Simple Neat and Wrong

9 11 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 01:44:00 +0000

Returning from dinner this evening, I turned the corner of my building right into a small flock of middle school girls. They halted and gasped mid-sentence, staring into the sky "It's the..." said one. "The 9/11 lights," another finished.

A few minutes later I found myself in line behind one of them at the corner convenience store. She bought a cigarette lighter. Still later the flock reappeared directly in front of me. One girl said loudly to the others, "don't tell my mom about lighting this fire thing because she'd -" But the speaker was cut off by another girl: "Shhh! don't talk about fire so loud today. It's 9/11!"

I wonder just what today means to them. How old were they when the towers -- which once stood about three blocks from where I encountered the girls -- came down? 6 years old? 4? They've lived the majority of their lives in a post-9/11 world. Can it mean anything like the same thing to them?

This is my fourth September 11th living in this neighborhood, in the imaginary shadow of the towers. I wasn't here when it happened, but even I can feel the atmosphere around Ground Zero, every year. It's getting easier. Slowly.

(photos are my own)

uncivic meetings

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 03:09:00 +0000

We of the political left and middle are increasingly exhorted to acknowledge a painful truth: the bizarre public ‘debate’ over health care, its shockingly disingenuous claims and scarily angry town hall shouters, all reflects a deep undercurrent of racism in American society. It’s not us, of course; we’re not the racists. It’s them. Those people. They are the racists. The ones who turn town halls into personal echo chambers. They are racists. Not us.

This suggestion – emanating from such dispassionate analysts as Paul Krugman and Cynthia Tucker - bears so many familiar marks of self-comfort and expectation-confirmation that we should in fact be very, very wary. The thought seems simple enough: those people (not us) can’t handle the idea of a black president, but don’t want to openly admit their racism – perhaps even to themselves – and so they channel it towards ridiculous stories about death panels and incoherent rants against socialism. They have no real problem with health care reform – they just find it terrifying because of its association with Barack Obama, whom they find terrifying because he is black. They (not us) are racists.

Are there some racists among the town hall mobs? Yes, of course. There are also racists at the opera, and racists in the Democratic Congressional Caucus, and racists at your family reunion. Without a doubt, it’s worrisome that the crazy town hall phenomenon seems to have provided opportunities for rare public expression of possibly racist sentiment. Yet a handful of nasty incidents simply does not give good grounds for concluding that most members of the angry town mobs are motivated by deep racism, or that opposition to Obama’s drive for health care reform is really just a covert enactment of anxiety at a black president.

If we make such facile assumptions, we fail in two ways. First, we fail internally: we pander to our own ugly sense of superiority. The people who disagree with us, they cannot have good ideas, for they are not us! In fact, they can’t even have real ideas at all – their alleged views on public policy are mere camouflage for their vile prejudices. In opposing such people, we show ourselves to be reasonable and tolerant. (cf. Liz Lemon: “[white guilt] is to be used only for good, like overtipping and supporting Barack Obama.”) We certainly needn’t engage in any reflection on the values animating the opposing side, for plainly there can be none – racism has no value!

Second, we risk failing externally, in alienating those we accuse of racism and thereby making any sort of civic peace that much more difficult. Accusing someone of racism does not promote discussion – it ends discussion. Add to this the outrageous condescension in diagnosing an opponent’s avowed views as mere unwitting diversion, and it should be no surprise that they might be unable to see in us anything like tolerance or reasonableness. That many of the town hall screamers are so obviously destroying careful deliberation provides us justification to do the same only under the most ‘but they inhibited civic discourse first!’ playground mentality.

We need to abandon this meme, and quickly. Are some of the people who scream about Barack Obama’s socialist plan to destroy our country driven by secret racism? Yes. But it’s likely that most are merely expressing the familiar opportunistic paranoia that had Bill Clinton executing Vince Foster and that turned the phrase ‘swift boat’ into a verb. (And that finds its precise ideological counterpart in recent years’ imputation of fascism to George W. Bush.)

Some small portion of vocal health care reform opponents are racists. Some are lunatics. Some are cynical liars. But the bulk are our fellow citizens, who happen to sincerely hold values divergent from our own, however inchoate their expression may be at times. In contentedly assuming their motives dark, we show them disrespect, do a disservice to civic discourse, and – perhaps worst of all - delude ourselves in righteous comparison. It is just too happy a coincidence that the people who happen to disagree with us on an issue unconnected to race also happen to all be closet racists.

relationship jujitsu

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:57:00 +0000

I highly recommend this great little piece by Laura Munson in the NYT:

Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear

“I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”

His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, “I don’t buy it.” Because I didn’t.

Her story is an excellent reminder of how tempting it is to always see everything as being about us, as our own fault - and how difficult yet powerful it can be to break out of that pattern. This isn't fuzzy self-help stuff; this is solid practical psychology.

I love Japan so much

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:36:00 +0000

Don't you wish that American television networks covered presidential races in this fashion?!

Japan's general election is underway!

via japanprobe

birdsday on a duck island

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Conservative MP Sir Peter Viggers was forced to declare his retirement after attempting to claim £1,645 in taxpayer-funded expenses for a "duck island" in his garden.

Just what is a duck island?

Hytesbury Bird Pavilions

Now you know.

two is not enough

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:00:00 +0000

President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court will accomplish at least one thing: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will no longer feel quite so lonely.

Obama would clearly have been in some trouble had he not nominated a woman for the seat. Here's my question: will there be repercussions if he picks a man for the next vacancy? (Assume here that the next vacancy is not Ginsburg; obviously her replacement must be a woman.) When John Paul Stevens - who joined the Court when Sotomayor and Chief Justice John Roberts were in college - finally retires, will Obama be expected to name a third woman to the Court? And after that - a fourth?

Given that women comprise 51% of the national population, a representation rate of 2/9 is still quite miserable. And 3/9 won't be good enough. I'm not saying that the percentage of women on the Court must precisely mirror national demographics. But the figures also shouldn't demonstrate a blatant and dramatic bias - which they will until women hold more than a third of the seats.

But at what point do people start saying "so many women in a row! Give men a chance!"?

This is a real problem with historically entrenched discrimination. Any systematic attempt to correct it inevitably looks like a new form of ("reverse") discrimination. Does Obama have the political fortitude for that?

quandaries in pedagogical ethics

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Sun, 03 May 2009 07:18:00 +0000

Amid final paper grading, my procrastination-seeky mind alighted upon two useful ruminations. Hence, two separate dilemmas of pedagogical ethics follow:

1. It is unethical – and indeed illegal around here – to disclose a student’s grades to anyone else, including other students. This is entirely reasonable. It would even be wrong for me to tell a student that her friend did better or worse than she did. But what if I provide equivalent information without mentioning the other student?

I would like to write “highest score in the class!” on the paper of the student who earned that mark, as a means of encouragement. But given this information, she can infer that any other particular student in the class received a grade below her numerical score. Functionally I might as well just explicitly say “the following people got a grade below x”, and then list everyone but her.

Of course intent matters; my goal is to encourage her, not gossip about other students. And, arguably, had none of this occurred to me, it would have been innocent – or at least excusable – for me to have written the remark. But now that I’ve more carefully considered these consequences of praising the student in this way, I wonder if I cannot ethically do so.

2. Last year I taught a course on issue surrounding mortality, and happened to assign an essay about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, written by the current Dalai Lama. As it happened, no one complained. But suppose my class included a Chinese nationalist, someone who regards the Dalai Lama as an objectionable “splittist” and who therefore refused to read his work (even if it notionally has nothing to do with Sino-Tibetan politics).

Would I have to accept this hypothetical student’s refusal to read the course material? Of course, the university is supposed to be a place for unfettered discourse, and students should be taught not to shield themselves from views other than their own. Of course. On the other hand, we recognize exceptions for circumstances that are particularly difficult for certain students. If a student with Holocaust victim relatives told me that he felt uncomfortable reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, or if a rape victim told me she found philosophical pieces on rape triggering, then I would readily permit an exemption to the reading requirements.

Now, if someone (apparently sincerely) claims to suffer similar emotional distress from encountering the Dalai Lama, must I be similarly accommodating? Or is the specifically political genealogy of the student’s anxiety somehow disqualifying? Should it matter that I am personally more sympathetic to the Dalai Lama than to Nazis or rapists?

I don’t see handy resolutions for either of these quandaries. They both seem to require balancing the emotional needs of students against institutional considerations, and I’m simply not sure which sides end up with the greater weight.

(image from UW-Madison Dept of Info Tech)

torture memos, Eichmann, and irrevocable irresolution

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 03:35:00 +0000

The Bush administration “torture memos” released last week contain the following gem of bureaucratized sadism. It’s lengthy, but definitely worth your time to read. Asked to advise the CIA on the legality of various techniques to acquire “cooperation” from captured Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee wrote:

In addition to using the confinement boxes alone, you also would like to introduce an insect into one of the boxes with Zubaydah. As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. If you do so, to ensure that you are outside the predicate act requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain. If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, then, in order to not commit a predicate act, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause his death. [two lines redacted here] so long as you take either of the approaches we have described, the insect's placement in the box would not constitute a threat of severe physical pain or suffering to a reasonable person in his position. An individual placed in a box, even an individual with a fear of insects, would not reasonably feel threatened with severe physical pain or suffering if a caterpillar was placed in the box. Further, you have informed us that you are not aware that Zubaydah has any allergies to insects, and you have not informed us of any other factors that would cause a reasonable person in that same situation to believe that an unknown insect would cause him severe physical pain or death. Thus, we conclude that the placement of the insect in the confinement box with Zubaydah would not constitute a predicate act.

Translation: you know that Zubaydah has a phobia about insects. It’s okay to lock him into a small, dark box and toss in an insect to crawl all over him, provided that it isn’t actually a dangerous insect, and you don’t explicitly tell him that its sting causes “death or severe pain”. This is okay because a “reasonable person” would not react too badly if his torturers locked him in a trunk with a non-lethal stinging insect.

Such is the Kafkaesque legacy of the Bush administration. This week the Obama administration willingly donned a bit of the old Bush garb, as the new president promised to shield from prosecution CIA officers who engaged in torture. In his prepared statement, Obama said:

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution. … We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs.

The idea, in part, is that the CIA torturers, people who work in very dangerous circumstances and whose ability to follow orders is crucial to national security, should not be punished for having done what they were told was their job. This is the point of a chain-of-command: the people at the top make policy, and the people further down carry it out. If CIA officers were to engage in constant second-guessing of policy, America’s intelligence capabilities would be drastically hindered, perhaps resulting in terrible things. So, while we might hold accountable those who created the torture policy, we should leave alone those who carried it out.

To keep track of things, call this the Good Faith Principle: government agents who act in good faith – who conform to a policy they’ve been told is legal – should not be punished if the policy is later found to be illegal or immoral. I endorse the Good Faith Principle, for the reasons given in the last paragraph.

But, of course, there are obvious counterexamples. Most infamously, perhaps, there is Adolf Eichmann, the senior Nazi bureaucrat who knowingly kept the deportation trains running on time to the concentration camps. Before being sentenced to death in Jerusalem years later, Eichmann insisted that he ought not be punished, for he had merely been “following orders”. Nearly everyone agrees that this is just not good enough; even though Eichmann did not set Holocaust policy, he executed it. He did something absolutely terrible, and he deserved punishment for it.

Call this one the Eichmann Principle: government agents who do bad things should not be later excused from punishment on the grounds that they were “just following orders”. I endorse the Eichmann Principle.

Clearly, the Good Faith Principle and the Eichmann Principle are in tension. One says that government agents may not be held culpable for following orders, while the other says precisely the opposite. And, as I’ve indicated, I endorse both principles. Am I being inconsistent?

At this point the dominant methodology of (analytic) moral philosophy says we should try to formulate some new principle, a middle point that captures the concerns animating each of the previous principles. It will presumably be very complicated, drawing a fine distinction about what sort of conduct may be excused on grounds of good faith, or just how bad an act must be before triggering Eichmann-style responses. I don’t think we should try to formulate any such compromise principle. I don’t believe there is any way to antecedently circumscribe some region of the dense, tangled moral terrain confronted by policy makers and their agents. The problem is one of irrevocable irresolution: there are good reasons behind each opposed principle, and no formulaic way to accommodate both simultaneously.

This much must be clear: there is a line, somewhere between producing one’s own version of “Fear Factor” with entomophobic mujahideen and facilitating the mass slaughter of an ethnic group. Government agents who cross that line, even in good faith, are liable to later punishment. Where is that line? I don’t know. Neither do you, Barack Obama, or various anonymous CIA torturers at black sites around the globe. This is why real-world ethics (not the sterilized academic version) is so difficult: we cannot map unexplored moral continents before we’ve set foot on their shores.

(image: NY Times / Israeli Government Press Office)

the evo-psych of not being Larry Summers

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:17:00 +0000

I’ve just finished reading Robin Dunbar’s 1996 book, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Dunbar is an Oxford anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, most well known for the ‘Dunbar number’: the hypothesis that the ratio of human neocortex to overall brain size predicts (successfully, it seems) stable human social groups of around 150 individuals. Although the book bears a Harvard University Press imprint, it reads at times like popular science, a bit scanty on citations and too-quick with some important arguments. Nevertheless, it’s quite fascinating to read; Dunbar attempts to explain human language (and high-level cognition) as an evolutionary solution to the problem of social friction in a species whose group size has outgrown the practical limits of bonding behavior in other primates (e.g. reciprocal grooming).

I want to riff on a few different points in the book, starting in this post with a point about gender differences in the use of language, and its relation to the status of women in intellectual professions. In chapter 9, Dunbar describes research conducted with colleagues, from which they conclude that “conversations often function as a kind of vocal lek. Leks are display areas where males gather to advertise their qualities as potential mates to the females.” (176) This idea is based upon data gathered from studies of actual human conversations. In one-on-one male/female dyadic conversations, men and women talk for more or less equal periods of time. However, in conversational groups of any larger size, men tend to dominate air time. This is true even when one particular man and one particular woman break off to form a dyadic sub-conversation on the periphery of the main group; the man will tend to speak much more than he would were the pair isolated.

Dunbar and his colleagues think that the lek hypothesis can explain this difference between male/female conversational behavior in dyads and in larger groups. In lek species, males engage in competitive displays to persuade observant females of their reproductive superiority. The females are welcome to sit back and merely observe; indeed, they must do so if they want to pay attention and accurately size up the males. Dunbar and colleagues hypothesize that a similar thing happens in human conversational groups; the men (unwittingly, most of the time) are driven to speak up, to out-compete one another for the attention of the women. Such competition is unnecessary when there are no other men around, hence in isolated dyads men and women share speaking time more evenly.

One more bit of data ties this into the status of women in intellectual professions. Dunbar and colleagues analyzed not only the total quantity of speaking time, but the frequency of particular conversational content. In general, all humans of any gender tend to talk mostly about social matters; about 65% of their talk-time centers around ‘who-is-doing-what-with-whom’. (That’s one bit of critical data behind Dunbar’s central hypothesis that language evolved primarily to facilitate gossip.) Dunbar observes that in single-gender conversational groups, certain relatively intellectual topics like “work and academic matters or religion and ethics” take up only 0-5% of total conversational time. However, in mixed-gender conversational groups, the proportion of male talk-time devoted to these topics rises significantly, with much less increase in corresponding female patterns.

Dunbar offers a somewhat sketchy evolutionary hypothesis to explain that last bit. In mixed-gender groups, discussion of relatively intellectual topics increases among men because they are a way of advertising intelligence, a type of reproductive advantage. Women have no need to advertise (they are the ones who get to be choosy about mates) and so no need to out-compete each other (or men) in conversational prowess. Hence, women are less likely to increase their conversational attention to abstract subjects. (It’s important to note that all of the underlying data comes from observation of casual conversations – like those in the lunch room or hallway – not from formal contexts as in the seminar or board room, where participants gather with a specific purpose in mind.) Following on all of this, Dunbar concludes the section with the following remarks, whose relevance to his preceding points about gender difference is left unclear:

In the intellectual world of the university, demonstrating your intellectual skills by showing off your knowledge of Kant or the Romantic poets, or by being able to explain yesterday’s lecture on the second law of thermodynamics, may be quite acceptable hallmarks of competence and status. They mark you out as a cut above the rest, the obvious choice in the mating stakes. In that kind of environment, intellectual prowess is as appropriate a criterion of future status or earning power as being the best card player in a bridge club or the best musician in a music club. Knowledge, as it is so often said, is power. (177)

Given all the attention he’s just paid to the relative preponderance of intellectual topics in male conversation, and their role as a competitive advertising mechanism, is Dunbar here attempting to explain the greater success of men in intellectual, academic fields? He doesn’t say – presumably he’s smart enough not to explicitly stick his leg into that political bear trap. But it certainly sounds as if he’s suggesting as much.

Now, here’s the thing. I think we can react to this with the sort of bristly outrage that usually greets evo-psych-fueled gender difference research in feminist circles. The research is reductivist and essentializing; it provides ammunition to those who would naturalize (and implicitly justify) oppressive stereotypes. Et cetera. But I don’t think that’s the correct reaction. I actually think this sort of research should be welcomed by feminists, provided that it rests on solid methodological grounds (about which I won’t judge here).

Notice that nothing in Dunbar’s story implies or entails that men are actually better at intellectual pursuits than are women. The account just explains why men are more prone to talk about them even in informal contexts, and why men are more prone to dominate conversations regardless of topic. So it is entirely consistent with the Dunbar story that we might insist there is no (presently relevant) evidence for suspecting latent intellectual superiority in males. Instead, the account offers us two different tools for correcting gender imbalance in the intellectual professions.

First, the account provides a potential debunking explanation for gender imbalance. We needn’t invoke (as Larry Summers once did) a natural superiority among men in certain intellectual areas. Rather, we need merely presume certain sociological facts about the intellectual professions, and add these to what Dunbar and colleagues tell us. Who is most likely to get ahead? Those who speak up in front of the professional power-brokers. Who is most likely to speak up? Men. Does tendency to speak up have anything necessarily to do with actual competence? No. So we may very well understand the relative success of men in intellectual fields as an incidental consequence of behaviors that are simply arbitrary as to ability.

I would go one step even further. If Dunbar et al. are right, then all of us – men and women alike – are hardwired to expect differential linguistic behaviors between genders. We expect men to be more dominating and intellectual (even in casual conversation), and we expect women to be more quiet, or attentive only to gossipy matters. We’re generally not aware of having these expectations, still less of why we have them. But have them we do – and as with all expectations, we are unnerved when they are not met. We are biologically conditioned to react appreciatively to dominating, intellectual discursive behavior from men, and to react with at least some measure of confusion to the same from women. Hence, in addition to the success-generating basic tendencies mentioned in the last paragraph, we see another explanatory factor for relative male domination of intellectual fields: we are disposed to reward intellectual success-seeking men, and to punish similar women. Indeed, this might explain why, until very recently, nearly every human culture excluded women from political and other intellectual discussion, on grounds of propriety.

Building upon these explanatory stories, Dunbar’s account offers us a practical tool for remediating gender imbalance. Consider your academic department ‘s or workplace’s resident alpha male blowhard. He seizes control of every conversation. He clearly experiences intellectual discourse as a form of combat. Merely pointing out to him that his behavior edges out other conversational participants probably has zero effect. He cannot understand why they don’t just talk more, if they want to!

But imagine now another strategy. Show him Dunbar’s research. Explain to him that his behavior is at least partly explicable as the bidding of his lek-frenzied ape brain. Ask: does he want to be the sort of creature whose manner of participation in an abstract, rarified environment conforms better to that of a horny chimpanzee? He is a conscious, reflective being; if he wants to, he can modify the output of his evolutionary programming through a regime of attentive habituation. And with this new insight, he might also try to correct inferences he makes about the competence of others based upon their inability or unwillingness to act just like him. Is such an argument likely to work on most blowhards? No - people’s self-concepts are extremely resilient. But getting the story out might have appreciable effects upon more moderate men, and more generally on everyone in authority, whose assessments of individuals’ conversational practices matters to their advancement in the profession.

If nothing else, here’s a take-away point. Evolutionary psychology, even gender-difference evolutionary psychology, needn’t always be a vehicle for unreflective stereotype reification. We – our brains, our behaviors, or social institutions - are products of naturally selective forces. Some of the outcomes of these evolutionary processes worked perfectly well for our primate forebears, but they have come out of sync with modern, reflective, socially-conscious humans. Evolutionary psychology can sometimes allow us to trace (speculatively, at least) the causal origins of these undesirable behaviors, and so might sometimes point us to the causal-psychological joints where they may be most efficiently dismantled.

image (c) Charles Burns at edobarn.demon.co.uk

chirp chirp chirp

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:00:00 +0000

After a hiatus, birdsday returns, audibly.

Take a look at birdsongradio.com. You can listen to peaceful chitters and chirps whenever you want!

Powered by Birdsong Radio

assuming

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:43:00 +0000

Rather often while teaching, I misuse the word “assume”. What I mean to say is something like this: “philosopher X believes she has proved claim C, but that claim might still be disputed – and you students should give disputing it a go – but meanwhile we’re going to move on to examine what further conclusions X would like to draw once C is granted”. What I actually say is: “philosopher X assumes claim C in order to get the following conclusion…”. I catch this mistake at least some times, and immediately correct myself with some version of, “I mean, X has already argued for C, and now…”

But what sort of mistake have I made here? This seems obvious: I’ve unfairly accused the philosopher of making assumptions. To say that someone ‘assumes’ something is to say that she’s made that claim without any support, that she’s merely helped herself to whatever is it that she wants to say. In this sense, assuming is a bad thing to do. We’re told “never assume” about other people’s histories or intentions. Famously, one who assumes makes “an ass out of you and me”. An assumption is a bad thing because unwarranted beliefs frequently turn out to be wrong, and so deliver bad consequences for the believer and for innocent bystanders. Further, assumption seems like such an obvious evil to avoid: don’t assume without evidence – go get some evidence!

But something is wrong here. Assumption is not usually a matter of being without evidence. Typically, we assume a claim because we have some evidence for that claim, and often rather powerful evidence. The trouble is that in such cases our evidence does not wholly rule out alternative possibilities – and when those possibilities are later manifest, we get in trouble.

Here’s an example. Imagine that you and I share an office. You have a habit of nearly always taking your office keys with you when you go to the bathroom. I’ve noticed this habit, but you and I have never discussed it; we have no policy about locking the door when the other is temporarily absent. One day you return from the bathroom to find that I’ve left for the day – and locked the office with your keys inside. The next day, after hearing about your odyssey getting security to unlock the office, I apologize and explain that I’d thought you always took your keys. You shake your head, and tell me, “you shouldn’t have assumed.”

In this little story, I think that you make a legitimate complaint; I really should have waited a couple more minutes for you to come back from the bathroom, just to make sure you had your keys. But notice something odd about the (natural) use of ‘assume’ in this story. It seems correct to say here that I did in fact assume you’d taken your keys. But I had a lot of evidence for thinking that you’d taken your keys. You usually do that. I’ve seen you do it virtually without exception in the past. And on almost any other day, I’d have been right: you’d have taken your keys, and no harm would have resulted. If there’s evidential fault to be found in my belief, it’s a fault at the heart of the inductive method (and so a fault in basic science). And yet it still seems right to say that in this case I have assumed. What gives?

I think we gain traction here by noticing that there are at least two ways I might have avoided the accusation of making assumptions. First, I might have sought out other evidence bringing me far closer to certainty. I could have gone through your coat pockets, your bag, and your desk drawers – all the places you’re likely to keep your keys. If I’ve done that before locking the door, then when you later tell me that you have the peculiar habit of sometimes storing your keys in the potted plant, I might protest that cannot fault me for having made any assumptions. (You might, of course, fault me for violating your privacy.) So one way I might avoid accusation of assumption is by upping my evidence.

But there’s another possibility. Imagine – contrary to the original version of the story – that you and I had previously discussed this issue, and that we’d explicitly agreed that we were each responsible for taking our keys anytime we left the room. If you one day forget to do so and wind up locked out, you can’t fault me for making assumptions: I’ve merely acted upon our mutual understanding. But notice that our agreement in this version of the story doesn’t actually give me any better evidence than I had in the original version of the story. That’ll you’ll take your keys with you on a given day is at least as well predicted (if not better) by a lengthy pattern of previously doing so than by your explicit pledge to do so. Neither version entirely rules out the possibility that you’ll forget at some point.

If your explicit pledge to take your keys doesn’t give me any better evidence, why does it allow me to avoid accusation of assumption? Presumably because our agreement about key-taking shifts responsibility from me to you. If we don’t have the agreement, I have some responsibility to adjust my actions to a range of things you want or happen to do (like leave your keys behind). But by forging an agreement, you’ve relieved me of this responsibility, and shifted the blame for relevant consequences onto yourself. In other words, it seems that whether or not one has ‘made an assumption’ is in part a matter of who has done something right and who has done something wrong – what philosophers often call a ‘normative’ matter (specifically, in this case, an ethically normative matter).

So, to review some major points: assuming is not simply believing without evidence (as loose talk sometimes suggests); it is believing with some amount of evidence, but not enough. (Enough for what? That seems to depend on context, but the burden appears to sometimes be higher than that confronting acceptable induction.) One can avoid accusation of assumption either by greatly increasing one’s evidence, or by shifting responsibility away from oneself. All this suggests that the concept of ‘assumption’ is more richly normative than conventional wisdom has it.

Let’s return, then, to our initial example. When I tell my students that “philosopher X assumes claim C”, what I’m really attempting to communicate is something like this: “philosopher X has some evidence for C, but not as much as I think the context requires, and X has a responsibility to meet that level of evidence”. I am, then, obviously not claiming that the philosopher in question possesses no evidence at all. At the outset I suggested this was a mistaken use of the word ‘assume’, but it now looks much more apt. What I perhaps ought not be doing – for pedagogical reasons – is telegraphing to the students my own doubts about the strength of the philosopher’s evidence. But that’s another discussion.

An interesting upshot of all of this: there’s something almost tautological about the blanket admonition not to assume. Basically, “don’t assume” means “don’t accept claims for which you have contextually insufficient evidence, when it is your responsibility to be sensitive to such evidence”. Shouldn’t this be obvious to people? Is it really a credible piece of advice? It’s sort of like saying “don’t do bad things”: either someone will do things they believe to be bad or they won’t, but being told not to seems beside the point. It only has force if the speaker and the audience agree on which particular acts qualify as assumption – that is, what are appropriate standards of evidence and how are evidential responsibilities fixed in particular contexts. But there’s likely to be little consensus on that! In other words, there’s trouble with the naïve theory of assumption – it assumes too much.

image via some random public photobucket account

Freedom's never free. It's $3.1 billion.

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 04:20:00 +0000

The new World Trade Center got its first commercial tenant today: Beijing Vantone, a Chinese foreign trade group, agreed to lease 5 floors of the flagship tower, whose skeleton is only now beginning to protrude above street level. Interestingly – as pointed out this morning on WNYC, the local NPR affiliate – the contract refers to the building as “1 World Trade Center”, and not as the “Freedom Tower”. (See an NY Times article cryptically referring to it as “once called the Freedom Tower”. And, released even while I’ve been writing, here is confirmation of the official name change. )

Evidently there’s been some decision to let the “Freedom Tower” name gradually dissipate. I have mixed views about this change.

It would seem to be a good thing. The name was always a bit embarrassing, appearing to merely recapitulate America’s disturbingly possessive attitude toward the concept (if not the practice) of freedom. Wasn’t it enough that the building’s forcedly symbolic height was already a 1,776 foot long stick in the eye of America’s enemies? (Incidentally, is preservation of this purported symbolic measure going to end up another argument against converting to the metric system?)

Worse yet, the name carried certain vague yet unmistakable links to the Bush administration’s ideology of promiscuously vengeful victimhood. Why did the terrorists attack us? Because they hate our freedom! You know who else hated freedom? Saddam Hussein! Alongside the eyes-wide-shut moral permissiveness endowed on American policy by that slippery sentiment, the semiotic presence of undefeated ‘Freedom’ at Ground Zero doubtlessly also helped salve wounded national pride. Comforting and perhaps understandable in the attack’s aftermath, the whole thing is a bit awkward eight years, two wars, and one Abu Ghraib later.

And, for goodness sake, this is commercial real estate. Hey, I think that capitalism is the least-bad socio-economic system ever invented by our species. But even I wonder if the ‘Freedom’ logo is a bit tarnished attached so prominently to a shiny robber baron encampment. (Not to mention that the artist’s conception depicts an enormous jagged blue phallus rudely erupting from graceful lower Manhattan.)

Now, to be fair, there’s nothing new about embarrassingly sentimental public nomenclature. Indeed, Liberty Street, which lines the southern boundary of the Trade Center site, was known as King Street until, in a fit of fraternal regicidal pride, New Yorkers celebrated the French Revolution. But haven’t we as a society moved beyond unselfaware triumphalist civic dubbing?

Yet. A part of me – presumably the same part that secretly enjoys Disney World – wonders if maybe the old name was a good name. Us postmoderns are all so ironic, detached, sensitive and self-conscious. We’re bred to greet heart-on-sleeve expressiveness with nary but an awkward cringe-snicker. Couldn’t it be healthy, just sometimes, to indulge in a bit of old timey earnest naïve glorious romanticism? The Freedom Tower, for all its sleek lines and energy-efficient ventilation, might have borne a name, a mere name, radiating fuzzy proud American can-do-ism, the spirit of our grandparents’ generation, out over the Hudson River and into the jaded fallow countryside beyond.

No? Well, dear friends and countrymen, we’ll always have One World Trade.

image from Wikipedia

let me take you to your leader

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 03:35:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, President Obama publicly attacked Rush Limbaugh, instructing Republican lawmakers to ignore the bloviating talk show host (who had just called Obama a socialist and declared that “I hope he fails”). At the time, the remark seemed to be mistake of a hyper-reactive new president and administration. The leader of the free world does not personally acknowledge the existence of an overgrown shock-jock! But I’m now wondering if this was actually the opening maneuver in an incredibly subtle application of the dark art of politics. If I’m right, then the Obama administration is scarily brilliant.

An ongoing Democratic theme – apparently orchestrated from on high by Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff – holds that Limbaugh is now the de facto “leader of the Republican Party”. This is a pretty silly claim, but the Democrats are happy to tie their opponents in public perception to Limbaugh’s extremist reputation. (They’re already producing TV ads attributing Republican opposition to the stimulus to Limbaugh.) But that is political child’s play. The deep game, I think, comes from the effect that all of this has within the Republican Party. By taking on Limbaugh directly, Obama and Emanuel have drastically inflated his stature – and the real GOP leaders have begun to show the psychological strain of being crowded out.

Over the weekend, new Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele (he of ’Drill Baby Drill’ fame) snapped when a CNN host casually referred to Limbaugh’s leadership of the party. Steele asserted that he is the leader, and then called Limbaugh “an entertainer - Rush Limbaugh, his whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it’s incendiary. Yes, it’s ugly…” (Watch the video here)

Two days later, after Limbaugh spent his Monday program savaging Steele, Steele called Limbaugh to apologize.

This was a tactical disaster for Michael Steele. Apologizing to Limbaugh amounts to a concession that Steele’s own power within the party is shallow at best. But –and this is the more important point – it’s not clear that Steele had a choice about apologizing, once he’d taken the initial swipe at Limbaugh. The talk show host has been a national figure longer than nearly anyone else in the party, with more than 13 million regular listeners. He can direct the Republican grassroots when he’s sufficiently provoked. In January GOP Rep. Tom Price issued a panicky declaration of loyalty after being accidentally cited as the source of an anti-Limbaugh quote. The real culprit, Republican Congressman Phil Gingrey, then had to grovel on-air to atone for offending Limbaugh.

Steele’s only good option was to never engage Limbaugh at all; he should have kept his mouth shut about Limbaugh’s alleged leadership. Why didn’t he? Partly to attempt to distance his party from the radio host – but also out of simple ego. Steele won an incredibly difficult race for the RNC Chair only a month ago. Of course he wouldn’t enjoy being told he is still merely second fiddle to an ‘entertainer’.

But – to go back to the source – why did Steele face such a threat to his self-concept? Because Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama started the media drumbeat around Limbaugh’s purported leadership, and kept it up by regularly engaging Limbaugh as if he were really their chief rival. The Democrats knew that if they fanned all political oxygen on the right toward Limbaugh, inevitably some GOP leader – Steele, as it turned out – would begin clawing for air. Clawing at Limbaugh, that is.

And this really could be a political master stroke. Of course the Democrats get to keep on linking the GOP to Limbaugh’s pugnacious image. (Steele’s DNC counterpart, Tim Kaine, reacted immediately to the apology by reiterating in a press release Limbaugh’s alleged leadership.) But much, much more importantly, this could be the start of a slow, grinding civil war between the Republican Party’s establishment leadership and its Limbaugh-roused rabble. Want to see vicious primary fights? Brutal spats over party funds? An ungovernable national party, lacking message or organization? If this keeps up, the Republican Party will smolder pitifully for years.

And Rahm Emanuel is a political genius. Let us hope he uses his powers only for good.

(Photos: Limbaugh via thedailyvoice.com; Steele via the Washington Blade/AP; Emanuel via ABC News/AP)

fidel tells it like it is

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:51:00 +0000

You may not know that, in addition to being the semi-retired dictator of the Cuban workers' paradise, Fidel Castro is also a newspaper columnist! He writes regularly for Granma, the totalitarian state's major print news organ. Recent topics include "media terrorism" and the fact that he, Fidel, has outlasted 10 American presidents. In his February 9 column (drawn to my attention by this fun New Yorker piece which in turn comes to me from An), Fidel offers some cogent reflections on Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's White House Chief of Staff. His writing here has an addled stream-of-consciousness flavor to it - James Joyce with head trauma and a 50-year-old axe to grind. You could read the whole thing here if you'd like, but I've summarized it below, so that one might more easily appreciate the fine structure of El Comandante's thoughts. Each bullet point represents the thesis of one paragraph, in order, from Fidel's column.

Rahm Emanuel
by Fidel Castro

-Rahm Emanuel has a funny name!

-Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher, but he spelled his name with an 'I'.

-The Cuban ambassador to Venezuela wrote a book called The Transparency of Enmanuel.

-That Enmanuel is the son of Clara Rojas Gonzalez, who unsuccessfully ran for president of Colombia before being kidnapped by the FARC.

-He was born in the jungle during Rojas Gonzelez's captivity.

-She stayed there out of solidarity with Ingrid Betancourt for six years.

-I also spent time in prison after trying to seize control of a fortress in 1953.

-After the revolution, I sometimes thought about Kant.

-I took over Cuba before Obama and Rahm Emanuel were even born!

-Rahm Emanuel served in the Israeli military during the first Gulf War.

-America sells lots of weapons to countries in the Middle East.

-American racists would like to assassinate Barack Obama.

-Obama and Rahm Emanuel cannot fix the US economy.

-Even Kant, Plato, Aristotle and John Kenneth Galbraith could not fix the American economy. But maybe Abraham Lincoln could.

-Capitalism is bad.

The End

the will to paranoia

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:24:00 +0000

Thus spake Friedrich Nietzsche (The Genealogy of Morals, Essay One, Section 8; transl. 1966 Walter Kaufmann):

This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this "Redeemer" who brought blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick and sinners - was he not this seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible form, a seduction and bypath to precisely those Jewish values and new ideals? Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this "Redeemer", this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that "all the world", namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait? And could spiritual subtlety imagine any more dangerous bait than this? ... Israel, with its vengeance and revaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals.

I draw attention to this unhappy excerpt because I think it illustrates very well a trait common to all virulent conspiracy theories. The supposed conspirators have allegedly constructed an incredibly subtle and complex means of maintaining their deception. There is a sort of perverse grandeur in their trick: in this case, the Jews supposedly stow their own ideals in a Trojan Jesus, which they then make attractive to their enemies by apparently condemning it. As Nietzsche says, how "truly grand" is that product of the "secret black art"?!

A good conspiracy theory is fundamentally a good story. It has villains (the conspirators) and - well - a plot. More importantly, the recounter of a conspiracy theory employs the storytelling tool of revelation: the facts are gradually shown to be something other than what the audience initially supposed! But conspiracy theories, which are taken by most of their tellers and some of their audience to be more than just stories, are that much more urgent. The villains are out there; they have been tricking us, and aren't we so very clever for having figured them out?

That thread runs from Nietzsche's awkward anti-Semitism through to the '9/11 was an inside job' whackos. I'll try to remember that in September, when the latter engage in their annual desecratory theatrics around Ground Zero - they're caught up in a master narrative, one that is just too good not to be true.

image borrowed from the ANU IR Theorists gallery

birdsday gets counting

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:26:00 +0000

This weekend is the Great Backyard Bird Hunt. Count birds in your own backyard (or, for New Yorkers, the alley visible from your apartment window) from February 12-16, and submit your results here.

image from birdsource.org

birdsday chocolatey goodness

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:35:00 +0000

For birdsday today we bring you glad tidings of chocolate penguins. Or one chocolate penguin, as presented (and given to me) by An Xiao. Penguins are birds after all!

Important facts about penguins:
In their avian form, penguins smell very bad.
In their chocolate form, penguins taste very good.

Hi!

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:01:00 +0000

I wrote a guest blog for An at That Was Zen today, regarding Facebook and the ethics of digital relationships.

If you're coming here from over there, welcome!

I am an academic philosopher, but this blog is an opportunity for me to think through things less rigidly - and more enjoyably - than academic writing often requires. I write about politics from a deliberately nonpartisan angle (I accept only the label 'radical moderate'), philosophy in a deliberately casual way, and all sorts of cultural trends with deliberate fascination. Throughout, my central goal is to try to discover and emphasize the more complicated (and more interesting!) perspective than conventional wisdom permits.

So, welcome! I hope you like what you'll see, and you'll stick around.

Come Sail Away (To Somalia. Involuntarily.) (Dec H08)

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:00:00 +0000

This is the December entry in my Hangover 2008 project. Want to see the November entry?

It's been a long year. What better way to relax than a Red Sea cruise - unless Somali pirates attack your cruise ship. After years of mounting pirate attacks, including the accidental seizure of 33 Russian tanks, the world has finally taken notice. (Japan may abandon strict pacifism to protect its shipping.) Meanwhile, Somalia is in freefall, and the cruise industry has to contend with new threats. But one German cruise line has figured out a solution to piracy: air travel.

And that's it for Hangover 2008. Click here to review the whole year!

photo: P&O Cruises / bmtfm.com

The Land’s Highest Racial Barrier Falls (Nov H08)

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:00:00 +0000

This is the November entry in my Hangover 2008 project. Want to see the October entry?

On November 23, only a few weeks after what's-his-name won some election, Desiree Rogers was appointed the nation's first African-American White House Social Secretary. A Harvard MBA, Chicago businesswoman, and New Orleans Zulu Queen, Rogers will have tremendous influence over who has access to the president. Early signs of her aesthetic? Apparently a less stuffy approach than the past, including a White House open house, and the possibility of stew for State Dinner. Whatever she ends up doing, it is remarkable that she controls the social affairs of a building whose conventions excluded African-Americans less than a century ago. Woodrow Wilson must be spinning in his segregationist grave.

Photo: Stephen J. Serio / Chicago Business.com

a birdsday bridge to the future

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Baby peregrine falcons on the Throgs Neck Bridge. See NY Times story here.

Mayor Kilpatrick of Cell Block D (Oct H08)

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:00:00 +0000

This is the October entry in my Hangover 2008 project. Want to see the September entry?

Kwame Kilpatrick may be the first major politician brought down by a text messaging scandal. The son of Congresswoman Caroyln Cheeks Kilpatrick, he was once famous for being Detroit's youngest mayor in history - and later for having something to do with an exotic dancer who angered his wife and wound up shot by assailants unknown. Meanwhile, Kilpatrick had become involved in a relationship with his Chief of Staff, Christine Beatty. Thus began a shabby several year drama, in which the illicit power couple allegedly fired two police officers to prevent their exposure of the affair, then lied about it under oath. Everything unraveled when a series of explicit text messages came out. Kilpatrick and Beatty were charged with perjury; the mayor spent a night in prison for violating his parole, and finally, in the early autumn, Kilpatrick pled guilty, resigned, and the mayor went back to prison. But he gets out soon, and his plea bargain only bars him from running for office until 2013... Hey - it worked for Marion Barry.

photo: Ghetty Images, via Zimbio

ofessionalpray ournalismjay

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 04:12:00 +0000

A light article in the NYT includes an unexpected word.

THE earth held firm in its orbit. The continents did not founder. Martial law was not imposed. This, despite the fact that the “21” Club has loosened its tie for the first time since it opened at 21 West 52d Street 79 years ago.
...
Actually, “21” instituted the policy “after Labor Day, a soft opening if you will,” said Bryan McGuire, the manager for the last, yes, 21 years. “We wanted to be on a more level playing field with our competitors,” he said, adding, “We didn’t think it was that big a deal.” Especially since, during lunch, the tie policy was ixnayed in 1996, he said.

Goodness - the Grey Lady is using pig latin! Perhaps it helps capture the tone of the story, the ebbing of rigid expectations amidst economic spiral. But, still, definitely a surprise.

Google’s World Domination: The Oceanic Phase (Sep H08)

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:00:00 +0000

This is the September entry in my Hangover 2008 project. Want to see the August entry?

Not content with controlling everything ever written, launching rockets and palling around with terrorists, Google took another step toward Bond-villaindom by filing a patent for a 'water-based data center'. The purported chief advantage of putting Google's computers to sea comes from efficient wave-driven power and cooling. But nautical data centers would also place Google's chief asset beyond the reach of any terrestrial power. What next for Google? Well, don't forget that they're watching you right now.

image: Google, via CNET

The Birth of a Catch Phrase (Aug H08)

noreply@blogger.com (Regina) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:28:00 +0000

This is the August entry in my Hangover 2008 project. Want to see the July entry?

On the second full night of the Republican National Convention, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor, and certified black Republican Michael Steele addressed the crowd, shortly before the formal debut of VP nominee Sarah Palin. Steele, who recently abjectly failed to win a Senate seat in Maryland, despite his puppy-loving policies, stumbled through an unremarkable speech - until he proposed a solution to the energy crisis and a way to end nasty foreign entanglements: "Drill Baby Drill". The phrase quickly acquired a life of its own, prompting GOP conventiongoers to overwhelm Rudy Giuliani, giving Sarah Palin something to fall back on, and even keeping John McCain busy. And yet, for all the silliness, one might ask: who gets the last laugh?

Yes, technically this happened a couple days into September. But it's my Hangover 2008, I make the rules, and nothing especially distinctive happened in August.
Photo: Gloria Gery's Romania Journal