From the category archives:
Academia
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).
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall has been making the case that the states are critical sites of resistance to Trump’s lawless power grabs on the road to authoritarianism. He was challenged today by a reader who asked him what, specifically, the Blue states can do. Marshall tossed out some ideas: Secure the vote, sure. But we should already expect this, and it’s still a very defensive move, not chipping away at Trump’s expanding power. Withholding taxes collected from state employees from the Federal Government. I am not keen on this, as it is probably illegal. And why wouldn’t Trump retaliate by stopping all Federal payments to California? Arresting masked and out-of-uniform ICE agents who refuse to identify themselves. Maybe, but this could get dangerous very fast.
Strategizing like this is not really my thing. But I have an idea. And I think it could be significant. Over at Vox, Dylan Matthews argues that Trump’s 15% tax on Nvidia’s and AMD’s chip exports to China is flagrantly unconstitutional. It’s not just that Trump lacks any authority from Congress to impose this tax. It’s that Article I, Section 9, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution says, “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.” Trump is imposing a duty on a major export from the State of California. This looks like an open-and-shut case, easy to understand.
The difficulty is that Nvidia and AMD have caved on this, because Trump has so many other ways to get back at tech companies if he wants. He could, after all, simply prohibit chip exports to China, which would be perfectly legal. So this is extortion. Nvidia and AMD, although they have legal standing to object to Trump’s illegal tax, and would likely win their case if they filed one, would lose financially from Trump’s retaliation if they filed.
So here’s my idea: Governor Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta should sue the Trump administration to stop the 15% export tax on Nvidia’s and AMD’s chip exports to China. I know, I know, neither China nor the big tech companies are popular. But hear me out.
Human beings are creatures who can describe their actions at various levels. Elizabeth Anscombe has famously introduced the example of a man who moves his arm, to pump water, to poison the inhabitants of a house, to overthrow a regime, to bring peace.* You can play with this case, or others, to create all kinds of variations: which of these descriptions does a person know of? Which elements could be outsourced to others, who might not know other descriptions? This is the stuff of comedies, tragedies, and detective stories. And arguably, it matters immensely when it comes to the introduction of AI and other digital technologies into our work.
I was reminded of this basic insight from the philosophy of action, about the multiple descriptions under which our actions can fall, when, the other day, I had to do the proofs for a paper. In the past, I had seen proofing as an act of care – a loving gaze that spots the last mistakes and makes the last improvements before a text goes out into the world. Not the most exciting part of academic work – the arguments have been made, after all – but a meaningful closure of the sometimes bumpy road to publication. I’m the generation who always got pdfs; generations before me did it on paper.
A book review from Inside Story: After The Spike by Spears and Geruso
The most striking observation in Dean Spears and Michael Geruso’s new book, After the Spike, is summed up by the cover illustration, which shows a world population rising rapidly to its current eight billion before declining to pre-modern levels and eventually to zero. As the authors observe, this is the inevitable implication of the hypothesis that fertility levels will remain below replacement level indefinitely into the future.
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