New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

NC Anti-LGBT Law Update: NBA Moves All-Star Game from Charlotte

North Carolina’s infamous HB2, which prohibits LGBTQ people from getting the sorts of civil rights protections that women and racial minorities receive, as well as mocking the reality of trans* by demanding that everyone go to the restroom corresponding to the “biological sex” on their birth certificate (see here), has caused even more damage.  Today, the NBA announced that, because of HB2, it would move its all-star game out of Charlotte in 2017.  The league did add that if the HB2 problem were satisfactorily resolved, the city would get the game back in 2019.  The league had been threatening this move for some time, and it could cost the Charlotte area economy around $100 million.

Governor Pat McCrory’s response to the move was truly breathtaking, however.  As quoted in the Charlotte Observer, McCrory emailed that:

Regimes of Accumulation

In a new paper, Maximilian Fochler conducted a series of structured interviews with scientists to make an STS point: when we think of capitalism as a system that depends on “accumulation,” there are many different kinds of things that one can accumulate, many of them non-financial.  I think Fochler makes an important point, but I also think it should be pushed in a somewhat different, more critical direction.

First, though, the results of the interviews.  Fochler interviewed both academic and non-academic scientists in Austria.  On the academic side, he looked at those in charge of labs, and the post-docs who do most of the actual bench science.  Both are engaged in a race to accumulate.  The leaders have to produce peer-reviewed publications in order to get grants, which they need to then get more peer-reviewed publications (Fochler’s interview subjects were Austrian, but it should be noted that in this country, many of those scientists have to get grants to cover their salary.  No grant, no paycheck).  The post-docs are in perhaps the most dire situation: there are a lot more post-docs than there are positions for them, and so they have to engage in a competitive race to accumulate publications as well, in order to continue in their careers (or as Becker would say, adding a polite veneer, “invest in their human capital”), either by extending their current position or gaining another one.  Adding to the stress, postdoc positions typically last 2-3 years, which is not enough time to accumulate a significant publication record (I will leave it to readers to draw the connections between this situation and that faced by the humanities precariat).

On the corporate side, we find the CEO’s of start-ups trying to generate peer-reviewed publications, positive lab results, and other indicia that their particular research program – and its endpoint product – is worthy of continued venture capital funding, with the goal of (eventually) selling the start-up to a larger pharmaceutical company. Since the scientific process apparently takes about 10 years, and the VC funding cycle is two or three years, this is a continuous worry.  The scientists, on the other hand, much to their surprise (and mine, as I read the paper) work in a collaborative, non-competitive environment.  This is because successes and failures are attributable to the entire company.  Of course, the downside of this is that these scientists don’t accumulate anything they can use to parlay into their next job.

The simple point I would like to add is that, despite all of the accumulation, no one is making any real money.  Not the post-docs, especially, though a move into to a faculty position adds some salary and a little job security, but also adds to the need to publish. The CEO’s and employees of the start-ups aren’t likely to get rich either: 90% of start-ups fail generally; pharmaceuticals don’t do that much better; and one study reported  that “97% of drugs in preclinical tests never make it to market, and nor do 95% of the molecules in phase 1 clinical trials and 88% of molecules in phase 2. Not until phase 3 do their prospects get much better: Of the ones that make it that far, 56% are approved” (summative quote from here).

The Internet of Nature

Big Data theorists have, for a while, been warily eyeing the growth of the “Internet of Things” (IoT), which is when “smart” technology is integrated into ordinary household devices like refrigerators and toasters.  New fridges all have warning lights that remind you to change the water filter; IoT fridges will order the new filter for you.  “Smart” utility meters are another example: they can monitor your utility usage moment by moment, making adjustments, say, to the HVAC to optimize power (or to prevent brownouts by automatically raising the temperature of everybody’s house a degree or two during peak hours).  Such smart meters are obviously key if those with rooftop solar are going to sell their surplus capacity to the power company.  They also enable very detailed surveillance of people’s home lives: they apparently know when you’re using power for the dishwasher, the shower, the TV, and so on.

Capital knows opportunity when it arrives; if your dishwasher is using more power than the average dishwasher, expect advertising for a new, energy-efficient model.  If you routinely have lights on until very late at night, maybe you need some medicine to help you sleep, delivered to your web browser.  Your boss sees opportunity as well: if you routinely disarm the alarm, turn on the lights and open the fridge at 3:30am, maybe you’ve been out clubbing too late to be a good worker, and you need to have your desk cleared by 5:00 today.  This inference will be assisted by the fact that clubs now keep networked electronic records - ostensibly for security purposes - of who goes in and out (and who is banned: if you get thrown out of a club, all the other clubs on that network can refuse you entrance).  What if your boss buys the data from the club networks, and the utility company and crunches it to measure productivity?  Or, sells it to the insurance company, where you’re told that your new wellness initiative requires you to allow your devices to report that you come home and stay there by midnight every night, under penalty of punitive premiums?  Your auto insurance bill will almost certainly go up too, because you’ll have installed the vehicle tracking devices that will, by then, be necessary to avoid punitive insurance rates.

But all of that is about surveilling the human.  In a fascinating new paper, Kevin Haggerty and Daniel Trottier extend the study of surveillance to nature, noting that the practice is both pervasive and growing, on the one hand, and nearly completely ignored, on the other, with the partial exceptions of Latour and Haraway.  I suspect that this is a paper destined to have a big impact; Haggerty in particular is a very significant surveillance theorist, and in a 2000 paper, he and Richard Ericson made a very influential push to orient surveillance studies around the Deleuzian notion of an “assemblage,” arguing that the Foucauldian “panopticon” had become dated.  In the current paper, Haggerty and Trottier look at several ways that we now surveil nature that they expect to grow exponentially with developing technologies.  None of them are exactly new, but things like RFID tags will make them a lot cheaper, easier, and more commonplace: the representation of ever-more-remote aspects of nature, often turning it into spectacle; using animals as agents (for example, as the Germans did during WWI, attaching cameras to homing pigeons); the increased use of biosentinels (where we rely on an animal’s response to the environment to infer information about that environment.  The canary in the coal mine or the drug-sniffing dog are the textbook examples); and taking surveillance inspiration from nature (looking at insect eyes to develop cameras that can see a full 360 degrees, for example).  They then suggest three implications for research into surveillance: (1) there are non-technological aspects of surveillance that need highlighting and study; (2) not all surveillance is of humans (contrary to what most of the literature talks about); and (3) we need to look carefully at inspirations for surveillance.  They close by highlighting that the human/nature boundary has never been a particularly bright one, and it’s likely to get less so as we move on.

Why we reason redux: intention alignment and transfer of epistemic assets

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

A bit over five years ago I wrote a blog post on Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s then-recently published paper on their argumentative theory of reasoning. At that point I was about to start a research project on deductive reasoning, having as my main hypothesis the idea that deductive reasoning is best understood from a dialogical – and thus, argumentative – perspective, and so naturally the argumentative theory of reasoning was something to pay attention to. Yesterday was officially the very last day of my research project, and fittingly, earlier this week we convened for the very last (official) reading group session of the project to discuss a very recent paper by Andy Norman (CMU), forthcoming in Biology and Philosophy: ,‘Why we reason: intention-alignment and the genesis of human rationality’. The paper presents a broadly evolutionary account of human reasoning faculties, which takes on board much of Mercier & Sperber's (M&S) argumentative theory, but modifying it in important respects. Here is the abstract:

Why do humans reason? Many animals draw inferences, but reasoning—the tendency to produce and respond to reason-giving performances—is biologically unusual, and demands evolutionary explanation. Mercier and Sperber (Behav Brain Sci 34:57–111, 2011) advance our understanding of reason’s adaptive function with their argumentative theory of reason (ATR). On this account, the “function of reason is argumentative… to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade.” ATR, they argue, helps to explain several well-known cognitive biases. In this paper, I develop a neighboring hypothesis called the intention alignment model (IAM) and contrast it with ATR. I conjecture that reasoning evolved primarily because it helped social hominins more readily and fully align their intentions. We use reasons to advance various proximal ends, but in the main, we do it to overwrite the beliefs and desires of others: to get others to think like us. Reason afforded our ancestors a powerful way to build and maintain the shared outlooks necessary for a highly collaborative existence. Yes, we sometimes argue so as to gain argumentative advantage over others, or otherwise advantage ourselves at the expense of those we argue with, but more often, we reason in ways that are mutually advantageous. In fact, there are excellent reasons for thinking this must be so. IAM, I suggest, neatly explains the available evidence, while also providing a more coherent account of reason’s origins.