Aeon.co has posted an article I worked on for a couple of years. It’s only 2,200 words, but they were hard words to find because the ideas were, and are, hard for me. I have little sense of whether I got either the words or the ideas right.

The article argues, roughly, that the sorts of generalizations that machine learning models embody are very different from the sort of generalizations the West has taken as the truths that matter. ML’s generalizations often are tied to far more specific configurations of data and thus are often not understandable by us, and often cannot be applied to particular cases except by running the ML model.

This may be leading us to locate the really real not in the eternal (as the West has traditional done) but at least as much in the fleeting patterns of dust that result from everything affecting everything else all the time and everywhere.

Three notes:

1. Nigel Warburton, the philosophy editor at Aeon, was very helpful, as was Timo Hannay in talking through the ideas, and at about a dozen other people who read drafts. None of them agreed entirely with the article.

2. Aeon for some reason deleted a crucial footnote that said that my views do not necessarily represent the views of Google, while keeping the fact that I am a part time, temporary writer-in-residence there. To be clear: My reviews do not necessarily represent Google’s.

3. My original first title for it was “Dust Rising”, but then it became “Trains, Car Wrecks, and Machine Learning’s Ontology” which i still like although I admit it that “ontology” may not be as big a draw as I think it is.

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A long-time friend and, I’ve learned, a former grocery worker, today on a mailing list posted a brief rant calling people who do not return their grocery carts to the cart corral “moral cretins.” He made exceptions for people parked in handicapped parking spots, but not those who say they cannot leave their children unattended in a car for ten seconds. “Model good behavior,” he enjoins the latter folks.

While I always return my cart —honestly, I do–I felt weirdly compelled to defend those who willfully disobey the cart injunction, even though I understand where my friend is coming from on this issue: non-cart-returning is evidence of a belief that one can just waltz through life without thinking about the consequences of one’s actions, just expecting other “lesser” humans to clean up after you.

Here’s what I wrote:

I want to rise in a weak defense of those who do not return their carts.

While some certainly are moral cretins and self-centered ass-hats, others may believe that the presence of cart wranglers in the parking lot is evidence that the store is providing a cart-return service. “That’s their job, ” these people may be thinking.

Why then does the store give over some parking spaces to cart collection areas?  They are there for the convenience of shoppers who are taking carts. It’s up to the cart wranglers to make sure that area is always stocked.

But why then does the store have signs that say, “Please return your carts”? Obviously the “please” means that the store is asking you to volunteer to do their job for them.

Who would interpret a sign that way? Ok, probably moral cretins and self-centered ass-hats

I’m just being a wiseguy in that last sentence. Not only do I know you non-returners are fine people who have good reasons for your behavior, I even understand that there are probably more important things to talk about.

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The original Buridan’s Ass is a philosophical fable: An ass owned by Buridan (a 14th century philosopher whose ideas about morality were being criticized by the fable) found itself exactly equidistant between two bales of hay that were identically attractive. Finding no relevant difference between them that would justify walking to one rather than the other, the ass stayed put and perished.

I recently heard someone put forward what I will call Buridan’s Contrapositive Ass: he felt equally repelled by two alternative positions on a topic, and thus stayed undecided.

I would like to propose another variant: the Buridan’s Contrapositive Asshole who equally dislikes the Democratic and Republican candidates, and so votes Libertarian.

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danah boyd’s 2018 “You think you want media literacy, do you?” remains an essential, frame-changing discussion of the sort of media literacy that everyone, including danah [@zephoria], agrees we need: the sort that usually focuses on teaching us how to not fall for traps and thus how to disbelieve. But, she argues, that’s not enough. We also need to know how to come to belief.

I went back to danah’s brilliant essay because Barbara Fister [@bfister], a librarian I’ve long admired, has now posted “Lizard People in the Library.” Referencing danah’s essay among many others, Barbara asks: Given the extremity and absurdity of many American’s beliefs, what’s missing from our educational system, and what can we do about it? Barbara presents a set of important, practical, and highly sensible steps we can take. (Her essay is part of the Project Information Literacy research program.)

The only thing I’d dare to add to either essay — or more exactly, an emphasis I would add — is that we desperately need to learn and teach how to come to belief together. Sense-making as well as belief-forming are inherently collaborative projects. It turns out that without explicit training and guidance, we tend to be very very bad at it.

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This probably is not about what you think it is. It doesn’t take a moral stand about Parler or about its being chased off the major platforms and, in effect, off the Internet. Yet the title of this post is accurate: it’s about why moral frameworks don’t help us solve problems like those posed by Parler.

Traditional moral frameworks

The two major philosophical frameworks we use in the West to assess moral situations are consequentialism (mainly utilitarianism) and deontology. Utilitarianism assesses the morality of a choice based on the cumulative amount of happiness it will bring across the entire population (or how much it diminishes unhappiness). Deontology applies moral principles to cases, such as “It’s wrong to steal.”

Each has its advantages, but I don’t see how to apply them in a way that settles the issues about Parler. Or about most other things.

For example, from almost its very beginning (J.S. Mill, but not Bentham, as far as I remember), utilitarians have had to institute a hierarchy of pleasures in order to meet the objection that if we adopt that framework we should morally prefer policies that promote drunkenness and sex, over funding free Mozart concerts. (Just a tad of class bias showing there :) Worse, in a global space, do we declare a small culture’s happiness of less worth than those of a culture with a larger population? Should we declare a small culture’s happiness of less worth? Indeed, how do we apply utilitarianism to a single culture’s access to, for example,  pornography?

That last question raises a different, and common, objection with utilitarianism: suppose overall happiness is increased by ignoring the rights of others? It’s hard for utilitarianism to get over the conclusion that slavery is ok  so long as the people held slaves are greatly outnumbered by those who benefit from them. The other standard example is a contrivance in which a town’s overall happiness is greatly increased by allowing a person known by the authorities to be innocent to nevertheless be hanged. That’s because it turns out that most of us have a sense of deontological principles: We don’t care if slavery or hanging innocent people results in an overall happier society because it’s wrong on principle. 

But deontology has its own issues with being applied. The closest Immanuel Kant — the most prominent deontologist — gets to putting some particular value into his Categorical Imperative is to phrase it in terms of treating people as ends, not means, i.e., valuing autonomy. Kant argues that it is central because without it we can’t be moral creatures. But it’s not obvious that that is the highest value for humans especially in difficult moral situations,We can’t be fully moral without empathy nor is it clear how and when to limit people’s autonomy. (Many of us believe we also can’t be fully moral without empathy, but that’s a different argument.)

The relatively new  — 30 year old  — ethics of care avoids many of the issues with both of these moral frameworks by losing primary interest in general principles or generalized happiness, and instead thinking about morality in terms of relationships with distinct and particular individuals to whom we owe some responsibility of care; it takes as its fundamental and grounding moral behavior the caring of a mother for a child.  (Yes, it recognizes that fathers also care for children.) It begins with the particular, not an attempt at the general.

Applying the frameworks to Parler

So, how do any of these help us with the question of de-platforming Parler?

Utilitarians might argue that the existence of Parler as an amplifier of hate threatens to bring down the overall happiness of the world. Of course, the right-wing extremists on Parler would argue exactly the opposite, and would point to the detrimental consequences of giving the monopoly platforms this power.  I don’t see how either side convinces the other on this basis.

Deontologists might argue that the de-platforming violates the rights of the users and readers of Parler. the rights threatened by fascismOther deontologists  might talk about the rights threatened by the consequences of the growth of fascism enabled by Parler. Or they might simply make the utilitarian argument. Again, I don’t see how these frameworks lead to convincing the other side.

While there has been work done on figuring out how to apply the ethics of care to policy, it generally doesn’t make big claims about settling this sort of issue. But it may be that moral frameworks should not be measured by how effectively they convert opponents, but rather by how well they help us come to our own moral beliefs about issues. In that case, I still don’t see how they much help. 

If forced to have an opinion about Parler  — andI don’t think I have one worth stating  — I’d probably find a way to believe that the harmful consequences of Parler outweigh hindering the  human right of the participants to hang out with people they want to talk with and to say whatever they want. My point is definitely not that you ought to believe the same thing, because I’m very uncomfortable with it myself. My point is that moral frameworks don’t help us much.

And, finally, as I posted recently, I think moral questions are getting harder and harder now that we are ever more aware of more people, more opinions, and the complex dynamic networks of people, beliefs, behavior, and policies.

* * *

My old friend AKMA — so learned, wise, and kind that you could plotz — takes me to task in a very thought-provoking way. I reply in the comments.

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Twitter’s reasons for permanent banning Donald Tr*mp acknowledge a way in which post-modernists (an attribution that virtually no post-modernist claims, so pardon my short hand) anticipated the Web’s effect on the relationship of author and reader. While the author’s intentions have not been erased, the reader’s understanding is becoming far more actionable.

Twitter’s lucid explanation of why it (finally) threw Tr*mp off its platform not only looks at the context of his tweets, it also considers how his tweets were being understood on Twitter and other platforms. For example:

“President Trump’s statement that he will not be attending the Inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate…” 

and

The use of the words “American Patriots” to describe some of his supporters is also being interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.

and

The mention of his supporters having a “GIANT VOICE long into the future” and that “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” is being interpreted as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an “orderly transition” …

Now, Twitter cares about how his tweets are being received because that reception is, in Twitter’s judgment, likely to incite further violence. That violates Twitter’s Glorification of Violence policy, so I am not attributing any purist post-modern intentions (!) to Twitter.

But this is a pretty clear instance of the way in which the Web is changing the authority of the author to argue against misreadings as not their intention. The public may indeed be misinterpreting the author’s intended meaning, but it’s now clearer than ever that those intentions are not all we need to know. Published works are not subservient to authors.

I continue to think there’s value in trying to understand a work within the context of what we can gather about the author’s intentions. I’m a writer, so of course I would think that. But the point of publishing one’s writings is to put them out on their own where they have value only to the extent to which they are appropriated — absorbed and made one’s own — by readers.

The days of the Author as Monarch are long over because now how readers appropriate an author’s work is even more public than that work itself.

(Note: I put an asterisk into Tr*mp’s name because I cannot stand looking at his name, much less repeating it.)

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I was going through a shelf of books I haven’t visited in a couple of decades and found a book I used in 1986 when I taught Introduction to Computer Science in my last year as a philosophy professor. (It’s a long story.) Ethical Issues in the Use of Computers was a handy anthology, edited by Deborah G. Johnson and John W. Snapper (Wadsworth, 1985).

So what were the ethical issues posed by digital tech back then?

The first obvious point is that back then ethics were ethics: codes of conduct promulgated by professional societies. So, Part I consists of eight essays on “Codes of Conduct for the Computer Professions.” All but two of the articles present the codes for various computing associations. The two stray sheep are “The Quest for a Code of Professional Ethics: An Intellectual and Moral Confusion” (John Ladd) and “What Should Professional Societies do About Ethics?” (Fay H. Sawyier).

Part 2 covers “Issues of Responsibility”, with most of the articles concerning themselves with liability issues. The last article, by James Moor, ventures wider, asking “Are There Decisions Computers Should Not Make?” About midway through, he writes:

“Therefore, the issue is not whether there are some limitations to computer decision-making but how well computer decision making compares with human decision making.” (p. 123)

While saluting artificial intelligence researchers for their enthusiasm, Moor says “…at this time the results of their labors do not establish that computers will one day match or exceed human levels of ability for most kinds of intellectual activities.” Was Moor right? It depends. First define basically everything.

Moor concedes that Hubert Dreyfus’ argument (What Computers Still Can’t Do) that understanding requires a contextual whole has some power, but points to effective expert systems. Overall, he leaves open the question whether computers will ever match or exceed human cognitive abilities.

After talking about how to judge computer decisions, and forcefully raising Joseph Weizenbaum’s objection that computers are alien to human life and thus should not be allowed to make decisions about that life, Moor lays out some guidelines, concluding that we need to be pragmatic about when and how we will let computers make decisions:

“First, what is the nature of the computer’s competency and how has it been demonstrated? Secondly given our basic goals and values why is it better to use a computer decision maker in a particular situation than a human decision maker?”

We are still asking these questions.

Part 3 is on “Privacy and Security.” Four of the seven articles can be considered to be general introductions fo the concept of privacy. Apparently privacy was not as commonly discusssed back then.

Part 4, “Computers and Power,” suddenly becomes more socially aware. It includes an excerpt from Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason, as well as articles on “Computers and Social Power” and “Peering into the Poverty Gap.”

Part 5 is about the burning issue of the day: “Software as Property.” One entry is the Third Circuit Court of Appeals finding in Apple vs. Franklin Computer. Franklin’s Ace computer contained operating system code that had been copied from Apple. The Court knew this because in addition to the programs being line-by-line copies, Franklin failed to remove the name of one of the Apple engineers that the engineer had embedded in the program. Franklin acknowledged the copying but argued that operating system code could not be copyrighted.

That seems so long ago, doesn’t it?

Because this post mentions Joseph Weizenbaum, here’s the beginning of a blog post from 2010:

I just came across a 1985 printout of notes I took when I interviewed Prof. Joseph Weizenbaum in his MIT office for an article that I think never got published. (At least Google and I have no memory of it.) I’ve scanned it in; it’s a horrible dot-matrix printout of an unproofed semi-transcript, with some chicken scratches of my own added. I probably tape recorded the thing and then typed it up, for my own use, on my KayPro.

In it, he talks about AI and ethics in terms much more like those we hear today. He was concerned about its use by the military especially for autonomous weapons, and raised issues about the possible misuse of visual recognition systems. Weizenbaum was both of his time and way ahead of it.

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Daily Nous has run a guest editorial by C. Thi Nguyen defending “public philosophy.” Yes! In fact, it’s telling that public philosophy even needs defense. And defense from whom?

Here’s a pull quote from the last paragraph:

To speak bluntly: the world is in crisis. It’s war, the soul of humanity is at stake, and the discipline that has been in isolation training for 2000 years for this very moment is too busy pointing out tiny errors in each other’s technique to actually join the fight.

And this is from near the beginning:

We need to fill the airwaves with the Good Stuff, in every form: op-eds, blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, long-form articles, lectures, forums, Tweets, and more. Good philosophy needs to be everywhere, accessible to every level, to anybody who might be interested. We need to flood the world with gateways of every shape and size.

So, yes, of course!

Who then is Dr. Nguyen arguing against? Who does not support increasing the presence of public philosophy?

Answer: The bulk of the article in fact outlines what we have to do in order to get the profession of philosophy to accept public philosopher as an activity worth recognizing, rewarding, and promoting.

If that op-ed is a manifesto (it is), sign me up!

[Disclosure: I am an ex-academic philosophy professor whose writings sometimes impinge on actual philosophy.]

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I’ve written before about the need to teach The Kids (also: all of us) not only how to think critically so we can see what we should not believe, but also how to come to belief. That piece, which I now cannot locate, was prompted by danah boyd’s excellent post on the problem with media literacy. Robert Berkman, Outreach, Business Librarian at the University of Rochester and Editor of The Information Advisor’s Guide to Internet Research, asked me how one can go about teaching people how to come to belief. Here’s an edited version of my reply:

I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer. I actually haven’t thought much about how to teach people how to come to belief, beyond arguing for doing this as a social process (the ol’ “knowledge is a network” argument :) I have a pretty good sense of how *not* to do it: the way philosophy teachers relentlessly show how every proposed position can be torn down.

I wonder what we’d learn by taking a literature course as a model — not one that is concerned primarily with critical method, but one that is trying to teach students how to appreciate literature. Or art. The teacher tries to get the students to engage with one another to find what’s worthwhile in a work. Formally, you implicitly teach the value of consistency, elegance of explanation, internal coherence, how well a work clarifies one’s own experience, etc. Those are useful touchstones for coming to belief.

I wouldn’t want to leave students feeling that it’s up to them to come up with an understanding on their own. I’d want them to value the history of interpretation, bringing their critical skills to it. The last thing we need is to make people feel yet more unmoored.

I’m also fond of the orthodox Jewish way of coming to belief, as I, as a non-observant Jew, understand it. You have an unchanging and inerrant text that means nothing until humans interpret it. To interpret it means to be conversant with the scholarly opinions of the great Rabbis, who disagree with one another, often diametrically. Formulating a belief in this context means bringing contemporary intelligence to a question while finding support in the old Rabbis…and always always talking respectfully about those other old Rabbis who disagree with your interpretation. No interpretations are final. Learned contradiction is embraced.

That process has the elements I personally like (being moored to a tradition, respecting those with whom one disagrees, acceptance of the finitude of beliefs, acceptance that they result from a social process), but it’s not going to be very practical outside of Jewish communities if only because it rests on the acceptance of a sacred document, even though it’s one that literally cannot be taken literally; it always requires interpretation.

My point: We do have traditions that aim at enabling us to come to belief. Science is one of them. But there are others. We should learn from them.

TL;DR: I dunno.

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“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953.

“If an algorithm could talk, we could not understand it.”
— Deep learning, Now.

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