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Recent philosophy-related news*, and a request…
1. Stephen Kershnar (SUNY Fredonia), whose February 2022 discussion of adult-child sex on the Brain in a Vat podcast sparked viral outrage and led to his removal from campus, has “filed a lawsuit this week in U.S. District Court in Buffalo asking the court to declare that Fredonia’s administrators violated his First Amendment rights by removing him from the classroom after the comments he made on a podcast kicked off a social-media firestorm,” according to the Buffalo News. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has filed the lawsuit on his behalf, Kershnar says.
UPDATE: Here is the lawsuit and the motion for injunction (via Stephen Kershnar).
2. The editors of Philosophy, the flagship journal of The Royal Institute of Philosophy, have announced the winners of their 2022 Essay Prize, which was on the topic of emotions. They are: Renee Rushing (Florida State) for her “Fitting Diminishment of Anger: A Permissivist Account” and Michael Cholbi for his “Empathy and Psychopaths’ Inability to Grieve.” Mica Rapstine (Michigan) was named the runner-up for his “Political Rage and the Value of Valuing.” The prize of £2500 will be shared between the winners, and all three essays will be published in the October 2023 issue of the journal.
3. Some philosophers are on the new Twitter alternative, Bluesky. Kelly Truelove has a list of those with over 50 followers here. And yes, you can find me (and Daily Nous) on it.
4. One philosopher is among the new members of The American Philosophical Society, a learned society that aims to “honor and engage leading scholars, scientists, and professionals through elected membership and opportunities for interdisciplinary, intellectual fellowship.” It is John Dupré of the University of Exeter, who specializes in philosophy of science. The complete list of new members is here. Professor Dupré joins just 21 other philosophers that have been elected into the society since 1957 (the society was founded in 1743).
5. I’ve decided that some news items I had been planning to include in these summary posts over the summer should instead get their own posts. These are posts about philosophers’ deaths and faculty moves. Regarding the former, it would be wonderful if individuals volunteered to write up memorial notices for philosophers they knew, or whose work they are familiar with, including at least the kinds of information I tend to include in these posts (see here). Recently, philosophers Henry Allison, Richard W. Miller, and Donald Munro have died. If you are interested in writing up a memorial notice for one of them, please email me. Generally, over the summer, these posts and faculty move notices may take longer to appear than usual.
* Over the summer, many news items will be consolidated in posts like this.
The post Philosophy News Summary (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.
A Federal judge's ruling offered a stern rebuke of the Internet Archive's National Emergency Library and its controlled digital lending service, providing a significant victory for the four publishers that had filed suit.
The post Controlled Digital Lending Takes a Blow in Court appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Black women worldwide value their hair. From afros to wigs, braids, and blowouts, Black women have used hair to symbolize their gendered racial identity. Indeed, Madam C.J. Walker, the first Black woman millionaire in the U.S., highlights the significance of hair to Black women as a form of labor and enterprise. In this blog post, I present five crucial insights anchored in Black feminist thought regarding Black hair.
“Black beauty: Shade, hair, and anti-racist aesthetics,” by Shirley Anne Tate, Professor and Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Feminist and Intersectionality at the Sociology Department, University of Alberta, Canada, is a commonly cited paper in Black hair studies. In the essay, Tate investigates the performance and instability of black beauty through an examination of conservations amongst mixed race Black women. Historically, natural Black beauty has been associated with textured hair and darker skin, which is then further associated with antiracism, whereas hair straightening is viewed as an artificial attempt to resemble white or Eurocentric beauty standards.
Since they are often perceived as having more European physical traits, mixed race Black women have historically been put in a complicated position in the hierarchy of feminine and racialized beauty ideals. This leads in a persistent experience of othering and difference, as Rachael Malonson experienced though in backlash for her election to Miss Black University of Texas in 2017.
Tate explains that the way mixed race Black women grapple with the normalized racialized aesthetics of Black beauty exposes how physical signifiers have political meaning that reinforce the boundaries of what constitutes Black beauty. Rather than attempting to comply to specific aesthetics, some reinterpret what defines Black beauty in diverse ways, illustrating how the performance of racialized beauty aesthetics is fluid yet indeterminable.
Good or bad; authentic versus inauthentic; natural versus straightened. In a 2009 Women’s Studies article, Cheryl Thompson, Assistant Professor in Performance at The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, discusses how these opposing hair perspectives affect Black women’s sense of self. Thompson overviews the history of Black hair to illuminate how slavery, emancipation, and Black social movements constitute key political contexts that affect how Black people style their hair.
Beauty standards for Black women are shaped not just by white society, but also by members of their own community. Because of the cultural association of straightened, long hair with feminine beauty, Black women are pressured to alter their naturally kinky hair to conform to these expectations. Further, in their everyday life, they must manage how these standards justify prejudice and discrimination; for example, workplace hairstyle standards may impede their economic mobility in the long run. For these reasons, Thompson explains that we can’t depoliticize Black hair because of how western values affect Black people’s lived experiences.
Black women have a complex and nuanced relationship to beauty, hair, and embodiment. In western society, black hair has become politicized and hyper-scrutinized, with longstanding hegemonic standards of beauty privileging straighter hair and looser curl patterns as “good hair.” In “Rooted: On Black women, beauty, hair, and embodiment,” Kristin Denise Rowe, Assistant Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, examines the ways hair is tied to their embodied experiences for many Black women.
According to Rowe, the natural hair movement, which has gained momentum in recent years, offers a vehicle for Black women to reclaim embodied agency and interiority, in the face of misogynoir. Through this movement, Black women have created a space to rearitculate standards of beauty and to affirm their natural hair textures. However, the beauty industry has also commodified and commercialized Black women’s growing emphasis on their natural hair, with a predicted worth of over $13 billion
Overall, Rowe’s essay provides a comprehensive examination of the history, politics, and dynamic relationships to beauty culture for Black women in relation to their hair. Additionally, it acknowledges the importance of Black women’s experiences and narratives to expand and complicate ideas of beauty that shape the unique relationship of women of color to beauty culture. By understanding the complex constellation of interlocking factors that inform how Black women experience and conceptualize beauty, we can reveal what Rowe calls the intimacies, (re)negotiations, (re)articulations, and radical possibilities of Black women’s embodiment and the potentiality of “beauty” as a construct.
From precolonial Africa to the present, Black women’s hair has had political importance. Throughout the history of the Americas, Europeans used hair to demonstrate political authority over the Other. In her 2022 Sociology Compass essay “Historicizing black hair politics: A framework for contextualizing race politics,” Sylviane Ngandu-Kalenga Greensword, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Texas Christian University’s (TCU) Race and Reconciliation Initiative (RRI), explores these dynamics. Greensword discusses the intersectionality of race and gender in the political oppression of Black hair, as well as resistance to this oppression. The essay also explains that Black hair culture has progressed from enslavement and colonialism to globalization and decolonization, yet Black women still suffer hair discrimination and policies that privilege white hair practices.
Black women have long used West and Central African practices of hairstyling and ornamentation to resist these injustices. For example,in the 1780s, then-Governor Miró issued the “Edict of Good Government,” which forced women of color to either cover their hair with a handkerchief or comb it flat or face incarceration. In response, Black women began to wear “tignons,” elegant turbans that emphasized their textured hair rather than concealed it.
The tignon laws exemplify the weaponization of hair in order to control, hypersexualize, and defeminize Black women, denying them any claim to womanhood, femininity, or piety. As a form of political resistance, Black people praise their hair as beautiful, redefining normative standards of human value. Black people make a political statement about this (de)valuation through the time, money, energy, and care dedicated to their bodies via hairstyling.
Hair is an important part of Black women’s identities. However, for decades, the categorization of Black hair diversity into good and bad hair has been a source of disagreement. Eurocentric societies value long, straight, and silky as good, while they consider tightly coiled and kinky bad. In her 2011 Howard Journal of Communications piece, “Hair as Race: Why ‘‘Good Hair’’ May Be Bad for Black Females,” Cynthia L. Robinson, Black Studies Department Head and Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, unpacks this “hair hierarchy.”
Robinson argues that the concept of good and bad hair is based in the color complex, which refers to some Black people’s self-hatred and disdain for their Blackness. This complex is the product of years of enslavement and a lack of collective African identity, which causes Black people to discount physical attributes that reveal African heritage, notably skin color and hair texture. Rated on a scale of good to bad, good hair communicates European, Native American, or Asian trace ancestry through wavy or straight texture, and is likely to be long. In contrast, society categorizes tightly coiled, thicker, short hair that plainly reveals African heritage as bad. Thus, Black women have had to develop their own beauty standards that are particular to their hair textures, allowing for more creative range in popular Black hairstyles.
The dichotomy of good and bad hair is still a challenge for Black women. As Robinson explains, hair valuations are harmful to Black women because they elevate white beauty standards while undervaluing Black women’s hair textures. These labels also reflect the color complex and Eurocentric beauty ideals that have devalued Black women’s natural hair textures. Therefore, we must reject these harmful aesthetic standards and embrace the uniqueness of Black hair in order to move forward.
The post Black Hair: Black Feminist Perspectives appeared first on Blackfeminisms.com.
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Meet Minnesota artist Marlene Bourne. Bourne thinks she may be a ghost and finds messages hidden in movies, song lyrics, and overheard conversations. Fox News found Bourne credible enough to base its election fraud claims on a letter Bourne sent to notoriously unreliable Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. — Read the rest
You can sue for anything, even if all you can win from the effort is an unblock and the public learning once again that you're an attention-seeking cockalorum.
— Read the rest"She wants to kill babies but she's still beautiful. You look very beautiful in that dress.
Five pending cases may set new ground rules for use of training materials for AI. Here is what to watch.
The post Some Thoughts on Five Pending AI Litigations — Avoiding Squirrels and Other AI Distractions appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Algorithms were supposed to remake the American justice system, but data can discriminate, says Ngozi Okidegbe, an expert on data and the law.
Championed as dispassionate, computer-driven calculations about risk, crime, and recidivism, their deployment in everything from policing to bail and sentencing to parole was meant to smooth out what are often unequal decisions made by fallible, biased humans.
But, so far, this hasn’t been the case.
“In theory, if the predictive algorithm is less biased than the decision-maker, that should lead to less incarceration of Black and Indigenous and other politically marginalized people. But algorithms can discriminate,” says Okidegbe, associate professor of law and an assistant professor of computing and data sciences at Boston University. Her scholarship examines how the use of predictive technologies in the criminal justice system affects racially marginalized communities.
As it is, these groups are incarcerated at nearly four times the rate of their white peers. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the US Department of Justice, there were 1,186 Black adults incarcerated in state or federal facilities for every 100,000 adults in 2021 (the most recent year for which data are available), and 1,004 American Indians and Alaska Natives incarcerated for every 100,000 adults. Compare these to the rates at which white people were incarcerated in the same year: 222 per 100,000.
In recent papers, Okidegbe has studied the role of algorithms in these inequities and the interwoven consequences of technology and the law, including researching the data behind bail decisions.
In their most basic form, algorithms are problem-solving shortcuts. Engineers can train computers to digest a large amount of data and then produce a simple solution to a complex problem. Spotify, for example, uses algorithms to suggest songs the company thinks its listeners might enjoy, based on what they’ve listened to previously. The more data a computer model has to go on, the more nuanced and accurate its results should be.
But a growing body of academic research—including by Okidegbe—and news reports show that algorithms built upon incomplete or biased data can replicate or even amplify that bias when they spit out results. This isn’t a huge deal if, for example, your toddler’s Peppa Pig obsession leaks into your suggested Spotify playlists, but it can have devastating effects in other contexts.
Consider a judge, says Okidegbe, who receives an algorithmically generated recidivism risk score as part of a report on a convicted criminal. This score tells the judge how likely this person is to commit another crime in the near future—the higher the score, the more likely someone is to be a repeat offender. The judge takes this score into account, and assigns more jail time to someone with a high recidivism score. Case closed.
A sprawling report by the nonprofit news organization ProPublica found that because these scores feel impartial, they can carry a lot of weight with the judges who use them. In reality, these scores are neither impartial nor airtight. ProPublica found that one particular system used by courts across the country guessed wrong about two times as often for Black people than for white people: it mislabeled twice as many Black people who didn’t reoffend as being at high risk for doing so.
In a recent article for the Connecticut Law Review, Okidegbe traces this inconsistency back to its source, and identifies a three-pronged “input problem.”
First, she writes, jurisdictions are opaque about whether and how they use pretrial algorithms, and often adopt them without consulting marginalized communities, “even though these communities are disproportionately affected by their utilization.” Second, these same communities are generally shut out of the process for building such algorithms. Finally, even in jurisdictions where members of the public can lodge opinions about the use of such tools, their input rarely changes anything.
“From a racial-justice perspective, there are other harms that come out of the use of these algorithmic systems. The very paradigm that governs if and how we use these algorithms is quite technocratic and not very diverse. Kate Crawford has noted AI’s ‘white guy problem,'” Okidegbe says, referring to a principal researcher at Microsoft and cochair of a White House symposium on AI and society who coined the term to describe the overrepresentation of white men in the creation of artificially intelligent products and companies.
From the very outset, Okidegbe says, algorithmic systems exclude racially marginalized and other politically oppressed groups.
“I’ve been looking at the decision-making power of whether and how to use algorithms, and what data they are used to produce. It is very exclusionary of the marginalized communities that are most likely to be affected by it, because those communities are not centered, and often they’re not even at the table when these decisions are being made,” she says. “That’s one way I suggest that the turn to algorithms is inconsistent with a racial justice project, because of the way in which they maintain the marginalization of these same communities.”
In addition to producing biased results that disproportionately harm marginalized communities, the data used to train algorithms can be messy, subjective, and discriminatory, Okidegbe says.
“In my work, I’ve contended with what I think is a misconception: that algorithms are only built with quantitative data. They’re not, they’re also built with qualitative data,” she says. Computer engineers and data designers will meet with policymakers to figure out what problem their algorithm should solve, and which datasets they should pull from to build it, Okidegbe says.
In the criminal and legal context, this might mean working with judges to determine what would help them deliver prison sentences, for example. Once again though, it’s much less likely that data engineers would meet with incarcerated people, say, as part of their early information-gathering process. Instead, as Okidegbe writes in an article for a recent edition of the Cornell Law Review, most large datasets used in pretrial algorithms are built upon and trained on data from “carceral knowledge sources,” such as police records and court documents.
“That puts forth this narrative that these communities have no knowledge to add toward the broader question,” Okidegbe says.
Really delivering on the promise of algorithms in the criminal justice system—the promise that they make the process more uniform and less biased than humans otherwise have—requires a radical rethinking of the entire structure, Okidegbe says. It’s something she encourages her students to consider as they shape the future of law and criminal justice.
“It means actually accounting for the knowledge from marginalized and politically oppressed communities, and having it inform how the algorithm is constructed. It also means ongoing oversight of algorithmic technologies by these communities, as well. What I am contending requires building new institutional structures, it requires shifting our mindset about who is credible and who should be in power when it comes to the use of these algorithms. And, if that is too much, then we can’t, in the same breath, call this a racial justice project.”
Source: Boston University
The post Criminal justice algorithms still discriminate appeared first on Futurity.
A California couple is suing a snorkeling company in Maui after their tour group left them high and dry — or in this case, behind and wet.
The experienced snorkelers were on their honeymoon when they booked a day trip with Sail Maui from Lahaina to Lanai. — Read the rest
"We applaud President Biden for upholding the ITC's ruling and holding Apple accountable for infringing the patents that underpin our industry-leading ECG technology," said Priya Abani, CEO of AliveCor. "This decision goes beyond AliveCor and sends a clear message to innovators that the U.S. will protect patents to build and scale new technologies that benefit consumers."In the December ruling, the ITC recommended a limited exclusion order and a cease-and-desist order for Apple Watch models with ECG features. Were it to be enforced, Apple would no longer be able to import new Apple Watch models that support the ECG app. Apple plans to appeal the ITC's decision in a federal courthouse.
In January 2021, after a sleepover with her best friend, 12-year-old Molly Steinsapir got onto an e-bike in her Los Angeles neighborhood, crashed, and died. Who was responsible for the tragedy? Molly’s parents have sued Rad Power Bikes, a popular e-bike manufacturer. Author Peter Flax examines the thorny legal questions at the heart of the lawsuit and illuminates the potential pitfalls of the e-bike industry’s explosive, largely unregulated growth, in part by speaking with other Rad Power Bike users who, like Flax, have experienced worrying equipment problems:
I started talking to my neighbors. During the pandemic, hundreds of teenagers in my community took to the streets on RadRunners and other inexpensive DTC e-bikes with mechanical disc brakes, and I discovered that many of them were having similar issues. Some parents were clued into the problem and were either scheduling regular maintenance with local shops or learning how to make the fixes at home, while others had no idea that their kids were riding heavy electric bikes that couldn’t stop properly without frequent maintenance. I started a thread on Nextdoor with a summary of the problem and how to address it, and soon I was DMing with parents who wanted tips on barrel and caliper adjustments.
One of my neighbors — his name is Ezra Holland and he lives about five blocks from me — says that almost immediately he started noticing disturbing braking issues with the RadRunner he purchased early in 2022. Two or three weeks after he got it, Holland, an experienced road cyclist, noticed that the responsiveness of the brakes was poor, and he decided to remedy the problem by tightening the cables that run from the levers to the calipers. But he learned that this only bought him a few weeks, and that after tightening those cables a few times, one of the calipers clicked into a different position where there was zero braking action. “That is pretty scary,” he says.
Thus began a year of education, vigilance, maintenance, and communication with Rad. Holland now buys pads in bulk on Amazon; he checks and adjusts both calipers every two weeks, always on alert for a failure. He’s experienced the rear brake fail going downhill and is especially concerned about that happening while his 17-year-old is using the bike. Rad has sent him new brakes and new pads, but Holland says that in his ongoing phone calls with the brand, customer service reps and supervisors have told him that other customers aren’t experiencing braking issues like he has. But he alone knows a half dozen friends and neighbors struggling with the same problems. “I just got to a point where I started questioning my own thinking, because they keep saying I’m wrong,” he says. “I start thinking that maybe I’m just making a fuss here for no reason. Which I think is not fair, because I think it’s not true.”
Enlarge / Let's see, you landed on my "Google Ads" space, and with three houses... that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)
It has been expected for some time, but today the Justice Department and eight states are suing Google over its purported domination of the online advertising market. The government has a problem with Google's position in "ad tech," or the tools used to automatically match advertisers with website publishers. To solve it, apparently, the DOJ has told Google it's considering breaking the company up.
“Today’s complaint alleges that Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful conduct to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “No matter the industry and no matter the company, the Justice Department will vigorously enforce our antitrust laws to protect consumers, safeguard competition, and ensure economic fairness and opportunity for all.”
The press release gives a quick rundown of the DOJ's list of Google’s anticompetitive conduct:
In 2018, Elon Musk tweeted that he was about to take Tesla private at $420 a share, sending the company's stock into turmoil for weeks. The general presumption was that he was fooling around and making a weed joke for his social media followers. — Read the rest
Enlarge / A computer-generated gavel hovers over a laptop. (credit: Getty Images)
Some artists have begun waging a legal fight against the alleged theft of billions of copyrighted images used to train AI art generators and reproduce unique styles without compensating artists or asking for consent.
A group of artists represented by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm has filed a US federal class-action lawsuit in San Francisco against AI-art companies Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt for alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, violations of the right of publicity, and unlawful competition.
The artists taking action—Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz—"seek to end this blatant and enormous infringement of their rights before their professions are eliminated by a computer program powered entirely by their hard work," according to the official text of the complaint filed to the court.
Enlarge (credit: ANGELA WEISS / Contributor | AFP)
The weekend delivered some disappointing news for laid-off Twitter employees who launched a class-action lawsuit in November against the social media platform immediately after CEO Elon Musk kicked off the first round of layoffs at the company. On Friday, a US district judge ruled that five plaintiffs who proposed the class action would instead have to enter individual arbitration to pursue their claims that Twitter violated employment laws.
This doesn’t mean the class-action lawsuit has completely fallen apart, though. US District Judge James Donato wrote in his order that while these five employees waived their right to sue by signing optional arbitration agreements under Twitter’s prior owner, three other plaintiffs later added to the lawsuit said they opted out. Those employees still have the right to pursue the proposed class action, which alleges sex and disability discrimination during layoffs and argues that Twitter still owes proper severance payments and lost wages.
“After Twitter filed its motion, plaintiffs amended their complaint to add three named plaintiffs who say that they opted out of Twitter’s arbitration agreement,” Donato wrote.
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