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11200.652183
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and begin all over again. – Andre Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse
Thus reads one of the very few epigraphs that I remember well. …
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126647.652287
Very few researchers will have failed to notice that computing technology has been advancing rapidly, so that the landscape of computational tools and resources at our disposal looks completely di erent than a generation ago. Some researchers from the humanities and social sciences have embraced new ways of doing research, while many others have only a partial or passing awareness of the emerging computational research programmes within their elds. This book provides a fairly gentle and broad introduction to the new possibilities. This is a valuable contribution, since it would be a shame for the signi cant potential of computers to go untapped simply because people aren’t aware of this potential. For some sub- elds (such as social epistemology), computers have already been a game-changer.
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126663.652316
Sepkoski has written a history of the ‘extinction imaginary’, the immense variety of cultural ideas and expectations surrounding what has happened and what could (catastrophically) happen to life on Earth. As he skilfully argues, this has enabled ‘Western culture’s imaginary’ more broadly to seamlessly connect present ecological worries with narratives about ‘deep time’, from the earliest discovery of extinction to the contemporary claim, now taken to be self-evident, that biodiversity conservation is a good thing.
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126679.652331
In Science on a Mission, Naomi Oreskes aims to document how US Navy funding shaped research in oceanography from the twentieth century through to the present. The book seeks ‘to determine whether Navy patronage a ected the content of the scienti c work that was done and, if so, how’ (p. 9). Oreskes’s short answer to this question is ‘yes’. Her long answer consists of meticulous case studies on how the Navy’s interests came to shape the priorities and practices of American oceanography.
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138218.652346
Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) was the most prominent
rationalist of the black American enlightenment thinkers in the
nineteenth-century. He stands out among his
contemporaries—Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T.
Washington, most notably—for his robust defense of the central
place of reason in moral agency. His attempts to work out the
consequences of that view for the nature of language and history lends
his philosophy a breadth and depth not matched by other enlightenment
thinkers. The prominence of his protégé, W. E. B. Du
Bois, helped ensure Crummell’s continuing influence during the
rise of pragmatism, but he eventually fell out of favor as such
relativistic thinkers as Alain LeRoy Locke and Zora Neale Hurston
emerged.
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356601.652357
The standard theory of choice in economics involves modelling human agents as if they had precise attitudes when in fact they are often fuzzy. For the normative purposes of welfare economics, it might be thought that the imposition of a precise framework is nevertheless well justified: If we think the standard theory is normatively correct, and therefore that agents ought to be in this sense precise, then doesn’t it follow that their true welfare can be measured precisely? I will argue that this thought, central to the preference purification project in behavioural welfare economics, commits a fallacy. The standard theory requires agents to adopt precise preferences; but neither the theory nor a fuzzy agent’s initial attitudes may determine a particular way in which she ought to precisify them. So before actually having precisified her preferences, the welfare of fuzzy agents may remain indeterminate. I go on to consider the implications of this fallacy for welfare economics.
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356621.65237
The idea that people make mistakes in how they pursue their own best interests, and that we can identify and correct for these mistakes has been central to much recent work in behavioural economics, and the ‘nudge’ approach to public policy grounded on it. The focus in this literature has been on individual choices that are mistaken. Agreeing with, and building on the criticism that this literature has been too quick to identify individual choices as mistaken, I argue that it has also overlooked a kind of mistake that is potentially more significant: irreducibly diachronic mistakes, which occur when series of choices over time do not serve our interests well, even though no individual choice can be identified as a mistake. I argue for the claim that people make such mistakes, and reflect on its significance for welfare economics.
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416730.652381
|A common sight in Europe: |
poor person searching bare-handed through
garbage bins in search of deposit bottles
They are mistaken. While bottle deposit systems are superficially attractive they are a horrendously expensive way to do not much good, while also creating degrading and fundamentally worthless work for the poor. …
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469317.652392
This chapter provides a theoretical lens on conceptual disruption. It offers a typology of conceptual disruption, discusses its relation to conceptual engineering, and sketches a programmatic view of the implications of conceptual disruption for the ethics of technology.
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469386.652404
Generative AI enables automated, effective manipulation at scale. Despite the growing general ethical discussion around generative AI, the specific manipulation risks remain inadequately investigated. This article outlines essential inquiries encompassing conceptual, empirical, and design dimensions of manipulation, pivotal for comprehending and curbing manipulation risks. By highlighting these questions, the article underscores the necessity of an appropriate conceptualisation of manipulation to ensure the responsible development of Generative AI technologies.
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469403.652415
Franke, in Philosophy & Technology, 37(1), 1–6, (2024), connects the recent debate about manipulative algorithmic transparency with the concerns about problematic pursuits of positive liberty. I argue that the indifference view of manipulative transparency is not aligned with positive liberty, contrary to Franke’s claim, and even if it is, it is not aligned with the risk that many have attributed to pursuits of positive liberty. Moreover, I suggest that Franke’s worry may generalise beyond the manipulative transparency debate to AI ethics in general.
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587166.652427
Mark Antony’s funeral oration is the turning point of Julius Caesar. Brutus had just finished his own speech, and seemed to persuade the people that the killing of Caesar was the justified killing of a tyrant. …
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645869.652436
Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT reflect, and can potentially perpetuate, social biases in language use. Conceptual engineering aims to revise our concepts to eliminate such bias. We show how machine learning and conceptual engineering can be fruitfully brought together to offer new insights to both conceptual engineers and LLM designers. Specifically, we suggest that LLMs can be used to detect and expose bias in the prototypes associated with concepts, and that LLM de-biasing can serve conceptual engineering projects that aim to revise such conceptual prototypes. At present, these de-biasing techniques primarily involve approaches requiring bespoke interventions based on choices of the algorithm’s designers. Thus, conceptual engineering through de-biasing will include making choices about what kind of normative training an LLM should receive, especially with respect to different notions of bias. This offers a new perspective on what conceptual engineering involves and how it can be implemented. And our conceptual engineering approach also offers insight, to those engaged in LLM de-biasing, into the normative distinctions that are needed for that work.
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714091.652448
I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it).
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761125.652458
In this paper, we present an agent-based model for studying the impact of ‘myside bias’ on the argumentative dynamics in scientific communities. Recent insights in cognitive science suggest that scientific reasoning is influenced by ‘myside bias’. This bias manifests as a tendency to prioritize the search and generation of arguments that support one’s views rather than arguments that undermine them. Additionally, individuals tend to apply more critical scrutiny to opposing stances than to their own. Although myside bias may pull individual scientists away from the truth, its effects on communities of reasoners remain unclear. The aim of our model is two-fold: first, to study the argumentative dynamics generated by myside bias, and second, to explore which mechanisms may act as a mitigating factor against its pernicious effects. Our results indicate that biased communities are epistemically less successful than non-biased ones, and that they also tend to be less polarized than non-biased ones. Moreover, we find that two socio-epistemic mechanisms help communities to mitigate the effect of the bias: the presence of a common filter on weak arguments, which can be interpreted as shared beliefs, and an equal distribution of agents for each alternative at the start of the scientific debate.
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775524.652468
Preliminary Note: As usual, the end of the year is hectic, and I’m spending quite some time preparing special content for this newsletter that should be ready for Christmas Eve. Posting should be light until then, and today’s post is more a digression from my usual topics than anything else. …
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928656.65249
The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato ’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. Beginning then and there opens a new vista on the history of political thought by restoring questions of public administration to the foreground of the field. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their bureaucrats and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world ’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of wonder and enchantment. From this vantage point, the article calls for a new research agenda that will expand political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by recovering public administration as a major thematic throughline in the five-thousand-year global history of human political ideas. Understanding public administration as an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic claims in contemporary democracies that bureaucracy is a recent alien imposition.
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934084.652507
This paper interrogates the concept of luck in cancer diagnosis. I argue that while it might have some utility for individuals, at the clinical and research level, the concept impedes important prevention efforts and misdirects sources of blame in a cancer diagnosis. Such use, in fact, has the possibility of harming already vulnerable efforts at ameliorating social determinants of health and should therefore be eliminated from research and clinical contexts.
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1192706.652525
In 1979 Bob Dylan became a born again Christian, and worse, released three albums of songs about God. About this perceived betrayal, I was too young to have an opinion; it was part of a lore I learned much later. …
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1222904.652535
Is stand-up comedy akin to psychotherapy? Yes, argues psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir in Animal Joy:
As part of my research … I had frequented comedy clubs and noticed how each performance, had it been delivered in a different tone of voice and context, could have been the text of a therapy session. …
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1294718.652545
The standard way of thinking about ethics distinguishes axiological questions (about value) from deontic ones (about right action). On this way of carving things up, it’s the deontic question that’s central to ethical debates—after all, a non-consequentialist could agree with a consequentialist about which action results in the best outcome, yet disagree about which action is right. …
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1378372.652556
Many moral theories hold individuals responsible for their marginal impact on massive patterns (for instance overall value or equality of opportunity) or for following whichever rules would realise that pattern on the whole. But each of these injunctions is problematic. Intuitively, the first gives individuals responsibility for too much, and the second gives them responsibility for too little. I offer the outlines of a new approach to ethics in collective action contexts. I defend a new collaborative principle that assigns recognisably worthwhile responsibilities to agencies wherever possible. This principle supports a fractal model of moral responsibility, one that favours restructuring divisions of labour in ways that enhance the prospects of recognition at every resolution of social organisation. This essay is programmatic: starting from a conjecture about the moral significance of recognition, it sketches a new way of approaching a range of collective action problems that combines the importance of the perspectives of both moral and political philosophy.
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1427207.652566
Living systems are complex systems made of components that tend to degrade, but nonetheless they maintain themselves far from equilibrium. This requires living systems to extract energy and materials from the environment and use them to build and repair their parts by regulating their activities based on their internal and external conditions in ways that allow them to keep living. The philosophical and theoretical approach discussed in this Element aims to explain these features of biological systems by appealing to their organization. It addresses classical and more recent issues in philosophy of biology, from origins and definitions of life to biological teleology and functions, from an original perspective mainly focused on the living system, its physiology and behavior, rather than evolution. It discusses and revises the conceptual foundations of this approach and presents an updated version of it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
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1453745.652574
How do social factors affect group learning in diverse populations? Evidence from cognitive science gives us some insight into this question, but is generally limited to showing how social factors play out in small groups over short time periods. To study larger groups and longer time periods, we argue that we can combine evidence about social factors from cognitive science with agent-based models of group learning. In this vein, we demonstrate the usefulness of idealized models of inquiry, in which the assumption of Bayesian agents is used to isolate and explore the impact of social factors. We show that whether a certain social factor is beneficial to the community’s epistemic aims depends on its particular manifestation by focusing on the impacts of homophily – the tendency of individuals to associate with similar others – on group inquiry.
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1453771.652582
Concerns over medical paternalism are especially salient when there exists a conflict of values between patient and clinician. This is particularly relevant for psychiatry, the field of medicine for which the phenomenon of conflicting values is most present and for which the specter of medical paternalism looms large. Few cases are as glaring as that of anorexia nervosa (AN), a disorder that is considered to be egosyntonic (meaning its symptoms are reflectively endorsed by the patient) and maintained by the presence of pathological values. One might think, given this, that an approach to medicine that foregrounds the role of values in clinical encounters would be particularly well suited to address the problem of medical paternalism in treating AN. As it happens, this is precisely the goal of values-based medicine, an approach to medicine that prioritizes the integration of patients’ unique values into the aims of treatment and that has been touted as being particularly applicable to psychiatric conditions such as AN.
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1479194.65259
My colleague and co-author Alexandre Chirat published with Basile Clerc an op-ed in Le Monde a few days ago defending the use of non-linear pricing as an efficient and fair way to reallocate resources in the fight against climate change (in French). …
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1511641.652596
Scienti c collaboration is taking place with increasing frequency, at least since the Manhattan project. Globalization and rapid advancement in communication technologies have made easier national and international inquiry across di erent scienti c disciplines. Boyer-Kassem, Mayo-Wilson, and Weisberg have collected eleven chapters that address conceptual and normative issues about collaborative research and ensuing collective knowledge in the sciences. These issues are clustered around four core topics, each forming one part of the book: (i) information sharing among scientists, (ii) the reasons and strategies for (fruitful) collaboration, (iii) challenges, in terms of accountability, to the ordinary notions of authorship and refereeing, and (iv) the relationship between individual and group opinions in social decision-making problems. Most of the authors employ formal tools (mathematical models, computer simulations) to discuss and analyse di erent aspects of the dynamics of scienti c communities and collaborative research. Here, I focus on the notable contributions of each chapter.
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1547176.652605
PEA Soup Blog is pleased to be hosting this Ethics discussion with Lowry Pressly (University of Stanford) and Wendy Salkin (University of Stanford). This discussion focuses on Pressly’s paper “The Right to Be Forgotten and the Value of an Open Future”, with a critical précis from Wendy Salkin. …
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1756397.652613
Someone who worked here once said...that I was not interested in a story unless it contained a first-semester philosophy question. There is definitely some truth to that. (Errol Morris, in an interview.) …
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1800226.652619
In Chapters 1—4 and 7, Guala clari es and defends his favoured approach to social institutions. The concepts at the centre of his approach are drawn from game theory: individual preferences and motivations, individuals’ expectations, and game-theoretic equilibrium. Students and non-experts will bene t from Guala’s careful and clear exposition. And they will also welcome his sustained use throughout the book of three stylized examples: the institutions of property, of money, and of marriage. Experts, in contrast, will already be very familiar with game-theoretic approaches such as Guala’s. Nevertheless, many will value the sharpness with which Guala characterizes his account, carefully spelling out how concepts such as ‘rule’ can be rigorously de ned and analysed using more basic game-theoretic concepts.