Category: politics

Autonomous Ethical Reasoning

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I got my first run in today after two months off. It was refreshing in that I was finally moving beyond the pain, but it also gave me that runner’s high oxygenation that lifts my spirit and fuels my thoughts. My wife and I decided a change of lockdown venue was in order so we relocated to New Mexico (after completing and checking our ballots in Arizona, I will note). My run took me up into the local mountain range and around an iconic rock formation. A coyote was sniffing around the trail until I spooked him. Some things are constant across the West, including the numinous sense of peace and calm that overtook me while I recovered under some trees and watched a few fanned-out contrails slowly drift in the high winds.

The fragility of American democracy keeps coming up in the run-up to tomorrow’s elections. Hostility, disinformation, legal actions, disruption, and general uncertainty have overtaken what was once a fairly simple process (Florida in 2000 notwithstanding).

Richard Just wrote a long-form piece in The Washington Post Magazine titled How Religion Can Help Put Our Democracy Back Together, though the title is shockingly more certain than the actual article that rebuilding is possible. Here are some of the ideas that Just circulates:

  1. If we were all a bit more attuned to the great mysteries that religions promote we would be more humble in our political engagement.
  2. Perhaps our shift away from religious involvement means that we instead idolatrously attach to political leaders.
  3. We have become obsessed with politics and lost the sense of inner peace that religions can provide.
  4. Religious communities are trust building, unlike other kinds of community involvement.
… Read the rest

Innocents in Intellectual History

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In 1999, I lived in a modest, rented townhouse in Redmond, Washington with my wife and a year-old baby. I had just quit my academic R&D position in a fit of pique over issues of contracts and conscience, and had uprooted our lives to go to Microsoft to be a program manager while still harboring an academic’s independent streak. I had hair down to nearly my waist that I tied back in a ponytail after it dried a bit on my way to work. I had a coordinating goatee, too. On dark, overcast days I would sometimes reach back to reposition my hair tie and the cinched area would still be mildly damp into the afternoon.

In Seattle that year, the World Trade Organization came to meet and with it violent protests over, well, what was it over? Some of it had to do with the notion of globalization of the economy. Some of it had to do with a hope for labor empowerment. Some of the participants were just anarchists, it seemed. I had a run-in one morning with a door guard-type who thought I had tailgated her through a security door at Microsoft. We had been warned in a corporate-wide email about security concerns were the protests to come out to the suburbs. I dutifully backed out, pulled the door shut, and ran my access card to open the door. Curiously, even after that, she decided not to ride the elevator up with me, a look of uncertainty and fear in her eyes.

And then there were the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 that felt similar to those Seattle actions of more than a decade before.

Kurt Andersen, author of the memorable Fantasyland, has a new book and a new Atlantic essay, College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots, that continues his theme of capturing intellectual history as a series of consistent trends that are easily observable and digested.… Read the rest

Flailing in the Think Tanks

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Despite my best efforts to find some depth in modern intellectual conservatism, instead about the best we get is just about the worst imaginable. Much discussed is the Atlantic piece by Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule who argues for what he calls “common good constitutionalism” that asserts that an authoritarian assurance in defining a moral basis for legal decisions is best for all of us. Individual concepts of life and liberty be damned:

…that each individual may ‘define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life’ should be not only rejected but stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable forever after. So too should the libertarian assumptions central to free-speech law and free-speech ideology—that government is forbidden to judge the quality and moral worth of public speech, that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,”  and so on—fall under the ax. Libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights will also have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources.

Vermeule’s opening salvo is that the doctrine of originalism that conservative legal thinkers have hewed to has shown little progress in reversing the trend towards greater and more expansive liberties. These freedoms, without paternalistic guidance, take us down the slippery slope of moral turpitude. We need stronger hands at the tiller who can properly control the minds of the mob for their own good. In reality, though, Vermeule is just a “Catholic integralist” in disguise, which is to say he is promoting a kind of theocracy where law is subservient to the best guesses of Catholicism.… Read the rest

Ensembles Against Abominables

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It seems obvious to me that when we face existential threats we should make the best possible decisions. I do this with respect to investment decisions, as well. I don’t rely on “guts” or feelings or luck or hope or faith or hunches or trends. All of those ideas are proxies for some sense of incompleteness in our understanding of probabilities and future outcomes.

So how can we cope with those kinds of uncertainties given existential threats? The core methodology is based on ensembles of predictions. We don’t actually want to trust an expert per se, but want instead to trust a basket of expert opinions—an ensemble of predictions. Ideally, those experts who have been more effective in the past should be given greater weight than those who have made poorer predictions. We most certainly should not rely on gut calls by abominable narcissists in what Chauncey Devega at Salon disturbingly characterizes as a “pathological kakistocracy.”

Investment decision-making takes exactly this form, when carried out rationally. Index funds adjust their security holdings in relationship to an index like the S&P 500. Since stock markets have risen since their inceptions with, of course, set backs along the way, an index is a reliable ensemble approach to growth. Ensembles smooth predictions and smooth out brittleness.

Ensemble methods are also core to predictive improvements in machine learning. While a single decision tree trained on data may overweight portions of the data set, an ensemble of trees (which we call a forest, of course) smoothes the decision making by having each tree become only a part of the final vote for a prediction. The training of the individual trees is based on a randomized subset of the data, allowing for specialization of stands of trees, but preserving overall effectiveness of the system.… Read the rest

Ethical Grounding and Numeracy

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I recently discovered the YouTube videos of Paulogia. He’s a former Christian who likes to take on young Earth creationists, apologists, and some historical issues related to the faith. I’m generally drawn to the latter since the other two categories seem a bit silly to me, but I liked his recent rebuttal of some apologist/philosopher arguments concerning the idea that ethics must be ontologically grounded in something. The argument is of the sort stoned high schoolers engage in—but certainly more carefully attended to—as I commented on the video.

So rather than pick on definitional minutiae, let’s take an expansive view of ethical reasoning and try to apply it to contemporary problems in society. For instance, while all societies have generally condemned murder in one way or another, how do we approach something like whether governmental control or regulation of environmental pollution and interaction is necessary or obligatory?

For the apologist/philosophers in the video, they seem to argue that scriptural claims places a grounding of ethics in a person’s “heart,” but then leave open how that gets translated into some kind of decision-making. At one point, one of the guys says he tends towards virtue ethics, while the other notes that some might see deontological ethics as the proper extension of that ontologically- and theistically-grounded impetus.

Let’s take a minimalist and observational approach to ethical behavior. We can perhaps tease out a few observations and then try to fit an explanatory theory onto that.

  1. Moral and ethical perspectives are and have been varied across people and time.
  2. There seems to be some central commonalities about interpersonal and group ideas about what is ethical and moral.
  3. Those commonalities have reflections in the natural world and among non-human species.
… Read the rest

The Illiberal, Openness, and Oppression

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Continuing on with my fascination with intellectual conservatism (just removed denigrating scare quotes at the last minute), Sohrab Ahmari vs. David French is a curious anomaly to me, though it may have been always lurking below the surface. Certainly, going back to the Moral Majority, the desire of conservatives to have their version of Christianity play a greater role in US governance has been with us in terms of voting patterns and cultural preferences, but the notion that among the intelligentsia there was a desire for some kind of Christian Dominionism or at least greater control of the public square is not a perspective I’ve encountered. Instead, there were more targeted approaches like criticizing Roe v. Wade on the basis of constitutional arguments and legal ideas, or working towards expanding tax-dollar flows to home schoolers or other select (I originally wrote “fringe” here, but need to work on my neutral voice language that ebbs and flows) religious ideas. The religious deserved to not be disregarded in the face of cultural drift.

It’s worth noting that using the US Constitution as a touchstone for bolstering protections for the religious seems to most of us as a secular appeal rather than a scriptural or theological one. Such an approach squares nicely with our increasing defense of the rights and freedoms of groups previously marginalized or discriminated against. Yet part of the right (Ahmari and a pastor named Doug Wilson, at least; French is their foe) sees a desire for greater cultural and political control as actually rooted in that legal basis. After all, if reason is intrinsically derived from their god, then the reason in the American Experiment is always and inextricably tied to that god.… Read the rest

A Great, Modern Rambling

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I read across the political spectrum. I would say I read religiously across the political spectrum, but that is using the term in a secondary and impoverished way, which is part of my point in this particular post. When an author has no clearly defined thesis there is a tendency to ramble, or to fall back on form in the absence of content, or to play to the expectations of the audience through deliberate obscurity.

It is by a chance intersection that I encountered two ideologically conservative pieces that suffer from this tendency in the same week, but it could also be that everyone on the right is exasperated by the often vacuous—and always narcissistic—current happenings within the political parties that represent them. I sympathize with them if that’s their defense, and will also agree that the far left can be equally exhausting.

It has become de rigueur for the right’s commentariat to claim that this is not what they expect from the Party of Lincoln or, given a spat with National Review, that the magazine lacks the heft of Bill Buckley’s original ideals. If all of conservatism has become tainted by reactionaries and semi-populists, the very idea of intellectual conservatism huddles against an ever-present and threatening cloud.

So we start with Andrew Sullivan’s rambling in New York Magazine. Sullivan likes to praise the intellectual heft of those he argues against. Maybe he just likes to be pleasant and this is his way of signaling a commonality of purpose, or perhaps it’s to gird his own rejoinders as having equal weight. In this piece, it’s hard to discern why. The entire argument is a typology or map of what a center-right conservative is and is not.… Read the rest

Bullshit, Metaphors, and Political Precision

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Given this natural condition of uncertainty in the meaning of words, and their critical role in communication, to say the least, we can certainly expect that as we move away from the sciences towards other areas of human endeavor we have even greater vagueness in trying to express complex ideas. Politics is an easy example. America’s current American president is a babbling bullshitter, to use the explanatory framework of the essay, On Bullshit, and he is easy to characterize as an idiot, like when he conflates Western liberalism with something going on exclusively in modern California.

In this particular case, we have to track down what “liberal” means and meant at various times, then try to suss out how that meaning is working today. At one time, the term was simply expressive of freedom with minimal government interference. Libertarians still carry a version of that meaning forward, but liberalism also came to mean something akin to a political focus on government spending to right perceived economic and social disparities (to achieve “freedom from want and despair,” via FDR). And then it began to be used as a pejorative related to that same focus.

As linguist John McWhorter points out, abstract ideas—and perhaps especially political ones—are so freighted with their pragmatic and historical background that the best we can say is that we are actively working out what a given term means. McWhorter suggests that older terms like “socialist” are impossible to put to work effectively; a newer term like “progressive” is more desirable because it carries less baggage.

An even stronger case is made by George Lakoff where he claims central metaphors that look something like Freudian abstractions govern political perspectives.… Read the rest

Structure and Causality in Political Revolutions

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Can political theories be tested like scientific ones? And if they can, does it matter? Alexis Papazoglou argues in the New Republic that, even if they can be tested, it is less important than other factors in the success of the political theory. In his signal case, the conflict between anti-globalist populists and the conventional international order is questioned as resulting in clear outcomes that somehow will determine the viability of one theory versus the other. It’s an ongoing experiment. Papazoglou breaks down the conflict as parallel to the notion that scientific processes ultimately win on falsifiability and rationality. In science, as per Kuhn’s landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the process is more paradigmatic agendas, powerful leaders, and less calculated rationality.

The scientific process may have been all of those things, of course, and may continue to be so in the future, but there are ongoing developments that make it less likely that sociological factors will dominate. And this is why the comparison with political theories is perhaps wrongheaded. There may be a community of political theorists but they are hardly the primary architects and spectators of politics, unlike science and scientists. We are all political actors, yet very few have the time or inclination to look carefully at the literature on the threat of successful authoritarian Chinese civilization versus Western liberal democracy, for instance. But we are not all scientific actors, despite being governed by the reality of the world around us. Politics yells and seethes while science quietly attends a conference. Even the consequences of science are often so gradualistic in their unfolding that we barely notice them; see the astonishing progress on cancer survival in the past decades and note the need for economic discounting for global climate change, where the slow creep of existential threats are somehow given dollar values.… Read the rest

New Agile Governance

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John Dickerson, in his excellent Atlantic article, The Presidency: The Hardest Job in the World, combines historical analysis with quotes and insights from presidents and past advisers to develop both a critique of the expectations of the role of president and how to achieve better results. The analysis lands on a few recommendations including improving the on-boarding process for new presidents and simplifying the role itself. Having and trusting one’s cabinet leads to better delegation of the impossible responsibilities of the role. Maybe outsourcing the ceremonial aspects of the job to the VP or First Lady would allow the president to concentrate on policymaking and national security flare ups.

While all are reasonable suggestions, resetting expectations about the role of the executive branch should be balanced against reforming the legislative branch in parallel. If both are to be empowered to serve the public’s will with grace and intellect, they face concomitant challenges in overcoming the partisanship and influences of monied interests that have made them unresponsive to the people. Polls show that the public wants reduced health care costs, reasonable gun regulations, humane immigration policies, and an opening of rights for gays and marijuana consumers. But none of these are delivered because they are too complex or politically toxic for Congress to successfully navigate.

Maybe the methodology is wrong. Not in the sense of the Constitution being wrong or in need of updating, but in the sense of how decision making and information gathering is managed through the legislative and executive branches. I’d like to propose an alternative that I will label New Agile Governance (NAG) for simplicity. NAG is based on the simple idea that tracks what Dickerson attributes to H.R.… Read the rest