Whither the West?

Author: Scott Mauldin

  • The Challenge of Deepfakes and the Need for Institutions

    The Challenge of Deepfakes and the Need for Institutions

    What are Deepfakes? Fake videos that are too good for most people to tell apart from the real thing.

    These have long been used for entertainment, but it is clear the dangers that these can pose to the political and informational system. Unfortunately, we have to start treating videos with as much skepticism as we do images and news articles – they can all be faked, and the most damaging fakes are the ones that are only subtly faked and highly credible. They can and will deceive the cleverest and most scrutinizing of viewers – yes, even you.
    There are two ways around this: either require that everything you believe be seen live with your own eyes – in which case all digital news and media becomes useless – or trust in institutions that can do the research for you. The latter is more difficult, yes, but the truth is we do this already, all the time. People cannot be experts in every aspect of modern life; some things have to be taken on trust in competent regulatory authorities. How would a layman with no particular interest in science even know where to start finding out the efficacy of medicines? Is everyone an expert in automobile safety, consumer financial products, food safety, product safety, medicine, law, building codes, etc.? No one can be. You and I take some of those things on trust in authorities or we live the most joyless life imaginable. We simply have to add “news” to this list. It must be regulated in the way that medicines had to be regulated after babies were being given cocaine and influenza was being treated with river water.
    Unless we embrace regulatory bodies and authoritative institutions to help us sort through this coming quagmire, we are left crippled and blinded to any news or information whatsoever. Institutions that embrace peer-review, that embrace criticism, that embrace transparency – those are to be trusted. We have to. Modern civilization depends on it.

     

  • On the Relative Longevity of Chinese and Roman Civilization

    Ask yourself this question: which survived longer, China, or Rome? The conventional answer is China, of course. By why is that the conventional answer? Is that not just a story we tell ourselves?

    Why do we say that China is 2000 years old, but that the Roman Empire fell 1500 years ago? China was conquered and divided numerous times in its history, its dominant languages have changed drastically (though maintaining the same writing system so physical evidence of those changes is fleeting), and the dominant religions, customs, and institutions have oscillated and varied immensely.

    For comparison (note, this is in very broad strokes):

    • All European languages with the exception of Greek use the Roman alphabet – or Cyrillic, which was created by an Eastern Roman emperor.
    • The leaders of the Roman churches (in Rome and Constantinople) were the unquestioned religious leaders of Europe until the 1400s in the East, until the 1500s in Northern Europe, and still today in most of Southern Europe.
    • All European legal systems with the exception of the British ones derive in large part from the Roman/Justinian code.
    • The claimed successor to the Roman Empire in the West, the Holy Roman Empire, existed from 800 until the 1800s; if you count Byzantium, there was never a gap in the continuity of claimed successor empires until only 200 years ago. China, in comparison, had the Warring States Period, the Sixteen Kingdoms, the Ten Kingdoms, etc.
    • The above empire was conquered by a French Emperor presiding on a government substantially modeled on the Roman Republic including Consuls and eagle-adorned legion banners.
    • The German empire was later reformed by a Kaiser, the word being derived from Caesar.
    • Latin was the dominant academic, diplomatic, and scientific language of Europe until the 18th Century.

    This list could go on, but I’ll leave it here for now.

    I’m not attempting to make an argument for the survival of Rome per se, but merely in comparison to what is the generally accepted continuity of China, for example. If we accept the legitimacy of Chinese successor kingdoms after periods of imperial collapse and chaos, then I fail to see why the Holy Roman Empire doesn’t count as a legitimate successor kingdom to the Roman Empire by the same criteria. The HRE arguably has even more legitimacy, given that it had the sanction of an actual continuing institution of the Roman Empire, i.e. the Catholic Church, and all the while a very real Eastern Roman Empire saw themselves as every bit as Roman as the Western empire. They referred to themselves as Romaioi, for example.

  • Electoral College Reform

    Nevada is probably about to pass the National Popular Vote Compact, meaning that it will give its electoral votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote for president. This reform is a necessary one for the benefit of democracy.

    A snide retort that I saw to this news is “Tyranny of the Majority…”. This seems to me a very elegant way to say “the system is rigged in my favor so I want to keep it that way”.

    A Wyoming voter receives 3 times the representation in the electoral college that a California voter does. Do opponents of these reforms care so little for equality? Are Americans not all supposed to be equal under the eyes of the law?

    The size of the House of Representatives – and thus the size of the electoral college – is not written in the Constitution, but was set in 1911, when the distribution of population among the states was far, far more equal than it is today. There is something to be said for letting sparsely populated states have a little more representation to ensure that they are not taken for granted, but giving their citizens three times the voice of their fellow Americans in more densely populated states? Such a disparity is certainly unjust.

    Further, “Tyranny of the Majority” is a term first used by enlightenment thinkers like the Founding Fathers to refer to the danger of giving political power to the poor or uneducated. Since this opponent seems not to like the idea of a tyranny of the majority, should we weight votes by educational attainment instead?

    Image result for college attainment by state

    Well, depending on what you value in your policymaking, perhaps…

  • Michael Sandel on East-West Philosophical Encounters

    In the 2018 compendium “Encountering China”, renowned philosopher Michael Sandel makes the following observation about learning from Chinese philosophy:

    Engaging with responses to my work by scholars of Chinese philosophy is for me a learning opportunity on several levels. It requires me to consider challenges to my views from unfamiliar directions, it brings to light some of the competing perspectives at play within Chinese philosophy, and it prompts me to wonder how dialogue across cultural and philosophical traditions can best proceed.

    Sandel points out several highly interesting differences between Western and Chinese philosophical traditions; there are four primary points I would highlight here:

    1. The thickness of community
    2. The elevation of harmony or justice
    3. The externalities of progress
    4. The existence of individual identity

    I do not yet have concrete responses to any of these, but I find them worthy of repetition and contemplation here. To me, the interesting thing to note is simply how different human thoughts on fundamental questions can be, and perhaps how far outside the norms of Western philosophical thought Chinese thought can be. However, a caveat: I think we all recognize that philosophers forced into these conflicting spaces can adopt much more extreme and confrontational views than they really hold in their daily lives, and in many ways both Chinese and Western philosophers may adopt reactionary viewpoints to counter each other. For example, even if Sandel is correct in the fact that Western systems elevate Justice over Harmony, I think we all recognize that these can sometimes be at odds (see the many cop-vs-African American Community incidents in recent years), and in many cases courts and public opinion can elevate Harmony over Justice, preserving the social status quo and scorning what the law demands (see To Kill a Mockingbird).

    The Thickness of Community

    Having become accustomed to the objection that the conception of community I defend is too morally demanding, or “too thick” in the philosophers’ vernacular, I find it intriguing to encounter the challenge that my conception of community is “too thin.”

    Elevation of Harmony or Justice

    Until encountering the Chinese tradition, it had not occurred to me to consider harmony as the primary virtue of social life. Notwithstanding my critique of the unencumbered self and my argument for a deeper conception of community than the social contract tradition affords, I have always defended a pluralist conception of the common good, in which citizens argue publicly and openly about moral and even spiritual questions. Such arguments are typically more clamorous than harmonious.

    …

    In Singapore, whose population consists of ethnic Chinese, Malays, Indians, and others, a recent attempt to promote social harmony involves a proposal to rotate the presidency, an elected but ceremonial post, among the various ethnic communities. While some might complain that the rotation system would deprive certain aspiring candidates of the right to seek office in a given year, this right should give way to considerations of harmony. Having all groups represented would create a strong sense of citizenship

    …

    Tongdong Bai identifies two respects in which Confucian philosophy, as he interprets it, departs from my account of moral and civic virtue. First, only “the few” can go far in cultivating sufficient virtue to participate effectively in politics. Confucians therefore “reject the strong republicanism in communitarianism” and favor a meritocratic regime, in which the learned and virtuous few govern on behalf of the rest.

    Externalities of Progress

    But the Daoist gardener glimpses that something more is at stake—something about the attitudes we take toward the activities in which we are engaged. Technology can change our relation to our purposes and ends. The invention of irrigation systems changes the meaning of traditional gardening, casting it now as a backward, inefficient mode of farming that creates only enough crops for subsistence rather than a surplus to be sold for profit. This redescription of the activity may not force Daoist gardeners to abandon their vocation and go into agribusiness. But it does exert a certain pressure.

    Existence of Individual Identity

    In his essay attempting to mediate between the Ames-Rosemont conception of the person and mine, Paul D’Ambrosio discusses an analogy introduced by Rosemont in his book Against Individualism (2015). Those who believe in an essential, enduring self think of persons as if they were peaches with a pit. Although the skin and the fruit may change, the pit persists. On such a conception of personal identity, it makes sense to ask, “Who is the (real) person who is playing these various social roles?” But those who believe that social roles and relationships are constitutive of identity think of personhood as an onion; peel away the roles—son or daughter, husband or wife, parent, grandparent, friend, teacher, neighbor, and so on—and nothing remains. Rosemont offers the onion analogy to illustrate the anti-essentialist, role-bearing conception of the person.

    I am uneasy with both vegetarian options. […<] Let me see if I can explain why: I do not think that the continuity of our identities over a lifetime is given by an “essential” self at the core of our being whose contours are fixed once and for all, untouched by the vicissitudes of life. And yet neither do I think that a person is only “the aggregate sum” of his roles and circumstances. What the purely aggregative picture misses, it seems to me, is the role of narrative and reflection (including critical reflection). Not only social roles and relationships, but also interpretations of those roles and relationships, are constitutive of personhood. But narration and interpretation presuppose narrators and interpreters—storytelling selves who seek to make sense of their circumstances, to evaluate and assess the aims and attachments that would claim them. And this interpretive activity, this making of sense, constitutes moral agency.

  • The Heterozygote Advantage and the Crisis of Western Authority

    question

    I.

    There is a concept in biology known as Heterozygote Advantage. If you’re already familiar with this concept, feel free to skip to section II.

    As one may know, sexually reproducing organisms inherit two copies of each gene: one from the mother, one from the father. Sometimes having two identical copies doesn’t mean much. Sometimes it means a lot. Having one recessive allele (gene variant) and one dominant allele usually means that the recessive one can be passed on along with the dominant one, but the dominant one is the one that is presented in the organism. For example, if a child inherits one blue-eyed allele and one brown-eyed allele, the dominant brown-eyed allele is the one that drives (so to speak) the phenotype (the way the organism biologically presents its genes) while the recessive blue-eyed allele rides shotgun, serving no function in the organisms per se but maintaining the possibility of being the one that is passed on to this organism’s offspring when it’s time to send one of the two genes into the next generation’s car, to continue the metaphor.

    Say hypothetically that there’s a recessive gene that allows people to heal really quickly. If you inherit only one copy of this gene, since it’s recessive, the dominant “normal healing” gene is the one that is presented in the organism, and there’s no biological difference from someone not having the “quick healing” gene. If, however, an organism has two parents who have this recessive “quick healing” gene, and happens to inherit both copies, then this child would have the Quick Healing trait. This child could get in deadly car crashes and be more likely to survive, be shot on a battlefield and be able to heal before bleeding out, etc. Even if this child never got an adamantium skeleton and never gained the ability to eject and retract blades from his hands, this child would be more fit – more likely to survive into adulthood and pass on genes – than one who did not have this genetic combination (ceteris paribus). This would be, for most intents and purposes, a good genetic combination to have (leaving aside the fact that in many organisms in nature, quick healing attributes are correlated with higher propensity for cancer). We would say in this situation that this organism has a Homozygote Advantage. This means, there is an advantage to having both copies of a gene where there is not an advantage to having only one.

    Then we have the opposite concept: a heterozygote advantage. As one may be able to infer from the above idea, a heterozygote advantage is one in which it’s more beneficial to have only one copy of an allele than two. The classic example of this is Sickle Cells: one copy of the gene that produces sickle-shaped blood cells makes red blood cells less susceptible to attack by the parasitic plasmodium that causes malaria, conferring an advantage in fitness. Having two copies of this same gene, however, makes too many blood cells too misshapen; the circulatory system struggles to deal with this complication, and Sickle Cell Anemia results, usually ending in premature death. This is a homozygote disadvantage, or a heterozygote advantage.

    II.

    The term “meme” has in recent years taken on a very different meaning than that which it originally had. Professor Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976 to refer to the cultural analogue of a gene. In the same way that “genes” were the discrete units of genetic information that were passed on and selected for and allowed a population to achieve continuity and evolve, likewise “memes” were the discrete units of ideas and cultures that were passed on and selected for and allowed sociocultural populations to achieve continuity and evolve.

    In the past decade or two, this term was somewhat misappropriated (though somewhat accurately applied) from its original usage in cultural studies and information theory and used to describe elements of Internet Culture – image macros, witty comment chains on reddit, propensity for voting to name things “Harambe” or “Xy McXface”, or the trope of misdirecting people via links to 80s British Pop music videos. Perhaps because internet culture was create ex nihilo so recently, participants were eager to identify elements of commonality and give them the name “meme”, hence the prominence of this term in reference to internet culture viz. every other area of culture.

    Nevertheless, the original definition of a meme – any transmittable element of culture – remains valid. How broadly or narrowly one should define memes in this sense is open to debate – people’s idea of the proper length of a Toga can be a meme as much as the concept of the Mandate of Heaven or the consensus about the right age for a boy to begin his manhood quest – these are all culturally specific ideas that are transmitted vertically (communicated between generations) and horizontally (communicated verbally, textually, etc. among contemporaneous members of a group), and are subject to inception, evolution, and oblivion.

    III.

    I would like to focus on one particular meme: skepticism. I will define this simply as “the notion that propositions should be doubted”. This is a meme, an idea-gene, if you will, that not everyone has. In some cultures great efforts are made to minimize the prevalence of this meme, namely in rampant authoritarian or theocratic societies in which doubt of the Supreme Leader or The Party or The Faith are seen as ills to be purged; critical thinking is not prized or cultivated. When the skepticism gene is manifest in a skeptical culturotype (the ideological analog to phenotypes) they are pruned from the flock.

    Thus, like any genes or memes, the meme of skepticism is not an unalloyed good. In environs and situations in which survival is precarious and military-esque deference to authority is necessary to stay alive, having a sudden increase in skepticism and doubt of the hierarchy could lead to the death of the society and the individuals that it comprises. But at other times, the meme of skepticism presents great advantages: being creative, willing to go one’s own way, follow one’s inclinations and not blindly stumble after the herd can yield enormous benefits when it comes to science, business, art, politics, or personal interactions. I would posit that there is a strong correlation between the prevalence of the skepticism meme and the level of creativity, dynamism, and liberty of a society.

    But that does not mean that this correlation is purely linear. That does not mean that forever increasing the prevalence of the skepticism gene results in ever more creative, dynamic, and liberated societies; or perhaps it does, but that manifests in ways we don’t like. Because when the low-hanging, transparent falsehoods of life are stripped away, when the lies of the authorities are exposed, how does skepticism know where to stop? How does the skepticism known if it has penetrated the facades and is gnawing through the pillars of the firmament?

    IV.

    When we picture the embodiment of skepticism, we may picture someone like Galileo, or Descartes, or Martin Luther. In the minds of many, skepticism is associated with things that we generally prize in humans: with discovery, with challenging oppressive institutions, with exploration, with innovation, and perhaps with a scientific mindset. We normally wouldn’t associate it with people we despise, with people we think are delusional, with people we might think are in the grip of dogmatic and destructive ways of thinking. We don’t think of Flat Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers, Global Warming Deniers. We don’t think of 9/11 Truthers. We don’t think of Pizzagaters.

    But these groups are in many ways extremely skeptical. In fact, they are far, far more skeptical than the rest of us. They’re homozygous skeptics. They’ve inherited a double-serving of the “skepticism” meme. They doubt not only the facts, but the authorities that produce those facts, the institutions that those authorities serve, and even go so far as to doubt the ideologies that give rise to those institutions and authorities. A natural reaction of most normal people is to say that Flat Earthers are crazy and deluded. But they are saying “using only empirical observation, the world looks flat. You and I have never gone into space, never built a GPS system, never had to calculate and experience parabolic trajectories that take into account the supposed curvature of the Earth. You are taking it on faith from books and authorities that the Earth is round, whereas there have been plenty of societies that just took it from faith and books and authorities that the earth was flat. How are you any better than that?”

    Antivaxxers, dangerous though they are, are equally skeptical of authority and “established” truths. An antivaxxer points to thalidomide, to the vacillating warnings on fat and cholesterol and sugar, to the financial links between pharmaceutical companies and regulators, an Antivaxxer points to Tuskegee and says “how can you trust that?”

    Global Warming Deniers and 9/11 Truthers similarly point to the credibility of the authorities that interpret evidence at us. In an interview on the Ezra Klein Show, journalist danah boyd [sic] makes the argument that Pizzagaters were doing their own form of investigative journalism, truly feeling that they were seeing through secret codes and webs of lies and deceipt to expose a dark Washington DC underground. [source]

    These groups of hyperskeptics are not un-explainable deviants, nor could they not have been predicted. Rather, we created them, you and I and our school systems and our cultural tropes. They are the natural predictable end state of western society: when we encourage everyone to think for themselves, question everything, and doubt authorities, why shouldn’t we doubt all the things we can’t directly observe? Why do we still have any trust in any authorities? Who are we to say “whoa, wait a minute, I didn’t mean question that!”? When the selective pressure of western society encourages the proliferation of the “skepticism” meme, how are we surprised when people begin to inherit it homozygously?

    How does the skepticism know if it has penetrated the facades and is gnawing through the pillars of the firmament?

    V.

    The above skepticism is corrosive in itself, and the game of undermining scientific and medical knowledge presents obvious dangers. But in recent years these tendencies have reached a fever pitch, and become tinged with cynicism. If skepticism is the notion that propositions should be doubted, then its cousin, cynicism, is the notion that motives should be doubted. Cynicism would tell us that people who promise great things, who ask for your trust and loyalty in order to change your life or the world for the better, are usually looking for a way to take advantage of your trust and use you for their own ends.

    This brings us to the crux of this argument, and the fulcrum of Western society: what happens when this skepticism and cynicism is turned on our social and political institutions? What happens when homozygous skepticism is swapped out for cynicism, or occurs alongside it? The fact is that this process is happening now, throughout the West. From Trump to Brexit to Hungary and everywhere in between, the meme of “agenda-calling” is infiltrating social and political discourse. Anyone who wants anything has “an agenda”. The media has a liberal agenda. The EU has an agenda to subdue British power, or to erase Hungarian culture. Scientists have an agenda to destroy the oil industry and American jobs. And of course, their expressed motives – of providing information, of delivering on the promises of liberalism, of securing the peace and health of the world – are just facades to hide their secret abuse, pilfering, and power-grabbing.

    Be skeptical of them. Doubt the institutions. Doubt the motives.

    I do not wish to enter the argument of whether, or to what extent, Russia is actively interfering in Western politics, but I wish to submit that this ideology of cynicism and skepticism intertwined and directed at politicians has long been a core of Russian political psychology, and that it is the idea now infiltrating western political discourse. “I think what the Russian discourse is [is] that it’s, in fact, very difficult to cleave perfectly to [a set of morals],” Nikitin said. “And anyone that claims to the contrary can be unmasked as, in fact, being just as flawed as anyone else is” [source].

    This strategy is commonly called “whataboutism”, but that term misses the mark. “Whataboutism” is, literally, a usage of “what about…” also known as the “tu quoque” (you as well) fallacy. When someone criticizes you, you can respond with an accusation that the other person, or something the other person supports, is guilty of the same thing. Rather, this tactic of agenda-calling, unmasking, and dragging of idols through the mud perhaps deserves terms like “weaponized cynicism”, “weaponized skepticism”, or “weaponized postmodernism”. The idea that all ideologies – democracy, liberalism, good governance, freedom of the press, etc – are merely lofty promises that abusive politicians make to empty your pockets when you’re not looking – is a defense mechanism used by autocrats to make their critics out to be doe-eyed naifs.

    But to return to the Russia question, the fact is that it doesn’t really matter whether this is Russian meddling – because either way, we set ourselves up for it. We encouraged the skepticism. We filled the ideological meme pool with the skeptical meme. We must contend with the results. And we must find new pillars to hold up new firmaments.

    PS.

    An obvious criticism to this description is that there’s no need to resort to genetics and heterozygote advantages to explain this; this is a simple question of extremism. There’s a moderate, healthy amount of skepticism, and then there’s extreme, nigh-solipsistic skepticism. What we need to do is to encourage the healthy amount and discourage the extreme nigh-solipsistic kind.

    But I’m not sure that quite captures the way this works. First of all, it seems hard to pinpoint that a person picked and chose their level of skepticism and thought “hm, I really like being an extremist”; rather, these seem to be a priori propensities to doubt everything or not. In that way, they perhaps operate more like genes than political ideologies, which are at least in part a collection of individual policy and candidate preferences.

    Second, I’m not sure it’s one-dimensional; I think it’s possible that there are two slightly different domains of skepticism that someone can have individually, and only when they inherit the skepticism gene in both domains do they get these dysfunctional outcomes like flat-eartherism. Perhaps these domains are along the lines of “institutional skepticism” – skepticism of the authority of impersonal bodies; “societal skepticism” – skepticism of the veracity of lay common sense; or “empirical skepticism” – skepticism of the authority of senses to deliver veritable outcomes; “scientific skepticism” – skepticism of the truth-finding ability of scientific processes and community. I’m sure we can all think of people who have a few of these attributes, but do we know anyone who is skeptical in all of these domains?

    Can we agree that these are, to a large extent, uncorrelated dimensions – one could be maximally skeptical of science while having no skepticism for societal lay common sense, or vice versa – ?

    To that extent, I do think these operate as discrete attributes rather than a general “skeptical” spectrum.

  • Vespertine Dreams

    The Bible begins in the Garden of Eden which has become a moral allegory for millions. Plato famously invented the continent of Atlantis to demonstrate his ideas. Thomas Moore had his Utopia. Philosophers throughout the ages have invented States of Nature, various Paradises, their fictional worlds in which they posited ideal systems and via which they constructed their worldviews.

    The fictional world via which I most shaped my worldview was Star Trek.

    Growing up, I was undoubtedly deeply influenced by the vision laid out in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the corresponding films, in which Humanity had reached what is known as a post-scarcity society: a level of technological productivity in which all needs can be provided for and competition – be it economic or military – was rendered unnecessary. Along with this economic abundance came a democratic-socialist system of sociopolitical organization, with sufficient welfare systems and healthcare, and in which scientific advancement was undertaken not for private profit but for the collective good.

    I took this vision as my own ideal of what the future of humanity should look like. However, this was obviously a fiction, very greatly divorced from the way the world worked today. The questions that arose, therefore, were: in what ways was this vision achievable? In what ways would it have to be altered?

    More specifically, this is a society in which some of the ideas of Western society are taken to an extreme: science and logic are given pride of place, religion has all but disappeared save for private affairs, all individuals are subject to rule of law, and people of all races and genders are treated as equals. Though many people may see these institutions as the logical termination of our current “scarcity” era of human history, it is important not to become trapped in a teleological fallacy. These values are not universal ideals. These ideals are the hallmark of Western Civilization.

    Western ideas of liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist, or Orthodox culture” (Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations”, 1993, p. 40).

    As I understood it, the vision presented in Star Trek was closest to being achieved, in the early 21st century, in the European Union. In the EU, war had been all but abandoned as a tool of national policy. Religion was kept far from politics

    For me, a young liberal growing up in Bush-era middle America, this idea of Europe offered me a vision of society free from everything I hated about the United States: its self-exaltation, its bellicose policies, the rampant capitalism, the overbearing influence of religion on national life.

    As I grew up, however, I began to see that Europe was sleepwalking off a cliff. Western Civilization was not alone in the world, and it had no unchallenged right to lead the future of humanity. The philosophical changes that had led to a softening of military policies and an embrace of comfortable social policies in Europe had blunted any desire to carry a torch or wave the banner of a civilization. The projection of civilizational ideals abroad meant little if not backed with the ability to project civilizational force abroad. Though Europe was closest to achieving the Trekian dream, the road it had followed was a dead-end given geopolitical realities.

  • “The people in the world that considers culture the fourth branch of government weren’t confused. Bush forgot to nation-build an entire branch of government.”

    – https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/19/refactoring-culture-as-branch-of-government/

  • My Thesis: Technocracy, Democracy, and Legitimacy in EU GMO Regulation

    A majority of EU citizens support restrictions on GMOs, despite assurances of the scientific community of the safety of these products. The European Commission under the leadership of Jean-Claude Juncker has been attempting to respond to these public desires; however, Juncker’s policy proposals contravene the European Court of Justice and the World Trade Organization and threaten the integrity of the European Single Market and the vitality of European economic competitiveness; further, when placed in the context of long-term regulatory changes in the EU, they threaten to reduce the role of scientific expertise in policymaking decisions, with implications for European technological and scientific leadership.What should European institutions do about the GMO question, and are there possible resolutions to this dilemma?

    This investigation draws implications for the intersection of public opinion, regulation, and science policy in the EU and throughout Western democracies, particularly regulation of new technologies, and finds that science and democracy should and do occupy separate spheres. It argues that too much democratic interference into scientific processes poses a problem for the validity of science and threatens the societal underpinnings that give rise to scientific innovation and progress. The investigation also comments on the broader question of authority in modern Western democracies.

    https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Healthy_Institutions_Technocracy_Democracy_and_Legitimacy_in_EU_GMO_Regulation/10247279

    Full Abstract:

    As a result of several food and chemical-related public health scares as well as strong activism by environmental organization such as Greenpeace, longstanding majorities of European Union (EU) citizens support restrictions on the authorization and use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) for human and animal consumption in the EU. Given the EU’s ongoing Democratic Deficit and the deepening crisis of faith in recent years in European institutions, the European Commission under the leadership of Jean-Claude Juncker has been attempting to respond to these public desires with a series of proposed regulatory reforms.

    However, Juncker’s policy proposals pose an enormous quandary for European Institutions for several reasons. Namely, they contravene rulings by both the European Court of Justice and the World Trade Organization and threaten the integrity of the European Single Market and the vitality of European economic competitiveness; further, when placed in the context of long-term regulatory changes in the EU, they threaten to reduce the role of scientific expertise in policymaking decisions, with implications for European technological and scientific leadership. Several key questions arise from the current predicament regarding GMO Regulations in Europe, and which this thesis addresses.

    • First, how did the history of European food and GM regulation lead to this current impasse and how does it frame the current debate?
    • Second, what are the arguments in favor of the reforms proposed by the Juncker Commission?
    • Third, what are the primary arguments against these reforms?

    This research will show that there is strong evidence both for and against the reforms. In light of this evidence, this thesis will provide tentative answers to a final question:

    • What should European institutions do about the GMO question, and are there possible resolutions to this dilemma?

    To answer the questions this work takes the following course: first, it details the regulatory history and committee rules that create the background of the GMO dilemma, and the proposed reforms that would resolve the dilemma. Second, it analyzes the nature of Europe’s democratic deficit and ongoing populist legitimacy crisis as informed by the political philosophies of Jürgen Habermas. Then, it explains the institutional and structural constraints such as European law and World Trade Organization rulings that pose an enormous quandary for the proponents of Juncker’s reforms and show that Schumpeter’s elaboration of the Public Choice Dilemma is at work, despite the impact of coalition behaviors.

    Ultimately, this research argues that the broad strokes of the regulatory status quo should be preserved, but several specific points can be reformed in more democratic ways. This investigation draws implications for the intersection of public opinion, regulation, and science policy in the EU and throughout Western democracies, particularly regulation of new technologies, and finds that science and democracy should and do occupy separate spheres.

  • Amusing and Interesting Links

    Ancient Romans loved their dogs as much as we moderns do:
    https://www.thedodo.com/9-touching-epitaphs-ancient-gr-589550486.html

    The most effective weapon on the modern battlefield is…concrete?
    https://mwi.usma.edu/effective-weapon-modern-battlefield-concrete/

     

  • Privilege is Contextual

    Privilege is Contextual

    I was recently listening to The Ezra Klein Show episode featuring Jonathan Haidt:

    https://app.stitcher.com/splayer/f/82658/57404323

    Throughout the conversation is the idea that modern outrage culture is heavily centered on liberal and elite college campuses, and often discusses questions of privilege and sociocultural aggressions.

    This provoked a thought from me: no one at elite liberal universities is oppressed. The students who are able to gain admittance to the top universities in the US are not victims; they are amongst the most elite and privileged individuals in the country. They occupy spots that millions of Americans would sacrifice immensely to attain. These are people who will go on to be corporate leaders, politicians, academics, media personalities. These are people who will occupy top slots in American sociocultural and socioeconomic hierarchies.

    And yet many of these students come from low income backgrounds. Many of them are from historically marginalized groups: racial, sexual, or religious minorities, and indeed women, all of whom are now struggling (with my full support)  in many domains of life for real and lasting recognition and treatment as equals of Straight White (Post-)Christian Men. These are groups that struggle with problems such as lower average incomes, or legal exclusions, or dis-preference for jobs or promotions, or sociocultural pigeonholes; these are peoples who are in many respects victims, and oppressed.

    So how do we square these two different conceptions? Are these groups oppressed or are they not? Are these not contradictions?

    The resolution of this dilemma is the idea that Privilege is Contextual. A general sociocultural privilege that one may enjoy as a member of a broad group does not mean that in the workplace or classroom that it is impossible to be oppressed; likewise, a general state of sociocultural oppression does not prevent one from carrying out one’s own oppression against someone who is in other contexts “higher in the hierarchy”. For a more in-depth discussion of this, see my post “On Privilege“.

    It is important to note that just because someone is underprivileged in one context does not mean that they are always and everywhere free to “punch up” at relatively privileged groups, because in some contexts these groups are not “up”, and the noble fight to “punch up” the oppressors comes to create a type of oppression.

    To illustrate this point, I recently responded to a post on SlateStarCodex.

    If you find it too long, the summary is this (and ample evidence of these claims are provided in the article): feminism is generally good and necessary, but some leading self-described feminists are accused of being, but deny that they can be, oppressive in ways that cause pain and trauma. Whenever the pained and traumatized groups, in this case some nerds, find the courage to genuinely respond, they are told in various ways that their pain and trauma is not real and is just privilege because they are not the victims of structural oppression. This makes the pain and trauma worse. The author then gives various arguments and evidence of why structural oppression of groups like nerds is very real, and how many feminists seem to actively encourage the furthering of the oppression.

    This is not representative of most of my lived experience of growing up a (not by choice) nerd. Nor is it representative of the feminist views I hold nor most of the feminists I have known. But it is true to a few experiences I have had and people I have known on both sides of this issue. The capstone (with which I agree) of the article is this:

    “I see a vision here of everybody, nerdy men, nerdy women, feminists, the media, whoever – cooperating to solve our mutual problems and treat each other with respect. Of course I am on board with this vision. As Scott Aaronson would put it, I am 97% on board. What keeps me from being 100% on board right now is the feeling that the other side still doesn’t get it.”

    A friend responded the following:

    If the “genuine response” from nerds is the extreme misogyny I described above, then forget the rest of this response because all that’s needed is this: the argument provided here is incel-sympathizing misogyny.

    I responded as follows: I think an interpretation that “the ‘genuine response’ from nerds is the extreme misogyny” is a misreading of the whole argument. I’m not claiming that, nor, I think, is the author, and at no point does misogyny or the aggressively misogynistic “incelism” become a justifiable response. As I see it, the crux of the argument is this: if some influential feminist writers and mainstream newssources are actively discounting the stories of suffering in some of the (albeit unrepresentative) “nerds” as privileged whining, and actively contributing to the stereotypes of what these men want and what their “real” thought processes are, at what point *does* that become a kind of oppression? To generalize it, at what point can voices who are or were oppressed and underprivileged in some dimensions become oppressive in another dimension?

    Further, the accusation that a rational, well-documented criticism of the extremism of a group is somehow “misogyny” is self-defeating; what movement that cannot tolerate rational criticism can thrive? (For discussion on the relationship between “explaining” and “excusing”, see my post here).

    And most importantly, does whether or not it’s narrowly-defined “oppression” determine whether or not it’s harmful and needs to stop?