Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
 
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Seems like the type of thing this group likes to digest. (Note, there is an outline of the talk below the video, so you don't need to watch anything.) The argument is that Universities have put themselves in a bind, because you cannot be fully dedicated to both "the truth" and "social justice". This is not at all to say that students should be discouraged from working towards social-justice causes, but rather that the colleges must reassert themselves as a space in which, when multiple values collide, "truth" is the fundamental telos. Or, at the least, colleges should explicitly choose one or the other, and be upfront with prospective students about which they have chosen. In summary, Haidt states: "As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content. Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable. Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict." ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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I'd be cautious of denying anyone who feels physically unsafe access to security and I am suspicious of reverse discrimination claims. I think professors should do what they can to support anyone that might feel or be perceived as vulnerable when they
thoughtfully defend minority (either unpopular or culturally minority) views. Professors should put the most effort into scrutinizing the conventional wisdom and even their own curriculum. Other than that, the direct appeal to authority figures to manage
conflict doesn't scale. On campus or at the workplace that leads to the proliferation of crybabies who don't know how to win, retreat from, or refine arguments.
As far as `social justice' training goes, to paraphrase Mrs. Clinton, I'd say there are indeed a class of people that are deplorable (or stupid) and won't (or can't) change how they think. All you can do is train them to behave a certain way and punish
them if they don't comply. Sexual harassment training is in this category. It's annoying it is necessary, but unfortunately it is necessary.
I think there's a deeper misunderstanding about the functions of universities. Doing research is about falsification, activism through the academy is about bringing that knowledge to a wider audience beyond campus, and education is significantly about
making students navigate a complex hierarchical social system so that they can be good little workers. It is amazing that these things can coexist at all.
As far as the proliferation of the left at universities, to the extent that's true, it is just because liberals tend to like novel things (e.g. multiculturalism) more than stable things and a university is a good fit for them.
Marcus
From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Eric Charles <[hidden email]>
Sent: Monday, December 5, 2016 8:33:47 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses Seems like the type of thing this group likes to digest. (Note, there is an outline of the talk below the video, so you don't need to watch anything.)
The argument is that Universities have put themselves in a bind, because you cannot be fully dedicated to both "the truth" and "social justice". This is not at all to say that students should be discouraged from working towards social-justice causes, but
rather that the colleges must reassert themselves as a space in which, when multiple values collide, "truth" is the fundamental telos. Or, at the least, colleges should explicitly choose one or the other, and be upfront with prospective students about which
they have chosen. In summary, Haidt states:
"As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then,
at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as
American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student
protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training
for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.
Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable. Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict." ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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In reply to this post by Eric Charles-2
Is there anything in the study of telos that demands it be unitary? Even assuming "truth" and "social justice" are fundamentally disjoint, why must a university choose one over the other when they "collide"? The epithet "linear thinker" comes to mind.
Haidt's parenthetical is important: "But an institution such as a university must have one and only one highest and inviolable good." Institutions are complex, whether more or less so than the individuals composing them is debatable. But anyone who sells you with a pitch claiming that a university is a simple structure that must have a single arching _purpose_ is obviously a huckster of some sort. On 12/05/2016 07:33 AM, Eric Charles wrote: > Seems like the type of thing this group likes to digest. (Note, there is an outline of the talk below the video, so you don't need to watch anything.) > > http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-social-justice/ -- ␦glen? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Re: Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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Glen, ‘n all, I thought Haidt's point was not universal, but that we had passed some point of no return in the current situation. I have to reread it. Somebody once wrote a very profound essay on this subject 45 years ago. Oh, Wait a Minute! It was ME! I particularly like the author portrait on the title page. We’ve been here before. Clark Kerr vs The Free Speech Movement, 1964. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- Is there anything in the study of telos that demands it be unitary? Even assuming "truth" and "social justice" are fundamentally disjoint, why must a university choose one over the other when they "collide"? The epithet "linear thinker" comes to mind. Haidt's parenthetical is important: "But an institution such as a university must have one and only one highest and inviolable good." Institutions are complex, whether more or less so than the individuals composing them is debatable. But anyone who sells you with a pitch claiming that a university is a simple structure that must have a single arching _purpose_ is obviously a huckster of some sort. On 12/05/2016 07:33 AM, Eric Charles wrote: > Seems like the type of thing this group likes to digest. (Note, there > is an outline of the talk below the video, so you don't need to watch > anything.) > > http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-social-justi > ce/ -- ␦glen? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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Glen, Certainly one can follow more than one telos, and given fairly compatible choices one can typically do so for long periods without encountering conflict. But eventually they will conflict, if pursued long enough, and when that happens, there are various courses of action, and various consequences. One course of action is that you can deny the need to pick a priority, and thus handle every instance of a conflict on a case by case basis. That leads to schizophrenic behavior on the part of an organization, with difficult to interpret inconsistencies in the rewards and punishments distributed. Haidt argues that, we have reached such a state in many universities (to use Nick's phrase they have "passed a point of no return"). Conflicts between truth-seeking objectives and social-justice objectives are so frequent as to be ubiquitous, and the institutions are becoming schizophrenic trying to fully pursue both. Faculty don't know what to do (can we invite a respected expert on a controversial topic?), and administrators don't know what to do when faculty act (yes we put out a call for two-sides debates, but experts on both sides might lead to objections). The students also don't have a principled way to predict when the university will or will not agree with them if they voice an objection. It has, in many places, become a grand mess. The result isn't as dramatic as all this makes it seem, the result is a slow, but steady, decline in the intellectual atmosphere, as everything becomes ever more "safe." On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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I'd like to challenge the core assertion: that conflict will necessarily happen. Then, even if we can adequately show it will necessarily happen, I'd like to challenge the children:
• that it has happened and • that it will/has happenened so much that it's caused a problem. My challenge lays the burden of proof at the feet of those who claim: a) that truth and social justice are in any way different and _how_ they are different, b) that the apparent conflicts we've seen have actually been between truth and social justice, and c) that this alleged conflict is somehow more critical than others that seem to be successfully navigated (e.g. between budget and class size or tenure or admission policies or cost or the peer review crisis, etc.). A second type of challenge is to the (again, false binary) idea that there are only 2 ways to procede: 1) choose a singular priority or 2) handle each instance case by case. Why not a 1.5) handle some based on a (volatile) priority and others by case? Or why not any of a large number of multi-objective optimization algorithms? Why does it have to be one or the other? You'll note that both the above challenges are the same, really. I claim telos can be multifarious and solutions to problems can be a mix of rule-based and case-by-case. Haidt says this can be done in an individual _human_... So, what is it about institutions that _prevent_ it from being done? Why do you assert that institutions are simple, whereas individuals are complex? It seems reasonable to believe the "manipulation conception of mechanism", wherein one can only learn or understand some thing by modifying it. Hence, the dichotomy Haidt sets up (understand vs. change the world) is obviously suspect. A university _cannot_ be one or the other. It must be both. Change allows understanding and understanding allows change. To artificially separate the two seems a bit childish to me. On 12/05/2016 01:29 PM, Eric Charles wrote: > Glen, > Certainly one can follow more than one telos, and given fairly compatible choices one can typically do so for long periods without encountering conflict. But eventually they will conflict, if pursued long enough, and when that happens, there are various courses of action, and various consequences. One course of action is that you can deny the need to pick a priority, and thus handle every instance of a conflict on a case by case basis. That leads to schizophrenic behavior on the part of an organization, with difficult to interpret inconsistencies in the rewards and punishments distributed. > > Haidt argues that, we have reached such a state in many universities (to use Nick's phrase they have "passed a point of no return"). Conflicts between truth-seeking objectives and social-justice objectives are so frequent as to be ubiquitous, and the institutions are becoming schizophrenic trying to fully pursue both. Faculty don't know what to do (can we invite a respected expert on a controversial topic?), and administrators don't know what to do when faculty act (yes we put out a call for two-sides debates, but experts on both sides might lead to objections). The students also don't have a principled way to predict when the university will or will not agree with them if they voice an objection. It has, in many places, become a grand mess. The result isn't as dramatic as all this makes it seem, the result is a slow, but steady, decline in the intellectual atmosphere, as everything becomes ever more "safe." > > > > > > > > > ----------- > Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. > Supervisory Survey Statistician > U.S. Marine Corps > <mailto:[hidden email]> > > On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote: > > Glen, ‘n all, ____ > > __ __ > > I thought Haidt's point was not universal, but that we had passed some point of no return in the current situation. I have to reread it. ____ > > __ __ > > Somebody once wrote a very profound essay on this subject 45 years ago. Oh, Wait a Minute! It was ME! <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261728846_The_Failure_of_Pluralism> I particularly like the author portrait on the title page. ____ > > __ __ > > We’ve been here before. Clark Kerr vs The Free Speech Movement, 1964. ____ > > __ __ > > Nick ____ > > __ __ > > Nicholas S. Thompson____ > > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology____ > > Clark University____ > > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>____ > > __ __ > > __ __ > > -----Original Message----- > From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>] On Behalf Of ?glen? > Sent: Monday, December 05, 2016 10:15 AM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses > > __ __ > > Is there anything in the study of telos that demands it be unitary? Even assuming "truth" and "social justice" are fundamentally disjoint, why must a university choose one over the other when they "collide"? The epithet "linear thinker" comes to mind.____ > > __ __ > > Haidt's parenthetical is important: "But an institution such as a university must have one and only one highest and inviolable good."____ > > __ __ > > Institutions are complex, whether more or less so than the individuals composing them is debatable. But anyone who sells you with a pitch claiming that a university is a simple structure that must have a single arching _purpose_ is obviously a huckster of some sort.____ > > __ __ > > __ __ > > On 12/05/2016 07:33 AM, Eric Charles wrote:____ > > > Seems like the type of thing this group likes to digest. (Note, there ____ > > > is an outline of the talk below the video, so you don't need to watch ____ > > > anything.)____ > > > ____ > > > http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-social-justi <http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-social-justi>____ > > > ce/____ > > __ __ > > --____ > > ␦glen?____ > > __ __ > > ============================================================____ > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv____ > > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>____ > > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove____ > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove > > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove > -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Re: Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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I was amused to hear a heckler yelling about false dichotomy toward the end of the video. Haidt wanted a clean vote between christian university, truth university, and social justice university, so he didn't open the ballot to poll for none of the above. And it's also amusing to consider that the bulk of his complaint is that there is a disparity in representation of conservative views on university campuses that needs to be remedied, a culture of intolerance, a climate of fear, etc, etc, basically the whole micro-aggression argument inverted to make the conservatives the injured minority; but for other minorities he strenuously argues that remedies for disparities in representation are just wrong. I went looking for another opinion of what a university is supposed to be. I went through Schleiermacher to the wikipedia page for the Humboldt University of Berlin, founded 1810. A brit is quoted saying "the 'Humboldtian' university became a model for the rest of Europe [...] with its central principle being the union of teaching and research in the work of the individual scholar or scientist." The great part of that article is the list of notable alumni and lecturers, including Bismarck, the brothers Grimm, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Heisenberg, Planck, Schrödinger, von Neumann, WEB Du Bois, and Angela Davis. Without watching the video, I granted Haidt the possibility of making a good faith argument. Watching the video it was clear that he cannot resist baiting his opponents as often as possible. Yes, he throws in a few left handed compliments here and there, but he's a partisan. He has no interest in or understanding of the arguments of his opponents on this issue. He is quite happy just mocking his cartoon view of their position. The one place where he cites an experimental study about discrimination, he talks about sending cv's applying for positions with male or female names and claims that the results were exactly the opposite of the results of a similar experiment that I read in Science. Granted there might have been another study with the opposite result, but to pretend that the only study worth mentioning supports his view makes a shambles of his credibility. I just read W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz this past week, and I was surprised to learn, at this late stage of my development, that the nazi's weren't just into final solutions as an end in themselves, they actually had a rational economic interest in declaring groups of people sub-human. They seized the assets of the sub-humans, they imprisoned their populations in labor camps, they employed them as slave labor, and they disposed of them when their value was exhausted. It was a radical value creation proposition for the master race, and ownership of some of that created value is still being contested now. -- rec -- On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 4:47 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote: I'd like to challenge the core assertion: that conflict will necessarily happen. Then, even if we can adequately show it will necessarily happen, I'd like to challenge the children: ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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In reply to this post by gepr
All I can say in defense of Universities, Glen, is that it's hard as hell. You're trying to foster a discussion a class that gets to the bottom of some important issue, and some student keeps trying to veto the discussion on the grounds that no such discussion should be allowed to happen. I don't teach, anymore, but I was on an RG forum the other day where a guy kept ranting on the one hand about the ills of political correctness AND paradoxically insisting that a Marxist theory of science should not get any hearing on the forum because Stalin had killed 30 million people. Now, on a forum, on can just skip the post; but in a classroom, that one person can simply destroy a semester of discussion. I am also afflicted by my Deweyan voice, which keeps insisting that no progress can be made to the truth without social justice at least amongst the discussants -- equal access to the floor, no power dictating who can speak and who not, full attention to all relevant information, etc. etc. I can't remember, Glen, if you are now or have ever been a teacher. But before you quickly condemn the Haidt article, walk in a professor's shoes for a few days. It's ROUGH! Particularly if you have any idealism about either social justice or the truth. All the best, Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- I'd like to challenge the core assertion: that conflict will necessarily happen. Then, even if we can adequately show it will necessarily happen, I'd like to challenge the children: • that it has happened and • that it will/has happenened so much that it's caused a problem. My challenge lays the burden of proof at the feet of those who claim: a) that truth and social justice are in any way different and _how_ they are different, b) that the apparent conflicts we've seen have actually been between truth and social justice, and c) that this alleged conflict is somehow more critical than others that seem to be successfully navigated (e.g. between budget and class size or tenure or admission policies or cost or the peer review crisis, etc.). A second type of challenge is to the (again, false binary) idea that there are only 2 ways to procede: 1) choose a singular priority or 2) handle each instance case by case. Why not a 1.5) handle some based on a (volatile) priority and others by case? Or why not any of a large number of multi-objective optimization algorithms? Why does it have to be one or the other? You'll note that both the above challenges are the same, really. I claim telos can be multifarious and solutions to problems can be a mix of rule-based and case-by-case. Haidt says this can be done in an individual _human_... So, what is it about institutions that _prevent_ it from being done? Why do you assert that institutions are simple, whereas individuals are complex? It seems reasonable to believe the "manipulation conception of mechanism", wherein one can only learn or understand some thing by modifying it. Hence, the dichotomy Haidt sets up (understand vs. change the world) is obviously suspect. A university _cannot_ be one or the other. It must be both. Change allows understanding and understanding allows change. To artificially separate the two seems a bit childish to me. On 12/05/2016 01:29 PM, Eric Charles wrote: > Glen, > Certainly one can follow more than one telos, and given fairly compatible choices one can typically do so for long periods without encountering conflict. But eventually they will conflict, if pursued long enough, and when that happens, there are various courses of action, and various consequences. One course of action is that you can deny the need to pick a priority, and thus handle every instance of a conflict on a case by case basis. That leads to schizophrenic behavior on the part of an organization, with difficult to interpret inconsistencies in the rewards and punishments distributed. > > Haidt argues that, we have reached such a state in many universities (to use Nick's phrase they have "passed a point of no return"). Conflicts between truth-seeking objectives and social-justice objectives are so frequent as to be ubiquitous, and the institutions are becoming schizophrenic trying to fully pursue both. Faculty don't know what to do (can we invite a respected expert on a controversial topic?), and administrators don't know what to do when faculty act (yes we put out a call for two-sides debates, but experts on both sides might lead to objections). The students also don't have a principled way to predict when the university will or will not agree with them if they voice an objection. It has, in many places, become a grand mess. The result isn't as dramatic as all this makes it seem, the result is a slow, but steady, decline in the intellectual atmosphere, as everything becomes ever more "safe." > > > > > > > > > ----------- > Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. > Supervisory Survey Statistician > U.S. Marine Corps > <[hidden email]> > > On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>> wrote: > > Glen, ‘n all, ____ > > __ __ > > I thought Haidt's point was not universal, but that we had passed > some point of no return in the current situation. I have to reread > it. ____ > > __ __ > > Somebody once wrote a very profound essay on this subject 45 > years ago. Oh, Wait a Minute! It was ME! > <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261728846_The_Failure_of_Plu > ralism> I particularly like the author portrait on the title page. > ____ > > __ __ > > We’ve been here before. Clark Kerr vs The Free Speech Movement, > 1964. ____ > > __ __ > > Nick ____ > > __ __ > > Nicholas S. Thompson____ > > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology____ > > Clark University____ > > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>____ > > __ __ > > __ __ > > -----Original Message----- > From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of ?glen? > Sent: Monday, December 05, 2016 10:15 AM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses > > __ __ > > Is there anything in the study of telos that demands it be > unitary? Even assuming "truth" and "social justice" are fundamentally > disjoint, why must a university choose one over the other when they > "collide"? The epithet "linear thinker" comes to mind.____ > > __ __ > > Haidt's parenthetical is important: "But an institution such as a > university must have one and only one highest and inviolable > good."____ > > __ __ > > Institutions are complex, whether more or less so than the > individuals composing them is debatable. But anyone who sells you > with a pitch claiming that a university is a simple structure that > must have a single arching _purpose_ is obviously a huckster of some > sort.____ > > __ __ > > __ __ > > On 12/05/2016 07:33 AM, Eric Charles wrote:____ > > > Seems like the type of thing this group likes to digest. (Note, > there ____ > > > is an outline of the talk below the video, so you don't need to > watch ____ > > > anything.)____ > > > ____ > > > > http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-social-justi > <http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/one-telos-truth-or-social-just > i>____ > > > ce/____ > > __ __ > > --____ > > ␦glen?____ > > __ __ > > ============================================================____ > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv____ > > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to > unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>____ > > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove____ > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove > > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe > at St. John's College to unsubscribe > http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove > -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
Re: Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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In reply to this post by gepr
Glen☣ Yours is a characteristically adroit yet confrontational argument and I don't know that it is my place (or ability) address it completely, but would like to try to add some context that I hope will help: A) Are Truth and Social Justice in any way different?
B) Apparent conflicts we have seen are (or not) between Truth and Social Justice.
C) This alleged conflict is somehow more critical than others which ...
- Steve On 12/5/16 2:47 PM, glen ☣ wrote:
I'd like to challenge the core assertion: that conflict will necessarily happen. Then, even if we can adequately show it will necessarily happen, I'd like to challenge the children: ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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In reply to this post by Roger Critchlow-2
Yes. Even beyond the oversimplification that "diversity" means equal representation between the fictitious "right" vs. "left", Haidt never considers the idea that the very reason there are more left-leaning professors is because universities do pursue truth. And perhaps it just turns out that the left is more true than the right.
On 12/05/2016 06:58 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote: > And it's also amusing to consider that the bulk of his complaint is that there is a disparity in representation of conservative views on university campuses that needs to be remedied, a culture of intolerance, a climate of fear, etc, etc, basically the whole micro-aggression argument inverted to make the conservatives the injured minority; but for other minorities he strenuously argues that remedies for disparities in representation are just wrong. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
Sorry if I gave the impression of disrespecting universities. I'm a big fan, actually. I've never been a teacher, no. But I've faced obstructionists in literally _every_ domain in which I've worked. So, I'm familiar with the feeling of simply trying to get some work done and having a small contingent of jerks harp on _apparent_ tangents. Unlike hucksters like Haidt, however, my preferred route is more Socratic. Assume those obstructionists may not be malicious, may either be merely stupid or be hiding a productive point buried deep inside their "obstructionism". That method slows down my work dramatically ... often to the extent that I look completely unproductive. At one job, whether an achievement or a failure, I don't know, I managed to completely re-route a spittle-spewing gray beard who had alienated literally everyone in the company. After about 4-6 months of such, he finally felt listened to and came back aboard as a productive member. It wouldn't have been worth the effort (and my wasted time) had he not held core IP inside his head. As Roger points out, Haidt seems to have zero interest in doing that sort of work. That'd be OK if he'd just plug along on some other productive route, without the constant whining and false accusation. On 12/05/2016 07:16 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > All I can say in defense of Universities, Glen, is that it's hard as hell. You're trying to foster a discussion a class that gets to the bottom of some important issue, and some student keeps trying to veto the discussion on the grounds that no such discussion should be allowed to happen. I don't teach, anymore, but I was on an RG forum the other day where a guy kept ranting on the one hand about the ills of political correctness AND paradoxically insisting that a Marxist theory of science should not get any hearing on the forum because Stalin had killed 30 million people. Now, on a forum, on can just skip the post; but in a classroom, that one person can simply destroy a semester of discussion. > > I am also afflicted by my Deweyan voice, which keeps insisting that no progress can be made to the truth without social justice at least amongst the discussants -- equal access to the floor, no power dictating who can speak and who not, full attention to all relevant information, etc. etc. > > I can't remember, Glen, if you are now or have ever been a teacher. But before you quickly condemn the Haidt article, walk in a professor's shoes for a few days. It's ROUGH! Particularly if you have any idealism about either social justice or the truth. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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Re: Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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In reply to this post by gepr
Or that universities pursue social justice because they feel the truth that is not shared will always be the more partial truth?
Or that conservatives are happier pursuing money and pandering to sympathetic audiences? (Just kidding, some of my best friends ...) -- rec -- On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 11:50 AM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote: Yes. Even beyond the oversimplification that "diversity" means equal representation between the fictitious "right" vs. "left", Haidt never considers the idea that the very reason there are more left-leaning professors is because universities do pursue truth. And perhaps it just turns out that the left is more true than the right. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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In reply to this post by Steve Smith
Thanks for the response. Below, I'll propose _alternatives_, the plausibility of which I believe to greater or lesser extents. What I believe to be the case is irrelevant, though. The point is to provide alternatives (what "Millian" might actually mean, in contrast to what Haidt seems to think it means). On 12/05/2016 09:14 PM, Steven A Smith wrote: > A) Are /Truth/ and /Social Justice/ in any way different? > > I think they are categorically different... they represent different goals and values. This is not to say that they are fundamentally incompatible, however. I *think* your argument implies that you believe that they are very compatible, possibly to the point that the pursuit of truth serves social justice, or in the strong "they are no different" case, that social justice *also* serves truth. My own belief is that the pursuit of truth should be bounded by reasonable merits of social justice and that social justice should be grounded in truth. I *think* this is different than saying that they are no different from one another. Consider the idea that social justice (equality and equality of opportunity for all) is the most _powerful_ way to, or the most efficient path toward, a maximimally effective biosphere. Every person (or plant or animal) that dies is a loss of power, a loss of productivity. Every poor or underprivileged person hyper-constrained by their environment results in suboptimal world. Now, consider the idea that truth is two-fold: a) understanding the world well enough to b) effectively control the world. But this alternative is not, as you put it, truth in service to social justice or vice versa. They are one and the same thing. You cannot effectively understand/control the world without social justice or vice versa. Since the two always, exactly overlap, then they are the same. (Perhaps in some Platonic ideal, they are different. But that leads to a distinction without a difference.) I think this idea could be made (eventually) falsifiable. Those who disagree with it should help in the formulation, rather than simply denying it. > B) Apparent conflicts we have seen are (or not) between /Truth/ and /Social Justice./ > [...] > Trying to make them identical seems to confront what I apprehend to be a fundamental truth about Truth and that is that in it is nominally absolute, it is not relative while Social Justice is fundamentally relative to the "Social System" or "Ideals" we are trying to provide justice for or around? But this ignores plenty of good arguments against naive realism. Even if there is a unitary truth out there that we might be able to find/perceive/manipulate, there's no guarantee that our structures (physiology, hereditary mechanisms, social systems, etc) are capable of finding/perceiving/manipulating that unitary truth. We may be stuck with pluralism no matter what we do. Hence, reality would be plural just like our social systems (and vice versa). Again, this could be (and has been to some extent in more speculative physics) formulated so that it's (almost) falsifiable. But we haven't yet falsified pluralist truth. So, it's an alternative we must consider. But when I said that to Eric, I had in mind the more banal cases that we could pick apart (like getting someone like Curtis Yarvin uninvited from a programming conference or somesuch). I _bet_ that I could formulate an argument that uninviting such jackasses _is_ the pursuit of truth. Whether or not anyone would take the time to hack their way through my argument is another story, of course. 8^) > C) This alleged conflict is somehow more critical than others which ... > > I think the discussion emerges from decades of their appearing to have been such a conflict, especially in the domain of education. Hm. I tend to think it's just apophenia. People really really _want_ institutions to be simple things. They really want it to be _easy_ to, say, plant and harvest a garden, even in New York City. They _want_ students to listen to them. They want it to be easy to program firmware devices. Etc. But, unfortunately, EVERYTHING IS HARD (at least until it's easy 8^). The oversimplification made by Haidt is just evidence that he wants his social psych problem to be easy. He wants to have identified the culprit and spend the rest of his days yapping about his solution. I certainly empathize. I didn't want to spend dozens of hours tracking down my last memory leak, either. But that difficulty doesn't cause me to blanketly assert that the cause of all memory leaks is _unitary_ and I should adopt a single, inviolable good to pursue. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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Re: Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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Glen writes:
<<Consider the idea that social justice (equality and equality of opportunity for all) is the most _powerful_ way to, or the most efficient path toward, a maximimally effective biosphere. Every person
(or plant or animal) that dies is a loss of power, a loss of productivity. Every poor or underprivileged person hyper-constrained by their environment results in suboptimal world. Now, consider the idea that truth is two-fold: a) understanding the world
well enough to b) effectively control the world.>>
Many hands make light work. Due to coordination overheads, however, if there are too many hands then more work is needed. (Or rather, it doesn't matter of individuals are excluded from a group if the group's work is easy.) If there aren't immediate resource constraints, and energy barriers to escaping a local minima seem high or are hard to estimate (or imagine), keeping underprivileged individuals out of a group is, from some perspectives, rational. If we assume that there will be a distribution of productivities for each person adding to the group, how does the group estimate how at what rate to tolerate low productivity vs. high productivity additions to the group? For an average member of a group (or the whole group) how do existing group members prevent potentially more productive candidates from displacing them?
Sure, one could make a simulation of all this, or apply game theory. I don't think that gets at a fundamental question which is why should any selfish agent care if the biosphere is effective? The environment just needs to not to completely collapse and of course those global environmental questions are too big for most agents to address by themselves. Perhaps there is really nothing to know -- just vote, fight, compete, etc. as appropriate for prevailing social (dis)order.
Even given the goal of omniscience and omnipotence and an ever-increasing ambition for harder problems, it still isn't clear that every agent is useful. Some agents may consume more resources than they contribute. Or just from a light cone type of argument it can cost more to send a message, do a calculation, and return a result, than doing it within a smaller network. From the pro- social justice perspective, one might argue that it is just too difficult to anticipate what constitutes `fit' behavior, so everyone must be supported. On the other hand there sure seems to be a lot of similar individuals in the population. In this `global' view, it seems some coherent (but arbitrary) vision is needed to identify which hard problems to tackle and how to combine resources to do it. Coherent visions tend to come from individuals or small groups.
Marcus
From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of glen ☣ <[hidden email]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 6, 2016 11:03:26 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses Thanks for the response. Below, I'll propose _alternatives_, the plausibility of which I believe to greater or lesser extents. What I believe to be the case is irrelevant, though. The point is to provide alternatives (what "Millian" might actually mean, in contrast to what Haidt seems to think it means). On 12/05/2016 09:14 PM, Steven A Smith wrote: > A) Are /Truth/ and /Social Justice/ in any way different? > > I think they are categorically different... they represent different goals and values. This is not to say that they are fundamentally incompatible, however. I *think* your argument implies that you believe that they are very compatible, possibly to the point that the pursuit of truth serves social justice, or in the strong "they are no different" case, that social justice *also* serves truth. My own belief is that the pursuit of truth should be bounded by reasonable merits of social justice and that social justice should be grounded in truth. I *think* this is different than saying that they are no different from one another. Consider the idea that social justice (equality and equality of opportunity for all) is the most _powerful_ way to, or the most efficient path toward, a maximimally effective biosphere. Every person (or plant or animal) that dies is a loss of power, a loss of productivity. Every poor or underprivileged person hyper-constrained by their environment results in suboptimal world. Now, consider the idea that truth is two-fold: a) understanding the world well enough to b) effectively control the world. But this alternative is not, as you put it, truth in service to social justice or vice versa. They are one and the same thing. You cannot effectively understand/control the world without social justice or vice versa. Since the two always, exactly overlap, then they are the same. (Perhaps in some Platonic ideal, they are different. But that leads to a distinction without a difference.) I think this idea could be made (eventually) falsifiable. Those who disagree with it should help in the formulation, rather than simply denying it. > B) Apparent conflicts we have seen are (or not) between /Truth/ and /Social Justice./ > [...] > Trying to make them identical seems to confront what I apprehend to be a fundamental truth about Truth and that is that in it is nominally absolute, it is not relative while Social Justice is fundamentally relative to the "Social System" or "Ideals" we are trying to provide justice for or around? But this ignores plenty of good arguments against naive realism. Even if there is a unitary truth out there that we might be able to find/perceive/manipulate, there's no guarantee that our structures (physiology, hereditary mechanisms, social systems, etc) are capable of finding/perceiving/manipulating that unitary truth. We may be stuck with pluralism no matter what we do. Hence, reality would be plural just like our social systems (and vice versa). Again, this could be (and has been to some extent in more speculative physics) formulated so that it's (almost) falsifiable. But we haven't yet falsified pluralist truth. So, it's an alternative we must consider. But when I said that to Eric, I had in mind the more banal cases that we could pick apart (like getting someone like Curtis Yarvin uninvited from a programming conference or somesuch). I _bet_ that I could formulate an argument that uninviting such jackasses _is_ the pursuit of truth. Whether or not anyone would take the time to hack their way through my argument is another story, of course. 8^) > C) This alleged conflict is somehow more critical than others which ... > > I think the discussion emerges from decades of their appearing to have been such a conflict, especially in the domain of education. Hm. I tend to think it's just apophenia. People really really _want_ institutions to be simple things. They really want it to be _easy_ to, say, plant and harvest a garden, even in New York City. They _want_ students to listen to them. They want it to be easy to program firmware devices. Etc. But, unfortunately, EVERYTHING IS HARD (at least until it's easy 8^). The oversimplification made by Haidt is just evidence that he wants his social psych problem to be easy. He wants to have identified the culprit and spend the rest of his days yapping about his solution. I certainly empathize. I didn't want to spend dozens of hours tracking down my last memory leak, either. But that difficulty doesn't cause me to blanketly assert that the cause of all memory leaks is _unitary_ and I should adopt a single, inviolable good to pursue. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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I'll respond to your particulars below. But I think they're a bit distracting. If we indulge in a little essentialism, the proto-hypothesis is that equality-inducing instincts (like empathy or emotions of "justice") are mechanisms for optimizing living systems' effort/power. That's the hypothesis that needs to be formulated. I was interested to see a spate of articles this morning about this book: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10921.html and some other "experts" opinions that violence isn't necessary. The intersection with this conversation (in my own fantasies, anyway) is obvious. Violence requires abstraction and objectification of the victim, whereas more subtle remedies to inequality require the more complex mechanisms like empathy or a sense of justice. It should be obvious that, say, a nuclear war reduces our efficacy, at least in the short term. It's reasonable to think that we have to go through sporadic catastrophes in order to find a more global optimum. But just because that's reasonable, doesn't mean it's inevitable. On 12/06/2016 06:51 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > If we assume that there will be a distribution of productivities for each person adding to the group, how does the group estimate how at what rate to tolerate low productivity vs. high productivity additions to the group? For an average member of a group (or the whole group) how do existing group members prevent potentially more productive candidates from displacing them? These questions are founded on the assumption that the produce is a _simple_ thing. Not only does it assume the measures of productivities is simple, but that the thing(s) being measured are also simple. It's possible that's not the case. If we allow that the produce can be complex, then the methods for tolerating rates of high or low productivities depend fundamentally on the mesh of products. It's reasonable for, say, a scientist to work their entire lifetime on cheap fusion power and die without having made much progress. But as long as their work can be learned from, the contemporary and future communities of scientists can still call that productive. In the end, we have to resort to the minorities _telling_ the majority what is or is not "just". If the fusion community tells us that Sally is a jerk to the fusion community and shouldn't be tolerated, we have to give that some credence. That's social justice and it's one mechanism for truth seeking. > Sure, one could make a simulation of all this, or apply game theory. I don't think that gets at a fundamental question which is why should any selfish agent care if the biosphere is effective? Right. A simulation can, however, help a non-empathetic person empathize, though. This is the great promise of video/VR games. We now have an extraordinary power to put people in the shoes of others. And if such experiences can lead to a broader sense of ecology, then it will get at that fundamental question. > Perhaps there is really nothing to know -- just vote, fight, compete, etc. as appropriate for prevailing social (dis)order. It's interesting to put it that way: there is nothing to _know_. The foundation of social justice is not entirely about facts or knowledge. It's about feelings. And feelings, emotions are one mechanism for data fusion, a collapse of lots of heterogeneous signals down into a single measure (disgust, love, etc.). These can be used as tools. They hypothesis relies on the idea that they _are_ used as tools, already, by at least animals to make decisions. Social justice, the feelings we feel when, say, Richard Spencer speaks at one's alma mater, is just an extension of that. > Even given the goal of omniscience and omnipotence and an ever-increasing ambition for harder problems, it still isn't clear that every agent is useful. Some agents may consume more resources than they contribute. Or just from a light cone type of argument it can cost more to send a message, do a calculation, and return a result, than doing it within a smaller network. From the pro- social justice perspective, one might argue that it is just too difficult to anticipate what constitutes `fit' behavior, so everyone must be supported. Well, I think there are both positive and negative sides of social justice. It seems clear that people like Richard Spencer and Curtis Yarvin are attacked by the SJWs because the SJWs feel those people are not useful and should be muted/ignored. So, it's not clear that social justice is about making _everyone_ equal. It is a mechanism for discriminating between the potentially useful and the (obviously?) useless. FWIW, Richard Spencer is obviously useless ... with Yarvin, whose Urbit may well be useful to some extent, it's less obvious ... but we depend on the SJWs to help us navigate the turbulence. > On the other hand there sure seems to be a lot of similar individuals in the population. In this `global' view, it seems some coherent (but arbitrary) vision is needed to identify which hard problems to tackle and how to combine resources to do it. Coherent visions tend to come from individuals or small groups. Well, there's nothing about SJ that requires homogeneity or lack of diversity. SJ simply requests that we take the opinions of experts seriously. E.g. if the fusion community claims the Germans are close to a practical reactor, then we should listen. If they say Sally's ideas are quackery and should be muted, then we should listen. So, SJ does precisely what you're asking it to do. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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Re: Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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Glen writes:
"It should be obvious that, say, a nuclear war reduces our efficacy, at least in the short term. It's reasonable to think that we have to go through sporadic catastrophes in order to find a more global optimum."
There are other kinds of energy barriers besides catastrophes. Climbing a hill is different than falling in a hole and having to climb out again. Taking on debt or forcing everyone to buy car or
health insurance, say.
"Violence requires abstraction and objectification of the victim, whereas more subtle remedies to inequality require the more complex mechanisms like empathy or a sense of justice."
[I saw the articles mentioning that work today too. Kind of interesting.] I don't see why any cognitive process is needed for violence to occur other than operational aspects of making it happen or planning to avoid retribution. The person that believes there is inequality, say a terrorist, can take up arms without really modeling the target at all. A dog can get kicked just because it was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
"These questions are founded on the assumption that the produce is a _simple_ thing. Not only does it assume the measures of productivities is simple, but that the thing(s) being measured are also simple."
A group will be made up of a finite number of agents. If there are a much larger number of dimensions for measuring productivity, there may not be any basis for exchange. Each agent could live in their own imaginary world of value unrelated to others. Thus, productivity needs to measured on a relatively small number of dimensions to act as a common currency. On college campuses, I would think the currency would be papers (e.g. your fusion research example), or popularity of classes. For voters, it's current and future earnings.
"Right. A simulation can, however, help a non-empathetic person empathize, though. This is the great promise of video/VR games. We now have an extraordinary power to put people in the shoes of others. And if such experiences can lead to a broader sense of ecology, then it will get at that fundamental question."
It is not necessarily easy for an emotionally warm person to steel herself in such a way that major risks are addressed independent of the risk of collateral damage. When adding up a bunch of costs and benefits to make a decision, the first five or ten effects might be feasible to model, but not five or ten effects of every person involved. For a world leader that could be billions of small terms in an optimization. I emphasize this because you seem to be pushing back on the suggestion that there are categories of people that are mostly the same and can be modelled as the same -- even if they can't be treated the same, at some point they really must be.
"It's interesting to put it that way: there is nothing to _know_. The foundation of social justice is not entirely about facts or knowledge. It's about feelings. And feelings, emotions are one mechanism for data fusion, a collapse of lots of heterogeneous signals down into a single measure (disgust, love, etc.). "
I would stick with `know'. Questions like "Should I/he/she feel this way?" are relevant for social purposes. Without them, the chips fall where they may. If there is no language to model how differing emotions will interact and what it all means, then all that can be done is to let a conflict process play out.
"Well, there's nothing about SJ that requires homogeneity or lack of diversity. SJ simply requests that we take the opinions of experts seriously. E.g. if the fusion community claims the Germans are close to a practical reactor, then we should listen. If they say Sally's ideas are quackery and should be muted, then we should listen. So, SJ does precisely what you're asking it to do."
Perhaps I should have said `top-down' and not `global'. A top-down property would be like a set of cultural or religious norms that weight the value of certain kinds of behaviors. Or it could be a centrally initiated inspiration like Kennedy proposing the moon shot. A bottom-up scenario could instead have non-overlapping preferences with no pressure toward finding overlap or abstracting principles that cause the overlap. In the fusion-expert minority example, the outcome would be of great interest to everyone if it were realized. In the minority that demands cashmere socks, it is not clear to me why the majority should listen unless, say, that group is embedded in the NRA minority or has circulation problems or extremely sensitive skin. To me the word `justice' suggests that subgroup A can exert influence on subgroup B (or B on A) without some sort of dangerous potential energy building-up. If B wants millions of expensive cashmere socks without getting anything in return, there could be a problem.
Marcus From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of glen ☣ <[hidden email]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 7, 2016 10:17:01 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses I'll respond to your particulars below. But I think they're a bit distracting. If we indulge in a little essentialism, the proto-hypothesis is that equality-inducing instincts (like empathy or emotions of "justice") are mechanisms for optimizing living systems' effort/power. That's the hypothesis that needs to be formulated. I was interested to see a spate of articles this morning about this book: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10921.html and some other "experts" opinions that violence isn't necessary. The intersection with this conversation (in my own fantasies, anyway) is obvious. Violence requires abstraction and objectification of the victim, whereas more subtle remedies to inequality require the more complex mechanisms like empathy or a sense of justice. It should be obvious that, say, a nuclear war reduces our efficacy, at least in the short term. It's reasonable to think that we have to go through sporadic catastrophes in order to find a more global optimum. But just because that's reasonable, doesn't mean it's inevitable. On 12/06/2016 06:51 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > If we assume that there will be a distribution of productivities for each person adding to the group, how does the group estimate how at what rate to tolerate low productivity vs. high productivity additions to the group? For an average member of a group (or the whole group) how do existing group members prevent potentially more productive candidates from displacing them? These questions are founded on the assumption that the produce is a _simple_ thing. Not only does it assume the measures of productivities is simple, but that the thing(s) being measured are also simple. It's possible that's not the case. If we allow that the produce can be complex, then the methods for tolerating rates of high or low productivities depend fundamentally on the mesh of products. It's reasonable for, say, a scientist to work their entire lifetime on cheap fusion power and die without having made much progress. But as long as their work can be learned from, the contemporary and future communities of scientists can still call that productive. In the end, we have to resort to the minorities _telling_ the majority what is or is not "just". If the fusion community tells us that Sally is a jerk to the fusion community and shouldn't be tolerated, we have to give that some credence. That's social justice and it's one mechanism for truth seeking. > Sure, one could make a simulation of all this, or apply game theory. I don't think that gets at a fundamental question which is why should any selfish agent care if the biosphere is effective? Right. A simulation can, however, help a non-empathetic person empathize, though. This is the great promise of video/VR games. We now have an extraordinary power to put people in the shoes of others. And if such experiences can lead to a broader sense of ecology, then it will get at that fundamental question. > Perhaps there is really nothing to know -- just vote, fight, compete, etc. as appropriate for prevailing social (dis)order. It's interesting to put it that way: there is nothing to _know_. The foundation of social justice is not entirely about facts or knowledge. It's about feelings. And feelings, emotions are one mechanism for data fusion, a collapse of lots of heterogeneous signals down into a single measure (disgust, love, etc.). These can be used as tools. They hypothesis relies on the idea that they _are_ used as tools, already, by at least animals to make decisions. Social justice, the feelings we feel when, say, Richard Spencer speaks at one's alma mater, is just an extension of that. > Even given the goal of omniscience and omnipotence and an ever-increasing ambition for harder problems, it still isn't clear that every agent is useful. Some agents may consume more resources than they contribute. Or just from a light cone type of argument it can cost more to send a message, do a calculation, and return a result, than doing it within a smaller network. From the pro- social justice perspective, one might argue that it is just too difficult to anticipate what constitutes `fit' behavior, so everyone must be supported. Well, I think there are both positive and negative sides of social justice. It seems clear that people like Richard Spencer and Curtis Yarvin are attacked by the SJWs because the SJWs feel those people are not useful and should be muted/ignored. So, it's not clear that social justice is about making _everyone_ equal. It is a mechanism for discriminating between the potentially useful and the (obviously?) useless. FWIW, Richard Spencer is obviously useless ... with Yarvin, whose Urbit may well be useful to some extent, it's less obvious ... but we depend on the SJWs to help us navigate the turbulence. > On the other hand there sure seems to be a lot of similar individuals in the population. In this `global' view, it seems some coherent (but arbitrary) vision is needed to identify which hard problems to tackle and how to combine resources to do it. Coherent visions tend to come from individuals or small groups. Well, there's nothing about SJ that requires homogeneity or lack of diversity. SJ simply requests that we take the opinions of experts seriously. E.g. if the fusion community claims the Germans are close to a practical reactor, then we should listen. If they say Sally's ideas are quackery and should be muted, then we should listen. So, SJ does precisely what you're asking it to do. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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On 12/07/2016 07:55 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> There are other kinds of energy barriers besides catastrophes. Climbing a hill is different than falling in a hole and having to climb out again. Taking on debt or forcing everyone to buy car or health insurance, say. Right, which is what I'm claiming w.r.t. social justice (and political correctness, btw). Scott Aaronson's kerfuffle with Amanda Marcotte is a good example. Social justice diversifies the type of energy barriers on which to cut our teeth. > I don't see why any cognitive process is needed for violence to occur other than operational aspects of making it happen or planning to avoid retribution. The person that believes there is inequality, say a terrorist, can take up arms without really modeling the target at all. A dog can get kicked just because it was at the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm not so sure cognition is as binary as you're implying. The dog-kicker must model the dog to some extent, even if it's in the most banal sense of the adequate sensorimotor control required. Even if the dog-kicker intended to kick the cat and the dog was merely chasing the cat, the dog-kicker still had a model of "the thing to be kicked". > A group will be made up of a finite number of agents. If there are a much larger number of dimensions for measuring productivity, there may not be any basis for exchange. Each agent could live in their own imaginary world of value unrelated to others. Thus, productivity needs to measured on a relatively small number of dimensions to act as a common currency. On college campuses, I would think the currency would be papers (e.g. your fusion research example), or popularity of classes. For voters, it's current and future earnings. True. But projecting a huge space onto a 10 dimensional space looks quite different from projecting it onto a 1 dimensional space. My guess is that the set of bases for exchange in universities is roughly equivalent to whatever expressive outlets exist in the students, professors, and employees. This can (and should) be different for every university. And my guess is the size of such a set will be larger for a university than your typical corporation or government agency. It's a typical category error by conservatives (like Haidt) to assume universities should operate like corporations, to effectively reduce their telos to unity as if they were a VC funded startup. > It is not necessarily easy for an emotionally warm person to steel herself in such a way that major risks are addressed independent of the risk of collateral damage. When adding up a bunch of costs and benefits to make a decision, the first five or ten effects might be feasible to model, but not five or ten effects of every person involved. For a world leader that could be billions of small terms in an optimization. I emphasize this because you seem to be pushing back on the suggestion that there are categories of people that are mostly the same and can be modelled as the same -- even if they can't be treated the same, at some point they really must be. Well, I was arguing narrowly against the idea that simulation doesn't "get at" the question of why a selfish individual should care about the efficacy of the biosphere. Video/VR games directly target what the individual cares about. So that contradicts your claim. But whether or not one can use simulation as an effective policy tool is a different sort of usage pattern, less qualitative and more quantitative. And in that usage pattern I agree not only with your practical feasibility limit, but also accept a theoretical limit. If a model is as complicated as its referent, it becomes useless. But my preferred method is not to homogenize the aspects modeled by the Grand Unified Model (GUM), as you seem to suggest; it is to implement a model grammar and generate as many distinct models as necessary to circumscribe the referent. So the feasibility constraint is not on features of the unitary model, but on the number and types of models. FWIW, I seem to be in the minority in thinking this way, given all the pushback I get from traditional modelers and in peer review. 8^( > I would stick with `know'. Questions like "Should I/he/she feel this way?" are relevant for social purposes. Without them, the chips fall where they may. If there is no language to model how differing emotions will interact and what it all means, then all that can be done is to let a conflict process play out. Well, the topic, here, is social psychology. So, it's difficult for me to abandon the majority of the social medium, which is emotion/feelings. Going back to Aaronson's experience, this is what our conversation's about: the tendency of (us) nerds to avoid the complex fabric of context and focus on overly simplistic black/white contrasts. > To me the word `justice' suggests that subgroup A can exert influence on subgroup B (or B on A) without some sort of dangerous potential energy building-up. If B wants millions of expensive cashmere socks without getting anything in return, there could be a problem. Yes, I agree. I'm simply resisting the idea that we have to reduce everything to pairwise negotiations (or conflict), which is what Haidt's doing with his truth vs. SJ dichotomy and what you're doing with group influence. I think we should bite the bullet and admit that all influences exist in a rhizomic bath of influences. And that means we need more than pairwise relations. SJ stories help me in my argument for pluralism because they (almost always) involve factoring a 3rd variable into an otherwise false dichotomy (like considering Yarvin's anti-democratic and "scientific racism" views in deciding whether or not he can present his cloud OS to a meeting of programmers). Grafting externalities on the otherwise clean-looking relationships exposes the need for a more robust calculus. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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Re: Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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"Social justice diversifies the type of energy barriers on which to cut our teeth."
Yep. "Well, I was arguing narrowly against the idea that simulation doesn't "get at" the question of why a selfish individual should care about the efficacy of the biosphere. Video/VR games directly target what the individual cares about. So that contradicts your claim." What I mean is that there can be sufficient disequilibrium in the global system such that an agent could be reasonably well aware of the impact of the system on them and their impact on the system, and nonetheless act in a way that decreases global fitness but increases their individual fitness. An example I heard this morning on NPR was a writer that makes a living from advertisement revenue from fake-news at least partially about Clinton, but nonetheless voted for Clinton. Or any of hundreds of examples of externalized costs by corporations. Games may or may not clarify these factors. It's an act of faith to expect altruism, even in a cost neutral situation. "But my preferred method is not to homogenize the aspects modeled by the Grand Unified Model (GUM), as you seem to suggest; it is to implement a model grammar and generate as many distinct models as necessary to circumscribe the referent." So long that there are some iterative reconciliations between `neighboring' distinct models then one might hope a limited GUM could relax over the centuries (and that GUM would be related to federal government). "Going back to Aaronson's experience, this is what our conversation's about: the tendency of (us) nerds to avoid the complex fabric of context and focus on overly simplistic black/white contrasts." Nerds make black/white contrasts or do nerds simply bother to make contrasts? I would expect the stereotype would be that nerds would be more prone to depth-first approaches -- total dominance of some esoteric narrow topic rather than trying to find a way to rationalize a large but ambiguous or partial set of signals. In doing the latter, model free parameters need to be estimated, and at first that may involve extreme perturbations if measurement is not easy (sample some color with the value of black or white, but not grey -- assuming monotonicity). "I think we should bite the bullet and admit that all influences exist in a rhizomic bath of influences. And that means we need more than pairwise relations." I could see that would be useful to model politics (esp. high school popularity contests), but it can already hard to model complex things with pairs never mind many body terms. I suspect someone like Trump really is pairwise in his interactions. It works because no one in the whole network has come to expect consistency. With that kind of violence, it is fool's errand to model many body terms. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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On 12/08/2016 11:43 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> What I mean is that there can be sufficient disequilibrium in the global system such that an agent could be reasonably well aware of the impact of the system on them and their impact on the system, and nonetheless act in a way that decreases global fitness but increases their individual fitness. An example I heard this morning on NPR was a writer that makes a living from advertisement revenue from fake-news at least partially about Clinton, but nonetheless voted for Clinton. Or any of hundreds of examples of externalized costs by corporations. Games may or may not clarify these factors. It's an act of faith to expect altruism, even in a cost neutral situation. OK. As long as "the rising tide", that allows the current generation to stand on the priors' shoulders, is obfuscated, you're right; there's no reason to expect anything like altruism. But if a) it's true that, and b) individuals can see the truth that, increased power of the biosphere results in increased individual power, then we would have reason to expect altruism. Granted, there're lots of assumptions in there. But the primary complaint in SJ issues is that of unrecognized privilege. So, the important part of what we're talking about is facilitating ways in which the individual can _see_ the platform on which they stand in some synoptic context. FWIW, it's also that same complaint conservatives make toward entitlements, Boomers make against Millenials, etc. So, this isn't an SJ-specific problem/solution. > So long that there are some iterative reconciliations between `neighboring' distinct models then one might hope a limited GUM could relax over the centuries (and that GUM would be related to federal government). Yes, I agree completely. Pluralism is often a path toward Unitarianism/Monism. > Nerds make black/white contrasts or do nerds simply bother to make contrasts? I would expect the stereotype would be that nerds would be more prone to depth-first approaches -- total dominance of some esoteric narrow topic rather than trying to find a way to rationalize a large but ambiguous or partial set of signals. In doing the latter, model free parameters need to be estimated, and at first that may involve extreme perturbations if measurement is not easy (sample some color with the value of black or white, but not grey -- assuming monotonicity). Yeah, you're probably right about that, too. However, depth-first methods might always (or at least often) turn into us vs them contrast, which is plenty binary. And there are 2 choices to building your model in the context of free parameters: 1) ignore them or 2) assert universality over their dimension. And both approaches result in unjustifiable claims. So one is better off doing a horrible job of estimation and being clear about your estimation methods. Nerds often miss this opportunity and land on over-simplified models, which is why we're so helpless in the face of complex criticism. > I could see that would be useful to model politics (esp. high school popularity contests), but it can already hard to model complex things with pairs never mind many body terms. I suspect someone like Trump really is pairwise in his interactions. It works because no one in the whole network has come to expect consistency. With that kind of violence, it is fool's errand to model many body terms. I disagree. The way to outmaneuver someone like Trump is by demonstrating higher valence in your relationships. If we assume Trump is the master of ambiguous linguistics Lakoff thinks he is, then he already understands this, at least tacitly. Trump (under this idea) purposefully forms his expressions so that there are unbound variables that are likely to be bound by the listener. That's tantamount to a schematic axiom system, which is inherently many-bodied (perhaps infinite valence, depending on the structure of the variables). But since Trump's deliverables are/will only be pairwise, the way to out maneuver him is by delivering higher valence artifacts. Actual agreements that find consensus amongst multiple parties. For example, Al Gore could do this by presenting Trump with a deal that satisfies so many players, Trump will be incapable of refusing it. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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Re: Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses
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Glen (Marcus) -
>> I could see that would be useful to model politics (esp. high school popularity contests), but it can already hard to model complex things with pairs never mind many body terms. I suspect someone like Trump really is pairwise in his interactions. It works because no one in the whole network has come to expect consistency. With that kind of violence, it is fool's errand to model many body terms. > I disagree. The way to outmaneuver someone like Trump is by demonstrating higher valence in your relationships. If we assume Trump is the master of ambiguous linguistics Lakoff thinks he is, then he already understands this, at least tacitly. Trump (under this idea) purposefully forms his expressions so that there are unbound variables that are likely to be bound by the listener. That's tantamount to a schematic axiom system, which is inherently many-bodied (perhaps infinite valence, depending on the structure of the variables). But since Trump's deliverables are/will only be pairwise, the way to out maneuver him is by delivering higher valence artifacts. Actual agreements that find consensus amongst multiple parties. For example, Al Gore could do this by presenting Trump with a deal that satisfies so many players, Trump will be incapable of refusing it. > I think I actually understood (most of) this. It sounds almost like it could reduce to Trevor Noah's recent show on how to handle Trump in the way you must with a Toddler? http://www.ew.com/article/2016/11/30/trevor-noah-donald-trump-toddler Carry on, - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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