Digressions&Impressions

Chiang on metahumans (and the great chain of being)

The question is, are these worthwhile undertakings for scientists? Some call them a waste of time, likening them to a Native American research effort into bronze smelting when steel tools of European manufacture are readily available. This comparison might be more apt if humans were in competition with metahumans, but in today's economy of abundance there is no evidence of such competition. In fact, it is important to recognize that — unlike most previous low-technology cultures confronted with a high-technology one — humans are in no danger of assimilation or extinction.

There is still no way to augment a human brain into a metahuman one; the Sugimoto gene therapy must be performed before the embryo begins neurogenesis in order for a brain to be compatible with DNT. This lack of an assimilation mechanism means that human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch him or her grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser. It is not surprising that the percentage of human parents choosing the Sugimoto gene therapy for their children has dropped almost to zero in recent years.

As a result, human culture is likely to survive well into the future, and the scientific tradition is a vital part of that culture. Hermeneutics is a legitimate method of scientific inquiry and increases the body of human knowledge just as original research did. Moreover, human researchers may discern applications overlooked by metahumans, whose advantages tend to make them unaware of our concerns.

For example, imagine if research offered hope of a different intelligence-enhancing therapy, one that would allow individuals to gradually ‘upgrade’ their minds to a level equivalent to that of a metahuman. Such a therapy would offer a bridge across what has become the greatest cultural divide in our species' history, yet it might not even occur to metahumans to explore it; that possibility alone justifies the continuation of human research.

We need not be intimidated by the accomplishments of metahuman science. We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally invented by humans, and they were no smarter than we. Ted Chiang (2000) "Catching crumbs from the table," in Nature.*

The existence of metahumans (or enhanced, human cyborgs) reminds us that developments in technologies generate violations of Descartes' causal principle: what is more perfect can arise from what is less perfect. Technologies change how we conceive of what is humanly possible.+ In addition, technology helps generate violations of the great chain of being; there are  in-commensurable gaps between humans and metahumans.

Whether any technology can remove scarcity may well be doubted unless the metahumans can practice moral checks on themselves and nudge the humans into breeding at a replacement rate. Of course, if the metahumans did so, it's possible the humans would not know about it ([recall] in the way the machines/artificial intelligence nudge humans in Iain Banks' The Culture series).

The narration assumes that scarcity is the main motive for genocide. It also implies that being capable of developing science and technology, including presumably meta weapons of meta mass destruction, would generate an ethics of their proper use. Since metahumans were initially invented by humans no smarter than us, this is to be doubted. Perhaps the thought is that the ability to dominate nature (abundance, etc.) removes the desire to dominate (destroy/exploit, etc.) lesser beings. But let's leave that aside.

When I was reflecting on the story, I was initially unsure parents would indeed choose to be able to communicate with their children, and so continue their traditions even form of life, rather than choosing for their kids to be among the cognitive elite (the metahumans). Often today, it seems, designer babies represent not just the desire for healthy kids, but parents' status and economic aspirations for their children. Such parents appear to act for their childrens' good. 

But, upon second thought, Chiang's moral psychology seems persuasive. Because despite the emphasis on 'choice' in selling human enhancement technologies, our contemporary parents of designer babies are not really showing much respect for the (let's call it) autonomy of their children. Rather what they de facto do is lengthen the odds that the structure of their (parental/social) values/traditions are passed on and reproduced. 

Part of the joke of the story -- which first appeared in Nature -- is that academic journals have stopped being the vehicle for publishing original research. They are now mostly in the business of hermeneutics trying and trailing to understand metahuman science. For us the joke may be less funny because with the opacity of machine learning this possibility may well be shading into reality. Even so, it would indeed be funny if the success of an all-knowing data science would regenerate the felt need for a kind of science of interpretation that could help decode the revelations of a hidden intelligence. When computer science departments start hiring big-data-hermeneuticists, the heirs of Gadamer or Davidson can laugh at our analytic philosophers.++ Of course, with machine algorithms, there may simply be no there, there. And so this hermeneutics may well have to rely on an intentional stance.

Not unlike AL-Farabi's God (at least this is Al-Ghazali's charge), the metahumans may be t uninterested in the physical going-ons of mere mortals. One's position reflects one's choices of research topic. Chiang suggests that faced with the existence of scientifically superior metahumans, scientific humans would embrace if not standpoint epistemology, then the argument from epistemic diversity, from self-interest. If these human scientists are right, then the great chain of being would be restored.

 

On (Lippmann and) Ignorant Voters

The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile, is that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act....For the troubles of the press, like the troubles of representative government, be it territorial or functional, like the troubles of industry, be it capitalist, cooperative, or communist, go back to a common source: to the failure of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and their prejudice, by inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of knowledge. It is because they are compelled to act without a reliable picture of the world, that governments, schools, newspapers and churches make such small headway against the more obvious failings of democracy, against violent prejudice, apathy, preference for the curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three legged calves. This is the primary defect of popular government, a defect inherent in its traditions, and all its other defects can, I believe, be traced to this one.--Walter Lippmann (1922) Public Opinion (Chapter 24, 228-230) 

As regular readers know, I think reflection on Walter Lippmann is important in present circumstances. He is one of the intellectual architects (recall) of what I call the second-wave of liberalism (1945-2008), which has been imploding during the last decade, and even was the proximate cause of the development of what came to be known as neo-liberalism. More subtly, his conception of the good society, which hearkens back to the (attractive) kind of liberalism of Adam Smith and Sophie de Grouchy, rejects both state neutrality and state-craft as soul-craft; the good society is one that has many morally salient characteristics (the people are flourishing and can lead lives of their own choosing without fear or coercion). To attain the good society, not unlike a medieval cathedral, is a multi-generational, collective project. There is a sense in which this is a religious project. But, probably unlike the cathedral, the path and the outcome of the good society is, due to the uncertainty generating conditions of modern life, full of surprises. 

One reason to return to Lippmann (not in order to agree -- he also has (recall) serious weaknesses --) is that, as  JohnDewey emphasizes, he understands the problem of voter ignorance not, as anti-democrats do, as a problem of other (not-so-smart or gripped by ideology) voters, but as a structural feature of the human condition. One need not agree with all of Lippmann's ways of articulating the situation, to see that the (Platonic) cave is the human condition in mass society. And to overcome such ignorance, here he anticipates Hanna Arendt, is a rare achievement to be found in, or (perhaps its better to say) produced by, a few institutions:  the law and science.

As an aside, Lippmann, who knew the press from within, is adamant that the press is even during the best of times and ownership structures not that kind of institution capable of reliable generating truth.* And, in fact, he claims that, when the press is conducive, it is often relying on the rule-following features of the administrative state. Importantly, his skepticism about the press' truth-conducive-ness does not entail that the press has no positive contributions to make to democratic life. (If he thought that, his life would be self-undermining in a very obvious ways.)

I do not think Lippmann's answer to the problem of voter ignorance is successful, but it was (judging by what happened next) very influential; and if not influential, at least prophetic. It is possible that by Lippmann's own standards his solution would be deemed successful because Lippmann's aspirations were (again noted by Dewey) were more ameliorative than utopian.  Lippmann's proposal has three central features: first, is to advocate for an expansion of the (meritocratic) bureaucratic state and infuse it with what he calls 'technical knowledge' that he associates with "statisticians, accountants, auditors, industrial counsellors, engineers of many species, scientific managers, personnel administrators, research men, "scientists," and sometimes just as plain private secretaries." (234) He thinks such technical knowledge can also be turned into an "experimental social science." (237)  The point, for Lippmann, is not that such technicians will run the show, but rather that they become embedded (as "permanent intelligence section") in all government apparatuses (nationally and locally). For, by definition, a technician is not the decision maker.+

A key second feature of his proposal is that there will be a permanent circulation of college graduates from universities, perhaps even a privileged 'national university' (247) recruited from government staff, into government; and technical, government bureaucrats returning regularly to train and teach at universities. This intellectual flow of human capital would itself (in part) constitute "political science" and, in turn, would "associated with politics in America."+ (In 1922 economics was not yet seen as the future queen of the social sciences.) Lippmann optimistically assumes that all of this can be done transparently and openly (246).  The third, key feature is to insist that any political decision must be channeled through a procedure that will involve the bringing to bear of technical expertise on a problem (e.g., 255). 

As an aside, Lippmann's account is clearly distinct from the (later) Hayekian narrative, which sees the rise of the bureaucratic, technocratic state as a consequence of the experience of (mobilization and) war-planning during WWI. Lippmann, by contrast, thinks that the rise of the technician in the great society is itself the consequence "of blind natural selection" (234); complex organizations faced with complex decision environments started to require technical expertise merely to help integrate the flow of data and to structure decision-making for the executive. One discerns in Lippmann that the problem of big data is a nineteenth century problem, and that to overcome it even in competitive markets, requires the rise of expertise within organizations.

Now, Lippmann is not unaware that there is a real risk the technocrats will quickly run the show and displace elected officials and electorate. His response to this is to insist on a stark distinction between executive and technical functions and to aim to align incentives between them properly. [242]+ Only this can keep the technician's disinterestedness in place. If such a distinction were to be maintained in practice, and an esprit de corps among the technical class could be cultivated, then his hope that there will be circumstances in which the presence of a class of technicians can even abolish partisanship would not be comical. I don't mean to suggest that Lippmann's proposal is impractical: it very much reflects reality inside important elements of the governance of the EU and the US Federal government. As Dewey discerned, Lippmann proposes what became a tool, even an effective technique of governance one that has undoubtedly helped reduce the catastrophic mistakes all political agents can make.**

I used the word 'comical.' Perhaps that's unfortunate.  For Lippmann's weakness is the weakness of much of twentieth century liberalism. We can discern in Lippmann a tendency toward consensus and de-politicization in thinking about politics. In his (1937) Good Society, he demands that politicians combine, in spirit, the temperament of a legislator and a judge (who is impartial, fair, temperate, etc.) As the earlier Public Opinion teaches, that aspiration would only be possible in reality if political life is not governed by opinion. But if that were possible, we wouldn't (recall) need democracy at all. 

 

 

Bad News for some Libertarians and Conservatives on Precautionary Principles

[T]he acknowledgment of uncertainty and unknowability does not lead to a political-philosophical recognition of the fragility of modern life. On the contrary, this uncertainty itself becomes a ground for security action and intervention on the basis of speculation and imagination. As Francois Ewald put it...The precautionary principle invites one to anticipate what one does not yet know, to take into account doubtful hypotheses and simple suspicions. It invites on to take the most far-fetched forecasts seriously."--Marieke de Goede (2012) Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies, 50

The precautionary principle can be understood as follows: "if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action." Prior to reading De Goede's book I had two general reflections on the nature of precautionary principles (PP); first, the application of a PP is a means of pausing action, that is, as a moral tool that (a) could be used by Libertarians and Conservatives to slow down the machinery of government decision-making and (b) could be used by Progressives and Environmentalists to call attention to harmful, social consequences of policies on folk (or non-folk) that lack lobbying power. For, the precautionary principle is a natural accompaniment of uncertainty: if you don't know the wide consequences of an action on bystanders, you should be careful about advocating/pursuing it. It is a way to shift the burden of proof.

And, second, I worried that once Kuhnian ideas of science -- which treat science and consensus as strongly correlated -- are integrated into science's self-understanding, a (manufactured) scientific consensus itself could mask either considerable underlying uncertainty or facilitate further harms (see my piece with Lefevere for more reflections on the moral significance of such consensus). In practice, there are (i) complex judgments about whose risks and harms are counted in the context of justifying a course of action (or inaction) in light of PP (for an excellent example, see Kukla and Wayne's analysis here) and (ii) complex judgments about what possible futures one wants to allow (Arrow and Fisher (1974) showed that even without risk aversion "that the expected benefits of an irreversible decision should be adjusted to reflect the loss of options it entails.")**

Of course, logically the principle also facilitates government action because (and again quoting Wikipedia): PP "is used by policy makers to justify discretionary decisions in situations where there is the possibility of harm...The principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk" (emphasis added). That is, a precautionary principle can also function as a call to action. But because PP is a burden shifting demand, I had always viewed it as a means for slower, more responsible action that I associated with a generally conservative political outlook. (Given that I tend to view environmentalism as a species of conservatism, this fit my priors nicely.)

De Goede's book, which creatively uses Foucault-ian ideas, disabused me of the ideas in the previous paragraph. Rather she shows that precautionary principles are used to justify preemption; they are invoked in the "war on terror in the face of risks that are thought to be at once uncertain or unknowable and catastrophic to the extent that they require immediate action." (De Goede, xxviii)* The most chilling moments in the book are quotes from legal decisions that use the language of "temporary precautionary measure" (167) to deny those suspected of terrorist sympathies normal legal standards of evidence even in the absence of any criminal action (or evidence of intent). To what extent such precaution still falls under the classical precautionary principle (with its emphasis on scientific consensus) is, of course, also tricky; are the security and legal experts as well as the data-miners really representing a genuine scientific consensus?

Now, one might claim that given the-call-to-action-feature of a precautionary principle, we should not be surprised by such abuses; all principles are liable to abuse, after all. It is an open empirical (and contextually subtle) question if the abuses generated by applying precautionary principles are worse than their absence. It is familiar paradox, after all, that where such principles are needed most, they are most likely to be abused.

But rather than debating the merits of the precautionary principle, here I call attention to the key point in De Goede's book: in (urgent) contexts that focus on precaution (e.g., security), "the appeal to uncertainty replaces the demonstration of evidence as grounds for taking action" (174; see also p. 199). If this merely upends familiar habits of thought (and threatens cherished conservative principles), this would not be very disconcerting. But as De Goede notes, once such ideas get widespread bureaucratic uptake (not just in context of terrorism), a state of emergency is normalized and legally recognized. That's not just bad news for Libertarians and Conservatives.

 

The Technocratic Conception of Politics (The Economists and Rawls redux)

By a 'technocratic conception of politics,' (recall) I mean to capture the following three features of an enduring image of politics present in (social) science: first, it is characterized by the ideal that with social knowledge and its progress, substantial political disagreement can be eliminated. Here is a very striking instance of the claim from Milton Friedman's (1976) Nobel lecture: "Many countries around the world are today experiencing socially destructive inflation, abnormally high unemployment, misuse of economic resources, and, in some cases, the suppression of human freedom not because evil men deliberately sought to achieve these results, nor because of differences in values among their citizens, but because of erroneous judgments about the consequences of government measures: errors that at least in principle are capable of being corrected by the progress of positive economic science." The context of the passage is the furor surrounding his association with the so-called 'Chicago Boys' in Chile and the assassination of his Chilean critic Orlando Letelier (recall).

In particular, second, this ideal of conflict-free politics presupposes (as is clear from the quoted passage in Friedman's Nobel lecture) considerable value-unanimity in society. So, for example, in a famous article, the Chicago-school economists, Stigler and Becker write, "one may usefully treat tastes as stable over time and similar among people;" establishing this point "is the central task of this essay." When value-unanimity is granted then ordinary welfare economics is possible as a kind of (social) engineering science (recall).

Third, the conception requires an image of science in which one of the central aims of policy scientists is to achieve consensus (or lack of disagreement). In modern economics this idea goes back at least to Sidgwick's (1887) Principles of Political Economy (recall; for some prehistory on Hume). It was a central feature of Lionel Robbins's influential methodological restatement (1932) of what economics is: "Surely, for the sake of securing what agreement we can in a world in which avoidable differences of opinion are all too common, it is worth while carefully delimiting those fields of enquiry where this kind of settlement is possible from those where it is not to be hoped for —it is worth while delimiting the neutral area of science from the more disputable area of moral and political philosophy." This image of science was made widely popular by Thomas Kuhn in Structure (1960), but via Talcott Parsons's Weberianism and others it was already well known in mid-twentieth century social science.

It is worth emphasizing that the expectation of consensus was by no means universal. Friedman's sometime co-author, Savage, insists in The Foundations of Statistics, that "we must be prepared to find reasoning inadequate to bring about complete agreement." (1954 [1972]:7; see also 3, 67ff.) But this view became a minority position (cf. Aumann).

Of Fleeting Impressions, or an author's frailty

The Circumstance which gives Authors an Advantage above all these great Masters, is this, that they can multiply their Originals; or rather can make Copies of their Works, to what Number they please, which shall be as valuable as the Originals themselves. This gives a great Author something like a Prospect of Eternity, but at the same time deprives him of those other Advantages which Artists meet with. The Artist finds greater Returns in Profit, as the Author in Fame. What an Inestimable Price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their Works like a Statue, a Building, or a Picture, to be confined only in one Place and made the Property of a single Person?--The Spectator, No. 166. Monday, September 10, 1711. Addison.

At a conference, I recently caught Menachem Fisch engrossed in Dror Wahrman's fascinating Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, which Menachem warmly recommended. The passage from Addison is partially quoted on p. 51; Wahrman cuts it off at "Eternity." In context, Wahrman is not interested in the trade-off between profit for unique works and enduring fame that Addison posits (although fleetingness of life, of print, of identity (etc.) is a major theme of the book). Because duplication undermines scarcity -- it even risks effacing property --, it generates too much supply, and lowers what one might call "exchange value." (As Addison recognizes, the intrinsic or use value remains, and may, in fact, be increased because more folk can enjoy the fruits of one's labor.)* Addison imagines counterfactually, "What an Inestimable Price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their Works like a Statue, a Building, or a Picture, to be confined only in one Place and made the Property of a single Person?" Yet, unique properties, which have a huge upside in exchange value, are vulnerable to the destruction wrought by time: statue, buildings, even pictures are fragile--and  even when they survive they may -- despite the necessity of the logicians -- be disassociated from the name that ought to be associated with it.

That is to say, one can be rewarded in money and approbation. If one scribbles in the right sort of medium, one can even hope to rewarded with posthumous applause. Addison's little counterfactual implies, in fact, that the truly talented (Virgil, Homer, Cicero, Aristotle) correctly favor the possibility of extraordinary posthumous fame over extraordinary riches in one's life. As Hume insisted, while subtly correcting Addison's implicit axiology, that there was such a thing as a "most durable, as well as justest fame," and offered as examples:

Please give us new human beings

Today I received a call for papers in my email inbox. At first I thought it was satire. But in following the links, I ended up on the EU funded European Network for Social Intelligence.  As we know, European bureaucrats would not risk the ire of the increasingly skeptical public and openly fund satire (of itself). So, what to make of this call for papers? (As an aside, I note that parts of the call are plagiarized from this paper's abstract; I don't mean to suggest that this is anyway an ethical lapse; it's just amusing given the high minded tone.) I quote first, then comment:

Argument and debate form cornerstones of civilized society and of intellectual life. As online interaction usurps many traditional forms of interaction and communication, we would hope to see these processes alive and well on the web. But we do not. In spite of the ever-growing volume of online interaction,  its current mechanisms hamper and discourage serious debate; they facilitate poor quality argument; and they allow fuzzy thinking to go unchecked. Meanwhile, these same online resources are increasingly being trusted and adopted with little critical reflection. The problem needs to be addressed from two different but converging perspectives:

• We need better understanding and widespread awareness in the use of current and future ICT, to enable people to profit from new opportunities for argumentative interaction, instead of being mislead and thwarted by lack of familiarity with the emerging socio-technical systems. Several research areas are critical to this purpose, but their contributions need to be integrated in a concerted effort: among others, philosophy of information, critical thinking, digital literacy, e-inclusion, persuasive technologies, CMC.
• We need new tools, new systems and new standards engineered into the heart of the internet to encourage debate, to facilitate good argument, and to promote a new online critical literacy. This is the vision of the Argument Web, a web platform that brings together different domains and interaction styles (e.g. argument analysis, real-time debate, blogging) by combining linked argument data with software tools that make online debate intuitive for various audiences, including mediators, students, academics, broadcasters and bloggers.