A few weeks ago, Daniel Dennett published an alarmist essay (“Creating counterfeit digital people risks destroying our civilization”) in The Atlantic that amplified concerns Yuval Noah Harari expressed in the Economist.+ (If you are in a rush, feel free to skip to the next paragraph because what follows are three quasi-sociological remarks.) First, Dennett’s piece is (sociologically) notable because in it he is scathing of the “AI community” (many of whom are his fanbase) and its leading corporations (“Google, OpenAI, and others”). Dennett’s philosophy has not been known for leading one to a left-critical political economy, and neither has Harari’s. In addition, Dennett’s piece is psychologically notable because it goes against his rather sunny disposition — he is a former teacher and sufficiently regular acquaintance — and the rather optimistic persona he has sketched of himself in his writings (recall this recent post); alarmism just isn’t Dennett’s shtick. Third, despite their prominence neither Harari nor Dennett’s pieces really reshaped the public discussion (in so far as there (still) is a public). And that’s because it competes with the ‘AGI induced extinction’ meme, which, despite being a lot more far-fetched, is scarier (human extinction > fall of our civilization) and is much better funded and supported by powerful (rent-seeking) interests.
Here’s Dennett’s core claim(s):
You may ask, ‘What does this have to do with the intentional stance?’ For Dennett goes on to write, “Our natural inclination to treat anything that seems to talk sensibly with us as a person—adopting what I have called the “intentional stance”—turns out to be easy to invoke and almost impossible to resist, even for experts. We’re all going to be sitting ducks in the immediate future.” This is a kind of (or at least partial) road to serfdom thesis produced by our disposition to take up the intentional stance. In what follows I show how these concepts come together by the threat posed by AIs designed to fake personhood.
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There’s a backstory behind this Washington Post story on Republican persecution of academics, and it’s one that doesn’t make the Intercept look good.
Jordan’s colleagues and staffers met Tuesday on Capitol Hill with a frequent target of right-wing activists, University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, two weeks after they interviewed Clemson University professors who also track online propaganda, according to people familiar with the events. Last week, Jordan (Ohio) threatened legal action against Stanford University, home to the Stanford Internet Observatory, for not complying fully with his records requests. … The push caps years of pressure from conservative activists who have harangued such academics online and in person and filed open-records requests to obtain the correspondence of those working at public universities. The researchers who have been targeted study the online spread of disinformation, including falsehoods that have been accelerated by former president and candidate Donald Trump and other Republican politicians. … Last month, the founder of the conspiracy-theory-prone outlet the Gateway Pundit and others sued Starbird and Stanford academics Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta, alleging that they are part of a “government-private censorship consortium” that tramples on free speech. …
“Whether directly or indirectly, a government-approved or-facilitated censorship regime is a grave threat to the First Amendment and American civil liberties,” Jordan wrote.
The claim that these academics are part of a “government-approved or-facilitated censorship regime” is complete bullshit. But it is bullshit that was popularized by a grossly inaccurate story at the Intercept, which purported to discover a secret collaboration between academics and DHS to censor the American right wing. [click to continue…]
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I’m off to do a talk to mark World Ocean Day, so this is posted in haste. The ocean needs advocates. It’s our biggest ecosystem, probably our biggest carbon sink, a major source of oxygen. It regulates temperatures, and drives weather patterns. Hundreds of millions of people are nutritionally dependent on fish. But the ocean is also increasingly central to the global economy, and facing threats like never before.
Climate change – which drives ocean warming and acidification – is the big one. But plastic and nitrogen pollution and destructive fishing practices are also major threats. Fish farming has an enormous environmental footprint, and now a Spanish company has plans to open the world’s first octopus farm. Plans for mining the seabed are close to fruition – or, depending on your view, they may be many years away, exaggerated to boost the share price of a few mining corporations. But one way or another, the ocean is more and more central to the global economy.
Today is a day to reflect on the kind of ocean we want: an industrialised ocean devoid of much of its present life? Or an ocean in recovery, teeming with life once more? After the second world war (when U-boats patrolled the oceans and fishing boats were forced to stay at home in much of the world) scientists were amazed at the recovery the ocean’s ecosystems had made in just a few years. Will they get the chance of recovery again?
Climate change – which drives ocean warming and acidification – is the big one. But plastic and nitrogen pollution and destructive fishing practices are also major threats. Fish farming has an enormous environmental footprint, and now a Spanish company has plans to open the world’s first octopus farm. Plans for mining the seabed are close to fruition – or, depending on your view, they may be many years away, exaggerated to boost the share price of a few mining corporations. But one way or another, the ocean is more and more central to the global economy.
Today is a day to reflect on the kind of ocean we want: an industrialised ocean devoid of much of its present life? Or an ocean in recovery, teeming with life once more? After the second world war (when U-boats patrolled the oceans and fishing boats were forced to stay at home in much of the world) scientists were amazed at the recovery the ocean’s ecosystems had made in just a few years. Will they get the chance of recovery again?
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Since the beginning of this millennium, I’ve been writing critiques of the “generation game”, the idea that people can be divided into well-defined groups (Boomers, Millennials and so on), with specific characteristics based on their year of birth. As I said in my first go at this issue, back in 2000 (reproduced here )
Much of what passes for discussion about the merits or otherwise of particular generations is little more than a repetition of unchanging formulas about different age groups à the moral degeneration of the young, the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old, and so on.
Demographers have a word (or rather two words) for this. They distinguish between age effects and cohort effects. The group of people born in a given period, say a year or a decade, is called a cohort. Members of a cohort have things in common because they have shared common experiences through their lives. But, at any given point in time, when members of the cohort are at some particular age, they share things in common with the experience of earlier and later generations when they were at the same age.
My most prominent contribution to the debate was this piece in the New York Times five years ago, prompted by the Pew Research Centre’s announcement that it would define people born between 1981 and 1996 as members of the millennial generation. After discussing the history of the “generation” idea, I made the central point
Dividing society by generation obscures the real and enduring lines of race, class and gender. When, for example, baby boomers are blamed for “ruining America,” the argument lumps together Donald Trump and a 60-year-old black woman who works for minimum wage cleaning one of his hotels.
Now, I’m pleased to say, Pew has changed its view, partly in response to a “growing chorus of criticism about generational research and generational labels in particular.”
[click to continue…]
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Malbork Castle, from which the Teutonic knights dominated a swathe of central Europe in the middle ages, is a vast and impressive fortress. It also has some rather stunning interiors.
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Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Crack-Up Capitalism is an original and striking analysis of a weird apparent disjuncture. Libertarians and classical liberals famously claim to be opposed to state power. So why do some of them resort to it so readily?
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In general, I think the left focuses too much on national politics, when a lot of the action is happening at the state level. So I want to discuss politics in Michigan, my home state since 1987. Ann Arbor is even more blue than Detroit, but overall Michigan is basically a 50-50 state. Trump won here in 2016 by 11,000 votes; Biden won in 2020 by 154,000. Democrats and Republicans have alternated in the Governor’s seat for decades. But the Republicans had a lock on the state legislature for 40 years, until it was broken in 2022, when Democrats won both houses and swept all statewide offices. I’ll explain how that happened in a subsequent post. Here I want to focus on rising violence within the Michigan GOP and its connections to misogyny.
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The explosive growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT threatens to disrupt many aspects of society. Geoffrey Hinton, the former head of AI at Google, recently announced his retirement; there is a growing sense of inevitability and a concomitant lack of agency.
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Kevin Drum points to an obscure, but radical proposal to change the way the US government does benefit cost analysis. The Office of Management and Budget has released draft guidance saying
One practical approach to implementing weights that account for diminishing marginal utility uses a constant-elasticity specification to determine the weights for subgroups defined by annual income. To compute an estimate of the net benefits of a regulation using this approach, you first compute the traditional net benefits for each subgroup. You can then compute a weighted sum of the subgroup-specific net benefits: the weight for each subgroup is the median income for that subgroup divided by the U.S. median income, raised to the power of the elasticity of marginal utility times negative one. OMB has determined that 1.4 is a reasonable estimate of the income elasticity of marginal utility for use in regulatory analyses.
This is pretty obscure, but what it means is that, a project that delivers a dollar of benefits to each of a group of poor people is worth more than a project that delivers a dollar of benefits to each of a group of poor rich people.
A lot more !
Kevin uses a graph to illustrate, showing that an extra dollar for the median household is worth 50 times as much as an extra dollar for a household with an income of $1 million a year. Conversely, an extra dollar for households at the bottom of the income distribution is worth 12 times as much as an extra dollar at the median.
It’s actually simpler to get the intuition of you use an elasticity of 1, which corresponds to logarithmic utility. Then you can sum up the implications by saying that a given percentage increase (or reduction) in income yields the same additional (or reduced) utility no matter who gets it. So, for example, if a policy halved Elon Musk’s income, while doubling the income of a single randomly chosen US household, it would be evaluated as neutral. If the policy doubled the income of two households, it would be beneficial. More generally, you can just add up all the percentage changes in income from the project (included the taxes needed to finance* it). If that sum is positive, the project should be approved.
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Richard Bourke’s (2018) “What is conservatism? History, ideology, party” critically discusses (inter alia) Samuel P. Huntington’s (1957) “Conservatism as an Ideology.” Yes, that Huntington (1927–2008). What follows is not about the clash of civilizations, promise.
Bourke claims that “the conservatism of Oakeshott and Huntington, like the liberalism of Hayek and Rawls, reflects an effort to fabricate an ideal, to stake out territory – to label in order to legitimise a particular system of values.” (Sadly, Bourke is unfamiliar with my own work on philosophical prophecy.) In particular, Bourke treats Huntington as a kind of modern Humean who, first, thinks that liberty presupposes authority. And, second, “that a conservative programme was necessary for the survival of the tradition of liberal politics in America.” On this reading, Huntington, then, criticizes those (like Russell Kirk) who understand themselves as ‘conservative,’ but who in their lack of understanding of American political culture end up in reactionary places. The role of Burke is, following Strauss’ reading of Burke (according to Bourke), to legitimise “existing institutions without prescribing for them any particular content.” Fair enough.
Now, if we go back to Huntington’s essay, he distinguishes among three ways of understanding conservatism as “a system of ideas concerned with the distribution of political and social values and acquiesced in by a significant social group:” first, as an aristocratic response to the French revolution. Second, as “an autonomous system of ideas which are generally valid. It is defined in terms of universal values such as justice, order, balance, moderation.” In fact, those political agents that adhere to this second way of understanding conservatism may well understand it as a “preferable political philosophy under any historical circumstances.” (emphasis added) And third, a situationist one in which a “recurring type of historical situation in which a fundamental challenge is directed at established institutions and in which the supporters of those institutions employ the conservative ideology in their defense.” (emphasis added.) Notice that, one can accept this three-fold taxonomy even if one is not a conservative. One can even think, as a dispassionate scholar, that one of these kinds of notions best describes conservatism in history while not endorsing it as a political agent or from a normative perspective. As Huntington observes the three kinds of conservatism posited by this taxonomy only differ analytically in relation “to the historical process.”
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I had an odd intellectual experience recently. A US high school student wrote to me as part of an assignment, asking for my thoughts on Brave New World, and its current relevance. I replied talking about the role of “Our Ford”, and Gramsci’s contemporary concept of Fordism.
That got me thinking about post-Fordism, and then to the idea of post-post-Fordism, referring to the information economy that has emerged since the rise of the Internet. I expected that this would be a reinvention of the intellectual wheel on my part, but when I popped the phrase into DuckDuckGo, I got a single hit, which was part of a 2015 interview with UK radical economist Robin Murray. whose ideas about the concept were very similar to mine, but whose comments were very brief.
I didn’t know of Murray, but I thought I should write to him and ask him how he had developed the idea. Sadly, I was led to Wikipedia, which reported that Murray had died in 2017, apparently without writing anything further on the topic. I’ve found a handful of citations, but of the “in passing” variety.
I’m not sure where to go next with this. I’d like to revive the idea (if indeed it died with Murray), but I’m not sure how to deal with an intellectual history like this. Perhaps some of my readers knew (or knew of) Murray or have seen the idea of post-post-Fordism?
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This is why food in the US and Britain will never be quite good enough.
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