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It is currently held, not without certain uneasiness, that 90% of human DNA is ‘junk.’ The renowned Cambridge molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, makes a helpful distinction between ‘junk’ and ‘garbage.’ Garbage is something used up and worthless which you throw away; junk is something you store for some unspecified future use. (Rabinow, 1992, 7-8)
In the bioscience lab near Tokyo where I did my ethnographic study, the researchers taught me how to do PCR experiments. This was before Covid when almost everyone came to know what PCR was, or at least, what kind of instrumental information it could be good for.[1] The lab was working with mouse models, although I never got to see them in their cages. But the researcher I was shadowing showed me how to put the mouse tail clippings she collected into small tubes. She hated cutting tails, by the way, and preferred to take ear punches when she could. She told me that she didn’t like the way the mice wiggled under her hand, as if they just knew. But at this point anyway, the mice are alive in the animal room and she is only putting small, but vital, pieces of them into a tube to dissolve them down (mice becoming means), to get to the foundation of what she really wants.
I’ve still got the protocol that I typed up from the notes I made with her in the lab. Step 1 was: “Add 75 ul of NaOH to each ear punch tube (changing tips as I go).” The changing pipette tips part was really important to avoid haphazardly spreading around DNA, I learned. I also had to make sure the clippings were at the bottom of the tube and submerged. She said I could flick the tubes with my finger to get the “material” to fall down to the bottom and she showed me how to do it. I also, she cautioned, always had to be very careful of bubbles, but more flicking could help there and by making sure I didn’t put the pipette too far down into the solution. Then we would spin the tubes in the vortex (which I always typed as VORTEX for some reason), add some other reagents, and put it all in the “PCR machine,” but that is not at all its technical name.[2] Then we would usually go with all the others to the cafeteria for lunch.
In writing this now, I couldn’t remember what “NaOH” stood for so I had to ask the internet. And as I looked back over this protocol, and these practices I was just barely learning to embody before the pandemic sent us all home, I realize that they must have settled back in my mind somewhere, just as the material-ness of the lab which anchored them for me has receded like a shrinking lake in a drought summer. But what I do hold on to is what the researcher taught me about the importance of repetition and focus, for a kind of purity of practice, and the diligence to make materials—whether of mice or of sodium hydroxide—do what they ought to do.
Because what captivated me about these initial PCR steps was what appeared to me to be the profound transformation they wrought (of course, I am not the first person to say so)—from fleshy ear punch to silt DNA multiplied in a clear plastic tube, with just a little bit of chemicals and some repetitive cycles of heat—but even more, how this transmutation had the potential to fail in one way, or for one reason, or another. How difficult it could actually be to get the materials, and even the researchers themselves, to do what they ought. Once, I used some unknown solution instead of water because it was on a shelf in an unmarked bottle close to where the water, which I later supposed had gone missing, was usually kept. Once, I didn’t remember to change pipette tips. Or the sense in my hands of precisely what to do next and properly would simply begin to unravel. When we had to throw the tubes in the trash, the researcher comforted me by telling me about a time when her mind wandered for just an instant while pipetting and she lost track of which tube she had last filled with reagent. A minor momentary mistake that grows, and can even burst, into a huge error in the downstream. She taught me that sometimes, if I lifted the tubes to the light to examine their volume of liquid, I might be able to get back on track.[3] Other times the PCR machine might not cycle its heat properly. One machine was already considered to be of questionable working order but the lab didn’t have the funding to replace it. We didn’t know about its full potential for failure until we got all the way through to the very last stage of the process and discovered we had to go back to the beginning with new clippings.
The researcher and I classified these particular (wait, was that water?) experiments-in-the-making as failures because they missed the mark of their intentions. Their purposefulness, decided in advance by the goal of genotyping these mice, was also appended to other purposes, specifically to cultivate a living gene population that the researchers needed for other more central concerns. Trashing the experiments that deviated from this intentionality, although it could be costly, was a seemingly simple decision. After the PCR melt and the second half of the experiment, the electrophoresis machine either “read” back the base pair numbers we were looking for, or those numbers were just wrong and we’d made an obvious mistake. Or worse, everything collapsed into inconclusiveness and we needed to repeat the experiment anyway.[4] In this case, deviation from expectation, and therefore from usefulness, was what pushed experiments to a kind of failure, beyond which point they could not, in this context at least, be so easily reclaimed.
But what does something like “junk” have to do with mice ear punches, chemical transmutation, and mundane laboratory failures? Garbage experiments are routine in scientific practice after all. But as any scientist might tell you, failure can be its own kind of productive; in the least, as a way to learn the value of steady hands, and how to recognize water by smell, or its necessity as a control in genotyping—to become a “capable doer,” as one scientist told me. But beyond these mundane errors, some scientists argue that failures of a particular kind can break open old ways of thinking and doing, although what that failure is, and can be, is variously classified:
Science fails. This is especially true when tackling new problems. Science is not infallible. Research activity is a desire to go outside of existing worldviews, to destroy known concepts, and to create new concepts in uncharted territories. (Iwata, 2020)
I wish “failure” were the trick to seeing and moving beyond the limits of current knowledge. Is that what Kuhn said? I think that paradigm change requires making a reproducible observation that does not fit within the existing model, then going back to the whiteboard. But I don’t think these observations are very well classified as a failure. If failure = unexpected result of a successful experiment/measurement, then I can agree. (Personal communication with laboratory supervisor, 2020)
Failure has more potential than we might often recognize, where an instinct to trash can instead push to new beginnings. Just as Rabinow described Brenner’s description (1992), failure is like junk, those materials or states that are in-the-waiting—waiting to be actualized, reordered, and reclaimed as meaningful, valid and valuable, even if we don’t yet know how or why. Junk is, in this way, more than matter “out of place,” although it may land there interstitially. If “[d]irt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (Mary Douglas, 1966, 36), then junk is garbage and failure and decay, and even breakdown, on the precipice of being made anew. After all, without intentionality or purposefulness and other values, there can be no garbage, or failed and failing experiments and paradigms, in the first place.
Consider an example that seems categorically different from scientific experiments: inventory management in role-playing videogames. In Diablo 4 (2023), any item picked up from downed enemies or collected in the environment can be marked as “junk” and then salvaged by visiting an in-game merchant. These bits of amour and other gear reappear in your inventory afterwards as junk’s constitute materials, useful again for crafting and building up new things—strips of leather and other scraps as well as blueprints for better stuff. In Fallout 4 (2015), the “Junk Jet” gun lets you repurpose your inventory instead as ammo, anything from wrenches to teddy bears, which can be shot back out into the world and at random adversaries, where you might later be able to pick them up again, if you want. Managing encumbrance in Skyrim (2011), on the other hand, is a task of drudgery and tedium. Almost every item in the game world is moveable, each with its own weight calculation, and can be picked up and stored even accidentally, until your character is weighed down to the point of being unmovable. But the game is designed to make you feel that there is always the possibility that some magical potion, random apple, or 12 candlesticks, might just come in handy for a future encounter, a book that you might really read later, leading to a hesitancy to trash anything. In turn, every item brims with, as yet undiscovered, use-value. As Caitlin DeSlivey argues: “Objects generate social effects not just in their preservation and persistence, but in their destruction and disposal” (2006, 324). And certainly this is true when, over-encumbered deep inside a dungeon, I agonize over which items to drop, in order to move again, in order to continue to collect more—or laugh as I spray the world with cigarettes and telephones.
A decaying dog, reanimated by something that is not supposed to be there. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
For me then, junk is a way to look for when and where particular boundaries of the useful or valuable—and even the clean and functioning—are “breached” (Helmreich 2015, 187), and then reordered. Although Helmreich is speaking to scientific experimental practices and their organizing ideologies, his insight is useful for junk’s attention to those very breaches: “moments when abstractions and formalisms break, forcing reimaginations of the phenomena they would apprehend” (185). Of course, junk DNA itself has experienced this very kind of breaching—more recent scientific research demonstrating its non-coding role is actually not without usefulness (c.f. Goodier 2016)—(re)animating it for future use. And although DeSilvey is describing vibrant multispecies-animated decay within abandoned homesteads, like Helmreich, she points to junk’s transformative potential. We just have to dig through rotted wood and insect-eaten paper, or virtual backpacks and books, to find it.
Junk merges failure, trash, and decay with the processual and everyday negotiation of culturally meaningful and policed categories: garbage, scraps and waste, but also “breakdown, dissolution, and change” (Jackson 2014, 225). Although Steven J. Jackson describes the ways these last three are fundamental features of modern media and technology, an anthropology of junk collects and extends these processes into broader techniques and social practices. Junk can help us see connections criss-crossing symbolic and material breakage and disintegration. It helps us see in/visibility of the dirty and diseased, not as a property of any material or technological object alone, but as also always in coordination and collaboration with the ways they are imagined and invested—and more, always enmeshed in variously articulated forms of power.
If infrastructures like computer networks, for example, become (more) visible when broken (Star 1999), it is not their brokenness or decay in an absolute sense that reveals them, but the way their state change defies our everyday and embodied expectations—the way they push against normativity. We may be just as surprised to find things in good working order.
Metal becoming wood in “animation of other processes” (DeSilvey 2006, 324). (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Bit rot after all, has just as much to do with the made-intentionally-inoperable systems that force the decay, or really uselessness, of data (Hayes 1998), as it does with any actual mold on CD-ROMS and other corruptions of age and wear. In fact, digital information or technological and material infrastructures don’t become broken, just as they don’t become fully ever fixed either. Breaks and breaches are hardly so linear. Instead, these are “relative, continually shifting states” (Larkin 2008: 236). This view may be in contrast to Pink et al.’s suggestion to attend “to the mundane work that precedes data breakages or follows them” (2018, 3), but not to their entreaty to follow those everyday practices of maintenance and repair, and even intentional failure and forced rot. This is not simply because data and other material practices like PCR experiments may fail under given conditions or focused intentions, perhaps as a result of a momentary distraction or a faulty machine—or in the case of programming, because debugging is actually 90% of the work, as one bioinformatician told me. Indeed, software testing in practice goes beyond merely verifying functionality or fixing bugs and broken bits of code, but helps to define and make “lively” (Lupton 2016) what that software is, and can do, and can be made to do in the first place (Carlson et al. 2023). Along the way, as a generative process, testing, tinkering, and fixing have social effects (DeSilvey 2006) which are external to, but always in extension of, broken/working materials themselves (Marres and Stark 2020).
More importantly, perhaps, broken things can be used, as Brian Larkin argued in relation to Nigerian media and infrastructures, as a “conduit” to mount critiques of the social order (2008, 239)—to call attention to inconsistency and inequality, and to demand or remodulate for change. To see this resistance at work demands a collating of junk practices. As Juris Milestone wrote in his description of a 2014 American Anthropology Association panel, “What will an anthropology of maintenance and repair look like?”:
Fixing things can be both innovation and a response to the ravages of globalization—either through reuse as a counter-narrative to disposability, or resistance to the fetish of the new, or as a search for connection to a material mechanical world that is increasingly automated and remote.
Junk’s transformative potential asks us to see removal and erasure, or in Douglas’ terms “rejection,” as always coupled to these reciprocal practices: rebirth, repair, repurpose, renewal. In this way, junk shows us the way decay, even technological corruption, is less a “death” than a “continued animation of other processes” (2006, 324).
But if junk describes a socio-cultural ordering system concerned with practices of moving materials—even ideas and people—into and out of categories of value and purposefulness, it must also contend with the vital agency of other material and microscopic worlds, which just as easily unravel out or spool up regardless of human presence, intention, and desire. Laboratory mice in fact are particularly disobedient, they hardly ever behave as they are supposed to—just as cell cultures in a lab are finicky and fail to grow to expectations, and junk ammo from the Junk Jet has a 10% chance of becoming suspended in mid-air, becoming irretrievable.[6] If we repurpose sites or moments of breakdown to resist configurations of power, then materials themselves are also always resisting what they ought to do or become.[7] This is the draw of the things in which we are enmeshed, where we are always extending, observing, destroying and deleting. If junk is the possibility, under particular cultural expectations and desires, for things to be pushed or cycled across such thresholds, and also, of making and unmaking these, it also must contend with the things themselves—with what we see in a corroded mirror, looking, or not, back at us.
A woman in a corroded mirror, disappearing and extending. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Although junk may be over-bursting in its use here as a metaphor, I argue it can still usefully be used to stitch growing anthropological attention to material decay, breakage, and deviation together with tinkering, maintenance, and repair—across locations, states, practices and materialities. Granted, “manifesto” is also a too decisive word to attach to this short piece. Too sure of itself. But this post is also an attempt to challenge the understanding of what it means to be (academically) polished and complete. I use manifesto here mostly tongue-in-cheek, while still holding to the idea that any argument has to begin in small seeds, and start growing from somewhere.
My thinking about junk began years ago with Brian Larkin’s attention to breakdown (2008). More recently, I found DeSilvey (2006) by way of Pink et al. (2018); and Jackson (2014) from Sachs (2020); and Hayes (1998) from Seaver (2023). This lineage is important because I am not inventing, but building. These ideas are also bits and tears of conversations with Libuše Hannah Vepřek, Sarah Thanner and Emil Rieger, and very long ago, Juris Milestone. But everything gets filtered first through Jonathan Corliss.
This research has been supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 20K01188.
[1] PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. It is an experimental method for duplicating selected genetic material in order to make it easier to detect in secondary experiments.
[2] Thermal cycler, for anyone interested. Also, just to note, but for the purposes of this retelling, I gloss over the most detailed part in writing so simply: “add some other reagents” and later, “after the PCR ‘melt’ and the second half of the experiment.”
[3] I wrote in my protocol notes, as an (anthropological) aside to myself: “K. stressed that the amount of liquid in this case doesn’t have to be super accurate, but that this is rare in science experiments. When I tried it for the first time, I almost knocked over all the new tips and also the NaOH solution which can cause burns! Yikes~)”
[4] Inconclusiveness includes an unclear or unaccounted for band in the electrophoresis gel, which is seen in the machine’s output as an image file.
[5] The images in this post are part of the artistic work of Sarah Thanner, a multimedia artist and anthropologist who playfully and experimentally engages with trashing and untrashing in her work.
[6] Fallout Wiki, Junk Jet (Fallout 4), https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Junk_Jet_(Fallout_4)
[7] Here, I also gloss over (new) materiality studies, Actor Network Theory, etc. which have linages too long to get to properly in this small piece.
Carlson, Rebecca, Gupper, Tamara, Klein, Anja, Ojala, Mace, Thanner, Sarah and Libuše Hannah Vepřek. 2023. “Testing to Circulate: Addressing the Epistemic Gaps of Software Testing.” STS-hub.de 2023: Circulations, Aachen Germany, March 2023.
DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things.” Journal of Material Culture 11: 318-338.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Goodier, John L. “Restricting Retrotransposons: A Review.” Mobile DNA 7, 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13100-016-0070-z
Hayes, Brain. 1998. “Bit Rot.” American Scientist 86(5): 410–415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1511/1998.5.410.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2015. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Iwata, Kentaro. 2020. “Infectious Diseases Do Not Exist.”「感染症は実在しない」あとがき. Retrived May 9, 2020, https://georgebest1969.typepad.jp/blog/2020/03/感染症は実在しないあとがき.html.
Jackson, Steven. J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, & K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pp. 221-239.
Lupton, D. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Marres, N, Stark, D. 2020 “Put to the Test: For a New Sociology of Testing.” British Journal of Sociology 71: 423–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746.
Milestone, Juris. 2014. “What Will an Anthropology of Maintenance and Repair Look Like?” American Anthropological Association Meeting.
Pink, Sarah, Ruckenstein, Minna, Willim, Robert and Melisa Duque. 2018. “Broken Data: Conceptualising Data in an Emerging World.” Big Data & Society January–June: 1–13. https:// doi:10.1177/2053951717753228.
Rabinow, Paul. 1992. “Studies in the Anthropology of Reason.” Anthropology Today 8(5): 7-8.
Sachs, S. E. 2020. “The Algorithm at Work? Explanation and Repair in the Enactment of Similarity in Art Data.” Information, Communication & Society 23(11): 1689-1705. https://doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1612933.
Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–391. https://doi:10.1177/ 00027649921955326.
Richard Cox stormed the Virtual Alexandria to discuss his latest works, including The Essence of Anarchy and Measuring Mandates. What is the intersection of Gnosticism and Anarchism, or are they simply synonymous regarding worldviews and goals? What can the Gnostic myths tell us about coercion and tyranny, including what has happened today with the erosion of individual rights? Let’s find out together, even as no one here gets out alive (but you can live free if you embrace Gnosis).
This is a partial show. For the interview’s second half, please become a member or patron at Patreon.
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The post Gnosticism and Anarchism first appeared on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
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Recent philosophy-related news.*
1. A new journal, Passion: the Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions, has just published its inaugural issue. The journal is a peer-reviewed (double blind), open-access, biannual publication. Its editors-in-chief are Alfred Archer (Tilburg University) and Heidi Maibom (University of the Basque Country, University of Cincinnati). The first issue is here.
2. The popular nationally-syndicated radio program Philosophy Talk, co-hosted by Ray Briggs and Josh Landy (Stanford University), has been awarded a media production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create “Wise Women,” a 16-episode series about women philosophers through the ages. The series, which will feature different guest scholars in conversation with the show’s hosts, begins on July 23rd with an episode on Hypatia.
3. Butler University just wrapped up its first ever philosophy camp for high school students. You can learn more about it here.
4. PhilVideos (previously), a project from researchers at the University of Genoa that aims to sift through the abundance of philosophy videos online and present an expert-curated and searchable selection of them, is now online (in beta). You can try it out here and read more about its features (including a more specific search interface) here. If you’re interested in becoming a reviewer for the site, you can find out about doing so here.
* Over the summer, many news items will be consolidated in posts like this.
The post Philosophy News Summary first appeared on Daily Nous.
We can all admit that stress, burnout, and other pathologies are breaking us down more than ever. So it was a vital honor to host physician and Stanford University professor and pediatrician Dr. Greg Hammer to discuss his new book, Gain Without Pain. We love complex mysticism at the Virtual Alexandria, but practical yet proven hacks to reduce inner pain and optimize our psyche are just as rewarding. You’ll find the mini-Gnosis to refuel your journey to The All, from simple meditation techniques to brain-rewiring short exercises.
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The post Healing Stress, Burnout & Anxiety With The Mind first appeared on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
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An AI door, according to a generative AI
Written by David Lyreskog
In what is quite possibly my last entry for the Practical Ethics blog, as I’m sadly leaving the Uehiro Centre in July, I would like to reflect on some things that have been stirring my mind the last year or so.
In particular, I have been thinking about thinking with machines, with people, and what the difference is.
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The Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics is located in an old carpet warehouse on an ordinary side street in Oxford. Facing the building, there is a gym to your left, and a pub to your right, mocking the researchers residing within the centre walls with a daily dilemma.
As you are granted access to the building – be it via buzzer or key card – a dry, somewhat sad, voice states “stay clear of the door” before the door slowly swings open.
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The other day a colleague of mine shared a YouTube video of the presentation The AI Dilemma, by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin. In it, they share with the audience their concerns about the rapid and somewhat wild development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the hands of a few tech giants. I highly recommend it. (The video, that is. Not the rapid and somewhat wild development of AI in the hands of a few tech giants).
Much like the thousands of signatories of the March open call to “pause giant AI experiments”, and recently the “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton, Harris and Raskin warn us that we are on the brink of major (negative, dangerous) social disruption due to the power of new AI technologies.
Indeed, there’s a bit of a public buzz about “AI ethics” in recent months.
While it is good that there is a general awareness and a public discussion about AI – or any majorly disruptive phenomenon for that matter – there’s a potential problem with the abstraction: AI is portrayed as this big, emerging, technological, behemoth which we cannot or will not control. But it has been almost three decades since humans were able to beat an AI at a game of chess. We have been using AI for many things, from medical diagnosis to climate prediction, with little to no concern about it besting us and/or stripping us of agency in these domains. In other domains, such as driving cars, and military applications of drones, there has been significantly more controversy.
All this is just to say that AI ethics is not for hedgehogs – it’s not “one big thing”[i] – and I believe that we need to actively avoid a narrative and a line of thinking which paints it to be. In examining the ethical dimensions of a multitude of AI inventions, then, we ought to take care to limit the scope of our inquiry to the domain in question at the very least.
So let us, for argument’s sake, return to that door at the Uehiro Centre, and the voice cautioning visitors to stay clear. Now, as far as I’m aware, the voice and the door are not part of an AI system. I also believe that there is no person who is tasked with waiting around for visitors asking for access, warning them of the impending door swing, and then manually opening the door. I believe it is a quite simple contraption, with a voice recording programmed to be played as the door opens. But does it make a difference to me, or other visitors, which of these possibilities is true?
We can call these possibilities:
Condition one (C1): AI door, created by humans.
Condition two (C2): Human speaker & door operator.
Condition three (C3): Automatic door & speaker, programmed by humans.
In C3, it seems that the outcome of the visitor’s action will always be the same after the buzzer is pushed or the key card is blipped: the voice will automatically say ‘stay clear of the door’, and the door will open. In C1 and C2, the same could be the case. But it could also be the case that the AI/human has been instructed to assess the risk for visitors on a case-to-case basis, and to only advise caution if there is imminent risk of collision or such (was this the case, I am consistently standing too close to the door when visiting, but that is beside the point).
On the surface, I think there are some key differences between these conditions which could have an ethical or moral impact, where some differences are more interesting than others. In C1 and C2, the door opener makes a real-time assessment, rather than following a predetermined cause of action in the way C3’s door opener does. More importantly, C2 is presumed to make this assessment from a place of concern, in a way which is impossible in C1 and C3 because the latter two are not moral agents, and therefore cannot be concerned. They simply do not have the capacity. And our inquiry could perhaps end here.
But it seems it would be a mistake.
What if something was to go wrong? Say the door swings open, but no voice warns me to stay clear, and so the door whacks me in the face[ii]. In C2, it seems the human who’s job it is to warn me of the imminent danger might have done something morally wrong, assuming they knew what to expect from opening the door without warning me, but failed in doing so due to negligence[iii]. In C1 and C3, on the other hand, while we may be upset with the door opener(s), we don’t believe that they did anything morally wrong – they just malfunctioned.
My colleague Alberto Giubilini highlighted the tensions in the morality of this landscape in what I thought was an excellent piece arguing that “It is not about AI, it is about humans”: we cannot trust AI, because trust is a relationship between moral agents, and AI does not (yet) have the capacity for moral agency and responsibility. We can, however, rely on AI to behave in a certain way (whether we should is a separate issue).
Similarly, while we may believe that a human should show concern for their fellow person, we should not expect the same from AIs, because they cannot be concerned.
Yet, if the automatic doors continue to whack visitors in the face, we may start feeling that someone should be responsible for this – not only legally, but morally: someone has a moral duty to ensure these doors are safe to pass through, right?
In doing so, we expand the field of inquiry, from the door opener to the programmer/constructor of the door opener, and perhaps to someone in charge of maintenance.
A couple of things pop to mind here.
First, when we find no immediate moral agent to hold responsible for a harmful event, we may expand the search field until we find one. That search seems to me to follow a systematic structure: if the door is automatic, we turn to call the support line, and if the support fails to fix the problem, but turns out to be an AI, we turn to whoever is in charge of support, and so on, until we find a moral agent.
Second, it seems to me that, if the door keeps slamming into visitors’ faces in condition in C2, we will not only morally blame the door operator, but also whoever left them in charge of that door. So perhaps the systems-thinking does not only apply when there is a lack of moral agents, but also applies on a more general level when we are de facto dealing with complicated and/or complex systems of agents.
Third, let us conjure a condition four (C4) like so: the door is automatic, but in charge of maintenance support is an AI system that is usually very reliable, and in charge of the AI support system, in turn, is a (human) person.
If the person in charge of an AI support system that failed to provide adequate service to a faulty automatic door is to blame for anything, it is plausibly for not adequately maintaining the AI support system – but not for whacking people in the face with a door (because they didn’t do that). Yet, perhaps there is some form of moral responsibility for the face-whacking to be found within the system as a whole. I.e. the compound of door-AI-human etc., has a moral duty to avoid face-whacking, regardless of any individual moral agents’ ability to whack faces.
If this is correct, it seems to me that we again[iv] find that our traditional means of ascribing moral responsibility fails to capture key aspects of moral life: it is not the case that any agent is individually morally responsible for the face-whacking door, nor are there multiple agents who are individually or collectively responsible for the face-whacking door. Yet, there seems to be moral responsibility for face-whacking doors in the system. Where does it come from, and what is its nature and structure (if it has one)?
In this way, not only cognitive processes such as thinking and computing seem to be able to be distributed throughout systems, but perhaps also moral capacities such as concern, accountability, and responsibility.
And in the end, I do not know to what extent it actually matters, at least in this specific domain. Because at the end of the day, I do not care much whether the door opener is human, an AI, or automatic.
I just need to know whether or not I need to stay clear of the door.
–
Notes & References.
[i] Berlin, I. (2013). The hedgehog and the fox: An essay on Tolstoy’s view of history. Princeton University Press.
[ii] I would like to emphasize that this is a completely hypothetical case, and that I take it to be safe to enter the Uehiro centre. The risk of face-whacking is, in my experience, minimal.
[iii] Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt here, and assume it wasn’t maleficence.
[iv] Together with Hazem Zohny, Julian Savulescu, and Ilina Singh, I have previously argued this to be the case in the domain of emerging technologies for collective thinking and decision-making, such as brain-to-brain interfaces. See the Open Access paper Merging Minds for more on this argument.
By Gabriel De Marco
Consider the following case:
Classic Food Placement (FP): In order to encourage healthy eating, cafeteria staff place healthy food options at eye-level, whereas unhealthy options are placed lower down. Diners are more likely to pick healthy foods and less likely to pick unhealthy foods than they would have been otherwise.
This intervention is a paradigmatic case of what are often called nudges. Though many will think that it is OK to implement this sort of intervention for these sorts of purposes, there is a large debate about when exactly this is OK.
One common theme is that whether such an influence is easy to resist is going to be relevant to when the intervention is OK. If the intervention is not easy to resist, then, at the very least, this counts as a strike against implementing it. However, though there is often reference to the resistibility of a nudge, there is rarely explicit discussion of what it is for a nudge to be easy to resist, or for it to be easily resistible.
To begin giving an account of what it is for a nudge to be (easily) resistible, we need to figure out what it is an ability to do. So, what is it to resist a nudge?
Though authors tend not to explicitly answer this question, one natural, and perhaps common, answer is that to resist a nudge is to behave contrary to it. What sort of behavior is contrary to the nudge? An initially attractive thought is that, since nudges are intended to get agents to do (or not do) something, behaving contrary to a nudge just involves behaving contrary to what the nudge is intended to get the nudgee to do. Call this the intention conception of resistance. In Classic FP, the nudge is intended to get agents to pick the healthy food – suppose it is salad. The intention conception would tell us that resisting would involve not picking the salad. Though people tend not to be explicit about how they are understanding the claim that someone resists a nudge, the intention conception seems to capture the underlying theory.
There are, I will argue, issues with the intention conception. First, this way of conceiving of resistance is not helpful in cases where there is no intention behind the influence. Consider:
Random FP: The cafeteria manager is not aware of the placement effect on customer behavior. But she still needs to decide where to place the salad and the pudding; so, she flips a coin. It lands heads, the salad is placed at eye-level, and the cafeteria layout is identical to that found in Classic FP.
Here we have, at the very least, a nudge-like influence. The relevant feature of the environment is the same as in Classic FP, and if it has an effect in Classic FP, it presumably has the same effect in Random FP. And it is plausible that resisting the influence involves the same thing in both cases. The intention conception, however, would not tell us what resisting the influence involves in Random FP, insofar as there is no intention behind the nudge-like influence.
Second, although it is typically assumed that the effect of the nudge and the intention behind it are aligned, this need not always be the case. Consider:
Confused FP: The cafeteria manager receives a memo concerning the effect that food placement can have on customers. However, he is confused about the effect – perhaps there was a typo, or he misread it – such that he thinks that people are less likely than they would have been otherwise to pick the food that is at eye-level. Since he intends to get customers to purchase more chocolate pudding, he places the salad at eye-level, and the cafeteria layout is identical to that found in Classic FP.
As with Random FP, the relevant feature of the environment is the same as in Classic FP, and presumably has the same effect on customers (assuming it has one). On at least one way of understanding this, one might think that resisting the nudge, or the influence, involves the same thing across all three cases. But the intention behind the food placement in Confused FP is to get people to pick the pudding. On the intention conception, resisting this nudge involves not picking the pudding, which is something quite different than resisting the nudge in Classic FP. If resisting the nudge, or the influence, in all three FP cases involves the same behavior – if resisting the influence in all three cases involves not picking the salad – then the intention conception gets it wrong.
However, it seems at least plausible that there is some sense in which resisting the cafeteria manager’s attempt at influencing customers does involve different behavior in Classic FP and Confused FP. These managers tried to influence customers into doing different things, and whereas the former used a method that may help him achieve his goal, the latter did not.
So, I suggest that when we talk about resisting a nudge, we might be talking about two different things at once. One thing we could be talking about is resisting the influence itself. Doing this would involve the same behavior in all three variations of Classic FP. Another thing we might be talking about is something like resisting the would-be influencer’s attempt to influence, and this might involve different behavior in Classic FP and Confused FP; and, since there is no attempt in Random FP, there is no sense in which one can resist the attempt in this case. This difference is obscured when we make the common assumption that the effects of the nudge and the intention behind it are working in unison, but Confused FP pries these apart.
For the purposes of this post, we can just say that resisting the attempt at an influence involves acting contrary to the intention behind it; the intention conception is correct when it comes to resisting the attempt. But what does it take to resist the influence itself? Finding the answer to this is complicated, and I won’t resolve this in this post.
One might think that something like the intention conception will still serve us well enough. The issue with the intention conception, perhaps, was not so much the focus on intention, but rather the focus on the actual intention. Perhaps we can rescue a version of the intention conception if we focus on what intention the would-be influencer would have if they were informed. Call this the informed-intention conception. This may have more promise with respect to Random and Confused FP; the fact that there is no intention behind the food placement in Random FP does not preclude there from being an intention that the manager would have, were he informed of the effects. Nor does the fact that the manager in Confused FP is mistaken about the effect, and for similar reasons. What matters, on this conception, is what intention the cafeteria managers would have, were they informed of the effect of the food placement.
This apparent benefit, however, may be short-lived, and this becomes apparent once we try to work out what it would actually say about these, or similar, cases. What intention would the manager in Confused FP have, were he informed of the food placement effect? One might worry that in this hypothetical case, he would have the same intention – to get people to buy the chocolate pudding – it is the intervention that would change: he would have placed the pudding at eye-level instead. But this doesn’t seem to answer what it would take to resist the influence in Confused FP, which presumably is the same as in Classic FP.
Perhaps, instead, we could focus on the intention the manager would have, were he to a) be informed about the effect and b) implement the same influence. But this version faces some issues as well, insofar as there may not be a clear answer to what the manager would intend, were he informed. This can be made clearest, I think, by focusing on cases in which we stipulate the actual intention, or lack thereof. Consider, for example:
Apathetic FP: Everything is as in Random FP, but the cafeteria manager knows about the food placement effect, yet does not care at all what his customers pick. He flips the coin to decide how to place the items.
This case, again, features the same environmental feature, and so the same influence itself. Yet the manager is informed about the effect, and has no intention to modify behavior. Given this, it is not clear that there is any relevant intention that the manager would have, were he to be informed of the effect. If there is no such intention, this account fails to give an answer for what resisting the influence itself would involve in this case.
We could further modify the view by focusing on what intention the manager would have were he to, a) be informed about the effect, b) implement the same influence, and c) intend to influence customers. This could help to get around Apathetic FP insofar as we would now only be concerned with hypothetical cases in which he is not apathetic, and does have an intention.
But even this formulation faces a further issue. Nudgers who are informed of the effect of a nudge-like influence, and who intend for the intervention to have an effect on individuals, may still differ on the content of that intention. Consider another nudge that is often mentioned in the literature:
Calorie Count (CC): The food menu in a restaurant displays the calorie-count of individual food items.
One effect this has is that many customers form beliefs about the number of calories in a particular option. Another effect it might have is that individuals, when deliberating about what to eat, take calories into account, whereas they may not have otherwise. A further effect this might have is that people, in general, pick items with lower calorie-counts. Given these different effects, one might implement this nudge for different reasons, and with different intentions, even if one is informed of all of the above. Thus, consider the following two cases:
CC-Autonomy: As in CC, but the restaurant owner intends for people to make a more informed decision about what to eat.
CC-Paternalistic: As in CC, but the restaurant owner intends for people to pick healthier, lower-calorie, foods.
In both cases, the restaurant owners are aware of the same facts. However, the intentions are different; one intends for customers to make a more informed decisions – regardless of what they decide to do – and the other intends for customers to pick lower-calorie meals. Yet the feature of the environment – the display of the calorie counts – is the same, and we can suppose that they would have the same effect on individuals. The last version of the informed-intention conception would therefore tell us that resisting the influence itself involves different behavior in these two cases; yet, whatever it is that resisting the CC influence involves, it would plausibly be the same across these two cases.
There is much more to say here, but ultimately, I suspect that appealing to the intentions of a would-be nudger – be they actual or hypothetical – will not help to give us an account of what it is to resist the influence itself.
Disclaimer:
Recently, there has been some pushback against the efficacy of nudges, sparked by PNAS’s publication of three letters responding to a recent meta-analysis of nudges (the authors reply here). These letters pointed out various issues with not only the meta-analysis, but the whole body of work surrounding interventions often called nudges, and possibly suggesting that, at the very least, we have no evidence for the effectiveness of nudges. However, others take a more moderate line, often pointing to another large study that seems to avoid at least some of these issues (and here is a brief interview with the authors of this large study). And even one of the critics of that study agrees that nudges sometimes work (see here for a response from the authors of that study).
We connect the parallels between Hermeticism and Taoism. You’ll find the secrets to optimizing your spiritual life between these religions of the higher mind and numinous code. This exploration also deep dives into related traditions, including Sacred Geometry, meditation, Egyptians Magic, and Eastern Mysticism. Want more? Our discussion will move to our collapsing modern times and how the gifts of Hermes/Thoth might be our best chance.
Astral Guest – Ethan Indigo Smith, author of The Tao of Thoth.
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The post Taoism and Hermeticism first appeared on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
The post Taoism and Hermeticism appeared first on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
The last time math performance was this low for 13-year-olds was in 1990.
On Chinese gay dating apps, “fake profiles” are a constant concern: photos might have been altered or biometrics might have been fabricated. Offline, the person might barely resemble their profile. The lived experiences of Chinese gay men, however, show us that the fake is not always antithetical to the real. The fake, under certain circumstances, could enact material realities of its own. Gay socialites (同志名媛, tongzhi mingyuan) in urban China’s gay community are cases in point.
One aspect of my research among gay socialites focuses on the in-between zone of “real” and “unreal,” and how exactly the transformation from unreal to real can be achieved in a specific socio-technological context—contemporary urban China—in the digital age. I argue that we need to go beyond a binary of “real” and “unreal” to understand a social world where human actors are using digital technologies to create intermediate zones that are neither squarely real nor completely unreal, with the purpose of fulfilling their desires. These blurry, intermediate zones are liminal (Turner 1969), existing in the form of fantasies, constructed personas and lifestyles, and intoxicated states. It is through concrete human actions, and sometimes their unintended consequences, that liminal realities become full realities.
Fourteen years ago, in Coming of Age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff (2008) argued that virtual worlds are in and of themselves cultural worlds distinct from the physical world, and that it is not only possible but suitable to study the culture of a virtual world with ethnography. Contesting the “false opposition” that fails to recognize that “the myriad ways that the online is real” and mistakenly assumes that “everything physical is real” (Boellstorff 2016, 387), Boellstorff states that “[c]hallenging the derealization of the digital is of pressing importance” (2016, 397). There have been consistent efforts in anthropology and related social sciences that echo or take up Boellstorff’s intervention. Anthropologists caution that design features and affordances of apps are deeply shaped by socio-cultural contexts, and that these new technologies bring about not only new possibilities, but also new risks and hierarchies in users’ lived realities (Batiste 2013; McGuire 2016; Edelman 2016). They pose a collective challenge to the misconception that the virtual and the actual are separated (McGuire 2016; Hu 2015). These pioneer studies have, from various perspectives and with meticulously constructed ethnographic details, highlighted the fact that the virtual and the actual are not only increasingly integrated, but on many occasions the virtual is real in every sense of the word.
Speaking more broadly, Lisa Messeri (2021) cogently points out that what she calls the “anthropologies of the unreal” have continuously expanded what counts as real in anthropological worldview by demonstrating how the seemingly “unreal,” such as illusions, dreams, digital technologies, intoxicated states of mind, and so on, are real or made real in specific socio-technological contexts (Boellstorff 2008; Mittermaier 2010; Messeri 2021; Zigon 2019; Pearce 2009).
In this case study, I use the term “liminal realities” to better conceptualize these in-between realities that were neither absolutely real nor undeniably fake. I draw on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality (1969) to highlight not only the transitional nature of these realities but also their uncertainty, malleability, and fluidity. Indeed, a gay socialite in China is not born; he is made.
The lives of the Chinese gay men I met during fieldwork provide a fruitful lens to understand the in-betweenness of life as a liminality between “real” and “unreal,” when boundaries, or thresholds, are not always clear or absolute. In this blog post, I will show how my interlocutors—mostly rural-to-urban migrant gay men—use digital technologies to create “fake” personas; that is, personas whose lifestyle, socio-economic status, and overall social status were different from their offline ones. In these urban Chinese men’s cases, however, “fake” is not the opposite of “real.” It was precisely through meticulously constructed “fakeness” that these men accumulate attention from China’s gay community, build a large fan base, and increase their social status. Eventually, this “fakeness” materialized and turned into tangible economic gains and social recognition. In other words, the fake became something undeniably real.
A “gay socialite” was one of the multiple identity categories created by urban Chinese gay men that placed gay men into an always changing hierarchical system according to their upbringing, education, class status, sexual practices, and more. My interlocutors described a gay socialite as someone who was young, good-looking, muscular, financially well-off, and fashionable. Most importantly, however, being a gay socialite was about enacting a particular lifestyle. Indeed, without a Louis Vuitton bag, or comparable luxury brand-name products, a good-looking, muscular, young gay man was considered a “wild chick” (乡下野鸡, xiang xia ye ji) ridiculed for their assumed rural, financially tight, and unsophisticated “nature” (本性, ben xing) despite their good looks. In contrast, hard labor was considered a foreign concept to gay socialites. A socialite must not work yet still have the financial means to travel around the world, stay in luxury hotels, and post their experiences on social media for fans to admire and/or evaluate.
Image 1: A well-known gay socialite posting on social media an image from a luxurious high-rise hotel room. The caption reads: “This is what a vacation is supposed to look like.” (Image screenshot by the author)
Image 2: On a different day, the same socialite posted a picture of a fancy breakfast at a luxurious hotel in Hangzhou, China. The caption reads: “A beautiful day begins with two Americanos.” (Image screenshot by the author)
During my fieldwork, however, I found out that most gay socialites actually came from humble backgrounds and that their financial position was not exactly as their social media posts suggested. Their luxurious lifestyle was, in fact, performed. It was common for gay socialites to rent a hotel room together. They took turns taking individual photos in each corner of the room and planned to post their pictures on social media at different times. During my fieldwork, I also learned that these gay men often borrowed brand-name products from others—from either individual people or companies specializing in brand-name rentals—to enhance their upscale persona on social media.
What’s the point, one might ask? Many socialites are looking for “gold masters” to look after them. In the gay lexicon, a “gold master” (金主, jin zhu) referred to a wealthy and usually older gay man who took care of younger and less monied gay men. However, in this gay social hierarchy, gold masters were not just looking to take care of any physically appealing gay men. Due to the equally intense hierarchical thinking among gold masters, and a social environment that measured a person’s social worth partly through the identity of their intimate partners, gold masters were looking for “worthy” (配得上，pei de shang) gay men—a position well fit by gay socialites. If a gold master ended up with a “nobody” (谁也不是, shei ye bu shi, translated literally as “who is nobody”) the reputation or social worth of the gold master would deteriorate as well. After all, the number of wealthy people in China grew to such an extent that some felt the pressure to differentiate themselves even further, pursuing a form of distinction from the so-called “vulgar new rich” (暴发户, bao fa hu, translated literally as “people who got rich as quickly as an explosion”) (Osburg 2020). During my fieldwork, gold masters and gay socialites were common couples. While the former gained face by having an attractive intimate partner, the latter eventually lived a material life that used to exist only in the virtual sphere.
There was more than one way the “fakeness” on social media could turn into material and financial realities. Not every gay socialite could find a gold master. Some took advantage of China’s vast “sunken market,” referring to the vast number of consumers who purchased cheaper products with their more meager incomes. Numbering in the billions, these individuals form the biggest market with the strongest potential one could hope for. By creating a fake persona, gay socialites accumulated a large number of followers from this market, many of whom could never keep a socialite like a gold master could or afford the socialite’s lifestyle for themselves. This is beside the point, however: most fans knew that the social media gay socialite life was often staged. Rather, these virtually mediated personas and lifestyles served not as truthful representation of another person’s reality, but snapshots of the fantasy of a good life, of an otherwise, of an alternative of a life (hopefully) yet to come. The power of fantasy was strong, leading to loyal fanfare, who would click the link and purchase whatever their idols recommend to them.
Brian, for example, was one of the most well-known gay socialites in China. Brian started his entrepreneurship and accumulated his fortune by selling affordable protein power on his social media accounts back in 2010s. When I returned to China for my dissertation fieldwork in 2019, Brian already owned a couple companies, multiple properties in China and Thailand, and was a major sponsor for one of Asia’s biggest dance parties in Bangkok. Even though Brian is still ridiculed by other gays for his highly photoshopped, “fake” pictures on social media, it would be hard to deny that the real and tangible changes in his life originated from purposefully constructed fakeness.
Indeed, the persona and lifestyle put on social media by these socialites might be “fake.” But “fakeness” is not always the opposite of realness. Mediated by virtuality, fakeness—understood in this context as a form of purposefully constructed liminal reality with the intention to craft a better life—is generative, productive, and performative; it brings new realities into existence. For Chinese gay socialites, many of whom migrated from rural China or lower-tier cities to the metropolis such as Shanghai, virtually mediated fakeness was their attempt—sometimes a very convenient and efficient one—to “make it” in China’s urban centers. In their cases, the fake, instead of standing in sharp opposition to the real, stood right beside the real. Here, the differences between the fake and the real were not quite ontological but temporal and conditional. The fake, in this sense, bears the potential to transition and transform into tangible and material realities that are no longer constrained in the virtual world. The fake, then, can be seen as a specific kind of real—the liminal real.
Batiste, Dominique Pierre. 2013. “‘0 Feet Away’: The Queer Cartography of French Gay Men’s Geo-Social Media Use.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22 (2): 111–32.Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.———. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57 (4): 387–407.Edelman, Elijah Adiv. 2016. “‘This Is Where You Fall off My Map’: Trans-Spectrum Spatialities in Washington, DC, Safety, and the Refusal to Submit to Somatic Erasure.” Journal of Homosexuality 63 (3): 394–404.Horst, Heather A. 2013. “The Infrastructures of Mobile Media: Towards a Future Reseach Agenda.” Mobile Media and Communication 1 (1): 147–52.Hu, Tung-Hui. 2015. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.Ito, Mizuko. 2010. “Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media Mixes.” In Mashup Cultures, edited by S. Sonvilla-Weiss, 79–97. New York: Springer.McGuire, M. L. 2016. “The Problem of Technological Integration and Geosocial Cruising in Seoul.” New Media & Society, 1–15.Messeri, Lisa. 2021. “Realities of Illusion: Tracing an Anthropology of the Unreal from Torres Strait to Virtual Reality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (2): 340–59.Mittermaier, Amira. 2010. Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.Nibbs, Faith. 2016. “Hmong Women on the Web: Transforming Power through Social Networking.” In Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women, edited by Chia Youyee Vang, Faith Nibbs, and Ma Vang, 169–94. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Okabe, Daisuke, and Mizuko Ito. 2006. “Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use: Steps toward Techno-Social Ethnographic Frameworks.” In Mobile Communication in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Views, Observations and Reflections, edited by Joachim R. Hoflich and Maren Hartmann, 79–102. Berlin: Frank and Timme.Osburg, John. 2020. “Consuming Belief: Luxury, Authenticity, and Chinese Patronage of Tibetan Buddhism in Contemporary China.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (1): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1086/708547.Pearce, Celia. 2009. Communities of Play Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.Wallis, Cara. 2011. “Mobile Phones without Guarantees: The Promises of Technology and the Contingencies of Culture.” New Media & Society 13 (3): 471–85.———. 2013. Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones. New York and London: New York University Press.Zigon, Jarrett. 2019. A War on People: Drug Users Politics and A New Ethics of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.
David Block was in the burning house, and you know he elevated the Virtual Alexandria. In the fourth installment of his series, David fully exposed the Golem God and his machinations. This disclosure included the truth about CERN, DNA harvesting, DARPA, Artificial Intelligence, and more. David connected all these findings to ancient mystical concepts like the Tarot, the demon Apollyon, Dante’s Inferno, and so much more. Prepare yourself for the ride of your lifetime.
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The post Transhumanism, AI, and Demonic CERN first appeared on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
The post Transhumanism, AI, and Demonic CERN appeared first on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
by Dominic Wilkinson
This week, closing evidence was presented in the long-running trial of Lucy Letby, a nurse who is accused of murdering seven newborn infants (and attempting to murder 10 more) in a neonatal intensive care unit in Chester between 2015 and 2016. In the coming weeks, the jury will consider and then return their verdict on the charges. That verdict will bring some closure to a criminal investigation that has taken more than four years, and a trial that has lasted nine months. It may (though may not) provide some relief for the grieving families whose babies died seven or eight years ago.
Yet, whatever verdict is reached, there are likely to be profound wider repercussions for all those who work in the care of very sick infants and children, and for many many other parents and families.
As someone who works in newborn intensive care, I have found the Letby case too awful, too close to the bone to follow closely. I do not know and (without access to all the evidence) cannot judge what conclusion the jury should reach. However, there are, ultimately, only two possibilities, both of which are horrendous.
Guilty.
The idea that a health professional working in the care of critically ill babies would deliberately and repeatedly attempt to kill infants is, quite literally, beyond comprehension. At least for me, it is impossible to imagine what would lead someone to do such a thing. Health professionals in neonatal units work closely in teams, in a relationship of trust, united by our shared commitment to the support of babies and families. We depend on each other – mutual support that makes it possible to provide care in highly stressful situations. If Letby is guilty, that very obviously represents the ultimate betrayal of her responsibilities to her patients and their families. However, beyond Chester, that conclusion will ripple across hospitals in the UK and beyond. It will shake to the core the trust between doctors and nurses and importantly between families and professionals. It will cause widespread distress and disquiet across neonatal units.
Not guilty.
The opposite possibility is almost as distressing. If Letby is innocent, that means that a health professional committed to the care of infants has been subject to a prolonged period of intense public and police scrutiny and attention. Her career and her life appear to have been irretrievably damaged. For health professionals, this raises the prospect that any of us could be vulnerable to similar accusations, to having our lives similarly turned upside down.
Wider effects
Beyond professionals, and families of children who are currently in hospital, the Letby case will seriously and negatively impact another group – those who have lost a child or newborn infant. Many bereaved parents will have found the intense media attention to the tragic events in Chester has painfully stirred up memories and questions around their own child’s death. They may have had unanswered questions at the time, or they may now be re-examining events in the light of Letby, wondering whether they can believe the things that they were told and the answers that they were given. Even if (as will be the case for many or all of these) everything possible was done to care for their child and no malicious actors were present – how will they be able to know with certainty?
All of that is to say that the end of this case will not be the end of its effects. Trust is a precious commodity in healthcare. It may be in short supply in neonatal units in the wake of this case.
Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, has threatened to reconsider his state’s relationship with the College Board.
It’s a mad world, as the song goes. But how mad is it, Donnie Darko? We take a clinical and esoteric view of destructive mental disorders like narcissism, psychopathy, BPD, and codependency. This exploration includes seeing how the Gnostics accurately detailed so many mental disorders in their myths. Ultimately, we find an alarming rise in mental diseases creating dangerous egregores seeking to wipe out today’s society. Don’t worry: we will get into the solutions.
Astral Guest – Matt Socha, author of The Toxic States of America and Deconstructing Narcissism.
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The post Narcissism and Psychopathy (Individual & Collective) first appeared on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
The post Narcissism and Psychopathy (Individual & Collective) appeared first on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
How about a teaser to Astro Gnosis leading to a more extensive discussion on the dark forces that plague us today? It doesn’t get better than Mitch Horowitz and Richard Smoley together at the Virtual Alexandria. My astral guests also shared their latest research from new/upcoming books, so expect a treasure trove on modern occultism, mysticism, and nonlocal psychic phenomena. It’s just a hunk, a hunk of burning Gnosis!
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The post Archons of the Mind and Materiality first appeared on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
The post Archons of the Mind and Materiality appeared first on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
Written by Rebecca Brown
Breed Specific Legislation
The UK currently imposes what’s called ‘Breed Specific Legislation’ in an effort to limit serious injuries due to dog attacks. The legislation was introduced in 1991 and made it illegal to own, sell, abandon, give away or breed dogs deemed to belong to one of four banned breeds. These are the Pit Bull Terrier, Japanese Tosa, Dogo Argentino and Fila Brasileiro. These breeds, having been selectively bred for purposes such as fighting, hunting and guarding, and are considered to have physical and behavioural attributes that mean they pose an unacceptable risk to the public. Dogs that meet the criteria for being a banned breed can be seized and either destroyed or permitted to remain with their owner under restrictive conditions. Breed specific legislation has been recently criticised in a number of organisations.
I do not intend to defend Breed Specific Legislation. It’s plausible that there are alternative, more effective and less damaging ways of reducing harm from dog attacks. However, many of the critiques of Breed Specific Legislation made by prominent animal charities and veterinary bodies are flawed. In pursuing what they no doubt see as a worthwhile end (the scrapping of Breed Specific Legislation), those publicly lobbying for change have made numerous confused and misleading arguments. Below, I outline why these arguments are misleading, implausible or weak, and how they fail to show that Breed Specific Legislation should be revoked.
Any dog can bite
One common claim is that “All dogs, whatever their breed type or size, are capable of showing aggression” and that “All dogs have the potential to be dangerous”. I don’t want to quibble about whether or not a Chihuahua is technically capable of inflicting a serious injury, but the relevant question is surely a) how likely a given dog is to bite a person, coupled with b) how damaging that bite is likely to be.
The Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) point to the more relevant claim that “recent studies found no difference observed between legislated and non-legislated breeds in the medical treatment required following a bite, or in the severity of bite and the type of dog that bit.” Unfortunately they don’t provide any citation or link to this evidence so it’s impossible to evaluate it. So we are left with the frankly implausible claim that if you get bitten by a toy poodle puppy you’re as likely to be harmed as if you are bitten by a breed of dog that was selectively bred to be able to fight a bull to the death.
Elsewhere on the RSPCA website is a document about dog aggression. Here they seem to acknowledge – albeit carefully – the fairly obvious point that some dog breeds are more likely to show aggression, and are more dangerous when aggressive, than others:
Although it might seem that some dogs are born to be aggressive, it is more accurate to say that they are born with inherited tendencies that might, if not controlled, make aggressive behaviour more likely… There are inherited ways of behaving that are particular to some breeds or types of dogs that make it more likely for individuals to grow up to use aggression where others would not… Aggression is not a single characteristic, however there are breeds of dogs that have historically been used for specific purposes, such as for fighting dogs or other animals, or for guarding. Whilst these breeds may not be any more likely to show aggression, because of their physical and temperamental attributes if they do show aggression it is likely to have more serious consequences. Persistence in attack coupled with strong jaws can cause serious injuries.
Lack of evidence
Notwithstanding the above quote from the RSPCA, another common claim is that there’s no ‘robust scientific evidence’ that some dogs (and types of dog) are able to inflict more damaging injuries than others. Again, this seems to be a case of absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence. It may be worth recalling Yeh et al’s (2018) article ‘Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial’ which usefully highlights how direct RCT evidence might not be necessary in order to conclude that interventions such as parachutes are probably a good idea when jumping out of aeroplanes. Thinking again of the toy poodle versus pit bull example, we can probably draw some fairly reliable conclusions based upon ‘mechanistic reasoning’, without a need to inflict different kinds of dogs bites upon participants as part of a randomised trial.
Disconfirmatory evidence
It is also claimed that there is direct evidence that banned breeds are no more dangerous than other breeds, and that Breed Specific Legislation is completely ineffective at reducing (serious) injuries from dogs.
The RSPCA tells us that “Between 1989 and 2017, 48 people died in dog-related incidents. Of the 62 dogs involved, 53 were dog breeds not on the prohibited list.” And that “Only 8% of dangerously out of control dog cases involved banned breeds”. They also reference evidence that “in the past 20 years (1999-2019), the number of hospital admissions for the treatment of dog bites has increased by 154%, despite the prohibition of certain types of dogs”.
What can we make of this? First of all, the population data: dog bites requiring hospital treatment do not appear to have dropped as a result of the introduction of Breed Specific Legislation. This may well be the case, but it’s not possible to tell based on the information provided. We don’t know how dog ownership has changed over the time period studied – perhaps there were lots more dogs, and this resulted in more bites. It has certainly been speculated that the enthusiasm for pets during the covid lockdown (the number of dogs registered with the UK Kennel Club increased by nearly 40% between 2020 and 2021) might have contributed to more dog bite injuries in recent years. The population data might be suggestive, but it is far from conclusive evidence that Breed Specific Legislation doesn’t or hasn’t prevented any serious injuries from dogs since it was introduced.
Second, the breed-linked data, supposedly showing that banned breeds are responsible for only a small minority of serious injuries, including deaths. But wait: banned breeds, of which there are only four (amongst hundreds of other dog breeds) were involved in 1/7 (14%) of the fatal attacks on people during the period mentioned; they were implicated in 8% of cases of ‘dangerously out of control’ dogs. We don’t know how many dogs belonging to banned breeds exist in the UK, but surely it’s less than 14%, meaning they’re at least overrepresented in these samples.
And surely we can go further than that. I’m pretty keen on dogs and had a childhood of obsessively recording and watching all the annual coverage of Crufts repeatedly. I can reliably tell the difference between an Italian Greyhound, a Whippet and a Greyhound, or describe to you what a Wirehaired Vizsla looks like. But I have never heard of three of the breeds on the banned list and possibly never seen them.
This Wikipedia article lists fatal dog attacks in the UK, including breed information where known. The breeds responsible for fatal attacks on humans since 1980 are largely unsurprising. In the below table I’ve summarised the data from the Wikipedia article. (Note that I’ve grouped some breeds / breed types together [Mastiffs; Bulldogs other than American Bulldogs]).
| Breed | Number of fatalities involved in since 1980 (including as part of cross-breed) |
| Staffordshire Bull Terrier | 12 |
| American Bulldog | 9 |
| American Bully XL | 7 |
| Mastiff / Bull Mastiff / Neapolitan Mastiff / Italian Mastiff | 7 |
| Alsatian / German Shepherd | 6 |
| American Pit Bull Terrier / Pit Bull type | 6 |
| Rottweiler | 6 |
| Bordeaux Bulldog / Bulldog type / Aylestone Bulldog / British Bulldog | 4 |
| Jack Russell Terrier | 3 |
| Bull Terrier | 2 |
| Cane Corso | 2 |
| Husky | 2 |
| Doberman | 1 |
| Alaskan Malamute | 1 |
| Lakeland Terrier | 1 |
| Presa Canario | 1 |
| Chow Chow | 1 |
Again, without baseline information about how common these breeds are, one must be cautious about extrapolating from this list to draw conclusions about the dangers of specific breeds. Yet what is clear is that, with the exception of Jack Russell Terriers and a single Lakeland Terrier (responsible for killing three newborn infants), small dogs do not tend to kill people. Dogs that end up inflicting injuries sufficient to kill people tend to be powerful types, which have been selectively bred for guarding, fighting or hunting.
These dogs don’t deserve to die
One unfortunate refrain used by critics including the RSPCA and British Veterinary Association is that dogs deemed to belong to a banned breed and which do not qualify for an exemption, despite showing no previous signs of aggressive or dangerous behaviour, do not deserve to die. Yet this seems to mischaracterise what the Breed Specific Legislation is intended to do. It is clearly not intended to hand out punishment to ‘bad’ dogs, but instead to act as a preventative measure, to stop injuries in the first place. Indeed, since dogs are not moral agents it is entirely inappropriate to punish them on the basis that they ‘deserve’ it. We should of course treat dogs kindly and not cause them unnecessary suffering. But to suggest that Breed Specific Legislation is a form of undeserved punishment of ‘innocent’ dogs is misleading. Even the destruction of dogs that have seriously injured or killed people should not be construed as punishment: the justification for such actions is to protect people from future attacks from a dog proven to be dangerous.
Banning breeds implies that all other dogs are safe
Commentators suggest that, by banning certain breeds, the government sends the message that only these breeds are dangerous, that dogs belonging to other breeds are never dangerous, and that it is breed alone (rather than circumstances, handling, training, etc.) that makes a dog dangerous. Yet I wonder if this is really the case. It hadn’t crossed my mind that only those banned breeds were (potentially) dangerous, and I would be surprised if other people concluded this from the legislation. Indeed, it seems equally plausible that banning specific breeds would raise awareness of general dangers posed by all dogs.
A vet writing for the British Veterinary Association states “there has never been an onus on anyone, young or old, to behave sensibly and respectfully around dogs.” The problem is that many serious bites – particularly those resulting in fatalities – happen to children. 31 of the 64 fatalities in the UK since 1980 listed on the Wikipedia page were in children under 12. They include a number of babies, one of whom was 5 days old when she died. Children are particularly vulnerable to dog attacks: they are small (and thus injuries may be more severe and they are less able to escape or protect themselves if attacked); they are more likely to provoke dogs through excitement or rough treatment; they are more likely to miss the signs that a dog feels threatened and may attack. But there is a limit to what small children can be taught or the extent to which parents can control their behaviour, and we inevitably place them at risk by putting them in shared spaces with dogs. Of course there is an onus on people to treat dogs carefully and kindly, and to ensure those without the capacity to do this are protected. Yet focusing on whether or not children or their parents could (or should) have behaved differently once again seems to attend to questions of blame and desert, rather than the core matter: how best to prevent injuries in the first place.
Whilst it may well be a good idea to provide training and support to people regarding how to safely handle and act around dogs, this is not incompatible with Breed Specific Legislation. We need not accept the supposition that people are too stupid to simultaneously appreciate that poor training, irresponsible handling, stressful circumstances and the inherited predispositions and physical characteristics of a dog can all contribute to how likely it is to bite and injure someone.
Don’t judge a book by its cover
An interesting argument presented in criticism of Breed Specific Legislation is that the law is implemented based on the extent to which a dog fits the breed standard of a banned breed. This raises complaints from the RSPCA and British Veterinary Association for failing to use, for instance, genetic testing to determine whether or not a dog belongs to a particular (banned) breed.
But isn’t this disingenuous? First of all, if it is physical attributes that play a part in how severe a dog bite may turn out to be, then using physical attributes as a guide to which individuals should be restricted seems not unreasonable. Second, I do not think that, were the legislation to be enforced via genetic testing rather than breed standard, the RSPCA, British Veterinary Association or any of the other opposed groups would be any happier with it. Third, it’s not clear what additional information a genetic test will give you beyond the visible phenotypes that are used in the current system to determine breed. From my Crufts-watching days, the judges were looking at how well the dogs matched up against the breed standard. Of course, genes are partially responsible for what dogs end up looking like, but the relevant thing for dog breeds seems to be what they are actually like rather than what their genetic make-up is. The ‘you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover’ claim seems to be a piece of rhetoric rather than a genuine complaint about how the legislation is enforced.
A plea for better communications
As I said, I don’t want to defend Breed Specific Legislation. But it’s hard to evaluate the value of a policy on the basis of communications that are so clearly aimed at achieving a particular outcome (scrapping the legislation) rather than providing informative arguments. At the moment, the arguments made by the RSPCA, the British Veterinary Association and others could apply as equally to wolves as to any other dog breed. If I want to keep a wolf then, extrapolating from the above claims, I could defend myself against accusations I was risking others’ safety by saying “any dog can bite, and no one has shown me evidence that a wolf bite is worse than any other dog”. Indeed, none of the lethal attacks on humans by dogs in the UK in the last 50 years came from wolves. As long as the wolf hasn’t bitten anyone else yet, subjecting it to restrictions would be equivalent to ‘punishing the innocent’. Children just need to treat wolves respectfully and then they should be fine; there should be more of an emphasis on (potential) victims of wolf attacks to avoid putting themselves at risk, rather than restricting people’s freedom to keep wolves. Even though it looks and behaves exactly like a wolf, it’s not fair to say it’s a wolf unless this has been genetically proven.
Is this really the argument the RSPCA, British Veterinary Association and others want to make? It seems to me it would be vastly preferable to present the best evidence in support of their claims, and acknowledge where uncertainty lies so people can form a sensible and well-informed view on Breed Specific Legislation.
Elizabethton City Schools in Tennessee provided English tutoring this year for 404 elementary and middle school students with the increased funding.
Always an honor when Lon Milo Duquette visits The Virtual Alexandria. He will discuss his new book: An Accidental Christ. This “novel’ presents a thought-provoking exploration of who Jesus really was – a King of the Jews, Son of God, or a man caught up in Roman Palestine – and how the Jesus myth may have become distorted. It uses biblical quotes and facts to explore this concept and incorporates humor, tragedy, and thrills.
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The post An Accidental Christ first appeared on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio.
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