tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88133824914635949942024-02-19T00:13:16.263-08:00Café de la RégenceAndrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.comBlogger260125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-61793119265252025562021-08-08T13:46:00.004-07:002021-08-08T13:46:57.302-07:00Rights as Warning Lights<p> <span style="font-family: inherit;">It is sometimes suggested that utilitarianism is apt to inadequately
value people as individuals. If we are aiming to maximise utility across all
people, then the welfare of one individual can be sacrificed indefinitely so
long as this produces greater benefits to others. In order to avoid this conclusion,
people posit human rights which stand prior to the existence of society and the
state.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This depends upon a view that rights are “trumps” – that
when activated, they invalidate or outweigh other political considerations such
as efficiency or equality. I think this is mistaken – rights are more like
warning lights. The “warning lights” view of rights is not intrinsically tied
to utilitarianism or consequentialism, but they go well together – my introduction
to this way of thinking was <a href="https://philosophybites.com/2011/09/philip-pettit-on-consequentialism-1.html">a podcast in which Philip Pettit argued that itresolves some problems for consequentialist views</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is it right to sacrifice the life of one person in order to
save five? For example by turning a trolley? By pushing a man off a bridge? By
killing a man and redistributing his organs? By triaging patients in a military
hospital? The only honest answer to the original question is “it depends” – you
can’t give a universal answer, you have to attend to the particular situation
which you face. These are difficult questions, and abstract theory should not
give us easy answers – but it should at least identify which are the hard cases
and which are the easy ones. (See also - in the case of a pandemic, should we restrict the movement and association of millions of people in order to avert a certain number of deaths?)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Treating rights as trumps is frankly a very glib way of
responding to these questions. “The one person has a right to life” is a simple
answer, not a serious one. Ronald Dworkin might redefine his position to “the one
person has a right to life, but only in those situations where the five people
do not,” but that just becomes an outright evasion of the question.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What about the “warning lights” picture of rights? We say
that the one has a right to life, and so we will want to deliberate carefully
before we violate that – but in the end we may recognise that the situation
merits overriding the right. Or we might decide that in this case, the one
should not be sacrificed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This hasn’t really discussed utilitarianism as such, so if
you believe utilitarianism fails to adequately respect individuals then this shouldn’t
persuade that it does. What I hope this <i>does</i> show is that if you hold
that view, invoking rights is not the solution.</span><o:p></o:p></p>Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-30884985411509938242020-10-30T17:24:00.001-07:002020-10-30T17:26:57.322-07:00Miscellaneous mini-reviews of books I have read in 2020<p>(I have not read all of these cover-to-cover, to be clear - </p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Aeneid</i>, Virgil </b>(translated by Rolfe Humphries)</p><p>I tried reading this couple of years back with a rather archaic translation - I think it was by Dryden - and found it utterly impenetrable. The Humphries translation (<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61596">available on Gutenberg</a>) is much more accessible and really exposes some of the most lovely passages in Virgil. For example, the description of Dido considering her feelings for Aeneas:</p><p></p><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;">What woman<br />In love is helped by offerings or altars?<br />Soft fire consumes the marrow-bones, the silent<br />Wound grows, deep in the heart.<br />Unhappy Dido burns, and wanders, burning,<br />All up and down the city, the way a deer<br />With a hunter's careless arrow in her flank<br />Ranges the uplands, with the shaft still clinging<br />To the hurt side.</div></blockquote><p> The account of Priam's death is longer than I want to quote here, but very visceral and real. Or the description of the cyclopian shore near Mount Etna:</p><p><span class="i2" style="background-color: white; display: block; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-left: 1em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;"></span></p><blockquote><span class="i2" style="background-color: white; display: block; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-left: 1em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;">There is a harbor, safe enough from wind,<br /></span><span class="i0" style="background-color: white; display: block; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;">But Etna thunders near it, crashing and roaring,<br /></span><span class="i0" style="background-color: white; display: block; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;">Throwing black clouds up to the sky, and smoking<br /></span><span class="i0" style="background-color: white; display: block; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;">With swirling pitchy color, and white-hot ashes,<span class="pagenum" style="color: grey; font-size: 8.8px; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; left: 1281.55px; position: absolute; text-align: right; text-indent: 0em;"><a id="page_81" name="page_81">{81}</a></span><br /></span><span class="i0" style="background-color: white; display: block; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;">With balls of flame puffed to the stars, and boulders,<br /></span><span class="i0" style="background-color: white; display: block; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;">The mountain’s guts, belched out, or molten rock<br /></span><span class="i0" style="background-color: white; display: block; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;">Boiling below the ground, roaring above it.</span></blockquote><p>"The mountain's guts"! Love it. </p><p></p><p><b><i><br /></i></b></p><p><b><i>The Thirty-Nine Steps</i>, John Buchan</b></p><p>I blasted through this last Saturday, at barely 100 pages you can easily get through it in one or two sessions. Fun enough, nothing profound but a perfectly good way to enjoy a couple of hours.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>A Just Zionism: On the Morality of the Jewish State</i>, Chaim Gans</b></p><p>This was recommended to me by Anonymous Mugwump as perhaps the best one-book defence of liberal nationalism for the twenty-first century. It is clear, careful, and thorough, and has helped me to clarify my own thoughts regarding liberal nationalism (i.e. that there is a place for it, but that place is considerably smaller than it was in decades and centuries gone by). The bits I've read so far have had surprisingly little on the actual history of Israel, so I am at present unable to recommend it as a single source on the key issue it is intended to be about; it is possible that the second half of the book rectifies this, unfortunately the e-book on Amazon is appallingly put together (no hyperlinked contents, no options to change the font, etc) so this is difficult to check.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Sellout</i>, Paul Beatty</b></p><p>This is amusing in a politically incorrect way, but ultimately it feels like a fairly standard farce - if there's a deep message in there, it's well-obscured.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fateless-Imre-Kertesz-ebook/dp/B0031RS5F6/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=fateless+kertesz&qid=1604096671&sr=8-1">Fateless</a></i>, Imre Kertesz</b></p><p>A semi-autobiographical account of a Jewish boy surviving the Holocaust, and perhaps the most famous work of Imre Kertesz - to date, the only Hungarian author to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was surprisingly upbeat and optimistic - there are jokes of the kind that teenage boys make, #relatable stories of Jews in the camps feeling too socially awkward to disobey their imprisoners, tales of incredible naivety and incredible gumption, all leading to the quite incredible final paragraphs:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>But one shouldn't exaggerate, as this is precisely the crux of it: I am here, and I am well aware that I shall accept any rationale as the price for being able to live. Yes, as I looked around this placid, twilit square, this street, weather-beaten yet full of a thousand promises, I was already feeling a growing and accumulating readiness to continue my uncontinuable life. My mother was waiting, and would no doubt greatly rejoice over me. I recollect that she had once conceived a plan that I should be an engineer, a doctor, or something like that. No doubt that is how it will be, just as she wished; there is nothing impossible that we do not live through naturally, and keeping a watch on me on my journey., like some inescapable trap, I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the "atrocities", whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentrations camps.</p><p>If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don't forget.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><i>Fateless</i> is the first part of a trilogy; the third part, <i>Kaddish for an Unborn Child</i>, "explains why he cannot bear to bring a child into a world that could allow such atrocities to happen." I'll be interested to see how he squares this with the above.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State</i>, Joseph Heath</b></p><p>I've reviewed this at greater length <a href="http://cafe-regence.blogspot.com/2020/09/some-early-thoughts-on-machinery-of.html">previously on the blog</a>, and don't have a great deal to add except the chapter on paternalism was every bit as excellent as I expected it to be.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity</i>, Toby Ord</b></p><p>There's a <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/">Slate Star Codex review</a> which I agree with, and have little to add to; as someone who is already highly familiar with most effective altruist concepts, this shifted my priors a bit but isn't really all that memorable.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>A Little History of Poetry</i>, John Carey</b></p><p>A very fine guide to the history of poetry; some of it I was familiar with, much of it I wasn't, and it served as an introduction to some of my favourite discoveries of this year - particularly <i>The Rape of the Lock</i> (discussed below) and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho_31">Sappho fragment 31</a>. If you're looking for a guided tour of poetry which assumes minimal knowledge as a starting point, this is an excellent choice.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vanished-Kingdoms-History-Half-Forgotten-Europe/dp/0141048867/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2GRICUG5JHY8R&dchild=1&keywords=vanished+kingdoms&qid=1604097257&s=books&sprefix=canished+kin%2Caps%2C191&sr=1-1">Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe</a></i>, Norman Davies</b></p><p>This is one of the favourite books of some good friends of mine, so I really wanted to like it. I read the account of the Kingdom of Stratchclyde, and it was... OK? Nothing special?</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Trial</i>, Franz Kafka</b></p><p>I got about 40% of the way through this. It's interesting, both in itself and as an account of the world in that period, but it didn't feel in any way like <i>essential</i> reading.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Miller's Tale</i>, Geoffrey Chaucer</b></p><p><i>The Canterbury Tales</i> is one of the many classics which I have attempted and not got very far with. I remember the introduction being all full of long descriptions of the many virtues of the characters, and taking ages over this with nothing happening. Based on a recommendation in <i>A Little History of Poetry</i> (above) I jumped into this individual tale. It's not really all that funny.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Normal People</i>, Sally Rooney</b></p><p>Like <i>The Thirty-Nine Steps</i> this is very readable and has little in the way of depth. I suppose a straussian reading would be that in a broadly meritocratic society, such as the one in which we live, intelligence is the highest form of privilege. It's striking how unsympathetic the characters are - not just Marianne and Connell, but literally everyone except Connell's mum and one of his minor girlfriends.</p><p>I watched the first episode of the TV series, too. It struck me how much the whole thing must have had to be written anew - while the broad plot is the same, the novel contains almost no dialogue.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Asia-Works-Success-Failure-ebook/dp/B00BQWPRRW/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=how+asia+works&qid=1604098025&s=digital-text&sr=1-1">How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region</a></i>, Joe Studwell</b></p><p>I was astonished at the confidence with which Studwell proclaimed his conclusions, given that he was essentially working with an n of around 6. I think he makes a reasonable case for these conclusions - that the rapid development of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea in the second half of the twentieth century depended upon a combination of land reform, industrial policy focused on increasing industrial exports, and limiting the use of financial capital to "productive" investments - but there are, besides the small number of cases, a number of weak points:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>He can write at length on a topic without being particularly clear about what he sees as the main point. For example, on land reform I <i>think</i> the fundamental problem in his view is that tenant farming means that tenants cannot benefit from investments which would increase agricultural productivity (I believe this is Pseudoerasmus' reading of Studwell too, but can't find the tweets) now.</li><li>He fails to consider some fairly obvious alternatives to the policies he advocates. In the example above, he believes that land reform - i.e. redistributing land so that farms are owned by the people working them - incentivises the investments. But one could equally argue that what is needed is centralisation of land ownership to allow landlords to make these investments - as arguably happened in the English agricultural revolution. (He also fails to consider the question of why landlords themselves did not make these investments and thereby enable the charging of higher rents. I think there are several possible answers which would be perfectly good - maybe the value of these investments is hard to prove to someone not directly involved in making them, or maybe the key issue is <i>simplification</i> of land ownership out of the kind of convoluted systems described by James C. Scott, so the key issue is not tenant ownership so much as unclear and shared ownership. I'm not saying he's <i>wrong</i> on this point, merely that he lacks rigour.)</li><li>In general he seems to advocate an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach: it is not enough to directly subsidise exports, you must also indirectly subsidise them through cheaper credit, must threaten to lock up manufacturers who don't export enough, etc... This all seems incredibly wasteful, surely there will be one or two most efficient ways of incentivising a behaviour and all others are going to create weird distortions and inefficiencies.</li></ul><p></p><p>In sum - I can believe the broad strokes of his view, but on the details I am thoroughly unconvinced.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse, Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth, Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian,</i> Rick Riordan</b></p><p>I blasted through these for light relief over four evenings in January. As a teenager I loved these, they're less fun as a re-read but still good enough. Obviously highly recommended as a way to help your children gain a proper understanding of the crucial topic of Greek mythology.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The School for Wives</i> and <i>The Hypochondriac, </i>Moliere</b></p><p>Marvellous fun! <i>The School for Wives</i> is the play which BBC sitcom episodes wish they were - a bit right-on for my tastes (I'm not in favour of compelling woman to marry their guardians, obviously, but why did the antihero on this metric have to turn out to be awful in almost every other way too?) but otherwise tremendously funny, and surprisingly relatable. For my money if there's one writer who captured the spirit of Online Drama, it's Moliere. I highly recommend <i>The School for Wives</i> and one out of <i>The Hypochondriac</i> or <i>Tartuffe</i> (which I have not read but saw the RSC version of a couple of years ago).</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science</i>, Stuart Ritchie</b></p><p><b><i>Arts and Minds</i>, Anton Howes</b></p><p>I'm not going to go into detail on these, since the authors are my friends and I don't want to offend them. (More seriously: I may write reviews, but will want to cover them properly rather than just dashed-off thoughts at half-past midnight.)</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Weird IR</i>, David Bell Mislan and Philip Streich</b></p><p>This is mostly just a set of stories, most of them not with any particular purpose. Maybe they'd be useful for an intelligent International Relations undergrad in thinking about the limits of their theories, although then again many of the stories don't really challenge any particular theory. For example, chapter nine covers some odd cases of international trade which are probably useful to understand for people without any background in economics or international trade law; given my not-especially-advanced background in both, I felt there was nothing particularly substantive in this for me.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Story of Maps</i>, Lloyd A. Brown</b></p><p>Comparable to the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe: it's impressive how boring they made such an interesting topic.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Dog Fight: Aerial Tactics of the Aces of the First World War</i>, Norman Franks</b></p><p>Tells a good story of the pioneering days of early dogfights, and makes it clear how completely the nature of the air war changed over the course of the First World War. I need to read further into it, but a potential recommendation not just for military history but also for Progress Studies.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Swamp Dwellers</i>, Wole Soyinka</b></p><p>One of Soyinka's shorter, more accessible, and frankly less deep plays. I enjoyed it enough for it to be worth reading, and love to imagine the drama onstage as Igwezu - whose crop has failed, and whose wife has left him for his brother - holds a shaving knife to the throat of the priest who blessed both the planting and the marriage. I suppose you can read an anti-anti-colonial message into this, as with much of Soyinka's ouvre - Igwezu has been grievously wronged, not by any foreigner or stranger but by those who were closest to him. If you were going to read one Soyinka play, though, then it definitely has to be <i><a href="https://www.uibk.ac.at/anglistik/staff/davis/death-and-the-king-s-horseman---wole-soyinka.pdf">Death and the King's Horseman</a></i>.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean, </i>Taco Terpstra</b></p><p>Certainly far better than I expected given the author's background in classics and history - this is a deeply learned work engaging in depth with archaeology and with institutional economics. The introduction gives a guide to the long history of ancient Med trade and sets out his key theses that "First, state formation and consolidation had an aggregate positive effect on the economy of the ancient Mediterranean, starting in the Late Iron Age and peaking sometime in the Roman imperial period. Second, we should not ascribe that effect to ancient states acting as third-party enforces of private property rights." This is obviously a provocative pair of theses for a libertarian-sympathiser like myself, and Terpstra makes an excellent case for the importance of ideology and religion in promoting cooperation at a distance.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States</i>, Erin Metx McDonnell</b></p><p>A study of some relatively-effective agencies within generally-ineffective governments. I come at this from the perspective of a member of what is, according to the official statistics (whatever they may be worth) a high-performing division in a department of <a href="https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/about/partnerships/international-civil-service-effectiveness-index-2019">the world's most effective civil service</a>, so perhaps I'm inclined to be cynical here - but one of the most striking facts was that "highest-performing pockets" in the less effective civil services are broadly on a par with the <i>average</i> in more effective civil services. The ways of working which enabled them to be so effective were things like "working longer hours", which can obviously help in a pinch but which we would regard as fundamentally a short-term measure which, if required on a regular basis, would indicate poor prioritisation.</p><p>That said, I enjoyed many of the stories (especially the Sino-Foreign Salt Inspectorate, which went from a minor office to providing funding for half the Chinese government, all the while expanding the Chinese domestic salt industry) and it is sociologically interesting to see how these pockets avoid being dragged to the levels around them - including intense control of recruitment to take on good people when they appear rather than fixed numbers, modelling of good practice by leaders, clear and distinct identities, and - of course - a certain insulation from politics. It would be interesting to see this compared with high-performing areas of more advanced civil services.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Power Broker,</i> Robert Caro</b></p><p>What I can say can hardly add to what has been written about this. It did, however, strike me as much more ideological and willing to make unsupported speculation about Robert Moses' motives than is generally recognised.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Uncle Vanya</i>, Anton Chekhov</b></p><p>The last play I saw before Covid hit, back when it was a distant rumbling in China. The title character is fascinating - coming across as a bit of a creep, but fundamentally a man who has voluntarily undertaken a bit of a hard life in order to serve something higher, and seen this thrown right back in his face.</p><p>In the opening scene Ilya Ilych Telegin describes how his wife cuckolded and deserted him, and made a fool of him in every way, "yet I kept my dignity - and is not that what matters?" It comes across as ironic or as a coping mechanism and he as a figure of fun, yet ultimately the rest of the play could almost be seen as a defence of this statement, that it is better to suffer evil than to do it.</p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><b><i>Collective Choice and Social Welfare,</i> Amartya Sen</b></p><p>Far more boring than I remembered from covering the topic in undergrad.</p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><b><i>It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet</i>, James Herriot</b></p><p>Various nostalgic stories of being a vet in Yorkshire, back when vets were primarily there to serve farmers rather than pet-owners. Good for light relief; the main thing I took away was how much drink-driving there was. If you've seen how blokes drive in the Yorkshire Dales, you'll understand how crazy that is.</p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><b><i>The Plague</i>, Albert Camus</b></p><p>I picked this up in a Berkhamsted charity shop on the recommendation of Ben Sixsmith, and started reading this because in the early days of lockdown everyone had to. I didn't get very far, but intend to pick it back up again.</p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><b><i>How Fiction Works,</i> James Wood</b></p><p>A truly excellent book, which inspires in one a strong desire both to read the books it covers and to try some fiction-writing oneself to try out the techniques which Wood analyses. I will be asking for Wood's new book for Christmas, and frequently dip back into this. Perhaps my favourite book written in the twenty-first century.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Freedom and its Betrayal</i>, Isaiah Berlin</b></p><p>Interesting enough, although the fact of my reading it apparently caused my grandmother to suspect I was going communist.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Collected Poems,</i> Enoch Powell</b></p><p>I spotted this in a Cotswolds bookshop and bought it on the behalf of a notorious mutual on Twitter, who had a desire to read Powell's "tortured homosexual" poems, and in the couple of days between getting home and posting it off I blasted through the poems. The influence of Housman is very clear, as is that of Wagner. They are in many cases genuinely good poems; short and concise, expressing witty and inventive ideas.</p><p>(Powell, incidentally, was a local boy to me, having grown up five minutes' walk away on Woodlands Park Road; the other notable politician to have lived in this neck of the woods is Neville Chamberlain.)</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Hegel: A Very Short Introduction</i>, Peter Singer</b></p><p>I didn't get far enough into this to get into the properly heavy-duty Hegel; my experience of reading Hegel during my MA was that I would by dint of close reading and careful study make my way through a page of Hegel, and there would be meaning there, but it would be something quite banal which could have been expressed in one single sentence. The discussion of Hegel's <i>Philosophy of History </i>here was, however, quite clear.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i><a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Holy_Sonnets">Holy Sonnets</a></i>, John Donne</b></p><p>My introduction to these was not the poetry collection above - though it does mention them - but <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlUHKHLk_VU">John Adam's famous setting of the sixteenth sonnet <i>Batter my heart</i> for his opera <i>Doctor Atomic</i></a>. The sonnets are not easy-going, they typically require more than one reading to properly get the meaning of - but I think they're worth it. Sonnet Four, <i>O, my black soul</i>, was probably my favourite.</p><p>Benjamin Britten also set these to music; they are strange pieces, and not particularly pleasant to listen to.</p>Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-75972086637998030132020-09-15T16:08:00.001-07:002020-09-15T16:08:11.382-07:00Some Early Thoughts on The Machinery of Government<p>I'm enjoying Joseph Heath's latest book, <i>The Machinery of Government</i>. It has particular relevance to me at present, as a UK civil servant currently working on implementation of the NI Protocol, where the UK Government is currently taking what we might describe as a "high legal risk" approach.</p><p>At present I've read the first three chapters ("Taking Public administration Seriously", "A General Framework for the Ethics of Public Administration", "Liberalism: From Classical to Modern"), skipped the fourth and fifth on the welfare state and cost-benefit analysis, and am half-way through the sixth on administrative discretion. I assume that chapters four and five are more developed versions of his <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/HEATNM-2">previous papers</a> <a href="https://www.academia.edu/9811886/Cost_Benefit_Analysis_as_an_Expression_of_Liberal_Neutrality">on these topics</a>, but may have missed things which would rebut my criticisms below.</p><p>Some things I've enjoyed:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Heath makes a convincing case that the topic is under-studied: state officials wield vast vast power which really doesn't have a good democratic justification. He also, I think, provides a solid explanation of where this justification <i>does</i> come from.</li><li>I have serious disagreements with his interpretation of liberalism, but it's a very clear statement of why he believes it.</li><li>It's also by far the best defence I've read of the Communitarian/Habermasian idea that moral philosophy is about uncovering the principles implicit in our practices, rather than trying to divine an eternal moral law. He compares it to his business ethics, collected in the earlier volume <i>Morality, Competition, and the Firm:</i> "One of the major problems with traditional business ethics is that it treats morality as something entirely external to the practice of business. As a result, the pronouncements of ethicists tend to arrive like an alien imposition, which in turn gives businesspeople license to ignore them, on the grounds that the expectations are simply incompatible with the demands of running a successful business. My approach, therefore, has been to focus on the moral obligations that are already implicit in market relations, and that are advanced through commercial and competition law, as well as regulation." (page x)</li><li>To this end, he talks largely about an existing ethos, various written and unwritten norms which exist around civil service practice. I have been thoroughly convinced that this is the correct approach, as opposed to attempting to derive morality separately and then apply it in this case - despite my utilitarian inclinations.</li></ul><p></p><p>Some things I've thought less of:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Every one of Heath's books contains a long history of the topic at hand. His defence of this is that, as a student of Habermas, he believes you can only understand our moral practices through understanding the journey by which we arrived at them. Fair enough - but do you really need 60 pages to do this in a 400 page book?</li><li>Moreover - it's striking that for all that he talks about the history of liberalism, he does not any attempt to give the history of Westminster-style civil services, despite the obvious relevance of this. If one is aiming to defend a particular view of the principles inherent in civil service, it's fair enough to think that John Locke is more important than the Northcote-Trevelyan Reforms, but I'd expect you to at least make the case. For example, I am not aware of any mention of the latter in <i>The Machinery of Government. </i>Nor is there analysis of actually-existing civil service codes beyond the (admittedly, in my experience accurate) statements that they are often vague and give little to no guidance on how to weigh different values like objectivity, neutrality, etc.</li><li>Going deep into history inevitably involves a great deal of historical interpretation. There are some glaringly "controversial" examples - to take one which clearly doesn't affect the main thesis, his claim that "Napoleon was able to conquer most of Europe, not because of any technological or tactical superiority, but rather because of the superior organisation capacity of the French state, not least its power to impose universal male conscription upon the population, which made it possible for Napoleon to field massive armies." (p120). He attributes this to liberalism. Conscription was clearly a boon but:</li><ul><li>(a) logistical innovations which allowed French armies to travel faster, enabling things like the Ulm Maneuvre, were clearly much more important;</li><li>(b) Napoleon didn't exactly outnumber the Russian and Austrian armies he faced, conscription was at most an equalising force;</li><li>(c) this really needs a comparison to the Revolutionary Government which preceded Napoleon;</li><li>(d) why would you use <i>this</i> as your example of liberalism boosting military capacity rather than the well-known example of the UK being able to borrow at lower rates of interest?</li></ul><li>That example merely raises questions of attention to detail. One which I'll admit to not exactly being expert in, but which frankly seems fatal to his thesis if my understanding is correct - the Wars of Religion were ended not by agreement for states to stay out of religion - to follow liberal neutrality - but agreeing, at the Peace of Westphalia, that each ruler would control religion in his own land, and they would not try to force religion on each others' lands. This did not prevent wars, of course, but it prevented the religious wars which Heath claims liberalism arrived to prevent.</li><ul><li>Maybe Hath would say "That's in Germany, I'm talking about the Westminster model; religious wars continued well past 1648 in England." True, but (a) we were also oppressing Catholics much longer than that - the Test Acts were repealed in 1828 - and (b) <a href="https://antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-invention-the-crucial-century">many of the key things which Heath would attribute to liberalism preceded this</a>.</li></ul><li>His advocacy of a purely political liberalism is fine so far as it goes, but does rather take a lot of the force out of his claims that we don't recognise liberalism for the same reason fish don't recognise water.</li></ul><p></p>Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-14858408577043684812020-09-15T14:36:00.001-07:002020-09-15T14:46:52.350-07:00Reflections on the Role of Battle in Warfare<p>Context: I intend to listen to <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/cathal-j-nolan-the-allure-of-battle-a-history-of-how-wars-have-been-won-and-lost-oxford-up-2019/#:~:text=Cathal%20J.,%2C%202019)%20%7C%20New%20Books%20Network">an interview with the author of <i>The Allure of Battle</i></a>, and want to set my own views down first to note where I agree and disagree</p><p><br /></p><p>What is the contribution a won battle makes towards victory in war? The answer may seem obvious: you kill a load of them, so there's less of them left to fight back. Actually, I don't think it's so clear.</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>change over time in what we mean by a battle - in particular, as war has turned into a process rather than a series of events</li><li>most battles, even decisive ones, involve relatively small casualty ratios - and frequently not all that lop-sided. 10% on each side would not be atypical</li><li>armies being wiped out often historically led to surrender, even when the population at large had changed little. Kill 20,000 Austrians - so what? There are millions more! Why should that lead to surrender if war is about destroying enemy strength?</li></ul><br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>at very small level, a fight is determined by what we may call "strength". Most obvious at the level of 1v1. Look at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapogo_lion_coalition">lion coalitions</a>, where power is largely about how many male lions can bear to live alongside each other.</li><li>as fights get larger, it becomes less about overall strength and the ability to coordinate and concentrate it in one location</li><li>given an absence of opposition, it doesn't take all that much force to control an area and its people. See the el-Amarna letters, in which 50 men is sufficient to pacify Canaan</li><li>battles, then, are as much about disrupting the enemy ability to coordinate as about killing them. This can happen by scattering them, by capturing/killing their leaders</li><li>This is a primary reason why cavalry were important - not for fighting (horses are easily scared!) but for pursuit (and also scouting, which was key to success in battle - although my topic here is why battles were important, not how to win them)</li><li>total war, and war becoming a process, are fundamentally a result of state capacity - the ability to lose one army and build another, <i>Diplomacy</i>-style.</li><li>Also arguably due to the fact of generals being behind the line - meaning that defeat is less likely to mean disruption to the command structure</li></ul><p></p>Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-75118938705090203152020-07-30T13:54:00.000-07:002020-07-30T13:54:01.491-07:00Social Foundationalism in EpistemologyThere is an ancient problem in philosophy known as Agrippa's Trilemma, which many parents will have encountered with inquisitive children. Ordinarily if one is asked how we can know something, we will appeal to underlying beliefs which support it. But this raises the question of why we should believe these underlying beliefs - and if there are even deeper underlying beliefs, why we should believe those. There are three responses which can be taken to this:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><i>Infinitism</i>: the idea that is possible for human knowledge to be founded upon an infinite regress of reasons, in much the same way that the earth is stacked upon an infinite column of tortoises.</li>
<li><i>Foundationalism</i>: the idea that there are some beliefs which you just have to accept, and these form the foundation for other beliefs.</li>
<li><i>Coherentism</i>: the idea that we operate on a "web of belief", and it doesn't matter if there is no ultimate ground to it if the beliefs are mutually supporting.</li>
</ul>
<div>
I am myself a determined coherentist: it's not that there are no beliefs which don't require further support, it's that once you've gone "I think, therefore I am" it's rather difficult to spin that up into much more. But the debate between foundationalists and coherentists continues, with the occasional "foundherentist" peacemaker like Susan Haack and the occasional infinist troll.</div>
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<br />
What strikes me, however, is how completely dominant coherentism is in the field of ethics. Under the name of "the method of reflective equilibrium" it is basically <i>the</i> method for trying to establish truth. We combine judgements from a range of levels - from practical judgements like "if a child is drowning in water next to them, you are morally obliged to rescue the child" to highly abstract judgements like "if states of the world A, B, and C are such that A is morally better than B, and B morally better than C, A is necessarily better than C" - to create general theories which aim to explain as much of the moral universe as possible. A couple of possibilities as to why this difference exists between fields:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Taking a foundationalist approach feels more respectable, and probably more likely to be successful, when the foundational judgements are highly general and widely applicable. Foundationalist epistemology, for example, would take mathematics to be foundational; whereas the most widely agreed judgements which we aim to expand from in ethics tend to be very practical and narrow in nature, e.g. "it is wrong to torture innocent children for one's own pleasure."</li>
<li>Ethics is generally accepted to be a social enterprise - it's about how <i>we</i> should behave, less about how I as an individual should behave. In particular, the existence of other moral agents is not generally taken to be in doubt. By comparison, epistemology is much more easily framed not as "what are the reasons for believing/doing X?" but "why should <i>I</i> believe X?"</li>
</ul>
<br />
I don't know that I particularly believe either of these. Maybe my initial observation is off, for that matter. If the second explanation is true, however, then given the rise in popularity of social epistemology in the last couple of decades, there's probably some mileage for a new defence of foundationalism - not that individuals should take certain beliefs as basic and unquestionable, but that societies should.<br />
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<br />Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-90963823781813180632020-07-12T16:13:00.003-07:002020-07-12T16:13:50.838-07:00The Rise, Fall, and Rise of CarthageCarthage. Carthage! It was a major trading post in the ancient world, founded in the location now known as Tunis by Phoenician(1) merchants, which rose to eclipse Tyre as a major port of the Mediterranean and indeed the primary Phoenician city. At its zenith it controlled Sicily, Spain, much of North Africa, large parts of the south of the Italian peninsula, and the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca roamed northern Italy with his army - famously with a contingent of elephants - and utterly destroyed two major Roman armies at Trasimene and Cannae. But he was unable to bring Rome itself under siege, and was forced to return to Africa to defend Carthage from invasion by the Roman general Scipio - who defeated him at Zama, forever breaking the back of Carthage as a power. In the Third Punic War, some fifty years later, Carthage was razed to the ground, and famously the Romans salted the earth there, that nothing might grow back.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/N/N00/N00499_10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="568" data-original-width="800" height="227" src="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/N/N00/N00499_10.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Decline of the Carthagian Empire</i>, JMW Turner; <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-decline-of-the-carthaginian-empire-n00499">Tate Britain</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
...Except that it did grow back. Not immediately of course, and only because the Romans allowed it to. The New Carthage was founded by Julius Caesar in the years before his demise. But Utica, the Roman ally which was appointed the new capital of Roman North Africa, was soon overshadowed, and the new Carthage soon became once again the greatest city in North Africa - indeed one of the greatest cities of the Western Roman Empire. What was it about this location which made it such a natural site for great cities?<br />
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The answer, I believe, comes from two things: first, a look at a map of the Mediterranean, and second, some facts about ships of the ancient world.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://www.freeworldmaps.net/europe/mediterranean/mediterranean-physical-map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="444" data-original-width="800" height="353" src="https://www.freeworldmaps.net/europe/mediterranean/mediterranean-physical-map.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Carthage, as mentioned, was in what is now Tunisia - notably, near the narrowest crossing of the Mediterranean (though still a solid 100 miles across the sea from Sicily). This was in an era when sailing ships might achieve 50-60 miles on a good day of sailing. Crucially, ships of the day had to take to land every evening in order to dry out the wood. This had a number of consequences: for example, ships would not carry more than a day or two's supply of food with them, but would instead land in ports and acquire food (2).<br />
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Consider what this means for journey times and possibilities. Journeys from the north of the Med to the south are obviously greatly shortened in many cases. But this also gives opportunities to sacrifice directness for security. Someone sailing from Algeria to Egypt has the option to avoid the less-populated, less secure Libyan coast, and instead to coast around the north of the Med through well-known trading waters.<br />
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(1) This could be an interesting debate in itself. In the recent Princeton University Press sale I eventually did end up buying Josephine Quinn's <i>In Search of the Phoenicians</i>, which argues - as best I can tell - that the Phoenicians did not exist as such, but rather that there were various seafaring people who were all given the same label. This would be a very plausible hypothesis, and deeply appealing to me as someone who wishes to emphasise the vast <i>diversity</i> of past societies which has been flattened out by modernity in general and capitalism, mass media, and nationalism in particular, were it not for a book I did get: Taco Terpstra's <i>Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean</i>, whose second chapter argues that long-distance trade in the Ancient Med was facilitated largely by the existence of Phoenician minority communities in cities around the Med. Trade relies upon trust, which would have been very difficult to achieve in the absence of enforcement mechanisms - except that local ethic Phoenicians were able to send messages back to Tyre and to other Phoenician colonies and obtain justice - and were obviously subject to the justice and tolerance of the local majorities.<br />
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(2) Thus, towards the end of the Peloponesian War, the Athenian fleet happened to be caught on the defensive near the home-in-exile of their former general, Alcibiades, perhaps the chadliest man in all of Classical Greece. Alcibiades advised the Athenians to move their pitch closer to the town, on the grounds that their sailors would then spend less time away from the ships buying food and other supplies; this advice was ignored, and the fleet was soon lost, definitely knocking Athens out of the war.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-67995163606096831232020-07-12T15:16:00.000-07:002020-07-12T15:16:01.429-07:00Some Thoughts on Politicisation of the Civil Service<i>Trying to get back into the habit of blogging, mostly so that I'm writing more frequently. I'm not starting to write with well-formed views, or even nascent thoughts which I hope to clarify through the act of writing, so don't expect too much from this post.</i><br />
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<i><br /></i>
One recent piece of news: the resignation of Sir Mark Sedwill, who until recently held the posts of the UK Cabinet Secretary and National Security Advisor. Significantly, his replacement as NSA will be David Frost, presently the UK Lead Negotiator in the negotiations with the EU.<br />
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For people not from the UK: the higher posts in our civil service are considered non-political: while there is ministerial involvement in the recruitment of Permanent Secretaries (the civil servants who run government departments) and Director-Generals (the next rung down, and incidentally the highest rung I've had personal contact with in my own work as a fairly junior civil servant), but this is usually more limited than the extent of involvement which is suspected here.<br />
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I'm not going to comment too much upon the circumstances of Sedwill's departure. I know very little about him - when he started as Cabinet Secretary I began but did not complete a rather tongue-in-cheek post pretending that his "Fusion Doctrine" was the latest and most damning sign yet of the authoritarian nature of the government, but besides the minimal research involved in that I know nothing of him. The suggestion I've seen was that the UK's appalling response to Coronavirus was a proximate cause, since one would expect the NSA to be on top of the UK's pandemic response. Perhaps this is true, it seems plausible, but really very few people know enough to say with great confidence and I am certainly not one of them.<br />
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I'm not going to to comment much, either, on the appointment of David Frost as the new NSA - or at least, not on him personally. He previously served as the UK Ambassador to Denmark, and has held two Director-level posts previously, so I don't think objections to his appointment should focus upon questions of competence.<br />
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The move to making the position <i>openly</i> political is itself interesting, however. To comment effectively on this, one requires a conception of under what circumstances a decision should be considered "political" as opposed to "operational". The standard self-conception of the civil service would be that our political ministers tell us what to do - or we distil an understanding of what they want from their public statements. We then do what they want, providing updates on what we're doing, giving options and recommendations but giving them the decision where it's not clear what they want, alerting them to risks of the proposed approach - but there are a lot of details which one simply does not need to check with ministers. Political decisions, then, are those which involve (a) a weighting of interests: as a country would we rather seek to achieve X or Y, noting that X is better for some people but worse for others, or that it carries a certain risk, or will take longer to put into place; or (b), a decision about what it is, at the more fundamental levels, that the UK government is aiming to achieve.<br />
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What are the kinds of decisions of that sort which will arise in the post of NSA? One can think of a few - e.g. what are the criteria we prioritise when deciding how significant a risk is (loss of life? loss of effective national sovereignty? do we value lives differently based on the ages of the people dying?). Where risks are brought into being or exacerbated by the actions of other governments, particularly our allies, how do we respond to that? Certainly it feels as though, given the politically neutral basis of the UK civil service, there should be some political oversight - when the NSA reports to Cabinet on risks to the UK, they are not simply "reporting the facts" - they are passing on a mixture of fact and opinion, filtered by opinions regarding what is significant enough to be worth reporting on.<br />
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Is security different to other areas, in a way that justifies a political role which we do not apply across the board? I don't know. The argument which comes to mind is that a major advantage of political appointments - and in particular of ministers appointing their friends - is that it promotes greater trust between political and operational officials, and may give operational officials more leeway to tell unpleasant or unpalatable truths. There are of course risks to this approach, so I can see an argument that it's not an approach you'd want to take generally (and in any case, there's probably only so many people who have the requisite level of trust with any given Prime Minister, so it's not something you could do across the government) but in the field of security, where such truths are more likely to abound, it's worthwhile.<br />
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I have doubts about the merits of that with regard to this particular government; going into detail on that would possibly go beyond the civil service neutrality which I would prefer to uphold whenever writing publicly. In any case, these doubts are similar to those which Stian Westlake has written about with regard to the government's strategy around procurement and the need for freedom from state aid rules.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-43429026718230349692019-06-22T13:11:00.000-07:002019-06-22T13:11:19.307-07:00Tired: Amazon warehouse work is worse than being an Uber Driver. Hired: Yeah, but we should still complain about them equally<br />
<div>
<i>Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain</i> is clearly intended as a 21st-century version of <i>The Road to Wigan Pier</i>. James Bloodworth spends six months around the country working in various low-paid occupations and providing observations and reflections from his experiences and his conversations with the people he met during the journey.</div>
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The book is divided into four sections, each covering one stage of his journey; they are neatly ordered from best to worst. As the deadline for manuscript submission creeps closer (the final section contains multiple references to him scrabbling to get this book finished on time) the quality of the prose deteriorates massively: the first section is a fizzing cocktail of inventive similes, well-chosen nods to other works, and actual substantive content, whereas the final section is poorly paced and utterly predictable. Moreover, it's not hard to notice that as his employers become more and more reasonable, his raging against them barely lets up so that the justified fury of the first section (spent working in an Amazon warehouse in Rugeley) is scarcely different from his pathetic whining about Uber in the fourth section.</div>
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The first section is also the most balanced in terms of the presentation of the people Bloodworth meets. He's clearly happier telling the story of a working-class colleague expressing support for her transgender friend than reporting on tensions between people of British descent and eastern European immigrants, but he does mention both. It is the section of the book most focused upon what he actually saw, rather than upon his personal reaction to circumstances. These circumstances are indeed grim: the job is physically exhausting, the pay (which comes not from Amazon but through an agency) is unreliable and frequently arrives late, and the bosses have considerable power to make the lives of more menial employees hell. Outside work, his flat is also pretty bad (although this is perhaps connected to the fact of him moving around the country so frequently: my own experience is that the quality of landlords varies massively, so it's easy to end up with a bad one when you first move somewhere but given time you're likely to find somewhere better.)</div>
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<div>
The second section is set in Blackpool, where he is engaged by a home care provider. A fair bit of this section is taken up by how terrible of a place Blackpool has become, and how unpleasant people get when drunk. This section also provided the only complaint in the book which was genuinely new to me: that the requirement for care providers to submit to background checks creates massive delays to starting, in particular because local police forces - who have to contribute to these - do not have the resources to respond to requests for information in an adequate time frame.</div>
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The third account was the most familiar to me, being centred around his work in a call centre. This is distinctly where the book begins to take on a less observational and more preachy tone, and where one starts to have doubts about whether any set of arrangements would be enough to satisfy Bloodworth. It is quite clear that the call centre does all it can to make the monotonous work more pleasant for its workers - certainly much more than the call centre I had the misfortune to spend six months in late 2017 and early 2018 working in - but still Bloodworth complains that the company provides the perks of its own volition, and not as a result of pressure from a trade union. The writing style which effervesced through the earlier chapters has dried up, and the literary references become more tenuous.</div>
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Finally, he moves back to London and works a while as an Uber driver. The five chapters here resemble nothing so much as a dull thread from lower case Twitter, with bog-standard leftist talking points presented as though they were utterly original. The most extreme case of this comes when he recycles the more-than-sixty-years-old arguments against grammar schools - a set of institutions which have not existed in most of the country for several decades, and which are highly unlikely to make a revival - and tries to present himself as countercultural. As mentioned above, the pacing of this section is odd, to say the least - of five chapters devoted to this period, two of them take place entirely prior to him giving his first Uber ride. There no attempt at balance or at charitable presentation of those he disagrees with - of the two other Uber drivers he quotes in the book, both are generally negative and one is a person who went so far as to take them to court. There are irrelevant rants about Objectivism and Uber's tax accounting, both of which may be worth critiquing as part of a general leftist program but neither of which has any relevance to the day-to-day lives of Uber's drivers. The best example he can give of a case in which the interests of Uber collide with those of its drivers is that "some of the drivers I spoke to did not believe the algorithm always gave the available job to the closest driver." Leaving aside the possibility that this may be perfectly reasonable - perhaps the app may try to give jobs to drivers which will take them in the direction of their home patch? - surely, if the interests of these parties are "very often antagonistic", surely he can furnish a case which does not rely on personal impressions. He also fails to consider the possibility that restrictions placed by Uber on its drivers may be representing the interests not of itself, but of the other drivers - perhaps because this would undermine his desire to present a narrative of solidarity of the oppressed.</div>
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Th value of this book lies entirely in the first 60% or so, which is genuinely excellent: the sociological observations outweigh the politics, and the politics are on occasion genuinely original or enlightening. It's a book I'd encourage you to start reading, but also to give up when you start getting bored - it's really not worth the slog through to the end.</div>
Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-10013989180411123602019-03-11T14:23:00.001-07:002019-03-11T14:24:28.685-07:00Stability and EqualityA lot of political theorists talk about equality as a requirement for social stability, without having an explicit theory of mobs. This strikes me as a significant absence.<br />
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Social stability is not just about avoiding mobs, of course - it's also about keeping crime down, ensuring that pressure for change happens through peaceful channels, etc. But the sight of mobs rampaging through the streets is perhaps the most visible failure of states to maintain public order, and is surely a significant piece of what we ordinarily mean and care about under the banner of "stability".<br />
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(This is particularly true for theorists at the more cynical end of constructivism, who may regard society as an implicit compact between the proletariat and bourgeousie, in which the proletariat are granted certain rights and privileges in order to stave off revolution.)<br />
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I intend this not as a criticism of egalitarians, but as a debating point within egalitarianism. There are a wide range of factors which may plausibly reduce or exacerbate the risk of social disorder, and which have implications for the kind of egalitarianism one would endorse:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>The perception that the masses have little to lose from rioting (suggesting a need for broad-based prosperity)</li>
<li>The perception that social elite possess large quantities of goods worth taking (suggesting a need for levelling down)</li>
<li>The perception that social elites acquired their wealth unfairly (suggesting a need for equality before the law, and possibly more besides)</li>
<li>The presence of intelligent and hard-working people who are unable to succeed within established institutions (suggesting a need for equality of opportunity, but not for equality of income)</li>
<li>The perception that public authorities are biased against particular groups within society (which could point in a number of directions)</li>
</ul>
<div>
...and so on. Moreover, it matters how these interact. For example, one very simple (and highly dubious) model might suggest that all five of the above factors are individually necessary for riots to start. (An uncontroversial case of this is fire, where fuel, energy, and oxygen are all individually necessary for a fire to start.) In this case, we could focus on abolishing only one of the causes - perhaps whichever was cheapest to treat, or whichever cause we find most distasteful for other reasons.</div>
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A more realistic model would seek to quantify inequality of various types, and would give them different weights for their contribution to the frequency of riots starting and to the damage caused by riots. It seems likely, then, that if the achievement of social stability requires state action this is likely to require action against multiple different notions of inequality - we cannot focus on a single form of inequality.</div>
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I think this is far more a critique of egalitarian theory rather than of practice. John Rawls may have attempted to reduce equality to "sufficient and equal civil and political liberties, and maximisation of the primary social goods available to the worst-off class within society", but actually-existing democratic states are concerned to reduce economic equality, racial inequality, inequality of access to political institutions, ensure equal treatment before the law...</div>
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Speculatively, we might also take this an argument <i>against </i>the idea that inequality is intrinsically bad. Theories of the importance-in-itself of equality tend to end up focussing upon one particular conception of inequality. I think we have here a strong argument that no one conception of inequality is likely to satisfy all of our intuitions about the importance of equality, and ultimately the best evidence for egalitarianism - as with all moral theories - is derived from our intuitions.</div>
Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-6429634850803992132018-07-13T14:50:00.000-07:002018-07-13T14:50:10.767-07:00Anna Meredith & 59 Productions: Five TelegramsThe First Night of the Proms this year concluded with the premiere of a specially commissioned piece, <i>Five Telegrams</i> by Anna Meredith, themed around WWI communications and accompanied by a lights display. The five movements combined to around 22 minutes; it should be possible to find the video on iPlayer for the next few weeks, and who knows? Maybe it will be on YouTube after that.<br />
<br />
The first movement was energetic, with lights that could have come out of a disco; it was fun, but I don't have any particular desire to hear it again. The second was quieter and more contemplative, with lights that were more obviously designed than random, but still leaving it unclear what actual value they were supposed to add beyond pretties. Perhaps there was something deep or interesting going on in the music; if so, I didn't catch it.<br />
<br />
The third and fourth movements, however, were much better. The third, themed around the redaction of postcards sent home by WWI soldiers, had a driving flow with fun little lights going on and off in time; there was a rhythmic interplay between plucked strings and some Javanese-sounding percussion, with snatches of woodwind joining in. The fourth, themed around codes, had a similar energy but was much more showy about it.<br />
<br />
The final movement was in some ways less enjoyable than the two which had preceded it, but nonetheless had clear musical merit. It portrayed the feelings of people experiencing the armistice, and after a truly wonderful opening with a cello solo built up towards a kind of climax, never clearly in either a major or a minor key: both present, neither overwhelming the other. It died away in what felt like a bit of a disappointment after twenty minutes of music, but was perhaps appropriate to the subject.<br />
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Overall I'd be very enthusiastic to hear the last three movements again, and for their sake would sit through the first two.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-19346995637534464972018-06-02T14:32:00.000-07:002018-06-02T14:32:02.439-07:00Dictionaries are No Longer Useful For ArgumentationHistorically, one of the most important tools for resolving any philosophical debate has been the dictionary. When you encounter a thorny topic like "do we possess free will?", a healthy first instinct is to consult your nearest or most authoritative dictionary in order to establish exactly what the words "free will" mean.<br />
<br />
The reason for this is clear. Such debates typically lead to people attempting to twist the meanings of words in ways that are favourable to their views. The only answer is to outsource the business of defining these words to people who have training and experience in divining the precise meanings of words, and who do not have a dog in the particular philosophical fight.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, this is no longer true. See, for example, this recent tweet from Dictionary.com:<br />
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Well, actually, mansplaining refers to the practice of a man explaining something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ItsNotVeryNice?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#ItsNotVeryNice</a><a href="https://t.co/0DXbJWmj6Q">https://t.co/0DXbJWmj6Q</a> <a href="https://t.co/Jy1tTJWNEz">https://t.co/Jy1tTJWNEz</a></div>
— Dictionary.com (@Dictionarycom) <a href="https://twitter.com/Dictionarycom/status/1001517260668796928?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 29, 2018</a></blockquote>
This is far from an isolated example of the social media teams of online dictionaries intervening in political discourse. See, for instance this article of <a href="https://moneyish.com/ish/10-times-merriam-webster-has-majorly-trolled-donald-trump/">10 times Merriam Webster has majorly trolled Donald Trump</a>. The common factor to these cases, of course, is that they are intervening from a progressive standpoint. It's not just the social media teams - the very fact that a dictionary is willing to include SJW terms like "mansplaining" is a sign that they are no longer impartial arbitrators of our shared language.<br />
<br />
The consequences of this are clear. We can no longer argue things "by definition" or "by looking up what the dictionary says", because these alleged "definitions" are being rigged. Moreover, any attempts to argue in this way should be taken as signs of braindead progressivism.<br />
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Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-51877659462982042242018-05-21T15:13:00.000-07:002018-05-21T15:13:40.402-07:00Can Prediction Markets Reduce Sexual Harassment?Recently the @litenitenoah twitter account observed that:<br />
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Prediction markets for sexual harassment accusations don't seem very ethical, but I bet they would successfully expose a lot of real harassers.</div>
— Probably not Noah Smith but you never know (@latenitenoah) <a href="https://twitter.com/latenitenoah/status/994793314422489088?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 11, 2018</a></blockquote>
I'm not certain what ethical objections not-Noah has in mind, and suspect that I probably don't care about them. If prediction markets in sexual harassment (henceforth PMSHs) have the effect of reducing sexual harassment, then this is good and it will take a lot to convince me that the markets are overall not worth having. (There used to be a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market">prediction market in terrorism</a>, which was shut down after outrage from politicians.) That said, it remains an open question as to whether or not PMSHs actually <i>will</i> have this effect.<br />
<br />
After a couple of weeks of on-and-off thinking about this, I want to suggest that any PMSH will have both some specific advantages and some specific disadvantages. At present my fear is that the disadvantages win out; however, The size of these effects will of course depend upon the precise way in which these prediction markets are implemented. One of my aims with this post, then, is to open up discussion about how exactly these markets can be designed so as to maximise the good and minimise the bad.<br />
<br />
It is also worth stating, as a preliminary, a couple of limitations on all of this. Firstly, prediction markets are means of aggregating information, but they are not by themselves a means of governance. They can function as part of a government mechanism, as in Robin Hanson's futarchy, but only as a part. What this means is that while PMSHs may give us a reasonable idea of which men are abusers, it does not in itself provide a means towards actual trying men who may be guilty: any trial will require a concrete accusation from a concrete victim. This does not mean PMSHs can't reduce harassment, however, as we will shortly see.<br />
<br />
Second, it is typically assumed in discussions of prediction markets that the existence of and odds given by markets do not affect the outcome being predicted. This may well not hold in this case - a victim might be emboldened to speak out against her harasser if the prediction market says he is probably a harasser, or might alternatively conclude that someone else is likely to come forward and there is no need to subject herself to examination in court. The fact that prediction market odds can affect the outcome is not by itself a problem - one might imagine a prediction market for individuals' health and life expectancies, with individuals buying bullishly on themselves so as to have a financial incentive to eat well and exercise - but it can cause problems, which we will discuss later.<br />
<br />
Lastly before getting onto the ins and outs: I shall be proceeding on the assumption that prediction markets are basically efficient at aggregating information. If you disagree with this premise, please take that up elsewhere with Robin Hanson or someone, and accept it for the sake of argument in this post.<br />
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<b>The case in favour</b><br />
<br />
In my view, there are two large advantages which any PMSH would have, and two other advantages which PMSHs might have depending upon their design and size, and one other advantage whose size is difficult to gauge.<br />
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Firstly, there already exist informal whisper-networks, mostly though by no means entirely between women, about which men are not to be trusted or enabled. These networks can enable women to reduce their vulnerability to potential harassers, and can enable concerned third-parties to jump in to head off and stop harassment at an early opportunity. The effect of a prediction market would be to make this information, in an admittedly less-finely-detailed format, available to all concerned. Women should not have to change their behaviour to avoid being harassed, but since in some cases they can having access to PMSHs would give them a better idea of when this is necessary; concerned friends, similarly would be in a better position to know which men ought not to be left alone with young women for significant lengths of time, and which men really are harmless.<br />
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Second, harassers are frequently enabled by the institutions in which they work or serve. Larry Nassar, the former medic at Michigan State University and USA Athletics, was able to abuse over 300 women and girls because of silence surrounding his activities which had been going on since the 1990s. Such silences can only be maintained because institutions and the people within them have plausible deniability about whether they were truly aware of abuse going on. PMSHs would remove that deniability: having a high predicted odds of being accused of harassment would be an instant red flag that would make it much harder for institutions to engage in the kind of motivated ignorance which allows abuse to continue over extended periods of time.<br />
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An advantage which I think would be real, but can only speak for anecdotally, would accrue to men with prediction markets on their own odds of being accused of harassment. I do not wish to harass women; being of imperfect social intelligence, however, I frequently struggle to identify which behaviours will be taken as playful flirting or everyday platonic compliments, and which will be experienced as threatening by the women at whom they are directed. Of course I try to err on the side of safety, but I can hardly pretend that I have always succeeded here. Having an external evaluation of how threatening I am seen as would allow me to better calibrate my behaviour - was that girl giving of signs of distress that I didn't pick up on and the other guy did, or did he just want her to dance with him instead? Do I need to reduce the amount of alcohol I consume when going out on the town? Certainly I'm not alone in asking myself these questions - more than one male friend has expressed similar concerns in private conversations.<br />
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I wish to mention two other ways in which PMSHs might - might - serve to reduce sexual harassment. One of the biggest problems in tackling sexual abuse is that victims are, entirely reasonably, unwilling to publicly accuse their abusers because doing so will mean exposing deeply personal aspects of their lives to strangers. Whether you consider this to be the Patriarchy in action, an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of having a well-functioning justice system, or a bit of both, this is the constraint within which we have to work. PMSHs would allow women to provide information about their abusers anonymously, by buying bets that the abuser will in fact be accused.<br />
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The advantage I am most doubtful about - and which I think a PMSH would ultimately have to jettison - is that it may provide some material compensation to women who do expose their abusers. A woman who has bought bets on the man who harassed her may stand to make money by actually going public, which may make her more likely to go public and/or may alleviate her loss of privacy, for example by allowing her to spend a while in a new location without running down her savings.<br />
<br />
<b>The case against PMSHs</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
There are two issues with this, however, which I suspect mean that a well-functioning PMSH would have to prevent women from financially benefiting by accusing men. Firstly, it is not clear that this incentive would only affect cases where abuse actually did occur. This may therefore create cases where men are falsely accused of harassment by women who want to make money out of the accusation.<br />
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This is unlikely to be an especially widespread problem - while false accusations of rape do occur, they are at most a small minority of actual accusations. That said, the prospect of such accusations means that there will be an obvious new brush with which genuine victims can be tarred - any man accused of harassing women may simply claim that his accusers are mercenaries trying to destroy his reputation for money. This will both create extra stress for genuine victims, and may lead courts to wrongly fail to convict a higher proportion of genuine abusers.<br />
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It is possible that we may come up with a way to prevent false accusers from financially benefiting from their accusations. Suffice it to say, however, that I have not yet thought up such a way, and this is my greatest worry as to why PMSHs may ultimately be unworkable or counterproductive.<br />
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A second major concern is that rich abusers may be able to cover up perceptions of their threat level by buying all bets on their being exposed. This is not the absolute worst possible scenario - it would at least mean that they would pay <i>some</i> price for their misdeeds - but it might allow them a pretence of harmlessness which the informal whisper-networks would have quickly dissipated. We all know stories of rich artists who have raped young women and got away with it; while it might be better that they were in prison, at least their reputations provide a warning to other young women who fall into their orbits. These men might be able to counteract or upend these reputations by betting financially on their not being accused.<br />
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There are other, smaller, objections, mostly of the form that PMSHs do not go far enough or are insufficient - that they would only take into account abuse of women with money, or that only men who are already in some way notable would have PMSHs surrounding them. These objections might well be correct, but they are not reasons to oppose PMSHs, merely to think that they must serve as part of a whole package of measures we might take to reduce abuse.<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusion</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
My current suspicion is that the disadvantages win out - that PMSHs might well, on balance, make it easier for men to get away with abuse. There are ways to combat this - for example, by preventing men from betting on their own behaviour, and by preventing people from both holding bets that a person will be accused and accusing that same person. If these are even achievable, however, they may undermine the advantages that are supposed to make PMSHs useful.<br />
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This should not be the final word. I would welcome any suggestions as to how PMSHs can be designed so as to avoid incentivising false accusations - and as importantly, to avoid giving the impression of incentivising false false accusations - and as to how they can prevent rich abusers from rigging their own reputations. But it seems clear to me that such suggestions are sorely needed before PMSHs can serve as a tool for making women safer.<br />
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Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-60385918603759847792018-03-08T14:17:00.003-08:002018-03-08T14:36:35.902-08:00Notes on Never Eat Alone<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">I’m about 60% of the way through Keith Ferrazzi’s widely-recommended book on networking,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> </span><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Never-Eat-Alone-Secrets-Relationship/dp/0385346654" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Never Eat Alone</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> As such, this is not a comprehensive review but rather a few notes on things</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">that have so far struck me while reading it.</span></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-a5b64a9d-07b0-5ee7-4211-672f4ccc3593" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Where is the actual work being done?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">The impression one gets of Ferrazzi’s life from the book is that it (a) creates absolutely</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">enormous amounts of value for people and (b) involves little to nothing that we would</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">recognise as “ordinary work”. That’s not to say that he is lazy - the effort he apparently goes</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">to in making contacts and ensuring that he is adding value to their lives is nothing short of</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">heroic. But this seems to be all that is happening - there are descriptions of planning ahead</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">(i.e. planning which people to meet and befriend), and of strategies for meeting people,</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">directing meetings, and maintaining relationships, but none at all of making important</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">decisions. Indeed, there’s a mention of one senior business leader who attributes his</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">success to spending hours each day patrolling the factory, not actually achieving anything</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">but being sure to greet every individual worker, no matter how lowly, by their first name.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">I don’t want to suggest that this kind of stuff is unimportant or that it “isn’t work”. But for it</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">to be viable for businesses to pay people like Ferazzi megabucks for it, one is led inexorably</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">to the conclusion that either (a) most business purchasing decisions have a very great deal</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">of latitude, such that decision-makers can actually decide from whom to buy based on who</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">the know and like rather than product cost and quality, or (b) the business world is a</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">chronically low-trust place, such that the creation of these relationships really is incredibly</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">valuable not just to the individuals concerned but to society as a whole - if there were not these</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">strong bonds being forged, the deals would not be going through at all. There’s probably also</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">a fair dollop of (c), that the book - being focused on networking, after all - misses out a lot of</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Ferazzi’s other activities, but neither (a) nor (b) exactly fills one with optimism about the state</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">of the American business world.*</span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">It me</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">He argues that conferences are basically useless for learning things, but that they are</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">nevertheless highly valuable because they allow business-people to make connections</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">leading to contracts. To wit, one of his “Don’t Be This Person” profiles (page 133):</span></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">THE WALLFLOWER: The limp handshake, the postion in the far corner of the room, the</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">unassuming demeanour - all signs that this person thinks he or she is there to watch the speakers.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">The determinants of success</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">If I were to summarise the lessons of the book so far, they would be that social success</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">depends upon five factors: planning, research, organisation, confidence, and actively seeking</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">to create value for people.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Ferrazzi regularly thinks consciously about what his goals are, and sets out concrete action</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">plans for what he wants to achieve towards them in the next 90 days, the next year, and the</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">next three years. In particular, one aspect of planning I had never considered before s that in</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">addition to setting goals for himself, he identifies several people - not just for each goal, but</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">for each progress marker - who can bring him closer to his ambitions. The chosen goals and</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">targets are based on a mixture of introspection about what he truly wants, and consultation</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">with others (of course) about what his strengths and weaknesses are. There isn’t much</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">about tracking one’s progress towards these once started, but it seems safe to assume</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">that’s part of it too.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Second - he prepares for his networking. Quoting from page 69:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">“Before I meet with any new people I’ve been thinking of introducing myself to, I research who</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">they are and what their business is. I find out what’s important to them: their hobbies, challenges,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">goals - inside their business and out. Before the meeting, I generally prepare, or have my assistant</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">1prepare, a one-page synopsis on the person I’m about to meet… I want to know what this person</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">is like as a human being, what he or she feels strongly about, and what his or her proudest</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">achievements are.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">He suggests a variety of ways to go about compiling this information, all of which should</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">be available online - social media, company PR literature, and annual reports from the company.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">A while back, one notoriously successful networker raised considerable furor by revealing that</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">he </span><a href="http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/comment/column/9497/why-i-rank-my-friends-by-income-iq-and-hotness/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">kept a list of his friends</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">, ranking them on a variety of metrics including income, political</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">soundness (for his own warped value of “soundness”), and physical attractiveness. Ferrazzi</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">doesn’t recommend anything quite so calculating, but he reveals that he goes beyond merely</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">keeping a list of contacts to divide them up into 1s, 2s, and 3s, and makes contact with them</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">on a schedule according to their importance within this schema. He also advises that a new</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">contact will only remember you after they’ve had contact with you via three different media,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">and he communicates accordingly - if he emailed them originally, he’ll strive to speak to them</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">on the phone and to meet them in person within the next few months, for example.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">One of the reasons I’d be appalling in his job is that I’d have nowhere near his confidence in</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">pushing boundaries. I can just about get the idea of trying to meet people well above your</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">station and maybe even solicit favours from them - but his advice that people will tolerate</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">being contacted, unsolicited, five times a day seems remarkable. I used to work in a call</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">centre, and we would frequently have people screaming at us if we called them three times</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">in a week. Perhaps this is a difference between the UK and the USA?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">But the most optimistic key to the golden gates, and a positive note to end on, is his emphasis</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">on unconditionally aiming to create value for other people. Whenever someone mentions a</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">problem to him, he describes his thought process as “Who do I know who could help this</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">person with their problem?” He portrays himself as generous with his time and keen to do</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">favours, and I have no particular reason to believe that he is being dishonest; and above all,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">while he is clear that you should be receiving favours as well as giving them, states as the</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">title of one of the earliest chapters - Don’t Keep Score. This cuts both ways - being willing to</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">receive favours that you can’t repay as well as to give out favours with no particular prospect</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">of them being returned to you - but after all, there’s nothing wrong with being clear about</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">what others can do for you, so long as one is gracious in accepting them and pays it on to</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">someone else.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Overall the book’s advice seems actionable; the chapters are short, containing a minimum of</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">fat; and I am so far happy to add to the recommendations of it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">*Ferrazzi also finds the time for long monastic retreats, weeks building schools by hand in</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Africa, spending six months unemployed between jobs, and the like. Again I have no</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">objections to his presence in the business world, he seems to be creating enormous</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">amounts of value for those who know him - but it contributes further to the impression that</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">what value he creates is concentrated within a relatively low number of events, as opposed</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">to the long grind of value-creation that characterises most jobs.</span></div>
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Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-31291272818224855942018-03-02T16:24:00.001-08:002018-03-02T16:24:57.164-08:00Three Routes to ElitismOpen and explicit elitism is a greatly underrated political position. Being contrary to the democratic ethos of our times, "elitist" is more commonly a derogatory adjective than a merely descriptive one. In this post, I shall set out three ways in which one might attempt to justify elitism, and suggest ways in which they may be flawed.<br />
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<b>Route One: Aren't We Great!</b><br />
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This is the most basic route to elitism, and it is almost as simple as the title above suggests. This is the elitism of pub sessions, of putting the world to rights over a pint or six. Most people probably think that the world would be better off if they were in charge, but the difference is that <i>we</i> - being the cognitive elite, as evidenced by our smart conversations - are actually justified in this belief.<br />
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Well, clearly most people who engage in this kind of reasoning aren't justified in it. I actually <i>do</i> think that at least some of the people I know personally are justified in it, but the fact is that even explicitly elitist politics is highly unlikely to put <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project">Superforecasters</a> and the like into positions of power. In practice, an openly elitist political system would resemble the average academic department. If we're lucky, a science department where people would at least be highly numerate; if we're unlucky, a humanities department, which are mostly full of "<a href="https://twitter.com/adrwtp/status/962089622653276161">people like Hillary Clinton</a> with<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/09/how-alternate-nostril-breathing-works/539955/"> faulty BS detectors</a>, poor critical thinking skills, and severe social desirability bias." When one advocates for elitism, one should think of oneself as advocating less for the rule of sensible people like oneself, so much as advocating for the rule of humanities postgrads.<br />
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<b>Route Two: Whig History</b><br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.hungarybudapestguide.com/wp-content/uploads/ByNight7-500x333.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.hungarybudapestguide.com/wp-content/uploads/ByNight7-500x333.jpg" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="500" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Széchenyi Chain Bridge, a symbol of both Budapest and<br />Hungary. This is not the original bridge, which was destroyed<br />during the Second World War and had to be rebuilt.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istv%C3%A1n_Sz%C3%A9chenyi">Count István Széchenyi</a> left an impressive set of institutions around Budapest. The most famous are the Chain Bridge across the Danube and the Széchenyi Thermal Baths, but he also founded the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the National Casino. In addition to this, he conducted various measures to improve the navigability of the Danube and to open it up to steamships, and wrote a great deal of classical liberal political theory. (Since I'm posing Széchenyi as a champion of elitism, it is interesting to contrast him with another figure of 1840s Hungarian politics, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lajos_Kossuth">Lajos Kossuth</a>. Kossuth was far better known abroad, since after the collapse of the 1848 rebellion he lived abroad as perhaps the single greatest voice of democratic liberal nationalism. Kossuth is every bit as celebrated as Széchenyi - the square in which the Hungarian parliament stands is named for him - but it is almost impossible to point to anything he established which lasted beyond 1849).<br />
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Going back further in Hungarian history, the arrival of the Renaissance in Hungary is credited more or less entirely to King <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Corvinus">Matthias Corvinus</a>. Corvinus was not dealt an especially powerful hand - he started his kingship as a puppet of his uncle - but he greatly expanded his power by establishing a professional army, introducing legal reforms and curbs on baronial power, and creating meritocracy in state service.<br />
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The point at which I am driving is that some people <i>do things</i>. Sometimes these things are good, sometimes they are bad, but ultimately they create a small minority upon which progress is dependent. If you want society to progress, the best you can do is to create processes which select for these people and deliver as much power to them as possible.<br />
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One important thing to note is that while both of these lines of thinking lead to elitism, they lead to rather different elites - "Aren't We Great" suggests we want our leaders chosen for their intelligence, while "Whig History" suggests we should choose them for being driven and conscientious.<br />
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The biggest objection to this kind of elitism is the conservative worry that they will tear apart all that we have achieved. To be honest I think that's probably enough by itself - political deadlock is annoying, but kicking the machine to make it work is generally bad. One might also question the model of the world on which it rests. It may well be that the emergence of Hungary as a prosperous nation in the late 19th century owes a massive amount to Count Széchenyi, but how many other countries are there whose development could be traced to the positive actions of a single person?<br />
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<b>Route Three: If not the elites, then who?</b><br />
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I don't think anarchy is feasible, at least for the foreseeable future. It's not that I don't see anarcho-capitalism as a valuable ideal towards which me might aspire, but that people have yet to breed out their tribal instincts and the abolition of the state would lead in short order to massive demand either for a new one, or to its effective replacement with clans. Given this, it makes sense to have a government which is at least somewhat under our control.<br />
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Since there must be a government, there must be someone in charge. So... why not the elites? It's true that power attracts people with unsavoury motivations and brings out people's corruption, but that will happen whoever you put in charge. Good traits - not just things like intelligence, health, and height, but also pro-social and trusting attitudes - are positively correlated for the most part. So if it's a choice between the common man and the credulous, unoriginal, unspiring elite <a href="https://twitter.com/lenadunham/status/694183655703494656?lang=en">in pantsuits</a>... give me the elite every time.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-86636120757284424942018-02-28T15:06:00.000-08:002018-02-28T15:06:55.461-08:00Clearing out some old links<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-5b0690e302a38cf2a8068158199e7a21.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="255" data-original-width="367" height="222" src="https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-5b0690e302a38cf2a8068158199e7a21.webp" width="320" /></a></div>
<a href="https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-find-the-positive-integer-solutions-to-frac-x-y%2Bz-%2B-frac-y-z%2Bx-%2B-frac-z-x%2By-4">Solution here.</a><br />
<br />
A neural net <a href="https://medium.com/@hondanhon/i-trained-a-neural-net-to-generate-british-placenames-9460e907e4e9">creating names for British towns</a>. There's <a href="https://twitter.com/urnowentering">an associated Twitter account</a>, though it does lose its charm after a while.<br />
<br />
A <a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/reason-and-romance-the-worlds-most-cerebral-marriage">lovely old profile</a> of Derek Parfit (pbuh) and Janet Radcliffe-Richards. I don't really know the work of the Churchlands, but it's in my links folder so <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/12/two-heads?mbid=social_facebook">let's unload that too</a>.<br />
<br />
A brief discussion of <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/07/18/332405357/are-works-of-art-relics">the value of art</a>, very interesting in the light of Hanson and Simler.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/dungeons-dragons-saved-my-life?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter">HAIL SATAN!</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2o7c4x/married_people_what_did_you_not_find_out_about/cmkoipo/">Some wholesomeness for you</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://imgur.com/a/aXzJG">Photos of a real war fought with bows and arrows</a>. (Content warning: unpleasant photos of wounded people).<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/09/argentina-fake-weddings-falsa-boda?CMP=share_btn_tw">This is the future liberals want</a>.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.citylab.com/design/2016/03/the-tackiest-architecture-vasily-klyukin-cobra-tower/473946/">At least it's not brutalism</a>.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-79129341875283783452018-02-26T13:55:00.001-08:002018-02-26T13:55:54.860-08:00The Pinkerian Case for Campus SJWismLast week, courtesy of a commercial offer which I am shamelessly and ruthlessly abusing, I was able to attend a talk by Steven Pinker discussing his new book <i>Enlightenment Now</i>. I haven't yet had the time to look beyond the opening pages, so if you want a review on the book you should go to <a href="https://salonium.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/review-enlightenment-now/">the one written by his ultimate fangirl</a>. However, after the talk I was able to ask him the question:<br />
<br />
"Many people who accept the trends you point to argue that due to the decline of religion and of thick communities, it is harder for individuals to find meaning and purpose in their lives. Do you agree with this assessment, and either (a) why not? or (b) do you expect it to continue?"<br />
<br />
He disagreed with this assessment, giving two counterarguments. The first, which I don't find especially compelling (although IIRC I found it rather more compelling when Peter Singer said the same thing in <a href="http://cafe-regence.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/review-most-good-you-can-do.html">a book I was otherwise disappointed by</a>) was that people can find meaning in making a better world in general. People are not, in general, motivated strongly by the prospect of making the universe better. (<a href="https://nintil.com/2018/01/16/this-review-is-not-about-reviewing-the-elephant-in-the-brain/">Ctrl-f "charity"</a>). There definitely are some people who are, and more power to them, but I don't think universalism can play the role in people's lives that, for many years, deities did.<br />
<br />
His second, more convincing response was that people are finding new ways to build meaning in their lives. The example he himself gave was social justice movements on campuses - a purpose which many people choose for themselves as a purpose to which they can dedicate themselves. People may no longer identify as Christians, but they are very happy to identify as feminists.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-21676456108442235522018-02-26T04:03:00.003-08:002018-02-26T04:03:50.732-08:00Review: The Most Good You Can Do<i>I originally wrote this review in June 2015 for what was intended to be a collection of reviews of books with interesting and/or provocative these. Unfortunately, the person who was organising the collection did not manage to publish it before they left the ASI; I was reminded of this book by another discussion, and so am making the review generally available. This is the review as I submitted it, without any changes.</i><br />
<br />
Peter Singer achieved prominence as a moral philosopher in the 1970s with a series of books and
articles arguing for controversial positions in impeccably logical fashion. One article in particular,
<i>Famine, Affluence and Morality</i> (1972) argued that as members of rich, developed nations, we have
strong duties of rescue to people living in less developed countries. This line of thinking has spawned
the Effective Altruism movement, a set of groups whose members are pledged to ending poverty,
saving the world, and in general averting suffering wherever they see it. Effective altruists, due to
their focus upon concrete impact, think and act very differently from members of other charitable
movements. <i>The Most Good You Can Do</i> functions as an introduction to this movement, presenting
an introduction to and defence of its main beliefs and practices.<br />
<br />
The opening chapters give a brief description of the movement and of how it came about. This
includes some of the controversial claims to which effective altruists tend to subscribe – notably,
that one is unlikely to achieve a great deal of good by working for a typical charity. When one is
employed by a charity, this is likely to fill a role in the charity which could equally well have been
done by any other volunteer. If one instead finds a well-paid job and donates money to the charity,
the net positive impact of one’s career is likely to be far greater. This has led to some effective
altruists seeking out employment in financial trading, despite the rather poor reputations held by
financial firms regarding the morality of their practices.<br />
<br />
The second section of the book deals with some of the specific actions taken by effective altruists.
These include reducing one’s consumption in order to give more, seeking high-earning jobs, and
donating organs. The chapter on earning to give contains the first seriously philosophical sections of
the book, a response to objections made by David Brooks and by the ghost of Bernard Williams. In
response to the idea that earning to give sacrifices one’s integrity and alienates a person from their
personal goals and projects, Singer claims (without much in the way of argument) that merely “doing
good” is a perfectly adequate goal for one’s life – in which case earning to give, far from
representing the subjugation of one’s aims to an imperative to maximise global utility, can be the
ultimate expression of authenticity.<br />
<br />
In response to the idea that going into finance upholds and strengthens the system of capitalism
which impoverishes many and drives inequality, Singer engages in a brief defence of capitalism,
pointing to the fact that it has “lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty”. Finally he
considers the idea that going into finance harms people, and that ‘do not harm’ ought to be prior to
‘do the most good’ as a principle of morality. Singer questions this priority with an example drawn
from the London Blitz, but seems to devote more attention to attacking the account of harm upon
which the objection rests. It is unclear that Singer needs to defend earning to give against these
specific objections – while finance is one career path for someone who earns to give, there are after
all a range of alternatives including law, consultancy, and entrepreneurship.<br />
<br />
In addition to these, Singer discusses a range of other careers in which one’s impact might be
directly through the work – among others effective altruist advocacy, jobs in aid organisations, and
medical research. Finally, he discusses the good one can achieve by donating parts of one’s body.
Since many people are unwilling to donate kidneys except in exchange for kidneys to save the lives
of their own friends and family, someone who is willing to donate a kidney without attaching
conditions can start a “kidney chain” of multiple donations, perhaps saving five or six lives through a
single donation. Unfortunately the number of such donors is currently small (117 in the UK in 2013;
the US figure, adjusted for population, is worse), not helped by the fact that until 2006 such
donations were in fact illegal in the UK.<br />
<br />
The third section of the book discusses the factors which motivate effective altruists to undertake
apparently sacrificial actions purely in order to help others. Singer suggests that the emergence of
effective altruism represents a triumph of reasoning over emotion, and presents a range of evidence
to show that members of the wider population are usually moved to act altruistically more out of
instinct than out of reasoned consideration. He also argues that we tend to overestimate how much
happiness we will lose out on by giving away money and to fail to recognise the sense of purpose
and self-esteem which many people gain from helping others.<br />
<br />
The final section of the book presents perhaps the most controversial claims which effective altruists
universally take for granted: that some charities and causes are simply better than others. Singer
observes that, while poverty and suffering exist the whole world round, it is generally a lot easier to
relieve them in the third world than in the first world. Singer compares a program of Rubella
vaccination by philanthropist Ted Turner, estimated to have prevented around 13.8 million deaths
between 2000-2012 at an average cost of $80 per life saved, with a 2007 operation which separated
two conjoined twins from Costa Rica at a cost running into millions of dollars.<br />
<br />
After sharply criticising the practice of spending megabucks on improving museums while there are
starving children in Africa, Singer turns to some issues which are not universally accepted even by
effective altruists. The first is animal rights; the second, the perhaps less familiar subject of
existential risk. Given that (hopefully) the vast majority of humans have yet to exist, one of the
biggest threats to the sum of human wellbeing is the risk of becoming extinct. Efforts to reduce the
risks of nuclear war, asteroid impacts, and unfriendly artificial intelligence, then, could be a
remarkably effective form of charitable giving.<br />
<br />
All in all, <i>The Most Good You Can Do</i> is very readable and serves well as an introduction to the
effective altruist movement. Even as someone who has been involved with effective altruism for
almost two years, I learned things from reading it. Since the book is more a summary of existing
arguments than an attempt to break new ground, the arguments made are perhaps not as strong as
one might expect, with an often unnecessary reliance upon utilitarianism.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-64454815059672254812018-01-14T15:40:00.000-08:002018-01-14T15:40:09.165-08:00Review: Jorge Luis Borges, FiccionesBorges is a writer who I had been somewhat aware of for a while, read a few passages of and enjoyed, but never got around to reading deliberately. So when I set out a reading list for 2018, his collection <i>Ficciones, </i>generally regarded as the most accessible starting point in reading him, seemed an obvious inclusion.<br />
<br />
<i>Ficciones</i> is a set of seventeen short stories, originally published in two separate volumes in the 1940s and then later collated; they first appeared in English in 1962. Borges wrote in Spanish, though he was heavily influenced by English writers, in particular G. K. Chesterton. There is a tremendous playfulness in many of Borges' stories, exemplified by my favourite story from the collection: <i>Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote</i>. Pierre Menard is a deceased author and the story is an appreciation of his work, in particular of his greatest project: an attempt to rewrite <i>Don Quixote </i>in the exact same words used by Miguel de Cervantes. The narrator of this story therefore takes Menard to have made a conscious decision to write not in his own native land and time, but instead in "the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope". His Don Quixote is a wild and romantic figure, in contrast to de Cervantes' more pedestrian protagonist.<br />
<br />
There are other wonderful stories. <i>The Library of Babel</i> is an excellent counterpoint and companion to <i>Pierre Menard</i>, <i>Three Versions of Judas</i> is another masterful piece of intellectual trolling, and <i>The Form of the Sword</i> and <i>Theme of the Traitor and the Hero</i> provide scintillating plots which blast by in only a few pages. Borges' writing style goes after my own heart, with numerous allusions to both the real and the imaginary. But the quality is distinctly uneven. <i>The Circular Ruins</i> is eminently forgettable. <i>The End</i> will seem quite pointless to anyone who is not already familiar with the Argentine national epic <i>Martín Fierro</i>. Perhaps the biggest disappointment is <i>The Secret Miracle</i>, a story about a Jewish playwright in 1940s Prague struggling to complete his masterwork before his execution by the Nazis. By a miracle he is allowed to unfurl it all to its conclusion, to put each word into place - but only in his head, and it dies with him. There's a fantastic basis for a story there, but it seems so incomplete. One might argue that the point would be spoiled if we were to know what this play is about, but I'm not buying that - we already know that he was granted this miracle to complete it, something which no-one else inside the story would have been privy to. So the content of this play seems like a massive missed opportunity to draw parallels with the greater story, to exude some moral about life, or to draw some dramatic irony with the situation in which the playwright finds himself.<br />
<br />
Indeed, with several of the less allusive stories one begins to wonder why one does not simply read the Wikipedia page for each of the stories. Perhaps one does not gain so much intellectually from reading <i>Pierre Menard </i>that one could not also learn from the Wikipedia page, but Borges' charming voice makes the extra reading time well worth the investment. Some of the better stories combine abstract theorising and an actual story, again making them worth the time to read properly. But unless one enjoys all of the writing styles which Borges employs, one is liable to find some of the stories to be distinctly full of air and little else.<br />
<br />
Overall, I definitely recommend the book - if nothing else, most of the stories are pretty short and there's a pdf of Borges' collected works to be found on Google for free, so the costs of trying him and not enjoying it are trivial. More importantly, while there are some dull stories the greatest stories are magnificent, and the good significantly outweighs the mediocre. But if, after a couple of pages into a story, you still have no idea what it's actually about, take that as a sign that it may be worth skipping ahead to the next one.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-24914068936238699702018-01-09T16:16:00.000-08:002018-01-09T16:16:06.136-08:00The Elephant in the Brain: some notes<i>The Elephant in the Brain</i>, written by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson and recently out in paperback, is best viewed as two books on connected topics. The first is a convincing argument that "the elephant" exists: that we consistently engage in self-deceptive behaviour for purposes of social gain. The second is a serious of arguments, ranging from the highly plausible to the outrageous, that this explains various the function (or malfunction) of various human social behaviours.<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<u>The Elephant</u></div>
<div>
<u><br /></u></div>
<div>
The first section of the book presents multiple lines of argument leading inexorably to the conclusion that many of our behaviours are inexplicable in the first person but are on some level intended, in a way that a third party might easily observe, towards attaining social advancement. This is made possible by the modular structure of the brain, in which sections of the brain may have the ability to make decisions but not to communicate them or defend them. Crucially, we are unable to distinguish between those actions caused by the parts of our brain which also control what we say and those caused by other parts of the brain: hence, we will typically invent justifications for such actions which will own nothing to the actual motivations behind them.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The upshot of this is that one section of the brain can engage in devious, cynical scheming, and we are free to act upon this advice while having no conscious awareness of it, and therefore being able to honestly protest complete innocence when accused of holding these devious and cynical motives.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Hanson and Simler present a range of evidence for this, which I won't reiterate partly because other reviews will cover it and partly because I didn't take very good notes and really need to reread this section of the book. What I do remember finding illuminating, however, is the way they placed features of humans in the wider context of nature. Why is the American Redwood tree so tall? On clear and flat ground, being taller doesn't allow a tree to get any more sunlight but it does mean that the tree has to acquire more nutrients and transport them further upwards. The answer, of course, is that redwoods don't originate from clear and flat ground: they have to be as tall as, or taller than, the trees around them in order to have access to sunlight. The redwoods become so tall because of competition <i>with other redwoods</i>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/HtQtQhmM7STwgD8K_miEAB5M1WTwu8MTEZ7ok2dADeGQXVPZlMgi4CCI00qlXaa_fS2Bx3dJ6RQ=s400" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="245" data-original-width="400" height="245" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/HtQtQhmM7STwgD8K_miEAB5M1WTwu8MTEZ7ok2dADeGQXVPZlMgi4CCI00qlXaa_fS2Bx3dJ6RQ=s400" width="400" /></a></div>
<div>
Similarly, how did humans become as smart as demonstrated by the graph above (taken from the book)? The answer lies in not in the abilities it grants over nature, but in competition <i>against other people</i>. This thesis is not new to Hanson and Simler, of course, but their presentation of it is especially clear.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I have some further thoughts following from the discussion of norms and how we subvert them, but they are not developed enough to appear even in this miserable excuse for a book review.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<u>The Elephant in Practice</u></div>
<div>
<u><br /></u></div>
<div>
There then follow ten chapters, each discussing a different phenomenon from a <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/politics-isnt-a.html">Hansonian</a> perspective. I don't want to go over all of these, so will briefly look at two that I found especially interesting. Firstly, they argue that laughter - which we often struggle to explain, of course, so looking for hidden motives may well be the way to go - serves the function of signalling that we are "at play". When one laughs, this indicates to those around oneself that one is not in a serious mood, which can allow one to say or do things that would normally be taken as threatening.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This theory is fascinating, and for lack of a better theory has changed my view on at least one issue: rape jokes. The ability to laugh at something is an indication that one is not concerned about it - if this theory is true, then, we should probably consider dark humour to be indicative of a lack of virtue, and indeed to actively discourage such a lack of caring in others. Perhaps this doesn't merit an absolute prohibition on such jokes - humour is a value which can weigh against other considerations - but it does suggest that we should be very cautious with such jokes and should never consider rape in itself to be suitable for a punchline.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There's also a defence of canned laughter, which I don't remember well enough to faithfully pass on.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The second section has already gained some attention <a href="https://twitter.com/adrwtp/status/947643944015417344">when I shared a page from it on Twitter</a>: their theory of art. This theory, originally developed by Geoffrey Miller, is that art developed primarily as a way to show off various attractive traits - in particular intelligence, creativity, and conscientiousness. They draw a distinction, which I assume must have been drawn many times before, between the <i>intrinsic</i> and <i>extrinsic</i> properties of an artwork. Intrinsic properties are those that we perceive in an artwork, extrinsic are those that which cannot be known - primarily facts about how it was created. Quoting directly:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The conventional view locates the vast majority of art's value in its <i>intrinsic </i>properties, along with the experiences that result from perceiving and contemplating those properties... In contrast, in the fitness-display theory, extrinsic properties are crucial to our experience of art. As a fitness display, art is largely a statement about the artist... If a work of art is physically (intrinsically) beautiful, but was made too easily (like if a painting was copied from a photograph), we're likely to judge it as much less valuable than a similar work that required greater skill to produce.</blockquote>
This has the consequence that as our ability to produce things has improved, artists have had to find new ways to make art difficult for themselves. They offer this as an explanation for why theatre continues to be popular, despite the various capabilities (camera angles, numerous takes, vast amounts of post-production editing) that film offers: it has the chance to go wrong, and so demands greater skill of the performers. I think this is not the whole story (and nor, for that matter, is <a href="https://twitter.com/MWStory/status/627070379434094592">Michael Story's theory</a> that theatre serves to make lowbrow comedy acceptable for the middle and upper classes) - theatre offers advantages in terms of one's ability to focus on whichever section of the stage one prefers (<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11166-017-9259-x">regardless of whether or not, artistically speaking, it is the best</a>), and the ability to tailor to particular performances (theatre actors can wait for laughs to subside, film actors can't). But it's a fascinating view on the topic.<br />
<br />
As I suggested on Twitter, I am only partially sold on this. How good are audiences at realising that mistakes have been made? Sometimes it's clear - for example, a playgoer may see an actor requesting a line from the stage manager (I didn't see this happen when I saw <i>Twelfth Night</i> at the RSC the other day, but it happened very obviously a couple of months ago when I saw an amateur production of <i>Arcadia</i>) - but much modern art is highly abstract. If one of the lines on Jackson Pollock's <i>No. 5</i> is out of place, how shall we know? If someone gets the timing wrong or plays the wrong note in some atonal piece of music, will anyone without a score be in a position to check?<br />
<br />
I have some other thoughts on this in regard to popular music, which will be a post of their own because they're worth actually developing. For now I'm just going to raise three questions which I think are worth asking of the authors:<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>How sophisticated is the elephant, anyway?</b></div>
<div>
Some of the signalling stories which Simler and Hanson tell are very complicated. For example, they argue that much advertising works not by influencing us as individuals, but by causing us to expect others to be influenced by it:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When Corona runs its "Find Your Beach" ad campaign, it's not necessarily targeting you directly - because you, naturally, are too savvy to be manipulated by this kind of ad. But it might be targeting you indirectly, by way of your peers. If you think the ad will change other people's perceptions of Corona, then it might make sense for you to buy it, even if you know that a beer is just a beer, not a lifestyle.</blockquote>
The classic strawman of evolutionary psychology is that almost no-one has a conscious aim of maximising their genetic footprint. The chain of reasoning "I will do X, because X will make me more attractive, which will allow me to attract a higher quality mate or to attract more mates, which will increase my genetic footprint" will almost never include the less clause, and may not even go beyond "I will do X" if X is something we are inherently motivated to do. The answer, of course, is that we don't need to think everything through - so long as a category of action reliably leads to higher fertility, we may well find ourselves inherently motivated to do it. This explains desires to eat and drink, to have sex, to parent our children well, and many other things. But these things which we are inherently motivated to do are fairly broad classes of action, with no particular cultural knowledge required. The Corona example is actually highly sophisticated cognition, involving not only instrumental rationality but also a theory of other minds. Do Hanson and Simler think this is all being done non-verbally, by evolved instincts - or is there a portion of the brain thinking thoughts, in a verbal fashion, but entirely detached from our stream of consciousness?<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>How far do signals rely on common knowledge?</b></div>
<div>
Another example from their chapter on consumption:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Blue jeans, for example, are a symbol of egalitarian values, in part because denim is a cheap, durable, low-maintenance fabric that makes wealth and class distinctions hard to detect.</blockquote>
I had no idea about any of that. Indeed, I doubt most people consciously pick up on most of the signals which Simler and Hanson allege we send. So how far can we actually be expected to react to them?<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Signalling vs. Creating Meaning</b></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Depending on what kind of story we tell, the same product can send different messages about its owner. Consider three people buying the same pair of running shoes. Alice might explain that she bought them because they got excellent reviews from Runner's World magazine, signaling her conscientiousness as well as her concern for athletic performance. Bob might explain that they were manufactured without child labour, showing his concern for the welfare of others. Carol, meanwhile, might brag about how she got them at a discount, demonstrating her thrift and nose for finding a good deal.</blockquote>
If so many different messages could be sent by the same purchase, then none of them will be sent. I think these are far better explained as the stories we tell ourselves in order to create a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Once one raises this spectre, one wonders how much of their theory it could take over. Is the extrinsic value of art not that it could go wrong and is therefore a display of fitness, but that the process of creation is a way of creating meaning? Perhaps creating meaning is just another form of signalling, but this is something that has to be actually argued for.<br />
<br />
One piece of evidence in favour of signalling over meaning-creation theories of fashion is a dog that hasn't barked - decorating the inside of clothing. The underside of a shirt could have many messages, verbal or pictorial, that would be understood by the owner but not by observers. The fact that we worry greatly about the outside of clothing but not the inside suggests that it the impression given to observers that we care about.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusion</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
The book is very readable, and if you like Robin Hanson's other writings you'll like this. That said, it didn't quite live up to the praise given to it by other sources (e.g. <a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/elephant-brain-hidden-motives-everyday-life.html">Tyler Cowen</a>) - there are some excellent passages, and some wonderful ideas, but there are also many ideas which are in sore need of greater defence. It's worth reading, quite possibly more than once, but it is not - in my view - Book-of-the-year level good, which is the level I feel it has been hyped to.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-50896428678671482082017-12-15T13:20:00.002-08:002017-12-15T13:20:32.170-08:00We Already Have A Voting LotteryWhen, on that fateful day last year, the UK voted to leave the European Union, there was a great deal left as yet undecided. There were a great many paths we could have pursued, ranging from the Norway+ options that would have removed us from the European parliament and little else, to the economists' nightmare No Deal scenario. None of these options could at that point be declared "undemocratic", since the referendum gave us an answer to only a single question. Theresa May - or whoever else might have become Prime Minister - could have, if they so wished, declared that "52% to 48% is no mandate for radical change. We will leave the EU, but smoothly and cautiously" and changed very little.<br />
<br />
Instead, the narrative very quickly became that the referendum had ultimately been about immigration, and that the British People had ultimately voted to Take Back Control Of The Borders. It's not hard to see why the notoriously anti-immigration Theresa May wished for this narrative to prevail. Moreover, it's not totally absurd - the campaign for Brexit did, after all, emphasise this as a reason in favour of Brexit (though by no means the only one, or even the main one - remember that bus about the money which could go to the NHS?). What is puzzling, however, is the lack of pushback against this narrative. Theresa May may not have wanted to suggest the vote was anything less than an endorsement of radical change, but why have so many other actors, including many who are in principle in favour of immigration, colluded in this narrative and not challenged this interpretation of the vote?<br />
<br />
The answer, of course, is that it is a correct interpretation. Not that you could tell this from the Brexit vote alone, of course - referenda are, much like general elections, a quite incredible effort to extract the minimal possible sliver of information from voters. But we have a great many other surveys and polls of public opinion, conducted with great regularity and on a much richer array of questions than the usual choices offered at the polling station. We know that Brits want less immigration, but this is not because given a choice of two highly uncertain prospects, they chose the one likely to involve less immigration: rather, it is because people from YouGov have asked them exactly what their views of immigration are.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
An alternative to universal suffrage that almost only ever appears in the academic literature is the "voting lottery". The idea of this is that rather than collect votes from every single person, we select a certain much smaller number of citizens - say, 1000 - and only ask their votes. This would have three key advantages: firstly it would be cheaper ("But you can't put a financial value on democracy!" "Sure you can. In 2011 we rejected AV because it would be too expensive.") Secondly, by increasing the power of those who actually get to vote, it would give them more of an incentive to seriously consider their vote and its impact. Perhaps most importantly, it would provide an opportunity to stratify the sample of voters. Currently certain groups - in particular, the young and various ethnic minorities - are grossly underrepresented by democracy because of their lower turnout. A voting lottery would allow us to ensure that these groups are counted in accordance with their proportion of the total population, not merely the their proportion of the population that turns up to vote.<br />
<br />
Now of course many people who encounter this idea have a strong aversion to it. The point of democracy, they say, is in the mass participation. But the fact that our assessment of public opinion comes not from five-yearly general elections but from weekly polls rather pulls the rug out from under this. Voting in an election is screaming into the void: <i>real</i> political participation is happening to be selected for a YouGov survey, and giving your opinion there.<br />
<br />
Another common concern is that a sample of 1000 people cannot hope to fully capture the views of an electorate of millions. I'm not married to the 1000 number - in fact, I think it could stand to be more like 10,000. But the basis of all modern polling is the Law of Large Numbers, which in essence states that when you have a process consisting of many small things which are themselves error-prone, but whose errors can cancel each other out - the errors will tend to cancel themselves out. Hence a poll of 1000 people will be within 3% of the true values 95% of the time, and a poll of 2000 people will be within 2% 95% of the time, for example. Yes, the newspaper polls can be wrong, but this is more often due to bias in the way they have selected voters - asking by telephone, or at a particular time of day, or with certain incorrect assumptions about who is likely to vote - which we could eliminate by selecting voters directly from government records.<br />
<br />
It ought to be clear where this is leading. How about, rather than maintaining our thin veneer of universal suffrage with all its attendant problems of unrepresentativeness, we acknowledge the fact that we already live in a political system dominated by the voting lottery, and adjust accordingly? Of course there are costs, but there are also real benefits, benefits which we would be much better equipped to realise if we were honest about our political system and learned to live with it.<br />
<br />
People have every reason to worry about attempts to disenfranchise them. In the USA, very significant effort goes into attempts to disenfranchise black voters due to their tendency to vote for the Democrat party. But the voting lottery is different both in its intention and its effects: while we would stop even pretending to care about most voters as individuals (as though we ever could in a nation of 65 million!), we would give much greater weight to their views as members of groups. And voting is far from the only way to engage in politics: so long as we have free speech and a free press, those who are not randomly selected for the ballot will have the opportunity to influence the votes of those who do vote though force of persuasion.<br />
<br />
There's a Chesterton-like paradox to the suggestion that we should improve our democracy by removing the votes of most citizens. But the idea, I maintain, is not ridiculous. Certainly no more ridiculous than the idea that rather than vote on every single decision, we should delegate this to some 650 people, mostly white men, all living primarily in central London. I urge you to consider being explicit about the voting lottery which we already have - and to consider how it might be put to better use.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-54090267077647960822017-10-07T12:08:00.002-07:002017-10-07T12:08:38.197-07:00A Retraction and An ApologySeveral months ago I wrote <a href="http://cafe-regence.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/should-uk-spendthesix.html">a mostly-serious essay arguing the cosmopolitan case for #SpendTheSix</a>. In one line I claimed that:<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: #fb5e53; color: #666666; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Typical practice during the days of the old Empire, as best we can tell, was to spend around 7% of GDP on the military.</span></blockquote>
I can't remember if I made any attempt to check this claim at the time, but it seems unlikely. It was half-remembered from a book I read sometime in my teenage years - most probably Niall Ferguson's <i>Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire</i>. As my memory records it, the book was briefly discussing whether continuing US military dominance across the planet was financially viable, and argued that the US spends around 3.5% of its GDP on its military compared to the 7% or so which the old British Empire spent. Hence whatever barriers there were to continued US hegemony would not be financial, etc etc. It should be noted that not only I am only about 70% confident that <i>Colossus</i> was the book in question, it is entirely possible that either I misread it at the time or that in the seven or eight years since my memory of the factoid has become confused. Certainly I do not wish either to accuse Mr. Ferguson of making this claim, or to suggest that my failure to properly check the claim when I wrote the essay was in any way excusable.<br />
<br />
My attention was drawn again to this claim when, browsing Andrew Sabisky's Curious Cat, I discovered that he had cited this essay for the claim that <a href="https://curiouscat.me/SabsA/post/210832354">"we did in fact historically spend the six, & not just during the cold war either".</a> It occurred to me that I perhaps ought to check the veracity of this claim, so quickly googled "historical british military spending". From the results it seems clear that I could not have done this when I wrote the original essay. First, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14218909">this article on the BBC website</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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"It's often thought the British army in the 19th Century just mowed down natives with a machine gun. This is a myth," says military historian Nick Lloyd.</div>
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"The most remarkable thing is that they often had no technical advantages and we managed it by spending only 2.5% of GDP on defence, which is not much higher than we have today."</div>
</blockquote>
Second, <a href="https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/past_spending">ukpublicspending.co.uk</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: #eeeeee; color: #555555; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14.16px;">Defence began in 1900 at 3.69 percent of GDP but quickly expanded during the Boer War to 6.47 percent. After the war it contracted down to about 3 percent of GDP.</span></blockquote>
Third, <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/military-spending/">this fascinating graph from ourworldindata.org</a>:<br />
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The first part of Sabisky's statement is supported - we have historically spent the six. <i>Technically</i> the second holds up in that we also spent the six during various wars, but I think that it would be fair to characterise this as misleading.<br />
<br />
For what it's worth, I don't think the overall thrust of either Sabisky's or my argument is hurt to any great extent by this fact turning out to have been false - neither of us was arguing that we ought to spend the six <i>because</i> the Empire spent the six, merely trying to suggest that in historical perspective the claim would sound less absurd than it does to people who have only known the world of today. <b>Nevertheless, it is entirely clear that I ought firstly to retract that claim, and secondly to apologise - to anyone who read my piece, to Andrew Sabisky, and to anyone else who encountered the claim indirectly through him or some other intermediary. It was not my intention to mislead, but I ought to have practised higher standards of scholarship - and hope that in the future I will do so.</b>Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-76165193941339077642017-10-05T14:56:00.000-07:002017-10-05T14:56:19.153-07:00The Cult of the Composer: in lieu of an essay<i>NB: This is something I want to write as a proper essay, but have no idea about how to phrase. For this reason, I am simply stating the main claims and arguments here, with a view to converting them into an extended piece of writing at a later date.</i><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Music is like cookery, and different from most other art-forms, in that it is (a) reproduced from a "recipe", (b) generally not seeking to represent anything in particular - and even when it is, does so in a very abstract way</li>
<li>There are very good reasons for not messing with non-reproducible artworks (such as the originals of paintings). There are good reasons to be careful about how we treat many representational artworks (such as poetry).</li>
<li>However, when these do not apply, we are generally very happy to modify, deface, and do whatever we like to artworks. Example one: we are happy to adapt cooking recipes, even when they come from very good chefs. Example two: we are happy to deface posters and prints of paintings. (Remember the Joseph Ducreaux meme from a few years back?)</li>
<li>We should be more willing to carry out this kind of modification for music. By this I mean not just the kind of wholesale changes we already make (e.g. remixes, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvKTPDg0IW0">various</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIhZbvlCjY0">classical</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vbvhU22uAM">pieces</a>) but micro-changes.</li>
<li>By micro-changes I mean deciding that a certain chord is wrong and changing it, modifying a tune slightly, and all sorts of other small changes.</li>
<li>Composers are presumably good judges of what is good music, but the judgement of the composer is not infallible, and we should be willing to overrule them in cases where we think they have erred (or where tastes have simply changed!)</li>
<li>See for example these eight beautiful bars in Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, and the two-bar fart that follows them. (from 1:20 in) I don't have a ready suggestion for how to continue the tune, but am quite certain that there are option much better than what Schubert went with.</li>
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<li>Obviously if you are performing pieces for the public then you should make changes only after careful consideration, but this does not mean you should not make changes at all!</li>
<li>A good performer or composer can definitely improve on an already good piece, and this need not entail any disrespect to the original composer. See, for example, Marc-André Hamelin's excellent cadenza to Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no.2 (cadenza starts at 8:26, runs to around 11:40):</li>
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<li>We're past the days in which books are the ideal medium for this, but it's sad that there's no book of "Mozart's piano works, as adapted by __". Nowadays, why not have a website of suggested micro-changes to pieces?</li>
<li>Try to come up with more suggestions for micro-changes. e.g. I reckon we could improve the descending lines at the climaxes of <i>Finlandia </i>(occurs more than once, e.g. at 3:56)</li>
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Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-70802087366970861982017-09-30T15:38:00.000-07:002017-09-30T15:38:03.268-07:00The Sufficientarian Case for FeudalismMost people thing there is something morally wrong with the existence of poverty, to the extent that those who are in poverty - or at least, the government which represents them - is entitled to forcibly extract resources from other people to end, reduce, or ameliorate poverty. This is what is meant by "social justice".<br />
<br />
Views of this kind are often described as "egalitarian", but in fact one of the most plausible such views has nothing at all to do with equality. Sufficientarianism is the view according to which there exists a level which is "enough" for people; people below this line are entitled to the resources which bring them up to it, while those above are obliged to provide. Sufficientarianism has a lot of intuitive appeal: it is easy to see how a starving beggar might be entitled to the charity of a billionaire, but it is much harder to see how a comfortable homeowner, who while hardly a billionaire has no concern about where his next meal is coming from, would be entitled to this charity. We might still think a world in which the homeowner and the billionaire were more equal would be better, but this falls quite short of implying that the homeowner or his government has the right to forcibly redistribute from the billionaire to the homeowner.<br />
<br />
Similarly we might think that the higher one lies above the line of sufficiency, the greater is one's obligation to bring others above the line; but again, this does not require one to take equality as any kind of fundamental value.<br />
<br />
One consequence of sufficientarianism, often considered counterintuitive and sometimes considered damning, is what it implies in a world of people who are all or mostly below the line of sufficiency. If the measure of a society is the extent to which it brings people above this line, this seems to imply that we should worsen the lives of some of those who are already below the line in order to bring some others above the line. <i>In extremis, </i>with a world of 100 people narrowly below the line, sufficientarianism may require us to utterly ruin the lives of 99 of these people in order to marginally the life of the 100th so that she reaches the line.<br />
<br />
There are of course ways to avoid this conclusion, but I sometimes think we are too quick to reject it. Suppose 100 people are caught in a prison camp, and all would rather die than continue to endure this miserable existence. To wit, they hatch an audacious escape plan which will enable a small number of their fellows to reach freedom. Those left behind will be heavily punished and tortured for their roles in the plot, so the plan could hardly be less egalitarian - yet it is still worthwhile going through with, and it is worthwhile for those left behind to suffer for their fellows.<br />
<br />
Is there a clear historical example of this? Indeed there is, and for much of history it dominated our planet. The idea that most people could live good lives is a distinctly modern one, a product of the industrial revolution. Before that, poverty, starvation, and abject misery were the norm and indeed the only possibility 99% of the world's population. Simultaneously, however, there existed classes of knights who enjoyed lives vastly greater than any villein or serf could have hoped for: eating well (by the standards of the time), enjoying education (such as there was), and without having to engage in backbreaking labour in the fields.<br />
<br />
It is my contention that from a sufficientarian perspective, such arrangements made perfect sense: almost everyone below what should be considered an acceptable level of wellbeing, but by the sacrifice of the many a few were enabled to live genuinely worthwhile lives.<br />
<br />
In the modern world, with abundant food and water, with indoor plumbing and heating, it is hardly necessary to impoverish the masses in order to create lives worth living. But in the complacent post-scarcity society, it is easy to lose sight of the kind of sacrifices which were necessary for our ancestors. Feudalism was not a system of brutal oppression; rather it stands as the greatest monument to the nobility of the human spirit: the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the creation of lives which are truly worthwhile.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-31064688633709259502017-09-11T16:10:00.000-07:002017-09-11T16:10:32.466-07:00The Rhetoric of Desert<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-5e9d86c8-732d-ac58-3e3c-2d9d170f67c4" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">There are two ways in which a person can fail to deserve what they have. The first is that they are actually </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">undeserving</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;"> of it: the prodigal son does not deserve his father’s welcome, Job did not deserve to be tormented with destruction and agony. The second is that the concept of desert fails to apply: thus neither James Potter nor Lily Evans </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">deserved</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;"> the love of Lily Evans, because in the decision of who she should marry desert is simply not a relevant factor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">These two situations are very different, yet we use the same phrase of “not deserving” to describe them both. This is liable to create dangerous confusion: when a good (or bad) is appropriate for distribution by deservingness, someone’s lack of desert generally provides a reason for taking that good away from them (and typically giving to them). Physical property is, in most naive views of the world, taken to be appropriate for distribution according to desert: thus a simple argument for economic redistribution would be that the poor are no less deserving than are the rich of worldly goods.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">When a good is not appropriate for distribution according to desert - for example, love - the fact that someone is undeserving is no reason to remove the good from them. While most people naively think of private property as something to be distributed according to desert, this view is exceedingly rare among philosophers. The most obvious example of an anti-desert theorist is John Rawls, who argued that we cannot deserve anything at all: any good traits we possess are the results either of our environment or of our genes, neither of which we chose and therefore neither of which we can be credited for.</span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;">This anti-realism about desert does not - cannot - provide an argument for redistribution of goods. If desert is not real, then no goods can be appropriately distributed according to desert, and so the fact that the rich are no more deserving than the poor is no argument for redistribution. One may, of course, favour redistribution on other grounds, and this was Rawls’ purpose: to disarm desert-based arguments </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">against</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline;"> redistribution! But if one only takes the conclusion of his argument - that the rich do not deserve their wealth - and puts it not into the context of Rawls’ wider theory, but rather the naive view that desert is real and is a moral basis for property, then one arrives at a rhetorically effective, but subtly self-contradictory, agument for redistribution. I suspect that many people who dabble in political philosophy without studying it in depth, including many politics undergrads ae liable to fall into this trap.</span>Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8813382491463594994.post-60342593784372300662017-08-22T13:43:00.001-07:002017-08-22T13:43:47.471-07:00The Metaethics of the Harry Potter universeThe field of metaethics is broadly concerned with the following questions: are there any true moral facts? And if so, how can we come to know them?<br />
<br />
As an example of what this would mean: take natural-rights libertarianism, as espoused by Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and legions of spotty teenagers. According to this theory, there exist certain facts along the lines of the following:<br />
<br />
(a) The copy of <i>Anarchy, State, and Utopia</i> upstairs is my property.<br />
(b) For any entity <i>X</i>, if <i>X</i> is my property then others ought not to interfere with my usage of <i>X</i> unless my usage of <i>X</i> interferes with their usage of an entity <i>Y</i> which is their property.<br />
<br />
Of course, a lot of attention in this kind of theory will be devoted to exactly what it means to say that an entity is someone's property. A standard response made by a non-libertarian philosopher would be to observe that the notion of property is entirely socially constructed. To bring out the difference between socially-constructed and non-socially-constructed features of things, compare the properties of belonging to a person and of being less dense than water. Whether something belongs to me or my neighbour is determined entirely by the beliefs of society: if everyone believes the copy of <i>ASU</i> upstairs belongs to my neighbour, it's not that everyone is wrong - it's that the book actually is my neighbours, and I will be obliged to return it to him at the next opportunity. If something is less dense than water, however, it matters not one jot what any of us believes - it will float, and all the assertions in the world will not change that.<br />
<br />
Since property is socially constructed, then, perhaps we ought to construct it strategically so that it operates to the greatest advantage of all. Thus we might decide to agree that notions such as taxation are baked into the very notion of property: taxation is not theft, but simply the proper functioning of the property system. (There's <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-myth-of-ownership-9780195176568?cc=gb&lang=en&">a more ambitious version of this argument</a> which holds that no property would exist without a state and so submission to the state in general is part of what it means to own property, but this is silly because (a) <a href="http://politicalscience.yale.edu/publications/art-not-being-governed-anarchist-history-upland-southeast-asia">property has existed throughout history without the existence of states</a> and (b) even if that were not the case, it's not at all clear how the move from an is to an ought is supposed to be occurring here).<br />
<br />
One thing that would support natural rights libertarianism, then, would be if facts about property somehow turned out not to be socially constructed but to be intrinsic features of the world in the same way as density. It turns out that there is a well-known fictional universe in which this is the case: the Harry Potter novels, in which a key reveal towards the end of the last book is that the Elder Wand, a weapon of deadly power, never truly recognised Voldemort as its possessor - despite him having wielded it for much of the last book, ever since he ransacked the tomb of Dumbledore, a previous owner of the Wand. Instead, the wand recognised first Draco Malfoy and then Harry Potter as its true owner, despite neither of them having prior to this point even touched the wand. In the Harry Potter universe, ownership is not a social construct but a real and tangible feature of the universe - and so it may well be impossible, even if desirable, to move to a more socially beneficial meaning of the notion of "property".<br />
<br />
Libertarians should not rejoice too quickly, however: the way the wand passes between owners almost always involves violation of the Non-Aggression Principle. Grindelwald stole it from Gregorovitch, Dumbledore kept it after defeating Grindelwald, Malfoy ambushed and disarmed Dumbledore, Harry burgled and overpowered Malfoy. While there are substantial facts about property, which stand in addition to the facts which are known through science and empiricism, they are surely different from the facts which libertarians would have us believe. Perhaps not entirely different - wands aside, most objects seem to behave much as they do in the actual universe with regard to owners - but not the same either.<br />
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As a final aside, it is interesting to note that this universe also contains one of the more notable examples of a society with markedly different but non-utopian rules concerning property. I refer, of course, to the goblins, who believe all objects to truly belong to their makers: one cannot purchase an object, only rent it for life. To pass on to one's heirs something that one did not produce oneself is regarded by goblins as theft. Unless the original maker of the Elder Wand is still alive (and according to tradition, the wand was in fact made by Death Himself), this theory must surely remain live as a possible metaethical truth about property in the Harry Potter universe.Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09399125024366524125noreply@blogger.com0