rapists out, and all the Muslims, maybe something good can happen.  We will be strong.  We will win again.  In Messianic tones that Masha Gessen reminds us (this piece is a must read) we should take very seriously, he proclaimed that “I alone” can save you.  That almost none of that narrative was true became irrelevant, in the same haunted house in which Clinton’s email server somehow became a darker mark against her character than his many business failings, tax evasions, failures to pay subcontractors, etc.

      Two version of biopolitics.  In Foucauldian terms, Trump was advocating the return of state racism.  At one level, this is an obvious point, given his endless racist rhetoric about Mexicans and Muslims in particular.  But liberal commentators, including myself, have tried very hard to explain the Trump victory in other ways.  I have decided it can’t be done.  The Trump election is fundamentally about the maintenance of White Supremacy, something that women and people of color said a week ago.

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    • Two Quick Thoughts on the Election

      Leiter's post-mortem is worth reading, as is the analysis he links to by Ian Kerr.  If Trump does what he ran on (and what in his speech last night he said he wants to do: build infrastructure.  And really, he's right that our infrastructure is a national embarrassment), it's going to be very interesting to see how he intersects with the Republican party in Congress, since they don't want to spend money on things like that, or any of the other populist parts of the Trump agenda.  And his supporters are going to be very disappointed that he can't constitutionally do a lot of what he promised.

      Here are two things that I haven't heard mentioned that need to be talked about.

      1. Libertarians.  Gary Johnson got more votes than Trump's margin of victory in a lot of places, if my memory of late last night serves me well.  What percentage of those votes came from Clinton versus from Trump?  We'll never know, but in a very concrete way, libertarians own the Trump presidency.  When Nader was informed that his candidacy cost Gore in 2000, the response was a smug "well, Gore should have been a better candidate."  No doubt he (and Clinton) could have been better (I'm going to say something about that in point #2).  But that argument fundamentally misunderstands what it means to live in a majoritarian system.  In a parliamentary system, vote for the 5% candidate!  You'll get a seat in parliament, and maybe even a part of a ruling coalition.  But in a majoritarian system, if you vote for a candidate who can't win, you are indicating your acceptance of whoever does win.  You don't care, you can't tell a difference, whatever.  Because you take away a vote from the candidate you regard as less evil.  This isn't strategic voting or anything like that.  This is a structural feature of the system.  Don't blame the parties.  Blame the Constitution.  Anybody who voted for Johnson in a state more of a battleground than California or Texas needs to know that they played a non-trivial part in the Trump victory.  And Trump has indicated hostility to rights: during the campaign, he showed complete contempt for the 1st, 4th (and probably 5th), and 14th Amendments.  And women's rights are next, given that he's going to get Court appointments.  The Contrast with Clinton was very stark.  A Johnson vote in a battleground state was at the level of "what's Aleppo?"
      2. The Auto Bailout.  I had to go out and get milk this morning, and had a moan with the cashier at the grocery store.  She said that she couldn't believe he won Michigan, given the auto bailout.  And then it struck me.  Obama made a very high-risk, unpopular decision to bail out the auto industry – and in the process saved thousands and thousands of largely-white, working class jobs in places like Michigan and Ohio.  In other words, he took a huge risk to help the sort of people who voted for Trump.  Did he help them all?  Of course not.  Did other things he do hurt them?  Probably.  But the rust belt would have been in much, much worse shape without the bailout.  And I didn't hear Hillary mention the auto bailout even once during the campaign.  When you're looking for something to say in Ohio and Michigan about how democratic party elites stand up for working people without college degrees, you should probably start there.  It's an actual achievement, and it took some courage to get it done.