Login
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.
More than a half century ago, Dan Dennett re-introduced a kind of (as-if) teleological explanation into natural philosophy by coining and articulation (over the course of a few decades of refinement), the ‘intentional stance’ and its role in identifying so-called ‘intentional systems,’ which just are those entities to which ascription of the intentional stance is successful. Along the way, he gave different definitions of the intentional stance (and what counts as success). But here I adopt the (1985) one:
It is a familiar fact from the philosophy of science that prediction and explanation can come apart.* I mention this because it’s important to see that the intentional stance isn’t mere or brute instrumentalism. The stance presupposes prediction and explanation as joint necessary conditions.
In the preceding two I have treated the intentional stance as (i) an explanatory or epistemic tool that describes a set of strategies for analyzing other entities (including humans and other kinds of agents) studied in cognitive science and economics (one of Dennett’s original examples).** But as the language of ‘stance’ suggests and as Dennett’s examples often reveal the intentional stance also describes our own (ii) ordinary cognitive practice even when we are not doing science. In his 1971 article, Dennett reminds the reader that this is “easily overlooked.” (p.93) For, Dennett the difference between (i-ii) is one of degree (this is his debt to his teacher Quine, but for present purposes it useful to keep them clearly distinct (and when I need to disambiguate I will use ‘intentional stance (i)’ vs ‘intentional stance (ii).’)
Now, as Dennett already remarked in his original (1971) article, but I only noticed after reading Rovane’s (1994) “The Personal Stance,” back in the day, there is something normative about the intentional stance because of the role of rationality in it (and, as Dennett describes, the nature of belief). And, in particular, it seems natural that when we adopt the intentional stance in our ordinary cognitive practice we tacitly or explicitly ascribe personhood to the intentional system. As Dennett puts it back in 1971, “Whatever else a person might be-embodied mind or soul, self-conscious moral agent, “emergent” form of intelligence-he is an Intentional system, and whatever follows just from being an Intentional system thus is true of a person.” Let me dwell on a complication here.
That, in ordinary life, we are right to adopt the intentional stance toward others is due to the fact that we recognize them as persons, which is a moral and/or legal status. In fact, we sometimes even adopt the intentional stance(ii) in virtue of this recognition even in high stakes contexts (e.g., ‘what would the comatose patient wish in this situation?’) That we do so may be the effect of Darwinian natural selection, as Dennett implies, and that it is generally a successful practice may also be the effect of such selection. But it does not automatically follow that when some entity is treated successfully as an intentional system it thereby is or even should be a person. Thus, whatever follows just from being an intentional system is true of a person, but (and this is the complication) it need not be the case that what is true of a person is true of any intentional system. So far so good. With that in place let’s return to Dennett’s alarmist essay in The Atlantic, and why it instantiates, at least in part, a road to serfdom thesis.
At a high level of generality, a road to serfdom thesis holds (this is a definition I use in my work in political theory) that an outcome unintended to social decisionmakers [here profit making corporations and ambitious scientists] is foreseeable to the right kind of observer [e.g., Dennett, Harari] and that the outcome leads to a loss of political and economic freedom over the medium term. I use ‘medium’ here because the consequences tend to follow in a time frame within an ordinary human life, but generally longer than one or two years (which is the short-run), and shorter than the centuries’ long process covered by (say) the rise and fall of previous civilization. (I call it a ‘partial’ road to serfdom thesis because a crucial plank is missing–see below.)
Before I comment on Dennett’s implied social theory, it is worth noting two things (and the second is rather more important): first, adopting the intentional stance is so (to borrow from Bill Wimsatt) entrenched into our ordinary cognitive practices that even those who can know better (“experts”) will do so in cases where they may have grounds to avoid doing so. Second, Dennett recognizes that when we adopt the intentional stance(ii) we have a tendency to confer personhood on the other (recall the complication.) This mechanism helps explain, as Joshua Miller observed, how that Google engineer fooled himself into thinking he was interacting with a sentient person.
Of course, a student of history, or a reader of science fiction, will immediately recognize that this tendency to confer personhood on intentional systems can be highly attenuated. People and animals have been regularly treated as things and instruments. So, what Dennett really means or ought to mean is that we will (or are) encounter(ing) intentional systems designed (by corporations) to make it likely that we will automatically treat them as persons. Since Dennett is literally the expert on this, and has little incentive to mislead the rest us on this very issue, it’s worth taking him seriously and it is rather unsettling that even powerful interests with a manifest self-interest in doing so are not.
Interestingly enough, in this sense the corporations who try to fool us are mimicking Darwinian natural selection because as Dennett himself has emphasized decades ago when the robot Cog was encountered in the lab, we all ordinarily have a disposition to treat, say, even very rudimentary eyes following/staring at us as exhibiting agency and as inducing the intentional stance into us. Software and human factor engineers have been taking advantage of this tendency all along to make our gadgets and tools ‘user friendly.’
Now, it is worth pointing out that while digital environments are important to our civilization, they are not the whole of it. So, even in the worst case scenario — our digital environment is already polluted in the way Dennett worries by self-replication counterfeit people–, you may think we still have some time to avoid conferring personhood on intentional systems in our physical environment and, thereby, also have time to partially cleanse our digital environment. Politicians still have to vote in person and many other social transactions (marriage, winning the NBA) still require in person attendance. This is not to deny that a striking number of transactions can be done virtually or digitally (not the least in the financial sector), but in many of these cases we also have elaborate procedures (and sanctions) to prevent fraud developed both by commercial parties and by civil society and government. This is a known arms race between identity-thieves, including self-replicating AI/LLMs who lack all sentience, and societies.
This known arms race actually builds on the more fundamental fact that society itself is the original identity thief because, generally, for all of us its conventions and laws both fix an identity where either there previously was none or displaces other (possible) identities, as well as, sometimes, takes away or unsettles the identity ‘we’ wish to have kept (and, here, too, there is a complex memetic arms race in which any token of a society is simultaneously the emergent property, but society (understood as a type) is the cause. [See David Haig’s book, From Darwin to Derrida, for more on this insight.]) And, of course, identity-fluidity also has many social benefits (as we can learn from our students or gender studies).
Now, at this point it is worth returning to the counterfeit money example that frames Dennett’s argument. It is not obvious that counterfeit money harmed society. It did harm the sovereign because undermined a very important lever of power (and its sovereignty) namely to insist that taxes are paid/levied in the very same currency/unit-system in which he/she paid salaries (and wrote IOUs) and other expenses. I don’t mean to suggest there are no other harms (inflation and rewarding ingenious counterfeiters), but these were both not that big a deal nor the grounds for making it a capital crime. (In many eras counterfeit money was useful to facilitate commerce in the absence of gold or silver coins.)
And, in fact, as sovereignty shifted to parliaments and people at the start of the nineteenth century, the death penalty for forgery and counterfeiting currency was abolished (and the penalties reduced over time). I suspect this is also due to the realization that where systematic forgeries are successful they do meet a social need and that a pluralist mass society itself is more robust than a sovereign who insists on full control over the mint. Dennett himself implicitly recognizes this, too, when he advocates “strict liability laws, removing the need to prove either negligence or evil intent, would keep them on their toes.” (This is already quite common in product liability and other areas of tort law around the world.)
I am not suggesting complacency about the risk identified by Harari and Dennett. As individuals, associations, corporations, and governments we do need to commit to developing tools that prevent and mitigate the risk from our own tendency to ascribe personhood to intentional systems designed to fool us. We are already partially habitualized to do so with all our passwords, two-factor verification, ID cards, passport controls etc.
In many ways, another real risk here, and which is why I introduced the road to serfdom language up above (despite the known aversion to Hayek among many readers here at CrookedTimber), is that our fear of deception can make us overshoot in risk mitigation and this, too, can undermine trust and many other benefits from relatively open and (so partially) vulnerable networks and practices. So, it would be good if regulators and governments started the ordinary practice of eliciting expert testimony to start crafting well designed laws right now and carefully calibrated them by attending to both the immediate risk from profit hungry AI community, and the long term risk of creating a surveillance society to prevent ascribing personhood to the wrong intentional systems (think Blade Runner). For, crucially for a (full) road to serfdom thesis, in order to ward off some unintended and undesirable consequences, decisions are taken along the way that tend to lock in a worse than intended and de facto bad political unintended outcome.
I could stop here, because this is my main point. But Dennett’s own alarmism is due to the fact that he thinks the public sphere (which ultimately has to support lawmakers) may already be so polluted that no action is possible. I quote again from The Atlantic:
I don’t think our liberal democracy depends on the informed consent of the governed. This conflates a highly idealized and normative view of democracy (that one may associate with deliberative or republican theories) with reality. It’s probably an impossible ideal in relatively large societies with complex cognitive division of labor, including the (rather demanding) sciences. (And it is also an ideal that gets abused in arguments for disenfranchisement.) So, while an educated populace should be promoted, in practice we have all kinds of imperfect, overlapping institutions and practices that correct for the lack of knowledge (parties, press, interest groups, consumer associations, academics, and even government bureaucracies, etc.)
It doesn’t follow we should be complacent about the fact that many of the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, and governments control our attention which they already do a lot of the time. But this situation is not new; Lippmann and Stebbing diagnosed it over a century ago, and probably is an intrinsic feature of many societies. It is partially to be hoped that a sufficient number of the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, governments, and the rest of us are spooked into action and social mobilization by Harari and Dennett to create countervailing mechanisms (including laws) to mitigate our tendency to ascribe personhood to intentional systems. (Hence this post.)
There is, of course, an alternative approach: maybe we should treat all intentional systems as persons and redesign our political and social lives accordingly. Arguably some of the Oxford transhumanists and their financial and intellectual allies are betting on this even if it leads to human extirpation in a successor civilization. Modern longtermism seems to be committed to the inference from intentional stance(i) to ascription of personhoodhood or moral worth. From their perspective Dennett and Harari are fighting a rear-guard battle.
*Here’s an example: before Newton offered a physics that showed how Kepler’s laws hung together, lots astronomers could marvelously predict eclipses of planetary moons based on inductive generalizations alone. How good were these predictions? They were so good that they generated the first really reliable measure or estimate for the speed of light.
**Fun exercise: read Dennett’s 1971 “Intentional Systems” after you read Milton Friedman’s “The methodology of positive economics.” (1953) and/or Armen Alchian’s “Uncertainty, evolution, and economic theory” (1950). (No, I am not saying that Dennett is the Chicago economist of philosophy!)
+Full disclosure, I read and modestly commented on Dennett’s essay in draft.
We now approach the end of our symposium on Joanne Yao’s The Ideal River.
This last commentary is from Dr Ida Roland Birkvad. Ida is a Fellow in Political Theory in the Department of International Relations at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research engages with questions related to international political theory, histories of imperialism, and non-Western agency in International Relations.
She previously wrote for us on Judith Butler in Norway.
Two years after laying the foundation stone for the Sardar Sarovar Dam in 1961, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed that hydroelectric dams were the ‘new temples of India, where I worship’ (Yao 2022, 205). Charting the length of the country’s postcolonial history, this infrastructural project of unprecedented scale and ambition was originally conceived of by Nehru’s deputy, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, in the years immediately following independence. In 2017, more than seventy years later, the network of dams horizontally spanning over half of India’s interior landscape, following the Narmada River from the state of Madhya Pradesh to the coast of Gujarat, was finally completed.
The romantic flourishes of Nehru’s characterisation, tying rivers and their taming to the spiritual realm, constitutes my starting point for this book symposium. In the following, I place Joanne Yao’s luminous charting of the emergence of environmental politics through the erection of 19th century river commissions into conversation with Dalit and anti-caste critiques of the collusion between Romantic thought, elite politics, and Brahmanical supremacy in the context of the Sardar Sarovar Dam development. Indeed, while Yao’s The Ideal River might seemingly focus rather exclusively on the role of Enlightenment rationality in the taming of the river, I argue that her book allows us to glean the dynamic relationship, at times mutually constitutive and at times in mutual contestation, between Enlightenment thought and the role of the other intellectual movement of modern history, namely Romanticism, in environmentalist thought.
Displacing an astounding 245 villages and submerging 37,555 hectares of land, the Sardar Sarovar Dam has caused immense debate and uproar, intensifying especially from the late 1980s onwards when its erection began on a mass scale (Rao 2022). However, the grandiose nature of the size and scope of the dam was from the outset rivalled only by the resistance movement forming to stop it. Taking shape in the late 1980s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) consisted of a broad coalition of adivasis (India’s indigenous population), farmers, environmentalists, and human rights activists. Organising to both resist the expansion of the dam, as well as to mitigate the consequences for the people whose lives were disturbed and uprooted by it, the NBA constituted one of the largest political resistance movements of its time. Its tactics included rallies, marches, hunger strikes, and perhaps most spectacularly the action of jal samarpan, in which activists stood neck-deep in the river, demonstrating their willingness to drown rather than to leave their lands (ibid.).
Beyond the anti-dam efforts often spearheaded by grassroots movements led by adivasi communities, the well-known social and political activist Arundhati Roy also contributed to bringing attention to the cause. Having just won the Booker Prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things in 1997, Roy’s campaigning attracted an increasingly global audience. In the early 2000s she wrote furiously on the subject, participating in marches and rallies and famously donating her Booker prize money to the NBA. For Roy, the question of the Sardar Sarovar Dam had come to ‘represent far more than the fight for one river’ (Bose 2004, 147). Indeed, from being a struggle ‘over the fate of a river valley it began to raise doubts about an entire political system. What is at issue now is the very nature of our democracy. Who owns this land? Who owns its rivers? Its forests? Its fish?’ (ibid.). The case of the Narmada dams, according to Roy, could ultimately provide ‘important lessons about the real costs of modernist fantasies’ (ibid.).
Roy’s efforts were controversial, also within the resistance movement itself. In a series of speeches, articles and open letters, Gail Omvedt, the prominent American-born anthropologist turned anti-caste and farmers’ activist in the western state of Maharashtra, accused both Roy and the top leadership of the NBA of having become ‘the voice of the eco-romanticists of the world’ (ibid, 150). Dams were not, according to her, an unqualified evil (Omvedt and Kapoor 1999). Indeed, opposing them on principle was socially irresponsible, ignoring the needs of the impoverished populations living along the banks of the river. In their blanket opposition to industrial development, the leadership of the NBA and their urban, middle-class spokespersons were at fault of romanticising the past, trading in reactionary tropes fearful of modernity and progress. Omvedt, who had lived in the village of Kasegaon since the 1970s, shared this view with many Dalits amongst whom she lived and worked. They all seemed to ask: how could social change happen when the movement’s leaders were always looking backward for their political ideals?
As Yao elucidates so expansively and in such breathtaking historical detail in her book, infrastructural and political projects to tame the river have marred societies for centuries. Indeed, she would probably agree with Roy that this at times Sisyphean effort does indeed constitute a fantasy of modernity, one which, as Yao writes, involved a ‘desire for neatness, predictability, finite boundaries, and a straightened sense of political purpose’ (2022, ix). Despite the scientific rationale that undergirds this fantasy, Yao insists that the intrinsic relationship between the project of taming nature and the emergence of modern environmental politics needs to be understood through its ties to what is called the second scientific revolution. Emerging in the early 19th century, this new scientific revolution proscribed a change in perception where ‘scientific progress combined with Romanticism to create a vision of nature as infinite and mysterious’ (ibid., 21). In other words, the time of the first river commissions described in The Ideal River was as much the era of Romanticism, as it was that of Enlightenment rationality. Returning to the debates over the Sardar Sarovar Dam project, Dalit critics interjected that not only did the middle class and caste privileged leaders romanticise the river, seeing it as something to be worshipped and conserved, rather than utilised and managed, but also that their anti-developmentalism was casteist. In their romantic quest to preserve ‘village life’, Roy and others effaced the hierarchies and structural oppressions existing within Indian rural communities. In the words of writer and journalist Mukul Sharma,
dominant environmental narratives in India are often infused with nostalgic and romantic accounts of traditional knowledge of water management, emphasising its community-based systems and methods. However, they overlook the fact that (…) they are embedded in deeply structured hierarchies of caste, based on control, power and dominant religious rituals, which are intermeshed in an invisible line of caste presuppositions (2017b).
A more forgiving interpretation of the movement’s romanticisation of the river and its peoples would see them as furthering a politics of strategic essentialism where the mobilisation of certain tropes might allow for a broadening of political support. Beyond the concern for activist strategy, however, the critiques elaborated above clarifies Yao’s illumination of the creative relationship between Enlightenment and Romanticist logics in contemporary environmentalist contestation. This dynamism is further underscored by the strikingly rationalist approach of Dalit and anti-caste thought which advances an overtly Enlightenment infused approach to questions of the environment and industrial modernity.
For B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader, political thinker, and primary architect of the Indian constitution, modernity itself was an ethical project. Indeed, in contrast to his main political adversary, Mohandas Gandhi, who saw the village as India’s exemplary political community, Ambedkar pointed out that cities were in fact places of relative freedom for Dalits. Urban space afforded them anonymity, with the individualising effects of industrial labour standing in stark contrast to the feudal rigidities of rural economies (Teltumbde 2019). In the words of Ambedkar: ‘What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?’ (Gopal 2015).
Following these insights, we can see how Dalit thought de-naturalises the ostensibly progressive nature of key categories orienting environmentalist politics, namely the village as the ultimate harbinger of ‘local solutions’ and urban industrialisation as the definitive cause of alienation from nature. Indeed, the category of nature itself is key to these critiques. Many Dalit thinkers would claim that the idea of living in accordance with nature is in itself a casteist concept. This is because Brahmanical Hinduism’s non-dualist ontology claims the indivisible link between the physical and the moral realm. Here, caste hierarchy is rationalised as a law of nature, where the individual remains no more than a functional part of an overarching entity, namely caste society. As pointed out by Ambedkar, Hindu society is not a community but rather a collection of castes (Ambedkar 2016, 242).
In addition to his other political achievements, Ambedkar also became India’s first minister for water resources. This was particularly powerful because of the role that the access, distribution, and management of water plays in the logics and perpetuation of caste hierarchies. In his ministerial role, Ambedkar made the development of irrigation and power, including hydroelectric power, one of his key priorities. New technology and scientific discovery in these fields were according to him ‘key determinants in the struggle against the obscurantism and backwardness of caste Hinduism’ (Sharma 2017a, 150). Large dam constructions, presumably such as the Sardar Damodar Dam project, was to him necessary in order to realise ‘a modern social vision’ (ibid.).
Yao’s attention to the dynamic relationship between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, often understood to be diametrically opposed in their logics, sets her book apart from more conventional approaches in the discipline of International Relations, and indeed wider social science literatures, which elucidates more straightforward narratives of the collusion between Enlightenment rationality, imperialism, and modern environmental politics. What we learn both from The Ideal River as well as from Dalit thought is that the overplaying of the significance of the role of Enlightenment rationality in this context comes at a cost. Directing our theoretical and political critique solely against this rationale does not only produce analytical blind spots in our analysis of environmental conflict. It can also lead us to unwittingly reproduce essentialist ways of thinking. If the hydroelectric dam is considered the materialisation of only Enlightenment ideas of scientific rationality, then Romantic notions of the sanctity of nature and the unimpeachable status of ‘local communities’ start to appear as forms of anti-hegemonic resistance, rather than as constitutive parts of global relations of dispossession. These points stand, I believe, even after the insight that, in the end, the NBA’s dire projections all seemed to bear out. After its completion, the world’s second-largest concrete gravity dam by volume, encompassing more than three thousand smaller dams across the length of the Narmada River, displaced over two hundred thousand people. A disproportionate amount of the environmental and economic cost of its development fell on the poorest communities living along its banks.
Bibliography
Ambedkar, B. R. 2016. Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition. Edited by S. Anand. London: Verso.
Bose, Pablo S. 2004. “Critics and Experts, Activists and Academics: Intellectuals in the Fight for Social and Ecological Justice in the Narmada Valley, India.” International Review of Social History 49.
Gopal, Vikram. 2015. “Ambedkar’s Assertion Still Rings True: What Is a Village but a Sink of Localism, a Den of Ignorance and Narrow Mindedness.” Caravan Magazine, April 2015.
Omvedt, Gail, and Ashish Kapoor. 1999. “Big Dams in India: Necessities or Threats?” Critical Asian Studies 31 (4): 45–58.
Rao, Rahul. 2022. “Statue of Impunity: Monumentalisation under Modi.” Caravan Magazine, May 2022.
Sharma, Mukul. 2017a. “Ambedkar and Environmental Thought.” In Caste and Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics.
———. 2017b. “Observing Water Day on Ambedkar’s Birthday Is a Hollow Exercise If His Legacy on Water Is Ignored.” Scroll India, April 2017.
Teltumbde, Anand. 2019. Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva. New Delhi: Navayana.Yao, Joanne. 2022. The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
disorderedguests
Corporations are bringing back child labor in America.
And some Republicans want to make it easier for them to get away with it.
Since 2015, child labor violations have risen nearly 300%. And those are just the violations government investigators have managed to uncover and document.
The Department of Labor says it’s currently investigating over 600 cases of illegal child labor in America. Major American companies like General Mills, Walmart, and Ford have all been implicated.
Why on Earth is this happening? The answer is frighteningly simple: greed.
Employers have been having difficulty finding the workers they need at the wages they are willing to pay. Rather than reduce their profits by paying adult workers more, employers are exploiting children.
The sad fact of the matter is that many of the children who are being exploited are considered to be “them” rather than “us” because they’re disproportionately poor and immigrant. So the moral shame of subjecting “our” children to inhumane working conditions when they ought to be in school is quietly avoided.
And since some of these children (or their parents) are undocumented, they dare not speak out or risk detention and deportation. They need the money. This makes them easily exploitable.
It’s a perfect storm that’s resulting in vulnerable children taking on some of the most brutal jobs.
Folks, we’ve seen this before.
Reformers fought to establish the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 for a reason — to curb the grotesque child labor seen during America’s first Gilded Age.
The U.S. banned most child labor.
But now, pro-business trade groups and their Republican lackeys are trying to reverse nearly a century of progress, and they’re using the so-called “labor shortage” as their excuse.
Arkansas will no longer require 14 and 15 year olds to get a work permit before taking a job — a process that verified their age and required permission from a parent or guardian.
A bill in Ohio would let children work later on school nights.
Minnesota Republicans are pushing to let 16 year-olds work in construction.
And 14-year-olds in Iowa may soon be allowed to take certain jobs in meatpacking plants and operate dangerous machinery.
It’s all a coordinated campaign to erode national standards, making it even easier for companies to profit off children.
Across America, we’re witnessing a resurgence of cruel capitalism in which business lobbyists and lawmakers justify their actions by arguing that they are not exploiting the weak and vulnerable, but rather providing jobs for those who need them and would otherwise go hungry or homeless.
Conveniently, these same business lobbyists and lawmakers are often among the first to claim we “can’t afford” stronger safety nets that would provide these children with safe housing and adequate nutrition.
So what can stop this madness?
First: Fund the Department of Labor so it can crack down on child labor violations. When I was Secretary of Labor, the department was chronically underfunded and understaffed. It still is, because lawmakers and their corporate backers want it that way.
Second: Increase fines on companies that break child labor laws. Current fines are too low, and are treated as costs of doing business by hugely profitable companies that violate the law.
Third: Hold major corporations accountable. Many big corporations contract with smaller companies that employ children, which allows the big corporations to play dumb and often avoid liability. It’s time to demand that large corporations take responsibility for their supply chains.
Fourth: Reform immigration laws so undocumented children aren’t exploited.
And lastly: Organize. Fight against state laws that are attempting to bring back child labor.
Are corporate profits really more important than the safety of children?
Republicans are threatening to destroy the economy if President Biden doesn’t give into their demands. But the Fourteenth Amendment gives him the power to stop them.
Republicans are taking advantage of the “debt ceiling” to try to force deep, painful cuts to programs Americans rely on. If Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, America might have to default on its bills, destroying the credit of the United States and wiping out millions of jobs.
Remember, raising the debt ceiling isn’t about taking on new debt. It’s about whether America will pay its current debts.
This is a key reason why raising the debt ceiling should not be negotiable.
Ironically, Republicans had no problem raising it three times under Trump, even as they enacted major tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy that caused the nation’s debt to soar.
But now, Kevin McCarthy and his band of MAGA radicals say they’ll only raise it in exchange for drastic cuts to health care, education, veterans’ benefits, and more.
My advice to President Biden: Ignore them. Mr. President, your oath to uphold the Constitution takes precedence. And as the supreme law of the land, the Constitution has greater weight than the law on the debt ceiling.
Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment states that, “The validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”
A debt ceiling that prevents the government from honoring its existing financial commitments clearly violates the Constitution.
So, if Republicans threaten the full faith and credit of the United States, you are constitutionally obligated to ignore the debt ceiling, and must continue to pay the nation’s bills.
Should they wish, let the radical Republicans take you to court.
Even the conservatives on the Supreme Court will likely support you. No “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution could read that document differently,
The Constitution makes it clear that Congress’s power to borrow money does not include the power to default on such borrowings.
If Republicans are going to play this game, Mr. President, you need to play hard ball.
Clarion University in Pennsylvania, now part of PennWest. Its student body has dwindled by nearly half since 2009.
This is my sixth post on MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future. (The first here; the second is here; the third here; the fourth here; the fifth here; and this post on a passage in Parfit (here.)) I paused the series in the middle of January because most of my remaining objections to the project involve either how to think about genuine uncertainty or involve disagreements in meta-ethics that are mostly familiar already to specialists and that probably won’t be of much wider interest. I was also uneasy with a growing sense that longtermists don’t seem to grasp the nature of the hostility they seem to provoke and (simultaneously) the recurring refrain on their part that the critics don’t understand them.
In what follows, I diagnose this hostility by way of this passage in Kukathas’ (2003) The liberal archipelago (unrelated to Effective Altruism (hereafter: EA) and longtermism), which triggered this post:
In rejecting the understanding of human interests offered by Kymlicka and other contemporary liberal writers such as Rawls, then, I am asserting that while we have an interest in not being compelled to live the kind of life we cannot abide, this does not translate into an interest in living the chosen life. The worst fate that a person might have to endure is that he be unable to avoid acting against conscience. This means that our basic interest is not in being able to choose our ends but rather in not being forced to embrace, or become implicated, in ends we find repugnant.–Chandran Kukathas The liberal archipelago: A theory of diversity and freedom, p. 64.
Given my present purpose I can allow that Kukathas is mistaken that the worst fate that a person might have to endure is that a person be unable to avoid acting against conscience. Maybe this is just a very bad fate (consider, as Adam Smith suggests, being framed and convicted for murder one didn’t do; or being tortured for no good reason, etc.) All I stipulate here is that Kukathas is right that being (directly) implicated in bad ends is really very bad. This is, in fact, something that seems to be motivating longtermists and is compatible with their official views. While ‘repugnant’ is a good concept to use here, having one’s conscience violated is, in turn, a source of indignation. I think that’s fairly uncontroversial and i don’t mean to import Kukathas’ wider political theory into the argument (although I am drawing on his sensitivity to the significance of moral disagreement).
MacAskill’s book doesn’t use, I think, the word ‘conscience.’ This is a bit surprising because the key example of successful moral entrepreneurship (his term) in the service of moral progress (again his term) is Quaker abolitionism inspired by Benjamin Lay. And Lay certainly lets conscience play a role in (say) his All Slave-keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage (although he is also alert to the existence of hypocritical appeals to conscience). It’s also odd because one gets the sense that MacAskill and many of his fellow-travelers are incredibly sincere in wishing to improve the world and do, in fact, have a very finely honed moral sense (and conscience) despite arguing primarily from first principles, and with fondness for expected utility, and about (potentially very distant) ends.
Now, it’s not wholly surprising, of course, given his (defeasible) orientation toward total wellbeing that MacAskill is de facto attracted to, that conscience is not high on his list. In fact, in general the needs and views of presently existing people are a drop in the bucket in his overall longtermist position. But this lack of attention to the significance of conscience also leads to a kind of (how to put it politely) social even political obtuseness.
Let me explain what I have in mind in light of a passage that expresses some of MacAskill’s generous sentiments. He writes,
The key issue is which values will guide the future. Those values could be narrow-minded, parochial, and unreflective. Or they could be open-minded, ecumenical, and morally exploratory. If lock-in is going to occur either way, we should push towards the latter. But transparently removing the risk of value lock-in altogether is even better. This has two benefits, both of which are extremely important from a longtermist perspective. We avoid the permanent entrenchment of flawed human values. And by assuring everyone that this outcome is off the table, we remove the pressure to get there first—thus preventing a race in which the contestants skimp on precautions against AGI takeover or resort to military force to stay ahead.
Now, MacAskill isn’t proposing anything illegal or untoward here. His good intentions (yes!) are on admirable display. But it is worth reflecting on the fact that he or the social movement he is shaping (notice that ‘we’) is presuming to act as humanity’s (partial) legislator without receiving authority or consent to do so from the living or, if that were possible, the future. And he is explicitly aware that this might well generate suspicion (which is, in part, why transparency and assurance are so important here).* One suspicion he generates is that he will promote ends and means that go against the conscience of many (consider his views on human enhancement and what is known as ‘liberal eugenics’).
So, while MacAskill is explicit on the need to preserve “a plurality of values” (in order to avoid early lock-in), that’s distinct from accepting deeply entrenched moral pluralism–this means tolerating, at minimum, close-minded and morally risk-averse views. MacAskill does not have a theory, political or social, that registers the significance of the reality of such entrenched moral pluralism and the political and inductive risks (even backlash) for his project that follow from it. I don’t think he is alone in drifting into this problem: variants of it show up in the technical version of population ethics and in multi-generational climate ethics, and other fundamentally technocratic approaches to longish term public policy. That is, it is not sufficient to claim to be promoting “open-minded, ecumenical, and morally exploratory” values, even reject premature lock-in of “a single set of values,” if one never shows much sensitivity toward those that seriously disagree with you over ends and means.
In addition, to feel unseen and unacknowledged is a known source of indignation. MacAskill’s longtermism constantly flirts with lack of interest in taking into account the needs and aspirations of those whose wellbeing it aims to be promoting. But even if that’s unfair or mistaken on my part, given that MacAskill really doubles down on the need to promote “desirable moral progress” and tying “moral principles” that are thereby “discovered” to a “more general worldview,” it is entirely predictable that he will advocate for ends and means that many, who reject such principles, will find repugnant, and a source of indignation. As, say, Machiavelli and Spinoza teach, this leads to political resistance, and worse.
*Yes, you can object that the suspicion is officially at a less elevated level (the risk of AGI value lock in or conquest), but he is effectively describing a state of nature, or a meta-coordination problem, when it comes to dealing with certain kind of existential risk.
I keep hearing “no one wants to work anymore.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, corporate America’s biggest lobbying group, claims there are over 10 million job openings right now in the US for which employers can’t find workers.
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell says the U.S. is dealing with a “structural labor shortage” that won’t be resolved anytime soon.
But here’s the truth: there is no labor shortage.
There is a shortage of jobs paying sufficient wages to attract workers to fill them.
When a problem is wrongly described, the solutions posed often turn out to be equally wrong.
For most Americans, real inflation-adjusted wages continue to drop. Any pay increases workers may have earned in the past few years have actually been pay cuts, because wages have lagged behind the rising costs of basic necessities — like housing, food, childcare, and healthcare.
You don’t have to be a financial wizard to see why some workers might say the hell with it.
So, what should be done about the difficulty employers are having finding workers?
Simple. If employers want more workers, they should pay them more.
Many corporations are raking it in right now, they can clearly afford to.
Of course Jerome Powell and his colleagues at the Fed don’t want to hear this. They’re aiming to deal with the so-called “labor shortage” by slowing the economy so much that employers can find all the workers they need without raising wages.
But the Fed increasing interest rates to slow the economy will prevent millions of people from getting desperately-needed raises and cause millions more to lose their jobs — disproportionately low-wage workers, women and people of color.
Meanwhile, Republicans and some corporate economists blame the “labor shortage” on overly generous unemployment benefits. They say the way to get more people into jobs is to make their lives outside jobs less tolerable.
Rubbish. Most unemployed people are already hard up.
Pandemic benefits are long over, and even before COVID, America’s unemployment system was already the least generous of any rich nation.
Taken to its logical extreme, the corporate Republican argument holds water only if you don’t give a damn about workers.
Sure…you could eliminate all safety nets and at some point people without jobs will hurt so much they’ll have to take any available job, at any wage, whatever it demands.
But do this, and we’ll end up with an economy that’s even crueler than today’s economy.
Look: If we want more people to take jobs — AND we wish to live in a moral society where people can maintain decent lives — the answer is to pay people more.
Instead of saying “no one wants to work anymore,” we should be saying, “no one wants to be exploited anymore.”
There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in this latter genre are Michael Della Rocca’s (2020) The Parmenidean Ascent, Nathan Ballantyne’s (2019) Knowing Our Limits, and Elijah Millgram’s (2015) The Great Endarkenment all published with Oxford. In the service of a new or start (sometimes presented as a recovery of older wisdom), each engages with analytic philosophy’s self-conception(s), its predominate methods (Della Rocca goes after reflective equilibrium, Millgram after semantic analysis, Ballantyne after the supplements the method of counter example), and the garden paths and epicycles we’ve been following. Feel free to add your own suggestions to this genre.
Millgram and Ballantyne both treat the cognitive division of labor as a challenge to how analytic philosophy is done with Ballantyne opting for extension from what we have and Millgram opting for (partially) starting anew (about which more below). I don’t think I have noticed any mutual citations. Ballantyne, Millgram, and Della Rocca really end up in distinct even opposing places. So, this genre will not be a school.
Millgram’s book, which is the one that prompted this post, also belongs to the small category of works that one might call ‘Darwinian Aristotelianism,’ that is, a form of scientific naturalism that takes teleological causes of a sort rather seriously within a broadly Darwinian approach. Other books in this genre are Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back (which analyzes it in terms of reasons without a reasoner), and David Haig’s From Darwin to Derrida (which relies heavily on the type/token distinction in order to treat historical types as final causes). The latter written by an evolutionary theorist.* There is almost no mutual citation in these works (in fact, Millgram himself is rather fond of self-citation despite reading widely). C. Thi Nguyen’s (2020) Games: Agency as Art may also be thought to fit this genre, but Millgram is part of his scaffolding, and Nguyen screens off his arguments from philosophical anthropology and so leave it aside here. So much for set up, let me quote its concluding paragraphs of Millgram’s book:
Perhaps eventually an overall Big Picture will emerge—and perhaps not: Hegel thought that the Owl of Minerva would take wing only at dusk (i.e., that we will only achieve understanding in retrospect, after it’s all over), but maybe the Owl’s wings have been broken by hyperspecialization, and it will never take to the air at all. What we can reasonably anticipate in the short term is a patchwork of inference management techniques, along with intellectual devices constructed to support them. One final observation: in the Introduction, I gave a number of reasons for thinking that our response to the Great Endarkenment is something that we can start working on now, but that it would be a mistake at this point to try to produce a magic bullet meant to fix its problems. That turns out to be correct for yet a further reason. Because the approach has to be bottom-up and piecemeal, at present we have to suffice with characterizing the problem and with taking first steps; we couldn’t possibly be in a position to know what the right answers are.
Thus far our institutional manifesto. Analytic philosophy has bequeathed to us a set of highly refined skills. The analytic tradition is visibly at the end of its run. But those skills can now be redirected and put in the service of a new philosophical agenda. In order for this to take place, we will have to reshape our philosophical pedagogy—and, very importantly, the institutions that currently have such a distorting effect on the work of the philosophers who live inside them. However, as many observers have noticed, academia is on the verge of a period of great institutional fluidity, and flux of this kind is an opportunity to introduce new procedures and incentives. We had better take full advantage of it.–Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization, p. 281
I had glanced at Millgram’s book when I wrote my piece on synthetic philosophy, but after realizing that his approach to the advanced cognitive division of labor was orthogonal to my own set it aside then. But after noticing intriguing citations to it in works by C. Thi Nguyen and Neil Levy, I decided to read it anyway. The Great Endarkenment is a maddening book because the first few chapters and the afterward are highly programmatic and accessible, while the bulk of the essays involve ambitious, revisionary papers in meta-ethics, metaphysics, and (fundementally) moral psychology (or practical agency if that is a term). The book also has rather deep discussions of David Lewis, Mill, and Bernard Williams. The parts fit together, but only if you look at them in a certain way, and only if you paid attention in all the graduate seminars you attended.
Millgram’s main claim in philosophical anthropology is that rather than being a rational animal, mankind is a serial hyperspecializing animal or at least in principle capable of hyperspecializing serially (switching among different specialized niches it partially constructs itself). The very advanced cognitive division of labor we find ourselves in is, thus, not intrinsically at odds with our nature but actually an expression of it (even if Millgram can allow that it is an effect of economic or technological developments, etc.). If you are in a rush you can skip the next two asides (well at least the first).
As an aside, first, lurking in Millgram’s program there is, thus, a fundamental critique of the Evolutionary Psychology program that takes our nature as adapted to and relatively fixed by niches back in the distant ancestral past. I don’t mean to suggest Evolutionary Psychology is incompatible with Millgram’s project, but it’s fundamental style of argument in its more prominent popularizations is.
Second, and this aside is rather important to my own projects, Millgram’s philosophical anthropology is part of the account of human nature that liberals have been searching for. And, in fact, as the quoted passages reveal, Millgram’s sensibility is liberal in more ways, including his cautious preference for “bottom-up and piecemeal” efforts to tackle the challenge of the Great Endarkenment.+
Be that as it may, the cognitive division of labor and hyperspecialization is also a source of trouble. Specialists in different fields are increasingly unable to understand and thus evaluate the quality of each other’s work including within disciplines. As Millgram notes this problem has become endemic within the institution most qualified to do so — the university — and as hyper-specialized technologies and expertise spread through the economy and society. This is also why society’s certified generalists — journalists, civil servants, and legal professionals — so often look completely out of their depth when they have to tackle your expertise under time pressure.** It’s his diagnosis of this state of affairs that has attracted, I think, most scholarly notice (but that may be a selection effect on my part by my engagement with Levy’s Bad Beliefs and Nguyen’s Games). Crucially, hyperspecialiation also involves the development of languages and epistemic practices that are often mutually unintelligible and perhaps even metaphysically incompatible seeming.
As an aside that is really an important extension of Millgram’s argument: because the book was written just before the great breakthroughs in machine learning were becoming known and felt, the most obvious version of the challenge (even danger) he is pointing to is not really discussed in the book: increasingly we lack access to the inner workings of the machines we rely on (at least in real time), and so there is a non-trivial sense in which if he is right the challenge posed by Great Endarkenment is accelerating. (See here for an framework developed with Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans to analyze and handle that problem.)
That is, if Millgram is right MacAskill and his friends who worry about the dangers of AGI taking things over for rule and perhaps our destruction by the machine(s) have it backwards. The odds are more likely that our society will implode and disperse — like the tower of Babel that frames Millgram’s analysis — by itself. And that if it survives mutual coordination by AGIs will be just as hampered by the Great Endarkenment, perhaps even more so due to their path dependencies, as ours is.
I wanted to explore the significance of this to professional philosophy (and also hint more at the riches of the book), but the post is long enough and I could stop here. So, I will return to that in the future. Let me close with an observation. As Millgram notes, in the sciences mutual unintelligibility is common. And the way it is often handled is really two-fold: first, as Peter Galison has argued, and Millgram notes, the disciplines develop local pidgins in what Galison calls their ‘trading zones.’ This births the possibility of mutually partially overlapping areas of expertise in (as Michael Polanyi noted) the republic of science. Millgram is alert to this for he treats a lot of the areas that have been subject of recent efforts at semantic analysis by philosophers (knowledge, counterfactuals, normativity) as (to simplify) really tracking and trailing the alethic certification of past pidgins. Part of Millgram’s own project is to diagnose the function of such certification, but also help design new cognitive machinery to facilitate mutual intelligibility. That’s exciting! This I hope to explore in the future.
Second, as I have emphasized in my work on synthetic philosophy, there are reasonably general theories and topic neutralish (mathematical and experimental) techniques that transcend disciplines (Bayesianism, game theory, darwinism, actor-network, etc.). On the latter (the techniques) these often necessetate local pidgins or, when possible, textbook treatments. On the former, while these general theories are always applied differently locally, they are also conduits for mutual intelligibility. (Millgram ignores this in part.) As Millgram notes, philosophers can make themselves useful here by getting MAs in other disciplines and so facilitate mutual communication as they already do. That is to say, and this is a criticism, while there is a simultaneous advancement in the cognitive division of labor that deepens mutual barriers to intelligibility, some of this advance generates possibilities of arbitrage (I owe the insight to Liam Kofi Bright) also accrues to specialists that help transcend local mutual intelligibility.** So, what he takes to be a call to arms is already under way. So, let’s grant we’re on a precipice, but the path out is already marked.++
This post was published first at D&I with modest changes.
*Because of this Millgram is able to use the insights of the tradition of neo-thomism within analytic philosophy to his own ends without seeming to be an Anscombe groupie or hinting darkly that we must return to the path of philosophical righteousness.
+This liberal resonance is not wholly accidental; there are informed references to and discussions of Hayek.
** Spare a thought for humble bloggers, by the way.
++UPDATE: As Justin Weinberg reminded me, Millgram did a series of five guest posts at DailyNous on themes from his book (here are the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth entries.) I surely read these, and encourage you to read them if you want the pidgin version of his book.
Perhaps eventually an overall Big Picture will emerge—and perhaps not: Hegel thought that the Owl of Minerva would take wing only at dusk (i.e., that we will only achieve understanding in retrospect, after it’s all over), but maybe the Owl’s wings have been broken by hyperspecialization, and it will never take to the air at all. What we can reasonably anticipate in the short term is a patchwork of inference management techniques, along with intellectual devices constructed to support them. One final observation: in the Introduction, I gave a number of reasons for thinking that our response to the Great Endarkenment is something that we can start working on now, but that it would be a mistake at this point to try to produce a magic bullet meant to fix its problems. That turns out to be correct for yet a further reason. Because the approach has to be bottom-up and piecemeal, at present we have to suffice with characterizing the problem and with taking first steps; we couldn’t possibly be in a position to know what the right answers are.
Thus far our institutional manifesto. Analytic philosophy has bequeathed to us a set of highly refined skills. The analytic tradition is visibly at the end of its run. But those skills can now be redirected and put in the service of a new philosophical agenda. In order for this to take place, we will have to reshape our philosophical pedagogy—and, very importantly, the institutions that currently have such a distorting effect on the work of the philosophers who live inside them. However, as many observers have noticed, academia is on the verge of a period of great institutional fluidity, and flux of this kind is an opportunity to introduce new procedures and incentives. We had better take full advantage of it.--Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization, p. 281
There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in this latter genre are Michael Della Rocca's (2020) The Parmenidean Ascent, Nathan Ballantyne's (2019) Knowing Our Limits, and Elijah Millgram's (2015) The Great Endarkenment all published with Oxford. In the service of a new or start (sometimes presented as a recovery of older wisdom), each engages with analytic philosophy's self-conception(s), its predominate methods (Della Rocca goes after reflective equilibrium, Millgram after semantic analysis, Ballantyne after the supplements the method of counter example), and the garden paths and epicycles we've been following. Feel free to add your own suggestions to this genre.
Millgram and Ballantyne both treat the cognitive division of labor as a challenge to how analytic philosophy is done with Ballantyne opting for extension from what we have and Millgram opting for (partially) starting anew (about which more below). I don't think I have noticed any mutual citations. Ballantyne, Millgram, and Della Rocca really end up in distinct even opposing places. So, this genre will not be a school.
Millgram's book, which is the one that prompted this post, also belongs to the small category of works that one might call 'Darwinian Aristotelianism,' that is, a form of scientific naturalism that takes teleological causes of a sort rather seriously within a broadly Darwinian approach. Other books in this genre are Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back (which analyzes it in terms of reasons without a reasoner), and David Haig's From Darwin to Derrida (which relies heavily on the type/token distinction in order to treat historical types as final causes). The latter written by an evolutionary theorist.* There is almost no mutual citation in these works (in fact, Millgram himself is rather fond of self-citation despite reading widely). C. Thi Nguyen's (2020) Games: Agency as Art may also be thought to fit this genre, but Millgram is part of his scaffolding, and Nguyen screens off his arguments from philosophical anthropology and so leave it aside here.
I had glanced at Millgram's book when I wrote my piece on synthetic philosophy, but after realizing that his approach to the advanced cognitive division of labor was orthogonal to my own set it aside then.++ But after noticing intriguing citations to it in works by C. Thi Nguyen and Neil Levy, I decided to read it anyway. The Great Endarkenment is a maddening book because the first few chapters and the afterward are highly programmatic and accessible, while the bulk of the essays involve ambitious, revisionary papers in meta-ethics, metaphysics, and (fundementally) moral psychology (or practical agency if that is a term). The book also has rather deep discussions of David Lewis, Mill, and Bernard Williams. The parts fit together, but only if you look at them in a certain way, and only if you paid attention in all the graduate seminars you attended.
Millgram's main claim in philosophical anthropology is that rather than being a rational animal, mankind is a serial hyperspecializing animal or at least in principle capable of hyperspecializing serially (switching among different specialized niches it partially constructs itself). The very advanced cognitive division of labor we find ourselves in is, thus, not intrinsically at odds with our nature but actually an expression of it (even if Millgram can allow that it is an effect of economic or technological developments, etc.). If you are in a rush you can skip the next two asides (well at least the first).
As an aside, first, lurking in Millgram's program there is, thus, a fundamental critique of the Evolutionary Psychology program that takes our nature as adapted to and relatively fixed by niches back in the distant ancestral past. I don't mean to suggest Evolutionary Psychology is incompatible with Millgram's project, but it's fundamental style of argument in its more prominent popularizations is.
Second, and this aside is rather important to my own projects, Millgram's philosophical anthropology is part of the account of human nature that liberals have been searching for. And, in fact, as the quoted passages reveal, Millgram's sensibility is liberal in more ways, including his cautious preference for "bottom-up and piecemeal" efforts to tackle the challenge of the Great Endarkenment.+
Be that as it may, the cognitive division of labor and hyperspecialization is also a source of trouble. Specialists in different fields are increasingly unable to understand and thus evaluate the quality of each other's work including within disciplines. As Millgram notes this problem has become endemic within the institution most qualified to do so -- the university -- and as hyper-specialized technologies and expertise spread through the economy and society. This is also why society's certified generalists -- journalists, civil servants, and legal professionals -- so often look completely out of their depth when they have to tackle your expertise under time pressure.** It's his diagnosis of this state of affairs that has attracted, I think, most scholarly notice (but that may be a selection effect on my part by my engagement with Levy's Bad Beliefs and Nguyen's Games). Crucially, hyperspecialiation also involves the development of languages and epistemic practices that are often mutually unintelligible and perhaps even metaphysically incompatible seeming.
As an aside that is really an important extension of Millgram's argument: because the book was written just before the great breakthroughs in machine learning were becoming known and felt, the most obvious version of the challenge (even danger) he is pointing to is not really discussed in the book: increasingly we lack access to the inner workings of the machines we rely on (at least in real time), and so there is a non-trivial sense in which if he is right the challenge posed by Great Endarkenment is accelerating. (See here for an framework developed with Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans to analyze and handle that problem.)
That is, if Millgram is right MacAskill and his friends who worry about the dangers of AGI taking things over for rule and perhaps our destruction by the machine(s) have it backwards. The odds are more likely that our society will implode and disperse -- like the tower of Babel that frames Millgram's analysis -- by itself. And that if it survives mutual coordination by AGIs will be just as hampered by the Great Endarkenment, perhaps even more so due to their path dependencies, as ours is.
I wanted to explore the significance of this to professional philosophy (and also hint more at the riches of the book), but the post is long enough and I could stop here. So, I will return to that in the future. Let me close with an observation. As Millgram notes, in the sciences mutual unintelligibility is common. And the way it is often handled is really two-fold: first, as Peter Galison has argued, and Millgram notes, the disciplines develop local pidgins in what Galison calls their 'trading zones.' This births the possibility of mutually partially overlapping areas of expertise in (as Michael Polanyi noted) the republic of science. Millgram is alert to this for he treats a lot of the areas that have been subject of recent efforts at semantic analysis by philosophers (knowledge, counterfactuals, normativity) as (to simplify) really tracking and trailing the alethic certification of past pidgins. Part of Millgram's own project is to diagnose the function of such certification, but also help design new cognitive machinery to facilitate mutual intelligibility. That's exciting! This I hope to explore in the future.
Second, as I have emphasized in my work on synthetic philosophy, there are reasonably general theories and topic neutralish (mathematical and experimental) techniques that transcend disciplines (Bayesianism, game theory, darwinism, actor-network, etc.). On the latter (the techniques) these often necessetate local pidgins or, when possible, textbook treatments. On the former, while these general theories are always applied differently locally, they are also conduits for mutual intelligibility. (Millgram ignores this in part.) As Millgram notes, philosophers can make themselves useful here by getting MAs in other disciplines and so facilitate mutual communication as they already do. That is to say, and this is a criticism, while there is a simultaneous advancement in the cognitive division of labor that deepens mutual barriers to intelligibility, some of this advance generates possibilities of arbitrage (I owe the insight to Liam Kofi Bright) that also accrue to specialists that help transcend local mutual intelligibility.** So, what he takes to be a call to arms is already under way. So, let's grant we're on a precipice, but the path out is already marked.
*Because of this Millgram is able to use the insights of the tradition of neo-thomism within analytic philosophy to his own ends without seeming to be an Anscombe groupie or hinting darkly that we must return to the path of philosophical righteousness.
+This liberal resonance is not wholly accidental; there are informed references to and discussions of Hayek.
** Spare a thought for humble bloggers, by the way.
++UPDATE: As Justin Weinberg reminded me, Millgram did a series of five guest posts at DailyNous on themes from his book (here are the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth entries.) I surely read these, and encourage you to read them if you want the pidgin version of his book.
Tesla has quietly raised the price of its best-selling Model Y crossover. As of Saturday, the automaker’s US website lists the Long Range and Performance models at $54,990 and $57,990, respectively. For the former, that represents a $2,000 increase from the all-time low it hit when Tesla dramatically cut prices in the middle of January. As for the Performance variant, it’s currently $1,000 more than it was after last month’s price adjustment.
As The Wall Street Journal notes, the price hikes come after the Biden administration this past Friday modified eligibility criteria related to the $7,500 federal tax credit to treat more vehicles as SUVs rather than sedans. Before the change, it was possible to get the full $7,500 Inflation Reduction Act incentive on the five-seat Model Y, but you had to configure the vehicle in a way so that it fell under the $55,000 sedan threshold. Now, all Model Y variants, including the Performance model, fall under the $80,000 SUV ceiling.
The automaker did not say if it increased Model Y pricing in response to Friday’s announcement. Following the January price cut, Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn said the move was partly an effort to ensure more of the company's cars fell under the $55,000 threshold. With the Model Y now comfortably under the $80,000 limit, Tesla has more freedom to price the vehicle as it sees fit.
Side view of a white Tesla Model Y, parked on the street, of a city. In the background a building.
Kentucky, United States - February 27, 2022: Side view of a white Tesla Model Y, parked on the street, of a city. In the background a building.
Chances are you used a toilet at some point today, and you didn’t think much of it.
But if you used a port-a-potty, you probably did think about it. Maybe a lot. And it probably wasn’t pleasant.
“No one likes the port-a-potty,” said Brophy Tyree, co-founder and CEO of Wasted. “It’s embedded into a really antiquated operations and servicing industry and so there’s a chance to make all of that better.”
But Tyree, along with co-founders Thor Retzlaff and Taylor Zehren, wants to do more than just redesign the smelly plastic boxes. The company’s first order of business is to turn the waste from port-a-potties into fertilizers for farmers.
“Farmers have been applying manure and other forms of animal waste to farms for millennia,” Tyree said. “When you talk to a farmer, they completely understand the value proposition right away. You don’t need to educate them on the fact that what’s coming through our body is valuable and has nutrients, because that’s just the water that they swim in.”
Human waste contains plenty of nutrients, but urine appears to be the real gold mine. Urine contains a lot of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and wastewater in cities contains enough of the nutrients to offset around 13% of global fertilizer demand, according to one study.
Today, human waste is used as a fertilizer in some places. King County in Washington sells a biosolids soil amendment to farmers and foresters, for instance, and Milwaukee sells Milorganite to farmers and homeowners. They’re excellent examples of the reuse of human waste, but those products emerge at the end of a traditional sewage treatment process, which is energy intensive and vulnerable to severe storms and flooding.
Wasted wants to eventually serve as a backup for traditional sewage systems or even a replacement, particularly in regions where sanitation systems are underdeveloped. But it’s starting with port-a-potties for a few reasons.
We flush valuable nutrients down the toilet. Wasted wants to save them by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Earlier today, after I tweeted out that “Proposals to mint $1tn platinum coin are designed to circumvent the US constitution’s “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts,” I got lectured by Nathan Tankus for “not grasping the most elementary legal issues in the topic you’re pontificating on.” This turns on the interpretation on the authority granted by Section 31 U.S. Code § 5112. Advocates of the platinum coin naturally like to quote the plain meaning of the text: “(k) The Secretary may mint and issue bullion and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.” The plain meaning interpretation of (k) has been supported by Philip N. Diehl, former director of the United States Mint, who helped write the bill. But Diehl was not in Congress (and in virtue of his former office has obvious incentives to exaggerate its power and his former achievements).
However, the official author of the original bill, Representative Michael Castle, denied this interpretation, and suggested (quite plausibly in my opinion) that the provision was intended to cover collectibles (and not to provide the Treasure with the power to do an end run around any debt limits). I would be amazed if the original legislative record suggested otherwise. The law as we have it was inserted as a provisions into H.R. 3610, the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act for 1997. It would be interesting if the congressional leadership recorded any views on the matter at the time (and that would change my view!) But the revisionary (‘plain meaning interpretation’) wasn’t voiced until May 2010. Even Diehl has admitted at one point that (the ‘plain meaning interpretation’) would constitute an “unintended consequence” of the bill. [Quoted in Grey (2020) op. cit, p. 261.] So, I don’t think this is really in doubt.
Eventually Tankus, who himself has become a high-profile advocate of minting the $1tr coin, referred me to Grey’s very interesting law review article from which I quoted above (and also a fascinating interview that Grey did with Diehl.) Grey (a law professor at Willamette University) meticulously goes through the pros and cons of reading (k) literally (and also provides arguments for the opposing views that anticipate my own), but his main interest is not, I think, in gaming how a constitutional court would rule on using (k) to do an end-run around the fiscal debt limit (also authorized by Congress), but in thinking about the “new possibilities for fundamental monetary reform.”* Grey, correctly, notes that in various crises the FED has gone well beyond the Federal Reserve Act. As I wrote last week here at CrookedTimber (in the context of discussing Lev Menand’s recent book (2022) The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis) the “effect of this process is the development of a super-government-agency that tries to do too much without sufficient accountability and that undermines the legislative process.” So, I am at least consistent in worrying about treating this as precedent!
But this also gets me at the underlying theoretical-political issue that I want to discuss here. And I quote a key passage from his law review article:
I argue that in “constitutional monetary moments” like those generated by debt ceiling crisis, it is important—not only positively but also normatively—to recognize that contemporary operational constraints on money creation are self-imposed, institutionally contingent, and ultimately legal rather than material in nature. It is important to do so because in such instances it may be not only appropriate, but socially optimal, to subject existing legal constraints to creative interpretation, or even ignore them outright, in order to challenge and disrupt the social myths they uphold, as well as the political dynamics that they produce. As noted legal realist Thurman Arnold argued: “You judge the symbols [upon which society is built and depends] as good or bad on the basis of whether they lead to the type of society you like. You do not cling to them on general principles when they are leading in the wrong direction.”
By denying from the outset the possibility that debt ceiling crises are, in fact, constitutional monetary moments in which it may make sense to abandon outdated monetary symbols, we close off the full range of political possibilities and legal options available to us to improve fiscal policy administration, and with it, our economy more broadly. In other words, it was not sufficient then, and it is not sufficient now, to merely assert as a positive matter that our current social myths about the nature of money preclude exotic or even “radical” legal solutions such as HVCS from serious consideration. Rather, it is incumbent on us to question whether the social myths in question are in fact worthy of preservation, or at the very least, how sure we are that the alternatives that would likely emerge to take their place would lead to socially inferior outcomes.–Grey, Rohan. “Administering Money: Coinage, Debt Crises, and the Future of Fiscal Policy.” Ky. LJ 109 (2020): 289. [HT Nathan Tankus]
For Grey a constitutional monetary moment occurs when “partisan disagreements over proper exercise of the “money power” pushed monetary issues to the forefront of the popular and legal imagination.” (p. 288) Now, let’s grant Grey this stipulation.
Interestingly enough, as Grey recognizes political battles over the deficit limit need not become constitutional debates over money power. In fact, as Grey recognizes in the last few decades, the Democrats have tended to win the battles over the deficit limit by sidestepping “the deeper constitutional questions.” (p. 288) That is, rather than using the debates over deficit limits, the threat of default, and annoyance at legislative gridlock as an occasion to debate changes in the constitutional arrangement — that is, the proper exercise of the money power –, the Democrats have played ordinary (non-constitutional) political hardball. And even if they did this merely based on opinion polling and without any fundamental respect for the constitution, the significance of this fact is that fights over the deficit limit are not necessarily constitutional monetary moments by definition. I would hope that Grey agrees with me about that.
Of course, performatively, Grey would like it if a fight over the deficit limit were to be constitutionalized because for various reasons Grey rejects the contemporary status quo.* And, in fact, I can imagine that some kind of debt ceiling crises might well make me agree with Grey. Once the US defaults on debts and market turmoil starts hitting the real economy or the acrimony over the debt ceiling leads to street turmoil or even a revolutionary moment as bad or worse than January 6, that would quite rightly be treated as a constitutional monetary moment. But one shouldn’t wish for being in such turmoil, and one should recognize that debates and even games of chicken over the debt ceiling have been normalized in Washington, DC. (The US –and I will grant the MMT folk this much –has a lot more monetary sovereignty for such games than, say, the UK government (as was revealed in 2022) or most Euro member states, which lack any such sovereignty.)
Now, I am no friend of the current practice of setting a debt ceiling while simultaneously authorizing expenditures and borrowing that go beyond it. I don’t mind a demise of this status quo. And I also don’t mind ways of poking the irresponsible Congressional Republicans in the (proverbial) eyes. But I notice that Grey (and the proponents of minting such special coins) are not really worried by the Imperial presidency and the lack of checks on its power.+ That they lack this worry even after experiencing a Trump presidency and near usurpation (as well as the various ways in which courts were not a check on the Trump presidency) is something I cannot fathom.
But I view the tax and coin [sic] power of Congress as one of the few would-be-effective checks on the risks of the very real and ongoing erosion of liberty from an imperial presidency. If anything, while I dislike Republican control of the House, it is high time if Stateside the pendulum returned to the post-Watergate situation of the 1970s, and re-established Congressional authority. So, in so far as I offer a political-theoretical argument against seeing the situation as a constitutional monetary moments that is ripe for monetary innovation, I do so because the US needs a considerable restoration of the power of the legislative branch — which after all is also, despite everything (and yes that includes quite a few sins), still the most democratic element of the US constitutional arrangement — not a further strengthening of the Executive branch. And while one may not reasonably hope that this Congress would use such power reasonably or for noble ends, it is to be hoped that such enhanced power would attract better legislators and more effective citizen participation in the future.
*In fact, from reading the law review article, and Tankus’ enthusiasm for it, I suspect that Grey is a proponent of MMT (Modern Monetary Theory).
+I am much more sympathetic to arguments that view section 4 of 14th amendment as a reason to reject constraints of budget deficit limits if (and only if) these lead to default. But it is surprising to see left-wing commentators defend the sanctity of public debt!
FreshRSS 