procrastinating

I need a concrete task.

Post-race

I tend to agree that we can become post-racial. But banter about the idea rarely involves a clear set of properties defining the post-racial. What would it look like? How is it supposed to function? How is it different from a racial society? On the last point, one hits squarely the question of whether this supposed phenomena of "colorblindness" is possible or even desirable.

A good place to start would be the empirical aspects of race. The watering-down of great sociological and psychological research during 60s and 70s is what allowed the anti-PC movement to arise. The idea of using respectful titles was separated from the empirical fact that names matter to things that we presumably desire, like self-esteem.

Now, social-psych research has come a long ways since the 60s and 70s. I'm not saying all of those studies would pass the sniff test today. My point is merely that, if we want to talk about race, we need to define the empirical criterion. (Here is a powerful example of what I mean.) Moving to realm of rhetoric is just asking for the talking heads to drive in with their propaganda-tanks and win the battle of ideas.

Further, relying on marketers and advertisers to measure the opinions of the public seems problematic. In the first place, they often rely upon and are vigorous consumers of social scienfic research. Secondly, while gathering self-reported data can be useful, if we really want to understand social phenomena, we need to know more than just the fact of the matter, but causes and therapies. This is something social sciences pursue, which marketers and advertisers tend to avoid.... and insofar as they pursue therapies, the social good is not really their interest.

The article I point to above, for instance, identifies both the phenomena, possible causes, and possible therapies. In fact, one might say that they are unexpected therapies. For instance, it points out that inter-racial association is not necessarily good enough to overcome this "other-race" effect. Training seems important.

So, I guess my point is that a post-racial society means different things to different people. And my worry is that, while it might in fact be true that for each generation, "culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image," this isn't necessarily a good thing. There ought to be some sort of guiding principle. And it seems like the guiding principle of the Southpark generation is a perfect revelation of the illness arising when empiricism is co-opted by a rhetoric that can so easily be turned on its head.

Worth keeping an eye on

PolitiFact.com: How is Obama fairing on his campaign promises?

ruthless

Glennzilla strikes again. And helps clarify what was not already unbelievably clear.

To begin with, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not "being tried by the UCMJ." And that's not a ancillary or technical issue. That's the whole point of the military commissions controversy. They could have tried Guantanamo detainees in civilian courts or in standard courts-martial proceedings governed by the UCMJ. Instead, they created an entirely new process of "military commissions" that were explicitly not governed by the rules and safeguards of the UCMJ.

In fact, the Military Commissions Act (.pdf), pursuant to which Guantanamo military commissions are conducted after the Supreme Court's 2006 Hamdan ruling, explicitly states in numerous provisions that various critical safeguards and procedural rights afforded by the UCMJ do not apply to detainees tried at Guantanamo (see e.g., 948b (c) and (d)). The most notable (though far from only) example is that the Military Commissions Act expressly allows the use of evidence obtained through coercion (see 948r), whereas the UCMJ explicitly bars the use of such evidence (830 Art. 30(d)):

No statement obtained from any person in violation of this article, or through the use of coercion, unlawful influence, or unlawful inducement may be received in evidence against him in a trial by court-martial.

In critical respects, the Guantanamo military commissions and proceedings under the UCMJ are opposites. That's the whole point of the controversy and always has been.

as seen on reddit

Katrina

President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.

President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina. Citing the Bush Administration's "unconscionable ineptitude" in responding to Hurricane Katrina, then-Senator Obama introduced legislation requiring disaster planners to take into account the specific needs of low-income hurricane victims. Obama visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more trips to the region. He worked with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to introduce legislation to address the immediate income, employment, business, and housing needs of Gulf Coast communities.

President Barack Obama will partner with the people of the Gulf Coast to rebuild now, stronger than ever.

And it's right on the new whitehouse website!

Kantian twists

What I love about Kant is that he constantly forces us to twist our expectations.

For instance, in the Critique of Judgment, beauty involve a relationship between the feeling of pleasure and a judgment. What direction does that relation flow? Do we have a feeling of pleasure and then judge something to be beautiful? Or, do we judge something to be beautiful and then have a feeling of pleasure?

Our intuition would be that we experience the pleasure of observing a masterful work of art. Then we assert: that work of art is beautiful! But Kant flips this on its head.

He argues that assertions about beauty presuppose a universal voice - we don't mean simple that the work of art is agreeable to my sentiments. We mean that is should be agreeable to yours as well.

"If one calls the object beautiful, one believes oneself to have a universal voice, and lays claim to the consent of everyone, whereas any private sensation would be decisive only for him alone and his satisfaction" (5:126).

Thus, if we buy into Kant's account of beauty, no feeling of pleasure can provide a ground to leap towards a judgment of beauty. In judgments of beauty, then, the relation must flow from the judgment to the feeling of pleasure. What an odd thing to say!

symbolic gestures and moral absolutism

always insightful:

Amazingly, when you consider that this conflict regularly takes the lives of hundreds of people, it was the gesture that counted. It was the fact that one side showed willingness to even budge on matters of principle that prompted the other to do the same. It just goes to show that when people promote their ideas to the rank of beliefs, they risk losing the ability to view those issues rationally.

I don't know if I like the wording of the last point, however. Maybe I'm reading too much into "risk", but it's not necessarily a pitfall of moral reasoning that it resist a utility calculus. In fact, insofar as we admit that these "beliefs" of the moral absolutists are epistemically distinct from the "facts" of the pragmatic non-absolutists, we also imply that there are cognitive reasons to keep them distinct. The gesture, after all, is what makes possible the value of facts; and so, while rationality informs us, by utility calculus, what is useful, moral reasoning and beliefs are the means by which we select the very goal of that utility.

To put it circularly: we shouldn't be surprised that moral absolutists are enraged by tangible bribery, just as we don't expect moralist to fight against materialism. It is a rational domain that is, in some sense, defending itself. Though I think we could also give some sort of materialist, pop-evolutionary account of why moral reasoning is useful for the material survival of a social species.

logical fallicies

Greenwald points them out:

The fact that the people of Location X are suffering doesn't mean that anything and everything their government directs to the general vicinity of those inflicting the suffering is justified. Haven't we learned that lesson over the last eight years? Conversely, to object to the actions taken by a government (e.g.: torture, warrantless eavesdropping, attack on Iraq) is not to deny the legitimacy of the original grievance in response to which those measures are ostensibly undertaken (e.g.: the 9/11 attacks). Isn't that basic by now? Those who haven't learned that lesson have no basis ever for objecting to war criminality, or excessive or reckless military actions, or any other means employed by those with legitimate grievances.

sex differences

ahhh statistics.

Every serious player has an objective rating - the Elo rating - that measures their skill based on their results against other players. Bilalic looked at a set of data encompassing all known German players - over 120,000 individuals, of whom 113,000 are men. He directly compared the top 100 players of either gender and used a mathematical model to work out the expected difference in their Elo ratings, given the size of the groups they belong to.

The model revealed that the greater proportion of male chess players accounts for a whopping 96% of the difference in ability between the two genders at the highest level of play. If more women took up chess, you'd see that difference close substantially.

Kant on philosophical baggage

Hence, it is not left to the philosopher's discretion whether he wants to remove the seeming conflict [between nature and freedom] or leave it untouched; for, in the latter case the theory about this would be bonum vacans, into possession of which the fatalist could justifiably enter and chase all morals from its supposed property, as occupying it without title.

Groundwork, 4:456

An apparent warning to philosophers who simply want to assume freedom; a warning to political philosophers who don't want to grapple with the possible baggage that a clear concept of freedom might carry; an assault on libertarians stripping morality from property with an abstraction of freedom from title.

Charter Schools

Public Role, Private Gain
Board Chairman, a Banker, Took Actions That Stood to Benefit His Employer and Customers

I wonder if New Orleans is doing any better with their charter school system? Probably worse.

The most interesting thing I've read all week.

Mobbing and the Virginia Tech Massacre

This analogy brought it all together:

It was only after Cho committed his murders that observers
discerned in him a murderous personal identity. This is like calling a
substance dynamite after it explodes. If it could not be recognized as dynamite earlier, it may well have been something else, maybe a benign substance like garden fertilizer, sawdust, or ripening fruit, that detonated under an unusual combination of specific conditions.

Especially after having a discussion over whether sociology should be considered a science, and whether the social sciences are led astray by mimic the scientific rigor of the hard sciences.

*Although I must say that the author's account uses a lot of very unprofessional language.  Since when did sociologists start using the term "going postal"?

(Which was a great conversation, btw. I've certainly had to rethink a few of my points, which is often the manner of my dreams following drunken discourse. I've also learned that, when I'm losing a conversation, attribute the opponent's position to something Keith might say.)

Ayers

A lot of people are talking about Ayer's column in the NYTimes. Some people are asking why it was published, why he was given space. But I think the answer is obvious. Most people still don't have a clear position.

A lot of people seem to be condemning Ayers. But I'm confused as to what the actual problem seems to be. Is it because he's re-writing a bit of history? Maybe. But the splitting and recombining of groups seems a lot more significant when you're an insider. I think the underlying problem is that we constantly keep having this difficult moral problem thrust upon us. And we're sick of it.

There seems to be a lot of contradiction in people's thoughts - especially in the comments (where writers seem to be a bit more prone to espouse their intuitions). Many are condemning the violent underpinnings of the Weatherman movement. But many are also sneaking in that problematic "except in extreme circumstances" provisio. But it's not clear how one can be justified in making such a move. Where do you draw the line? How do you know when the circumstances are extreme? The problem is that you don't. History tells you whether you did or not; that is, the winners of History.

More importantly, if the Weatherman's bombing campaign had been successful in turning public opinion, what would the consequences have been? That whenever we fundamentally disagree with the government we start blowing shit up?

"No," we think, "this would lead to the rule by the angry mob." Extreme circumstances can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And even if we try to formalize that line with an intuitionist or pragmatic account, it will simply amount to another rule that could be part of the network of unjust rules.

But "yes," we think, "if there were still slavery or segregation, I'd blow shit up." Certain pictures seem so morally obvious that it's hard to understand how they were not recognized as such. The beauty of hind-sight, we might wax sarcastically; But hind-sight is very compelling. The mere fact of it being hindsight doesn't make it any less true. And truth is something we should at least aim at in a moral theory.

For the most part I'm a Kantian about this. But I had my day as an anarchist. And I feel that urge constantly. I want to fuck shit up when I see an injustice. Though now I'm a bit more humble: when I know I see an injustice. And even then - we can't always wait around for knowledge, which is it's own problem. Perhaps we just have to hope that our parents instilled in us a solid moral habit?

One way I often play with the idea of radical activism is to go the martyr route. It seemed to work well in the Middle East. Not just for extremists; I'm thinking of our Lord and Savior, too. Here's the thing about breaking the law - we don't want people thinking they are above the law. Even when there are bad laws, there are also good laws. But if we can overthrow one, why not overthrow them all? What other ground does law stand upon?

Let's try another direction. What does it mean to think you are above the law? One might argue, it means that the law doesn't apply to you. But that doesn't seem rational, at least. We'd have to be using the term law incoherently. It's universal but there are exceptions. How does that work?

So let's assume we have a coherent interlocutor. What does it mean to be above the law? It seems to mean that you think you are above the consequences of the law. It's not that the law doesn't apply - you're already admitting you broke the law. What you don't want is to be held responsible for breaking that law. You want to 'get away with it.'

This is where the martyr is different. They accept the consequences; and if jury has mercy, they refuse it.

Under this line of thinking, then, the test for radical action and the knowledge required is not: Can I accept responsibility? Rather, it is: Do I accept the responsibility? The only noble, violent political act is the one that you take as your own. There is not even the hope of escape repercussions. In fact, you demand them.

And, I guess, when circumstance are dire enough, when enough people are willing to sacrifice their lives to stop an injustice, then you have a pretty good sign that an injustice is occurring.* Of course, that's a pretty extreme requirement. What are the payoffs?

For starters, you don't get people taking radical political action for any-old cause. You also get people who think long and hard about the consequences of their actions.

More importantly, you respect a very Kantian feature of law: that moral law is law that you yourself would prescribe. And, it turns out to be a law that any other reasonable person would prescribe as well. Particular implementations will vary. And this is important - we don't want to be calling faulty implementations an injustice.

One last point: I can't imagine why anyone thinks they make ground by citing SouthPark. It's cute "political lessons" are always contrived, and often speak to a base sentiment about the way the world works - a sentiment that empiricism often proves to be incorrect. In this case, the problem with the underpants gnome explanation is that the only way the plot device would work is if there were in fact underpants gnomes. So what is the lesson we take outside the realm of SouthPark? That minority opinions are really just crazy, even if they are in fact true. But this isn't what empiricism teaches. It goes too far. We ought not reject ridiculous explanations out of hand; we ought only to reject those explanations that are impossible to falsify.


*Of course, there is also the problem of brainwashing. Here's the thing with suicide bombers, etc. They never face the law. They never face the reproach of their peers, so they never face the possibility that the injustice they perceived was false.

expertise

Two important stories today about the media and their experts.

One quick note: How much of what these experts are saying is really that important? Restricted to sound-bites, it's not clear that they are providing more information than an average person could muster with a few hours of study.

The media relies more on celebrity than on expertise; expertise is construed, so that celebrity can be granted. Whether or not they are experts, they can't present themselves as such. So the media gives them a name: expert. Now we'll listen.

But compare these experts to those on programs like Bill Moyer's Journal. Nothing challenging, no gotchas; but give anyone 20 minutes and you don't have to be an expert to know whether someone else is. To control the media: rather than what an expert knows, they must control who an expert is.

What can we do?

I'm profoundly disturbed by the city's decision to demolish and entire neighborhood. Whatever the cause.

Now, in this case they want to build a hospital. Seems reasonable, right? Except that there is a perfectly good hospital right next door. Charity has been abandoned since Katrina. Is it too old, too damaged? Heck no! The Army Core of Engineers had Charity ready to be opened within weeks after Katrina. (But nobody wants to open a Charity Hospital. Heck no! Those poor people might come back.)

Moreover, Charity was built almost 70 years ago. Doesn't that seem old? Yes. But that also means quality. It was built long before construction was divided up amongst hundreds of contractors, each trying to cut corners and save a buck. (Do I sound like an old fart? Sure. But it's true. Just look at the shit put up where St. Thomas used to be. It barely survived Katrina, and it didn't even flood!)

So the question is: What can we do about it? It's late in the game; is it too late?

theory and practice

I get hot when GG get's all Kantian on our ass.

Presumably, there are instances where a proposed war might be very pragmatically beneficial in promoting our national self-interest, but is still something that we ought not to do. Why? Because as a matter of principle -- of ideology -- we believe that it is not just to do it, no matter how many benefits we might reap, no matter how much it might advance our "national self-interest" (just as we don't break into our neighbor's home and steal from them even if they have really valuable things to take and we're pretty sure we won't get caught).

For some reason it became hip to be pragmatic. And I'm pretty sure it's not because Americans have decided to start reading Dewey and James (or Hume, for that matter). I'm also pretty sure it's not because we've become a scientific nation. Empiricism tends to lead us down the path of scepticism - right for the natural world into the moral one. And, I'm most certain that it's not because we have rejected the possibility of universal moral laws. There isn't anarchy on the streets; nor has any sort of religious pluralism taken hold.

I suspect our contemporary American pragmatism simply the result of laziness: Why stop at practical skepticism when you can shoot down the whole game? (Global warming, stem cells, cloning, etc.) Moreover, why conform to moral laws when you've got fine moral sentiments thank-you-very-much?

After all, wasn't morality supposed to be easy?

But I don't think I want to stop here. I'm not a distopian. It's not the American people that have gotten lazy; it's our academics and elites. And they've dragged the country down with them.

"smart" people believe in souls

Why is it that so many intellectuals don't believe that there can be pyschological harm? Do they think that our minds don't work under the same causal principles as the rest of the universe; that brains under-determine the mind? Do our top scientists really believe in anti-empirical and anti-scientific concepts such as immortal souls? Or, better, believe what they will - do we really want to be funding people who think they know about these immortal souls?

What is this talk about souls? Isn't this exactly what the anti-PC movement is doing? Psychological research in the 60s and 70s showed that there are strong correlations between language, self perception, mental health, and bodily health. It's perhaps unfortunate that this arose in the time of post-modern hoopla. But they were at least effective in attempting to integrate this information into other fields. If I can identify an empirical correlation, is that any less useful than a correlation between fists and bruising? (Well, of course it is! But smart people should understand how to think about and draw generalizations from different standards of statistical significance!)

Times Pic's usual standard of bias

What's wrong with this headline:Investigator says waste dumped as sabotage or the subheader: Rogue SDT employee instigated illegal sewage disposal, he says ?

No mention of the fact that this investigator was hired by SDT. He was not an independent investigator. I have nothing against SDT, but this is shoddy journalism. The headline is misleading and the article itself barely supports the headline; nor is there any need to open the article with gossip and unjustified accusations. The guy may have lied. But Kirkham doesn't provide any good reasons to drag the employee's name through the mud. In fact, he makes it clear that SDT can't even fire the guy yet, based on whistleblower laws. So they got the Times-Pic to harass him for them.

The things actual science can teach us.

Not that there aren't a lot of huge generalizations in this article. But it starts with the leg work. 10,000 hours to become an expert. Hey, Kant spent almost 10 years on his first Critique. Gotta get working.

I know I'm somewhat of cynic

but, if Bush Says ‘Smarter’ Regulation Needed, Not More, then I think that means we simply need more. I mean, do we really think someone like Bush can identify what "smarter" is?