New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Worst. Legislature. Ever.

UPDATE (12/24). Don't take it from me.  The Electoral Integrity Project, which monitors and rates elections internationally, scored North Carolina.  It wasn't pretty.  A sample from the report, as cited in the linked article:

"On the measures of legal framework and voter registration ... on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project."

As Nietzsche said, "that which does not kill me, makes me stronger."  The late  poet and diarist Jim Carroll added that "my version is, that which does not kill me, makes me sleep until 3:30 the next afternoon."  We can add now: "that which does not kill me makes me cheat until well into the evening of a special session."

ORIGINAL POST: I had been going to do a post called “If You Think You’re Going to Lose, Cheat.  If you Lose Anyway, Cheat Some More” in response to last week’s special NC legislative session, which was enough to cement the NC GOP as one of the worst governing bodies in the country.  Today, however, they surpassed themselves.  A quick review is in order, as the NC legislature makes Wisconsin look well and transparently governed.  For that matter, the level of shenanigans and corruption is starting to make Zimbabwe look well-governed.

Is Most of the Intelligence in the Universe Non-Conscious AI?

by Eric Schwitzgebel

In a series of fascinating recent articles, philosopher Susan Schneider argues that

(1.) Most of the intelligent beings in the universe might be Artificial Intelligences rather than biological life forms.

(2.) These AIs might entirely lack conscious experiences.

Schneider's argument for (1) is simple and plausible: Once a species develops sufficient intelligence to create Artificial General Intelligence (as human beings appear to be on the cusp of doing), biological life forms are likely to be outcompeted, due to AGI's probable advantages in processing speed, durability, repairability, and environmental tolerance (including deep space). I'm inclined to agree. For a catastrophic perspective on this issue see Nick Bostrom. For a polyannish perspective, see Ray Kurzweil.

The argument for (2) is trickier, partly because we don't yet have a consensus theory of consciousness. Here's how Schneider expresses the central argument in her recent Nautilus article:

Shameless Self-Promotion Dept: Papers on Foucault, and on Spinoza

I've just uploaded a (relatively minor) revision of my SPEP paper from this fall in Salt Lake City to SSRN.  The paper is ""Confessing Preferences: What Foucault’s Government of the Living can tell us about Neoliberalism and Big Data," and the abstract is:

Foucault’s 1979-80 Collège de France lectures, On the Government of the Living, offer one way to situate the development of his later work, and in particular to understand his supposed turn away from biopolitics and governmentality to ethics and subjectivity.  In this paper, I argue that (1) a unifying thread in most of Foucault’s work from the late 1970s onward is an increasing concern with the centrality of confession as a primary technology of power in the Christian West; and (2) Neoliberalism is deeply confessional, and therefore highly suspect from a Foucauldian standpoint.  (3) These connections are particularly evident in a Foucauldian reading of data analytics (“big data”).

 

I've also uploaded a somewhat older paper on Spinoza and finitude.  The  paper is "Of Suicide and Falling Stones: Finitude, Contingency, and Corporeal Vulnerability in (Judith Butler’s) Spinoza," and the abstract is:

This paper juxtaposes Judith Butler's reading of Spinoza with the commonly-received, originally Deleuzian, presentation of Spinoza as the "anti-Hegel" or as the presentation of "positivity" against Hegelian "negativity." Working via the key commentary by Pierre Macherey in Hegel ou Spinoza, I argue that, once we no longer are compelled to read Spinoza as Hegel's negation or opposite, the way is open to see a Spinoza who is profoundly concerned with human fragility and finitude. the Spinoza that emerges presents a more cautious, but also potentially more generous, approach to emancipatory politics.

To put the point too schematically, readings of the affirmative Spinoza tend to develop the importance of conatus as resistance, at the expense of developing an understanding of the importance of limitations imposed by our own finitude. It seems to me that much of Butler’s thought can be read as bringing those elements together. How do we understand conatus, and marshal it as resistance, given the inevitability of finitude and constraint as factors that structure the desires through which we actually live?

 

More on the Troubling Neoliberal Privatization of Health Care

Developments this week highlight the problems with the neoliberal decision to privatize medicine in the U.S.  Certainly the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which entrenches responsibility for access to healthcare to private insurance companies and then attempts to contrive a market for patients to shop between insurance plans as some sort of proxy for shopping for doctors, is the most famous recent example of this decision.  Never mind that in market terms medicine is a classic credence good: you may not know either before or after purchase whether you are getting a good deal, and the barriers to knowing this are nearly insuperable owing to the inherent complexity of medicine and the inherent uncertainty behind most medical judgment, even perfectly executed by brilliant practitioners.  Medical care just isn’t one of those things that works well as a market good. 

Meantime, this week, President Obama signed the 21^st Century Cures Act.  This bipartisan bill makes an enormous investment in research into urgent health problems from Alzheimer’s, to opiate addition, to cancer, and continues to fund the promising developments in “precision medicine.”  This is an obvious good.  What could be wrong?  The tradeoff, beyond the now stale point that there is no investment in the social determinants of health – like urban infrastructure – is that it loosens regulatory requirements for drug approval even further.  As the Washington Post reports: