A trolley problem, some personal stuff, a bit of Islamic jurisprudence, and then the Honda.
1) Trolley time. Let’s start with the trolley problem. People proposing trolley problems often do them in two parts. First, there’s the anodyne one with the easy answer:
A trolley is rushing down the tracks towards a group of five people. If it hits them, they will die. If you pull a switch, you can divert the trolley onto a different track. There is one person on that track, and they will die instead of the five. Do you pull the switch?
And of course you answer “yes” and then you get sucker-punched with something like this:
Five people are dying of organ failure, from different organs. If they get transplants they will live out their normal lives, Without the transplants, they will die. In front of you is a healthy person who has the organs that they need. If you kill the healthy person you will save the five. Do you kill them?
Okay so on one hand trolley problems can be a legitimate tool for exploring values and morality. There’s a lot of interesting stuff you can unpack with them. But on the other hand these little bait-and-switches can be, frankly, very irritating. They’re set up to put our rationality at war with our intuitions, emotions, and habits of thought.
Yes, that can sometimes be a useful or at least informative exercise. But for most of us, the likely response is going to be less “Hmm, maybe deontological ethics are more appropriate here than a simple utilitarian analysis” and more “Oh, ffs. Now you’re just being ridiculous.”
We’ll return to this shortly. First, a short digression on living green.
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You’ve probably heard of the “Peter principle”: that employees get promoted until they reach a job they are no longer good at. And in political philosophy, there is a famous dispute between (the camps of) John Rawls and Jerry Cohen about the appropriateness of people in a just society being motivated by money. Last week, reading around about why on earth we organize work life the way we do, I had a eureka moment about how these two are connected.
The Rawls-Cohen debate is about whether within the institutional framework of a just society, it is justified to use monetary incentives – and the ensuing inequalities – in labor markets (and one can add, for the sake of argument, motivation by status, which is usually intertwined with money, even though Carens had famously argued they could, theoretically, be separated). This allows for an efficient labor market allocation that can ultimately benefit the worst-off members of society, some in camp Rawls would say. It is incompatible with an ethos of justice to require a high wage for making a societally useful contribution, Cohen and others would reply (and those are, of course, not the only arguments in this debate).
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This weekend has been dedicated to the “reconstitution historique” of 1653 in Pézenas, when the États generaux of Languedoc met in what is now a small town but was then the seat of the Prince de Conti. So, a capital city back then and also a place where Molière used to hang out. There have been processions, music, acrobats, the whole works.
I’m working on a first draft of a book arguing against pro-natalism (more precisely, that we shouldn’t be concerned about below-replacement fertility). That entails digging into lots of literature with which I’m not very familiar and I’ve started using OpenAI’s Deep Research as a tool.
A typical interaction starts with me asking a question like “Did theorists of the demographic transition expect an eventual equilibrium with stable population”. Deep Research produces a fairly lengthy answer (mostly “Yes” in this case) and based on past interactions, produces references in a format suitable for my bibliographic software (Bookends for Mac, my longstanding favourite, uses .ris). To guard against hallucinations, I get DOI and ISBN codes and locate the references immediately. Then I check the abstracts (for journal articles) or reviews (for books) to confirm that the summary is reasonably accurate.
A few thoughts about this.
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Mr Magpie has always been a bold friend. He sits at the table with us when we are outside. In the warmer months when we often leave the back door open he walks inside the house, sometimes looking for a snack, but often enough walks all the way through the house, apparently just to say hello.
Mrs Magpie and Magpie Jr are friendly, but less bold. They come and sit near us on the ground, not at the table. And they join Mr Magpie in eating nearby, but they don’t eat with us as he does – insists upon, even.
When there is food the three magpies sing a special song. It starts with one low warble, then the other two join in. The pitch of the warble gets higher and it ends with a long note, in three parts, pleasantly discordant. The song feels like gratitude or celebration to me, but who knows.
Being in relationship with Magpies is just great.
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I seem to have become CT’s resident moderate techno-optimist. So let me push back a little: here are five things that we’re not going to see between now and 2050.
1) Nobody is going to Mars. Let me refine that a little: nobody is going to Mars and coming back alive. A one-way suicide mission is just barely plausible.
[spoiler: he does get home]
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I do these occasional posts about science papers. Some are just for fun. But sometimes — honest! — there’s an underlying connection to the greater Crooked Timber project.
This post is one of that sort, because it’s about the limits of understanding. Unsurprisingly, it involves biology.
So we all learned back in high school that our nerves are sheathed in a coating, like insulation on a copper wire. The coating is made of a special substance called myelin. If your tenth grade biology text mentioned myelin, it probably said something like “myelin allows impulses to flow along the nerves faster and more efficiently”. Which is true! It may also do some other things, but “myelin = faster and more efficient transmission” is what we all learned in sophomore biology back when, and it’s basically correct.
Occasionally something goes wrong, and either the myelin sheath doesn’t form right, or the body’s immune system gets confused and attacks it. This can lead to serious problems, conditions like multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy. Also, newborn babies haven’t finished forming their myelin sheathing yet. That’s why newborns are so very weak and uncoordinated. That magic moment, around the three month mark, where the kid suddenly starts holding up their head, looking around, and intentionally reaching for stuff? That’s when “myelinization” is complete.
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Looking at the facts, there’s no reasonable conclusion except that US democracy is done for. But rather than face facts, I’m turning to fiction. So, here’s a story about the collapse of Trumpism, crony capitalism and the AI/crypto bubble. Fiction is a relatively unfamilar mode of writing for me, so critique (on style and structure rather than plausibility) is most welcome.
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I was recently part of an online discussion that asked this question. People were talking about industry, democracy, civil society, world leadership, you name it. But nobody was asking the obvious question: when, in fact, will the sun set on the United States?
Yes, I’m going there. [click to continue…]
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People are wondering how Trump could get away with nationalizing 10% of Intel, with plans to acquire more corporate assets for the Federal government, while hardly hearing a peep from other Republicans. Isn’t this socialism, which is anathema to the Republican Party? Uhh, no. It’s National Socialism. Contrary to some right-wingers, who try to blame the left for fascism because the Nazi party had “socialism” in its name, that interpretation of what fascism was about is like thinking that the fact that the official name of North Korea is “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” somehow discredits democracy.
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My friend was bitten by a dog this summer. For British readers: being bitten by a dog elsewhere in the world isn’t merely painful, scary and shocking. It brings with it a real possibility of rabies. For non-British reader – really, I’m not making this up, there’s no rabies in the UK. My friend is here in Madison, and it was a drive-by bite, so he never saw the dog’s immunization papers, and can’t get it put down. He’s had to go through the course of preventative rabies therapy, and is clearly experiencing a certain level of trauma, not really wanting to go out in his neighbourhood. I suspect that, like me, he’ll now have a lifelong fear of dogs. Which, of course, may serve him well.
My experience being bitten by a dog was far more satisfying. The Miner’s Strike was half way through, and friends had organized a benefit concert with The Pogues in Camden that I planned to attend. Beforehand I decided to go up the shops to get something for dinner. As I walked up the road I noticed a bloke in a torn dirty old man mac gesticulating wildly to me from a distant phone box. I slowly twigged he was not alone in the box – he was accompanied by a 5-year old girl I recognized from the a house a few doors away, and a good-looking rather well dressed chap around my age. He seemed completely nuts.
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I managed to time things perfectly – I had a conference in Manchester after day one of the Cheltenham festival, which our friend Bob hasn’t missed since 1953, so we all went to see the first day of Gloucestershire v Hampshire (starring Wisconsin’s own Ian Holland!) at Cheltenham, and I booked a rail ticket from there to Manchester Piccadilly (via Birmingham New Street, naturally) for late in the day. Dad always liked to leave a red ball match shortly after tea, so he and Bob left me to watch an additional hour of play before getting the train.
I wandered off with plenty of time to spare and, as I approached the station, had that sense of dread known to most who regularly use English railways. About 150 people milling around outside the station even as two busses, both clearly replacements, left the station forecourt, bade ill for my trip.
ON investigation, all services to New Street were cancelled indefinitely. We were told, definitively, that no more replacement busses could be found. God knows why I cared – to be honest I’d be as happy spending the night in Cheltenham as in Manchester – but there were a lot of disoriented and pissed off people milling around. I was chatting with a very distressed young woman (20ish) from Bath University who was hoping to reach Middlesborough (good luck) when, looking at the announcements board, an alternative occurred to me. And this is what I love about the English.
The young lad (I suppose he was in his mid-to-late 20s, but he looked 13 to me) who appeared to be in charge of the whole business was, let’s say, stoical, despite being besieged by hundreds of people many of whom were being quite rude to him, poor chap. I sidled up to him and said “So, there’s no trains to New Street this evening right? Probably a death on the line?”. He confirmed my worst fears. “But: trains are still running to Worcester Foregate?” – he assented. “And, presumably, we could all get the next train to Foregate street, change there, and get a train from there to Birmingham Moor Street, from where we could walk to New Street?” (It’s a very short walk). His eyes lit up: “Yes”, he said, “What a good idea! That would work brilliantly!”. Then his face fell, “But how would people know how to get from Moor Street to New Street?”. “Well”, I said, “The most absurd strategy would be to tell them to follow me since I know what I am doing. Or – they nearly all have phones, so could navigate themselves. Another option would be to send an employee to lead them across the city”. He chose the most absurd option.
And so it was that I led about 200 people onto the train to Worcester. Funnily enough, when we reached Worcester Shrub Hill the station staff seemed to know what was going on and told everybody to get off there rather than carry on to Foregate Street, presumably because it facilitated getting an earlier Birmingham train out.[1] By then I was kind of stuck with the 20 year old woman – she was using my portable battery to charge her phone (god she was anxious) and on the one hand I didn’t want to weird her out by talking to her much, on the other hand I didn’t want to lose my portable battery, which I was going to need. With us were a young man from Hull who I genuinely couldn’t understand, and had to pretend to be deaf every time he said anything to get him to repeat it, and a slightly more comprehensible young woman from Derby: I thought they were a couple – more on that in a minute. As we all approached Birmingham I worked out that Snow Hill is as close to New Street as Moor Street is, and I knew it was an easier station to exit; combined with the fact that we’d reach Snow Hill 3 minutes sooner than Moor Street I suggested to the whole train that we all exit there for the walk to New Street. Bold, because I’d never actually walked that particular route myself.
Everything worked out though, and I successfully led my couple of hundred passengers from Snow Hill to New Street, feeling triumphant.
Until we reached New Street.
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