A pause on Progressive Geographies and social media

The last post on Lefebvre’s banned books was one I wrote a few days ago but hadn’t quite finished. I’m posting it now and expect it will be the last substantive post for some time on Progressive Geographies. 

I am currently in hospital undergoing some tests and awaiting surgery. The condition is serious but treatable, and I am expected to make a good, though slow recovery.

I’ll hopefully be back before too long. Many thanks for reading this site and hopefully the archive and resources remain useful.

“Proof differs from analysis. Proof establishes that something happened. Analysis shows why it…”

“Proof differs from analysis. Proof establishes that something happened. Analysis shows why it happened. Proof is a mode of argument that is, by definition, complete; but the price of its completeness is that proof is always formal. Only what is already contained in the beginning is proven at the end. In analysis, however, there are Read More

The post “Proof differs from analysis. Proof establishes that something happened. Analysis shows why it…” appeared first on Philosophy News.

special Diacritics issue on Heidegger

It was just published yesterday, HERE. The issue consists of interviews about Heidegger with a number of people, myself included.

AI As A Writing Tool: Great Benefits, Major Pitfalls.

Written by Neil Levy

Large language models look set to transform every aspect of life over the coming decades. Some of these changes will be dramatic. I’m pretty unconcerned by the apocalyptic scenarios that preoccupy some people, but much more worried about the elimination of jobs (interestingly, the jobs that seem likeliest to be eliminated are those that require the most training: we may see a reversal of status and economic position between baristas and bureaucrats, bricklayers and barristers). Here, though, I’m going to look at much less dramatic, and very much near term, effects that LLMs might have on academic writing. I’m going to focus on the kind of writing I do in philosophy; LLMs will have different impacts on different disciplines.

A number of academics, writing in academic journals and on Twitter, have suggested that LLMs could be used to streamline the writing process. As they envisage it, LLMs could take on the burden of writing literature reviews and overviews, leaving the human free to undertake the more creative work involving the generation and testing of hypotheses (here, too, though, the LLM might have a role: it could generate candidate hypotheses for the human to choose between and refine, for example).

As a proponent of what we might call extended cognition, the general idea is one to which I’m sympathetic. The extended mind hypothesis is a metaphysical claim: on this hypothesis, mind can extend beyond the skull and into the artifacts that enable certain kinds of thinking (my smartphone might partially constitute my mind, when its reminders, navigational capacities, search functions, and so on, are sufficiently integrated into my cognitive activities). The extended cognition hypothesis is agnostic about metaphysics: it simply emphasises the degree to which our thought is offloaded onto the world, including artifacts. New technologies enable new kinds of thinking, and this has always been true. As Richard Feynman said, notes on paper aren’t merely a record of thinking, “not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is paper.”

Extending cognition through new technologies opens cognitive horizons that are otherwise inaccessible to us. Supercomputers that perform millions of operations per second allow us to analyse data and perform mathematical calculations that were utterly closed to previous generations. But in opening up new horizons, new ways of extending thought can make others less accessible and have unwanted impacts on our native cognition. In The Phaedo, Plato expressed the fear that writing would undermine our capacity to remember things. He may have been right about its effects on our memory, but that’s more than compensated for by our increased capacity to record things externally. There are no guarantees, however, that changes will always be for the better.

The idea of a division of labor between the relatively routine and the creative imagined above, with the LLM taking on the first and the human (alone or in collaboration with the LLM) the second, is not unattractive. It can be tiresome to review a literature one already knows well. Sometimes, I find myself in the position of having to rewrite pretty much the same points I’ve made in a previous paper in an introductory section. It’s only norms against self-plagiarism that prevent me from cutting and pasting from the older paper to the newer one. Allowing the LLM to do the work of rephrasing is a tempting option. We might think that whatever other costs and benefits they have, getting them to do what we the drudge work is surely an unalloyed benefit.

Perhaps – perhaps – it’s a benefit overall, but it’s not an unalloyed benefit. While we may approach a paper with a hypothesis in mind, and think of the introductory sections as merely sketching out the terrain, the relationship between that sketch and the meat of the paper is not always so straightforward. Sometimes, in rephrasing and summarizing ideas that I thought I already knew well, I discover relations between them I hadn’t noticed, or a lack of clarity that hadn’t struck me before. These realisations may lead to the reframing of the initial hypothesis, or the generation of a new hypothesis, or simply greater clarity than I had previously. What I took to be mere drudge work can’t be easily isolated from the more creative side of thought and writing.

More generally, the drudge work lays down the bedrock for creative activity. If I had never attempted to review and synthesise the work that appears in the review section of a paper, I wouldn’t know it well enough to be able to generate some of the hypotheses I go on to explore. That drudge work is an essential developmental stage. It’s also a developmental stage for a set of skills at navigating a terrain. This is a generalizable skill, one we can apply in future to different material and different debates. It may be that those who have already developed such skills – those who became academically mature before the advent of LLMs – can outsource drudge work at a smaller cost than those who have not yet developed this set of skills. Perhaps doing the task for oneself, boring though it may be, is necessary for a while, before we throw away the ladder we’ve climbed.

I’ve got no doubt that LLMs can and will be incorporated into academic writing, in ways and with effects we’re only beginning to imagine. Externalizing thought is extremely productive: it’s always been productive to write down your thoughts, because externalizing them allows us to reconfigure them, and to see connections that we mightn’t otherwise have noticed. The more complex the material, the greater the need to externalize. LLMs allow for a near instantaneous kind of externalization: we might regenerate multiple versions of a thought we’ve written once, and the permutations might allow us to see new connections. LLMs can also be used to generate new candidate hypotheses, to identify gaps in the literature, to synthesise and visualise data, and who yet knows what else? Perhaps the day will come – perhaps it will even be soon – when AI replaces the human researcher altogether. For now, it’s a powerful tool, perhaps even a partner, in the research process.

Some of those who have worried about the singularity – the postulated moment when AI design takes off, with ever more intelligent AIs designing even more intelligent AIs, leaving us humans in their dust – have proposed we might prevent human obsolescence by merging with the machines, perhaps even uploading our minds to artificial neural networks. I don’t know whether the singularity or human obsolescence are real threats, and I’m very sceptical about mind uploading. Whatever the prospects might be for mind uploading, right now we can integrate AIs into our thinking. We may not stay relevant for ever, and we may never merge with the machines, but right now they’re powerful tools for extending our cognition. They might homogenize prose and lead to a loss of creativity, or they might lead to an explosion of new approaches and ideas. They’re certain to have unanticipated costs, but the benefits will probably be much greater.

Inevitably, I ran this blogpost through an AI tool – the free version of Quillbot. It identified one or two typos, which of course I corrected. It also made a number of stylistic suggestions. I accepted almost none of them, but several led me to think I ought to rephrase the passage. Perhaps that’s not a model for how AI might be useful for writing right now.

The Supreme Court Just Blocked Student Loan Forgiveness. Now What?

In a conclusion to one of the most consequential Supreme Court sessions in many years, the Court released an opinion today on the Biden administration’s proposed plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt per borrower. After dismissing one case due to lack of standing from the plaintiffs, the Court voted 6-3 to block forgiveness in the second case (giving standing based on the servicer MOHELA).

This decision will have major implications for higher education policy. Here are the things that I will be looking for in the coming months and years:

Restarting student loan repayment was already going to be a nightmare, and this creates additional challenges. The first challenge is the sheer number of borrowers re-entering repayment. Roughly 43 million Americans have federal student debt, and the Biden administration estimated that about 20 million would have their loans completely forgiven by their proposal. I have little confidence that the Department of Education, student loan servicers, and colleges can smoothly handle 23 million borrowers that would have remained, let alone 43 million. Federal Student Aid badly needed additional resources to manage a return to repayment, but Republicans were only willing to provide the funds if it came with a rider blocking its use on debt relief. Since both parties agreed on no riders in last year’s omnibus spending bill, no additional funding was provided.

In an overlooked item due to yesterday’s important decision on college admissions, the Department of Education released information about how they plan to manage the return to repayment. ED plans to give a 90-day grace period for missed payments and is considering future grace periods. Needless to say, Republicans are not happy and may go to court to stop grace periods based on the agreement in this summer’s debt ceiling legislation.

How many borrowers are willing to start making payments? There is going to be a group of people who are livid about having to resume payments after not getting the loan forgiveness they were expecting. I am expecting a substantial group of borrowers to not make any payments until they get to the brink of default—which could take a while. These borrowers may still hold out hope for another forgiveness effort (more on that in the next section) and they may not proactively reach out to servicers to update their information if they have moved since March 2020. A particularly interesting group is the 20 million students who would have received complete forgiveness, as the frustration factor is likely higher among this group than among students who knew they would still have a balance remaining under this plan.

As a note, with income-driven repayment, students at least in theory should be able to start making some payments. But adding an expense back to the monthly budget is painful and income-driven repayment is still complicated to navigate. So there will be challenges even among people who are not as upset about this decision.

How will Democrats respond? The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has been pressuring the Biden administration to forgive all student debt and immediately pivot to using the Higher Education Act instead of the HEROES Act. That is likely not happening given today’s court decision. But a few moderate Democrats voted in favor of a Republican-led resolution disapproving of debt forgiveness and ending the repayment pause. The Biden administration will point to its expanded income-driven repayment plan, which could also face legal challenges in light of this decision. Free college and debt forgiveness were key issues in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and they will continue to be key issues in contested Democratic primaries for the next several years.

How will Republicans respond? By the time you read this, there will be plenty of press releases from Republican politicians celebrating the discussion. But there are still concerns about a future administration trying another avenue to forgiveness, particularly through income-driven repayment. There are some thoughtful efforts among Republicans to maintain income-driven repayment while reversing most of the Biden administration’s proposed changes. But Republicans are also seeking to limit borrowing for graduate students, which is something that I have been expecting for years.  

This week’s Supreme Court decisions are likely to influence the direction of American higher education for years to come, and some of the influences are not going to be immediately obvious. But the items discussed above are going to play an outsized role in policy discussions for a good while.

Beds, beds, beds — We need more addictions beds

By Austin Lam.

With recent news of a major private donation to transform addictions care in Vancouver, British Columbia, I have reflected on my experiences as a resident physician taking care of patients with substance use disorders.

Drawing from her personal exposure to the devastating effects of addiction through the death of her brother, Jill Diamond reflected on the existing gaps in care and the importance of a seamless continuum of care. She rightly pointed out the need for inpatient recovery-focused beds. This has clicked with a reflection that I have held for this past year: where are our publicly-covered inpatient addiction beds in our hospitals?

Beyond opportunistic interventions, we need systematic interventions. There is a glaring incommensurability between opportunities for intervention and actual intervention needs in substance use disorders in inpatient hospital settings. In the current landscape of opportunistic addiction treatment, a patient is admitted under a Most Responsible Physician (MRP) service, e.g., Internal Medicine, Psychiatry, Surgery, etc. However, we do not have focused inpatient beds with the express purpose to optimize addiction treatment and to arrange appropriate community follow-up.

In the current landscape, addiction treatment teams ‘jump’ on the opportunity to help when requested by the aforementioned MRP services. The teams can then assist with managing substance withdrawal, offer medication therapies, engage in motivational interviewing, and provide connections to psychosocial services. But the addiction teams do not have beds themselves. The length of the patient’s hospital stay is contingent on their ‘primary’ reason(s) for admission or other medical/psychiatric/surgical issue(s) that necessitate continued inpatient treatment — and these may well be the consequence of addiction, such as cellulitis from intravenous drug use. However, substance use disorder is not by itself a reason for inpatient treatment optimization (though collegial work environments offer the opportunity for addiction teams to advocate for longer inpatient stay to optimize treatment, e.g., opioid agonist therapy).

Are substance use disorders not disorders that merit treatment in and of themselves in inpatient hospital settings?

Hence, we are left with a hodgepodge landscape of care, contingent on the collegiality amongst addiction and MRP teams as opposed to a systematic continuum of care that may allow patients who have been medically/psychiatrically/surgically stabilized to then benefit from longer inpatient stay under the care of a specialized addiction team who can focus on optimizing addiction treatment and to engage the patient and their support system (e.g. family/friends) in their recovery journey.

The task before us is not only to meet patients ‘where they are at’, but also to show patients ‘where they can be’ by discovering anew their self-understanding of life goals and larger sense of meaning/purpose. The risk of merely meeting people ‘where they are at’ is that it can objectify people as static entities. We are not static. We are dynamic beings, perpetually engaged in understanding ourselves and our world in the act of living. There is a risk of indulging in the bigotry of low expectations if we view patients as static at their ‘baseline’.

Beyond the laudable and crucial aim of reducing harms, we must encourage and promote flourishing in patients’ lives. Aristotle spoke of eudaimonia; Maslow wrote of self-actualization; and Frankl wrote of the importance of meaning. All these ideas tie to the fact that there are things that make life purposeful. We share common aims as human beings geared towards the discovery of meaning. John Finnis elaborated on the basic goods of human life: life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability of friendship, practical reasonableness, spirituality/metaphysical orientation, and partnership. These are the goods that we must promote in conjunction with reducing harms.

Accordingly, the types of inpatient beds we need are not the ones we currently have accessible. Importantly, many patients with substance use disorders do not want addiction treatment or are ambivalent. For the latter, we can lower the barrier to recovery by offering longer inpatient stays with the aim of addiction treatment optimization, continued psychosocial engagement, and arrangement of appropriate follow-up care. We can not only meet the patient ‘where they are at’ but also actively foster recovery: we can identify and work towards the patients’ goals and importantly, support the patient in aligning their goals with what it means to flourish.

Rudolf Virchow, pioneer of social medicine, is quoted as having said: “Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale … the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution”. However, rather than just ‘the politician’, we — as citizens in the public realm — hold the influence to push for change. Our collective society must have the will to invest in inpatient addictions beds as part of a systematic continuum of care. We must strengthen participatory democracy. As John Ralston Saul pointed out, against the specialized nature of non-governmental organizations, “self-interest or business cannot lead in a decent society. Society must lead them”.

 

Author: Austin Lam

Affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the UBC Department of Psychiatry.

Competing interests: None declared

Social media account of post author: @austinaldenlam

The post Beds, beds, beds — We need more addictions beds appeared first on Journal of Medical Ethics blog.

Eugene B. Young, Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power. Deleuze via Blanchot (2022)

AGAINST THE DIFFERENCE-IMAGE: thoughts on Deleuze’s self-deterritorialisation

I reject the widespread idea that Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is based on an « ontology of difference ». The only book where he seems to propound such an ontology is in DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, and in the very next book LOGIC OF SENSE « difference » plays next to no role. « Difference » is a mask for multiplicity.

This idea of difference as being only one (and temporary) instantantiation of multiplicity is explicated in many places on my blog and in my various articles, but it can be found specifically set out here:

https://www.academia.edu/11652059/LARUELLE_AND_DELEUZE_from_difference_to_multiplicity

It would be a mistake to concludee that Deleuze progressed from differentialism to pluralism Guattari’s influence. The conceptual evolution involved is more complex than that.

First we must remark that Deleuze was already a pluralist before DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION (1968), the adhesion to pluralism is very clear in his NIETZSCHE AND PHILOSOPHY (1962), and straight after in LOGIC OF SENSE (1969).

In other words, far from being the key to Deleuze’s thought DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION is the exception, in which Deleuze takes on the « mask » of difference to speak to the contemporary conceptual conjuncture influenced by structuralism and to inflect it towards pluralism.

Note: I put « mask » in scare-quotes because it is more than a disguise on the same conceptual level, as if it were a case of a simple reformulation in the terms of the current vocabulary. It is rather a question of a difference in conceptual level, the ontology of difference is just one instantiation of Deleuze’s pluralist meta-ontology (as is the ontology of desiring machines) which progressively fades away in the chapters of A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, in favour of an ontology of « assemblages ».

My analysis here differs from that set out by Laruelle in his book PHILOSOPHIES OF DIFFERENCE (1986). As I have argued elsewhere on this blog Laruelle comes rather late to the game, propounding post festum his « critical introduction » of philosophies of difference at a moment when all the major thinkers of difference had already long abandoned it.

My second objection to Laruelle on this Deleuzian strand is that he misreads the status of difference in Deleuze, seeing it as the ultimate ontological concept whereas it is the provisional instantiation of a pluralist meta-ontology implemented for intervening in a specific conjuncture, and not to be inflated into a systemic ground.

Deleuze talks about the primacy of multiplicities in all his major works, and about difference in only one. In my reconstruction I call Deleuze’s overarching research programme a pluralist meta-ontology. One of the key traits of pluralism in this sense is diachronicity (the ontology evolves over time and varies over contexts, what Deleuze calls « heterogenesis), another is porosity (the existence of semantic or structural incommensurabilities does not exclude pragmatic interactions, which Deleuze calls « encounters » or « dialogues ».

It is on the basis of this model that I think « difference » is far less important for Deleuze than commonly believed, and that is embodies a low degree of ontological pluralism.

For some wider context, my original paper (from 1980): https://www.academia.edu/42083394/PLURALIST_FLEXI_ONTOLOGY_Deleuze_Lyotard_Serres_Feyerabend_

In 1980 after spending six months in Paris attending Deleuze and Foucault’s seminars, and interviewing Serres and Lyotard, I returned to Sydney and gave a paper synthesising my impressions. In particular I set out my idea of a common meta-ontology of pluralism (that I called « flexi-ontology » at the time, to highlight the diachronic aspect).

It was on the basis of this wider research programme that I elaborated my blog Agent Swarm, and I was pleased to see that Bruno Latour underwent a meta-ontological turn that confirmed my prior hypotheses, asking what is the recommended dose of ontological pluralism?, and distinguishing different levels of dose:

Pluralist’s Progress (1): Feyerabend and Latour

It is interesting in this context to see that Deleuze in 1989 played with the idea of grouping his published works not in chronological order, but rather in an order that we could call « thematic », but that is better described in the light of the distinctions made above between meta-ontology, instantiations, and degrees of ontological pluralism, that in Deleuzian terms we could call degrees of deterritorialisation.

In David Lapoujade’s introduction to DESERT ISLANDS, he cites the divisions that Deleuze envisions for his bibliography:

« I. From Hume to Bergson / II. Classical Studies / III. Nietzschean Studies / IV. Critical and Clinical / V. Esthetics / VI. Cinema Studies / VII. Contemporary Studies / VIII. The Logic of Sense / IX. Anti-Oedipus / X. Difference and Repetition / XI. A Thousand Plateaus »

I am indebted to Alexander Boyd who, citing this classification, posed the question of the logic behind the last four divisions.

In terms of the analysis I have been developing one could see Deleuze’s grouping as corresponding to an order of increasing degrees of deterritorialisation, or of ontological pluralism.

From this point of view, LOGIC OF SENSE is the odd-one-out, as it relies on psychoanalysis (content), series (method), surfaces (metaphysics). ANTI-OEDIPUS constitutes a rupture with all three.

Nonetheless ANTI-OEDIPUS is itself over-engaged in the agon with psychoanalysis and does not make explicit the new image of thought. Deleuze in his new preface to the American edition of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION makes it clear that over and above the ontology of difference is the « liberation of thought from the images that imprison it ».

This new pluralist practice of thought is described and analysed in Chapter 3 of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, but is only partially instantiated in that book. The concrete instantiation of a new image of thought in a variety of domains is finally accomplished in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS.

This is why Deleuze claims that the key chapter in DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION is Chapter Three on the image of thought (and not the chapters on repetition and difference), that this chapter is « the most necessary and the most concrete » and that it serves as the best introduction to the books that follow.

Zoom discussion in Brazil

Otávio Maciel writes:

“On Friday, July 7th at 14:00, there will be a conversation with me, with Thiago Pinho and André Lemos about the translation and publication of the book “The Quadruple Object: A Metaphysics of Things After Heidegger” by Graham Harman

The event will be broadcast on YouTube and will have the virtual presence of Harman himself for our conversation. The meeting is public and open to all!

For more info: http://www.lab404.ufba.br/lab404-promove-lancamento-de…/

Access Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJrUwGDjLE4

Now available on the EdUERJ website! https://eduerj.com/…/o-objeto-quadruplo-uma-metafisica…/ “

Kristin Ross’s “The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life” – Los Angeles Review of Books podcast

Kristin Ross’s “The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life” – Los Angeles Review of Books podcast

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak to the author Kristin Ross about her recent book, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life, a collection of essays that examine how everyday life emerges as a vantage point for understanding and transforming our social world. The book represents three decades of Ross’s writing about the everyday in French political, social, and cultural theory and history, including the commune form and current autonomous zones in France, the romance and memory of the May 1968 protests, and the present predicaments both faced and created by the Macron government. Featuring a long interview with the pioneering philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the book also invokes the work of Fredric Jameson, Jacques Ranciere, Emile Zola, and many others, to explore the intersections of political transformation and cultural representation as resources for thinking opposition and liberation in the present.

Details of the book here. Thanks to dmf for the link.

Uwe Wittstock, February 1933: The Winter of Literature – trans. Daniel Bowles, Polity, April 2023

Uwe Wittstock, February 1933: The Winter of Literature – trans. Daniel Bowles, Polity, April 2023

It all happened in a flash. February 1933 was the month in which the fate of German writers, as for so many others, was decided. In a tensely spun narrative, Uwe Wittstock tells the story of a demise which was predicted by some but also scarcely thought possible. He reveals how, in a matter of weeks, the glittering Weimar literary scene gave way to a long, dark winter, and how the net drew ever closer for Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Else Lasker-Schüler, Alfred Döblin, and countless others.

Monday, January 30: Adolf Hitler is sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Joseph Roth cannot wait any longer to learn what today’s paper will report. He leaves for the station early in the morning and takes the train to Paris; bidding Berlin farewell comes naturally to him. Meanwhile, Thomas Mann barely spares a thought for politics during the next ten days, focusing instead on his forthcoming speech on Richard Wagner.

Weaving an intimate portrait of the major figures whose lives he follows day by day, Wittstock shows how the landslide of events which immediately followed Hitler’s victory spelled disaster for the country’s literary elite. He resurrects the atmosphere of the times, marked by anxiety for many, by passivity and self-betrayal for some, and by grim determination for others. Who will applaud the new dictator, and who will flee, fearing for their life? 

Drawing on unpublished archival material, this important work is both a meticulous historical narrative and a timely reminder that we must remain vigilant in the face of the forces that threaten democracy, however distant the prospect of totalitarianism may seem.

Anna M. Grzymała-Busse, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State – Princeton University Press, January 2023

Anna M. Grzymała-Busse, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State – Princeton University Press, January 2023

Sacred Foundations argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation. Existing accounts focus on early modern warfare or contracts between the rulers and the ruled. In contrast, this major study shows that the Catholic Church both competed with medieval monarchs and provided critical templates for governing institutions, the rule of law, and parliaments.

The Catholic Church was the most powerful, wealthiest, and best-organized political actor in the Middle Ages. Starting in the eleventh century, the papacy fought for the autonomy of the church, challenging European rulers and then claiming authority over people, territory, and monarchs alike. Anna Grzymała-Busse demonstrates how the church shaped distinct aspects of the European state. Conflicts with the papacy fragmented territorial authority in Europe for centuries to come, propagating urban autonomy and ideas of sovereignty. Thanks to its organizational advantages and human capital, the church also developed the institutional precedents adopted by rulers across Europe—from chanceries and taxation to courts and councils. Church innovations made possible both the rule of law and parliamentary representation.

Bringing to light a wealth of historical evidence about papal conflict, excommunications, and ecclesiastical institutions, Sacred Foundations reveals how the challenge and example of powerful religious authorities gave rise to secular state institutions and galvanized state capacity.

Thanks to Adam Kotsko at An und für sich for a discussion – Sacred Foundations and the mechanism of political theology.

Tony C. Brown, Statelessness: On Almost Not Existing – University of Minnesota Press, November 2022

Tony C. Brown, Statelessness: On Almost Not Existing – University of Minnesota Press, November 2022

Just as the modern state and the citizenship associated with it are commonly thought of as a European invention, so too is citizenship’s negation in the form of twentieth-century diaspora and statelessness. Statelessness sets forth a new genealogy, suggesting that Europe first encountered mass statelessness neither inside its own borders nor during the twentieth century, as Hannah Arendt so influentially claimed, but outside of itself—in the New World, several hundred years earlier. 

Through close readings of political philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau to Kant, Tony C. Brown argues that statelessness became a central problem for political thought early on, with far-reaching implications for thinking both on the state and on being human. What Europeans thought they saw among the “savages” of the Americas was life without political order, life less than human. Lacking almost everything those deemed clearly human had achieved, the stateless existed in a radically precarious, almost inhuman privation. 

And yet this existence also raised the unsettling possibility that state-based existence may not be inevitable, necessary, or even ideal. This possibility, as Brown shows, prompts the response—as defensive as it was aggressive—that we call Enlightenment political philosophy, which arguably still orders much thinking on being stateless today, including our discourses concerning migrants and Indigenous peoples.

California’s protectionist legislation

I just submitted a letter opposing the so-called California Journalism Preservation Act that is now going through the Senate. Here’s what I said (I’ll skip the opening paragraph with my journalistic bona fides):

Like other well-intentioned media regulation, the CJPA will result in a raft of unintended and damaging consequences. I fear it will support the bottom lines of the rapacious hedge funds and billionaires who are milking California’s once-great newspapers for cash flow without concern for the information needs of California’s communities. I have seen that first-hand, for I was once a member of the digital advisory board for Alden Capital’s Digital First, owner of the Bay Area News Group. For them, any income from any source is fungible and I doubt any money from CJPA will go to actually strengthening journalism.

The best hope for local journalism is not the old newspaper industry and its lobbyists who seek protectionism. It will come instead from startups, some not-for-profit, some tiny, that serve local communities. These are the kinds of journalists we teach in the Entrepreneurial Journalism program I started at my school. These entrepreneurial journalists will not benefit from CJPA and their ventures could be locked out by this nonmarket intervention favoring incumbent competitors. From a policy perspective, I would like to see how California could encourage new competition, not stifle it. I concur with the April letter from LION publishers.

More important, the CJPA and other legislation like it violates the First Amendment and breaks the internet. Links are speech. Editorial choice is speech. No publisher, no platform, no one should be forced to link or not link to content — especially the kinds of extremist content that is ruining American democracy and that could benefit from the CJPA by giving them an opening to force platforms to carry their noxious speech.

Note well that the objects of this legislation, Facebook and Google, would be well within their rights to stop promoting news if forced to pay for the privilege of linking to it. When Spain passed its link tax, Google News pulled out of the country and both publishers and citizens suffered for years as a result. Meta has just announced that it will pull news off its platforms in Canada as a result of its Bill C-18. News is frankly of little value to the platforms. Facebook has said that less than four percent of its content relates to news, Google not much more. Neither makes money from news.

The CJPA could accomplish precisely the opposite of its goal by assuring that less news gets to Californians than today. The just-released Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford makes clear that more than ever, citizens start their news journeys not with news brands but end up there via social media and search:

Across markets, only around a fifth of respondents (22%) now say they prefer to start their news journeys with a website or app — that’s down 10 percentage points since 2018…. Younger groups everywhere are showing a weaker connection with news brands’ own websites and apps than previous cohorts — preferring to access news via side-door routes such as social media, search, or mobile aggregators.

Tremendous value accrues to publishers from platforms’ links. By lobbying against the internet platforms that benefit them, news publishers are cutting off their noses to spite their faces, and this legislation hands them the knife.

In a prescient 1998 paper from Santa Monica’s RAND Corporation, “The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead,” James Dewar argued persuasively for “a) keeping the Internet unregulated, and b) taking a much more experimental approach to information policy. Societies who regulated the printing press suffered and continue to suffer today in comparison with those who didn’t.” In my new book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I agree with his conclusion.

I fear that California, its media industry, its journalists, its communities, and its citizens will suffer with the passage of the CJPA.

The post California’s protectionist legislation appeared first on BuzzMachine.

Edgar Landgraf, Nietzsche’s Posthumanism – University of Minnesota Press, September 2023

Edgar Landgraf, Nietzsche’s Posthumanism – University of Minnesota Press, September 2023

While many posthumanists claim Nietzsche as one of their own, rarely do they engage his philosophy in any real depth. Nietzsche’s Posthumanism addresses this need by exploring the continuities and disagreements between Nietzsche’s philosophy and contemporary posthumanism. Focusing specifically on Nietzsche’s reception of the life sciences of his day and his reflections on technology—research areas as central to Nietzsche’s work as they are to posthumanism—Edgar Landgraf provides fresh readings of Nietzsche and a critique of post- and transhumanist philosophies. \

Through Landgraf’s inquiry, lesser-known aspects of Nietzsche’s writings emerge, including the neurophysiological basis of his epistemology (which anticipates contemporary debates on embodiment), his concerns with insects and the emergent social properties they exhibit, and his reflections on the hominization and cultivation effects of technology. In the process, Landgraf challenges major commonplaces about Nietzsche’s philosophy, including the idea that his social theory asserts the rights of “the strong” over “the weak.” The ethos of critical posthumanism also offers a new perspective on key ethical and political contentions of Nietzsche’s writings.

Nietzsche’s Posthumanism presents a uniquely framed introduction to tenets of Nietzsche’s thought and major trends in posthumanism, making it an essential exploration for anyone invested in Nietzsche and his contemporary relevance, and in posthumanism and its genealogy.

souvenir of Bruno Latour

Today would have been his 76th birthday, had he not passed on last October. In memory of Latour, here is a nice picture from his 75th birthday a year ago. (Photo: Nikolaj Schultz.)

Resisting Nudges

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).

 

 

Judith Revel, Orazio Irrera, Inédit de Michel Foucault : le discours philosophique (2023)

When Work Didn’t Follow You Home

In a recent article written for Slate, journalist Dan Kois recounts the shock his younger coworkers expressed when they discovered that he had, earlier in his career, earned a master’s degree while working a full-time job. “It was easy,” he explained:

“I worked at a literary agency during the day, I got off work at 5 p.m., and I studied at night. The key was that this was just after the turn of the millennium. ‘But what would you do when you had work emails?’ these coworkers asked. ‘I didn’t get work emails,’ I said. ‘I barely had the internet in my apartment.'”

In his article, Kois goes on to interview other members of Generation X about their lives in the early 2000s, before the arrival of smartphones or even widely available internet. They shared tales of coming home and just watching whatever show happened to be on TV (maybe “Seventh Heaven,” or “Law and Order”). They also talked about going to the movies on a random weekday evening because they had nothing else to do, or just heading to a bar where they hoped to run into friends, and often would.

The threads that kept catching my attention, however, were about work communication. “The very idea that, once work hours were over, no one could get hold of you—via email, text, Slack, whatever—is completely alien to contemporary young people,” Kois explained. But this reality made a huge difference when it came to the perception of busyness and exhaustion. When work was done at work, and there was no chance of continuing your labors at home, your job didn’t seem nearly as all-consuming or onerous .

There’s a lot about early 2000s culture I’m not eager to excavate, but this idea of the constrained workday certainly seems worthy of nostalgia.

The post When Work Didn’t Follow You Home appeared first on Cal Newport.

Weeknote 24/2023

I’m composing this from Newcastle Airport on Monday morning. It’s been a busy weekend, so let’s get that out of the way first.

Saturday morning, I went for a run and then spent most of the day with my wife and daughter at a football tournament for the latter’s new team. They expected to win it, and almost did, had it not been for a penalty given against them during extra time in the final. Back home, shower and change. Out to Wagamama, a family favourite, before our son’s football presentation evening at St James Park, home of Newcastle United. He won Player of the Season, which was not at all expected, although he is awesome (even if I do say so myself).

We were tired enough after the events of Saturday, but on Sunday we had to get the house ready for the estate agent’s photographer, who is coming today (Monday). As anyone who has sold a house in the age of Rightmove will know, the photos are effectively what sell it. So it was a bit of a mission to get everything ready. I was dripping with sweat after gardening, cleaning, painting, etc. So much so that I was thankful for the torrential rain that started in the evening.

It was Fathers Day in the UK yesterday, so we went over to my parents. I’d taken my dad and two kids to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse on Friday evening (amazing!) but also bought him a book I’d heard being recommended on a podcast. When I left the family this morning, with my son now finished his GCSE exams, my daughter still recovering from the tournament (she picked up a slight injury), and my wife preparing for a potentially tricky week of user research interviews at work, everyone looked knackered.

---

I almost can’t remember what I did before this last weekend. Laura’s been away, so it’s been a weird week at work. I published a couple of blog posts in different places:

• Finding the Others: The Social Power of Open Recognition Badges
• Open Badges and the ambiguity of recognition

Other than that, the majority of my work seemed to revolve around community platforms and setting up user research. For example:

• Helping WEAll (with John) come to a decision not to adopt Hylo but instead trial Discourse. I think they’ll be happy with it, even if it is a bit less shiny.
• Meeting with Participate to discuss our ongoing work and their new platform which we’ll be migrating the existing KBW community to over the coming weeks/months.
• Finishing up some of the initial workers.coop projects I’ve been leading. Now that we’re self-hosting Cal.com, not only can we run Co-op Conversations (for people interested in setting up worker co-ops) but we can use it to book user research interviews for the Member Learning group. The How to set up a worker co-op email course which I mentioned last week is now live, as well.
• Updating the privacy policy for Dynamic Skillset to include in a user research form for Bonfire.

I realised this week need to write a post about the difference between social networks, chat apps, and forums. People tend to conflate them, which is unhelpful, as they serve different purposes.

There’s plenty of other things I did this week, including deciding not to respond to an RfP after attending the Q&A, preparing for an interview for some other potential work, and just generally getting ready for my upcoming trip.

---

This coming week, I’ll be in Amsterdam to meet up with my WAO colleagues and for us to run a session at MozFest House. I’m back on Thursday afternoon and will almost immediately take my daughter to her second trial for Sunderland’s academy. She’s also going to the Newcastle trials, but being a Sunderland fan, and knowing it’s a better setup, I’m rooting for her switching from one to the other.

---

Photo of new temperature and humidity sensor in my home office. It ended up going up to 28.8 C so I bought an evaporative cooler, which increased the humidity but meant I could work in there! The awesome TRYING patch is bright orange in real life and came via Dan Sinker.

The post Weeknote 24/2023 first appeared on Open Thinkering.