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    • Why Faculty Lock-Outs Are Irresponsible And Inappropriate

      By: Samir Chopra

      In response to my previous post making note of the lock-out of faculty at Long Island University (LIU), a Facebook friend wrote on my page:

      So, I don’t understand. What makes university professors any different than people who work any other job? If you don’t like the pay, or don’t like the working conditions, simply go somewhere else. An employeer prohibiting someone from coming into their workplace who doesn’t agree to the terms of their employment is immenently fair. I’m sure the employeer (whatever, whoever, and for whatever industry) has made a calculated position to turn away their employees because they weren’t worth the compensation they demanded. The employees may not feel that way, and maybe they can come to an agreement, but maybe not and both sides go their own merry way.

      Because students are people, not products; because education is not a commodity. That’s the short answer, and it should be enough. But let’s look a little closer.

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    • Long Island University’s Labor Day Gift To The Nation: A Faculty Lock-Out

      By: Samir Chopra

      Some university administrators manage to put up a pretty good front when it comes to maintaining the charade that they care about the education of their students–they dip into their accessible store of mealy mouthed platitudes and dish them out every turn, holding their hands over their hearts as paeans to the virtues of edification are sung by their choirs of lackeys. Some fail miserably at even this act of misrepresentation and are only too glad to make all too clear their bottom line is orthogonal to academics. Consider, for instance, the folks at Long Island University who have kicked off the new academic semester in fine style:

      Starting September 7, the first day of the fall semester at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus, classes will be taught entirely by non-faculty members—not because the faculty are on strike, but because on the Friday before Labor Day, the administration officially locked out all 400 members of the Long Island University Faculty Federation (LIUFF), which represents full-time and adjunct faculty.

      Yessir, what a fine Labor Day gift to the nation this makes.  When contract negotiations with your workers fail, well, you don’t continue trying to find an agreement in good faith; you just lock them out¹ and replace them with grossly under-qualified folks instead:

      Provost Gale Haynes, LIU’s chief legal counsel, will be teaching Hatha yoga….Rumor has it that Dean David Cohen, a man in his 70s, will be taking over ballet classes scheduled to be taught by Dana Hash-Campbell, a longtime teacher who was previously a principal dancer and company teacher with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

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    • Issue Opinion Polls are Bad Biopolitics

      I am not the first to say this (I believe Habermas critiqued opinion polls in Theory of Communicative Action, though I bet he didn’t use the Foucauldian language I’m about to), but I live in what is now considered a “purple” state, which means my vote might actually matter, and so I am inundated with opinion polls. So allow me my few minutes of ranting here. Don’t get me wrong: I am very happy to learn that the RCP polling average as of this moment has Trump down 1.7 points in North Carolina, and down 5 points nationally, with almost no path through the electoral college.  It helps me sleep at night, though whatever faith in humanity those polling numbers restore is quickly erased by the sadness that anyone could vote for someone so openly racist.  

      I don’t mind being phoned and asked who I’d vote for if the election were held today.  What is more interesting and disturbing happens when the polls try to get at issues. It’s also an excellent example of the creation of a “population,” in the sense Foucault uses the term when he talks about biopolitics.  Today was the second time I’ve been polled by an outfit that clearly only works for Republicans – in both cases, I was presented with a list of things the candidates have done, and I was asked if I was more or less likely to vote for them on that basis.  The Republicans were presented as having done only things that they clearly thought I would say were good, and the Democrats were mainly associated with higher taxes and alleged scandals.  So that’s the first point: the poll often tries to push the voter in one direction or another, to create the reality it is ostensibly researching.

      The more interesting point is the one about constructing a population, which it does extracting a series of “issues” and presenting them as a disconnected set of questions, with no attention to their context or how they might interconnect.

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    • Kajieme Powell, Charles Kinsey, and “Blue Lives Matter” in an age of structural racism

      August 19 was the two-year anniversary of the shooting death of Kajieme Powell, an unarmed black man who robbed a convenience store, and whose shooting at the hands of responding police was clearly documented on video from a bystander’s cellphone.  Powell’s killing was within a few miles and weeks of Mike Brown’s, on August 9, and the news was buried in the coverage of the protests surrounding Brown’s death.  In a way, however, Powell’s death presented a more troubling case, as cell phone footage clearly showed to any reasonable observer that the shooting was unjustified.  As I noted at the time, the officers who arrived on the scene decided to escalate with firearms before even stopping, and even their brief interaction with Powell should have convinced them that his cognitive processes weren’t normal (the video makes this abundantly clear).  It took them about 15 seconds from the moment they pulled up on the scene to open fire.  They didn’t bother to first talk to the shopkeeper who made the call, or to the eyewitnesses who had video footage of the entire incident, and their defense that Powell lunged at them was risible. Of course, after a year, the officers weren’t charged with anything.

      After the apparent lone-wolf shooting of several police officers in Dallas, "Blue Lives Matter" has emerged as a slogan.  Fair enough: the officers, who were protecting and interacting peacefully with a Black Lives Matter protest, were apparently murdered in retaliation for police shootings elsewhere.  What does it mean to say that “lives matter,” though?  I want to push the point here that when we’re talking about “lives,” we’re talking about more than the biological process of living.  After all, most of us can imagine some sort of tipping point – perhaps being in a persistent vegetative state – where we would conclude that our own life was no longer worth living: that it no longer “mattered.”  To say that “lives matter” is to say something more than the obvious truth that police officers want to get home to their families in the evening.  It’s to say that their lives as police officers should be livable, supported lives.  And if you frame the question that way, I think it is very clear that the state apparatus has failed blue lives.  Not with the relentless intensity or in the same way that White Supremacy has failed black lives (I will say more about this in a subsequent post).  But a failure nonetheless, and a failure that needs to be remarked upon, because it is related to the failure to make black lives matter.

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    • Philosophical SF

      by Eric Schwitzgebel

      We might think of fictions as extended thought experiments: What might it be like if…? Ordinary fiction confines itself to hypotheticals in the ordinary run of human affairs (though sometimes momentous, exotic, or exaggerated). In contrast, speculative fiction considers remoter hypotheticals. Although much speculative fiction considers hypotheticals of future technology (and thus is science fiction), speculative fiction also includes fantasy, horror, alternative history, and utopia/dystopia. (The abbreviation “SF” can be read either as meaning science fiction specifically or speculative fiction more broadly.)

      Speculative fiction is often of philosophical interest: SF writers think through some of the same hypotheticals that philosophers do — for example about personal identity, artificial intelligence, and possible future societies. Good SF writers think through these hypotheticals with considerable insight. I would like to see more interaction between philosophers and SF writers.

      Since 2014, I have been collecting professional philosophers’ recommendations of “personal favorite” works of philosophically-interesting science fiction or speculative fiction. Each contributor has given me a list of 10 works, each with brief “pitch” pointing toward the work’s philosophical interest. So far, I have 48 sets of recommendations — almost five hundred recommendations total!

      Since the master list is huge, I have organized it in two ways: by contributor and by author recommended. The by-contributor list consists of each list of ten works, in alphabetical order by contributor. The by-author list lists the authors (or movie directors) in order of how frequently their work was recommended. For example, the single most recommended author was Ursula K. Le Guin. The list begins with her, gathering together the Le Guin recommendations from all of the contributors. Next come Ted Chiang and Philip K. Dick, so that you can see what work of theirs has been recommended and why; then Greg Egan, then… well, I don’t want to spoil your surprise!

      * Stable URL for both Master Lists and other “Philosophical SF” project links.

      * Master List by Contributor as of Aug 15, 2016.

      * Master List by Recommended Author as of Aug 15, 2016.

      Below are the three most recent sets of recommendations.

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    • NC Anti-LGBT Law Update: NBA Moves All-Star Game from Charlotte

      North Carolina’s infamous HB2, which prohibits LGBTQ people from getting the sorts of civil rights protections that women and racial minorities receive, as well as mocking the reality of trans* by demanding that everyone go to the restroom corresponding to the “biological sex” on their birth certificate (see here), has caused even more damage.  Today, the NBA announced that, because of HB2, it would move its all-star game out of Charlotte in 2017.  The league did add that if the HB2 problem were satisfactorily resolved, the city would get the game back in 2019.  The league had been threatening this move for some time, and it could cost the Charlotte area economy around $100 million.

      Governor Pat McCrory’s response to the move was truly breathtaking, however.  As quoted in the Charlotte Observer, McCrory emailed that:

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    • Regimes of Accumulation

      In a new paper, Maximilian Fochler conducted a series of structured interviews with scientists to make an STS point: when we think of capitalism as a system that depends on “accumulation,” there are many different kinds of things that one can accumulate, many of them non-financial.  I think Fochler makes an important point, but I also think it should be pushed in a somewhat different, more critical direction.

      First, though, the results of the interviews.  Fochler interviewed both academic and non-academic scientists in Austria.  On the academic side, he looked at those in charge of labs, and the post-docs who do most of the actual bench science.  Both are engaged in a race to accumulate.  The leaders have to produce peer-reviewed publications in order to get grants, which they need to then get more peer-reviewed publications (Fochler’s interview subjects were Austrian, but it should be noted that in this country, many of those scientists have to get grants to cover their salary.  No grant, no paycheck).  The post-docs are in perhaps the most dire situation: there are a lot more post-docs than there are positions for them, and so they have to engage in a competitive race to accumulate publications as well, in order to continue in their careers (or as Becker would say, adding a polite veneer, “invest in their human capital”), either by extending their current position or gaining another one.  Adding to the stress, postdoc positions typically last 2-3 years, which is not enough time to accumulate a significant publication record (I will leave it to readers to draw the connections between this situation and that faced by the humanities precariat).

      On the corporate side, we find the CEO’s of start-ups trying to generate peer-reviewed publications, positive lab results, and other indicia that their particular research program – and its endpoint product – is worthy of continued venture capital funding, with the goal of (eventually) selling the start-up to a larger pharmaceutical company. Since the scientific process apparently takes about 10 years, and the VC funding cycle is two or three years, this is a continuous worry.  The scientists, on the other hand, much to their surprise (and mine, as I read the paper) work in a collaborative, non-competitive environment.  This is because successes and failures are attributable to the entire company.  Of course, the downside of this is that these scientists don’t accumulate anything they can use to parlay into their next job.

      The simple point I would like to add is that, despite all of the accumulation, no one is making any real money.  Not the post-docs, especially, though a move into to a faculty position adds some salary and a little job security, but also adds to the need to publish. The CEO’s and employees of the start-ups aren’t likely to get rich either: 90% of start-ups fail generally; pharmaceuticals don’t do that much better; and one study reported  that “97% of drugs in preclinical tests never make it to market, and nor do 95% of the molecules in phase 1 clinical trials and 88% of molecules in phase 2. Not until phase 3 do their prospects get much better: Of the ones that make it that far, 56% are approved” (summative quote from here).

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    • The Internet of Nature

      Big Data theorists have, for a while, been warily eyeing the growth of the “Internet of Things” (IoT), which is when “smart” technology is integrated into ordinary household devices like refrigerators and toasters.  New fridges all have warning lights that remind you to change the water filter; IoT fridges will order the new filter for you.  “Smart” utility meters are another example: they can monitor your utility usage moment by moment, making adjustments, say, to the HVAC to optimize power (or to prevent brownouts by automatically raising the temperature of everybody’s house a degree or two during peak hours).  Such smart meters are obviously key if those with rooftop solar are going to sell their surplus capacity to the power company.  They also enable very detailed surveillance of people’s home lives: they apparently know when you’re using power for the dishwasher, the shower, the TV, and so on.

      Capital knows opportunity when it arrives; if your dishwasher is using more power than the average dishwasher, expect advertising for a new, energy-efficient model.  If you routinely have lights on until very late at night, maybe you need some medicine to help you sleep, delivered to your web browser.  Your boss sees opportunity as well: if you routinely disarm the alarm, turn on the lights and open the fridge at 3:30am, maybe you’ve been out clubbing too late to be a good worker, and you need to have your desk cleared by 5:00 today.  This inference will be assisted by the fact that clubs now keep networked electronic records – ostensibly for security purposes – of who goes in and out (and who is banned: if you get thrown out of a club, all the other clubs on that network can refuse you entrance).  What if your boss buys the data from the club networks, and the utility company and crunches it to measure productivity?  Or, sells it to the insurance company, where you’re told that your new wellness initiative requires you to allow your devices to report that you come home and stay there by midnight every night, under penalty of punitive premiums?  Your auto insurance bill will almost certainly go up too, because you’ll have installed the vehicle tracking devices that will, by then, be necessary to avoid punitive insurance rates.

      But all of that is about surveilling the human.  In a fascinating new paper, Kevin Haggerty and Daniel Trottier extend the study of surveillance to nature, noting that the practice is both pervasive and growing, on the one hand, and nearly completely ignored, on the other, with the partial exceptions of Latour and Haraway.  I suspect that this is a paper destined to have a big impact; Haggerty in particular is a very significant surveillance theorist, and in a 2000 paper, he and Richard Ericson made a very influential push to orient surveillance studies around the Deleuzian notion of an “assemblage,” arguing that the Foucauldian “panopticon” had become dated.  In the current paper, Haggerty and Trottier look at several ways that we now surveil nature that they expect to grow exponentially with developing technologies.  None of them are exactly new, but things like RFID tags will make them a lot cheaper, easier, and more commonplace: the representation of ever-more-remote aspects of nature, often turning it into spectacle; using animals as agents (for example, as the Germans did during WWI, attaching cameras to homing pigeons); the increased use of biosentinels (where we rely on an animal’s response to the environment to infer information about that environment.  The canary in the coal mine or the drug-sniffing dog are the textbook examples); and taking surveillance inspiration from nature (looking at insect eyes to develop cameras that can see a full 360 degrees, for example).  They then suggest three implications for research into surveillance: (1) there are non-technological aspects of surveillance that need highlighting and study; (2) not all surveillance is of humans (contrary to what most of the literature talks about); and (3) we need to look carefully at inspirations for surveillance.  They close by highlighting that the human/nature boundary has never been a particularly bright one, and it’s likely to get less so as we move on.

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    • Why we reason redux: intention alignment and transfer of epistemic assets

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      A bit over five years ago I wrote a blog post on Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s then-recently published paper on their argumentative theory of reasoning. At that point I was about to start a research project on deductive reasoning, having as my main hypothesis the idea that deductive reasoning is best understood from a dialogical – and thus, argumentative – perspective, and so naturally the argumentative theory of reasoning was something to pay attention to. Yesterday was officially the very last day of my research project, and fittingly, earlier this week we convened for the very last (official) reading group session of the project to discuss a very recent paper by Andy Norman (CMU), forthcoming in Biology and Philosophy: ,‘Why we reason: intention-alignment and the genesis of human rationality’. The paper presents a broadly evolutionary account of human reasoning faculties, which takes on board much of Mercier & Sperber's (M&S) argumentative theory, but modifying it in important respects. Here is the abstract:

      Why do humans reason? Many animals draw inferences, but reasoning—the tendency to produce and respond to reason-giving performances—is biologically unusual, and demands evolutionary explanation. Mercier and Sperber (Behav Brain Sci 34:57–111, 2011) advance our understanding of reason’s adaptive function with their argumentative theory of reason (ATR). On this account, the “function of reason is argumentative… to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade.” ATR, they argue, helps to explain several well-known cognitive biases. In this paper, I develop a neighboring hypothesis called the intention alignment model (IAM) and contrast it with ATR. I conjecture that reasoning evolved primarily because it helped social hominins more readily and fully align their intentions. We use reasons to advance various proximal ends, but in the main, we do it to overwrite the beliefs and desires of others: to get others to think like us. Reason afforded our ancestors a powerful way to build and maintain the shared outlooks necessary for a highly collaborative existence. Yes, we sometimes argue so as to gain argumentative advantage over others, or otherwise advantage ourselves at the expense of those we argue with, but more often, we reason in ways that are mutually advantageous. In fact, there are excellent reasons for thinking this must be so. IAM, I suggest, neatly explains the available evidence, while also providing a more coherent account of reason’s origins.

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    • New paper: Parrhesia under Neoliberalism

      (From the Dept. of Shameless Self-Promotion) I have just uploaded to ssrn a paper on Foucault's last two College de France lecture courses, On the Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth, looking at main concept Foucault analyzes there: parrhesia (roughly: frank speech).  Those of you who were at my SPEP paper last year will recognize that this is the much revised and expanded version of that paper.  The ultra-short version of my thesis is that I don't think that parrhesia as Foucault recounts in the ancient Cynics will get us anywhere today (that's going the opposite direction from the doxa on these lectures).  Here is the abstract:

      Foucault’s account of parrhēsia shows why it would have little critical traction today.  In Foucault’s analysis, parrhēsia has both a political and an ethical phase; Cynicism is the most radical version of the ethical phase.  The primary characteristic of Cynical parrhēsia is full visibility, something which Foucault does not endorse but which neoliberal biopolitics actively demands.  More fundamentally, ethical parrhēsia fails as a resistance strategy because branding capital blurs the boundaries between affirmations of capital and its critique, enabling the full cooption of parrhēsia-as-visibility into the process of branding.  Our problem is a lack of politics.

      In addition to more textual work, the main additions are probably to the section on capital and branding, where I use the pharmaceutical industry as an example (drawing from this book by Phillip Mirowski.  You should pour a stiff drink before starting).  I also engage in the conclusion with an important paper by Kelly Happe on OWS (I discuss a different aspect of that paper here).