New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Did Big Data Create President Trump?

One of the more perplexing things about the Trump presidency is why it exists in the first place: he took office having lost the popular vote by a wide margin, and with one of the smaller electoral college margins in memory.  The win also defied virtually all of the pre-election polling and commentary: almost no one (except Michael Moore) predicted the outcome correctly, and on his victory lap, Trump himself admitted that he thought he was going to lose.  So a lot of us have tried to figure out what happened (I continue to think the election was about white supremacy, though that doesn’t explain how Trump got the white supremacists to the ballot box; I’ve also wondered about the libertarian candidates and Clinton’s staggering failure to take the Good News about the auto bailout to the rust belt states).   Others have wondered about the Comey letter, Russian hacking, and so on.  Now there’s another possibility: the Trump campaign’s use of big data, as reported in this chilling article on Motherboard. 

Philosophy in the age of Trump: Threats to science, threats to the environment

by Roberta L Millstein

It's been a long time (too long) since I've blogged here, and now, with the political situation in such turmoil, it's hard to think about anything else.  And one wonders what place philosophy has in all of this.  But it occurs to me to share two blog posts I've written recently-ish elsewhere, both of which I think are relevant.

One is The PSA Women’s Caucus - 10 Years On, posted on the Science Visions blog.  It contains my reflections as I finished my 4-year stint as Senior Co-chair of the PSA Women's Caucus.  Science is under attack from the Trump Administration, as are, I think, women in science especially, given Trump's derogatory remarks towards women (emboldening the likes of Milo Y.).  We need groups like the Caucus to support the work of women in science and of women who think and write about science. 

The second is How the Struggle for Existence Became an Environmental Ethic for Our Lifetime, posted on the Center for Humans and Nature blog (@humansandnature).  The environment is also under attack from the Trump Administration.  Thus, it becomes ever more important for philosophers to reach out to the general public and make our case, to explain why environmental issues should be front and center, to show how even "survival of the fittest" does not undermine (but rather reinforces) our duties to the environment.

#resist

Trump Attacks Privacy of Non-Americans in the U.S.

Amidst the general horror that is Trump’s xenophobic and bigoted executive orders*, and in the executive order attacking sanctuary cities, comes Trump’s attack on the privacy of immigrants (h/t Dennis Crouch at Patently-O).  The order stipulates:

“Privacy Act.  [Federal] Agencies shall, to the extent consistent with applicable law, ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information.”

The Act does not require protection extend to non-permanent residents; Crouch provides the context, noting that “some agencies, however, have been providing aspects of privacy-act protections to non-citizens and permanent residents.  The order appears to force agencies to stop that approach and instead expand governmental data collection and dissemination of information related to non-Americans.”  In other words, expand the surveillance state as much as possible.  I don’t see how this expansion won’t involve the collection of data on citizens, since citizens often interact with those in the U.S. lawfully or otherwise (for example, as students, H1-B workers, or under other programs), and so a threat to the privacy of non-citizens is indirectly a threat to the privacy of everyone in the United States.

What Happens to Democracy When the Experts Can't Be Both Factual and Balanced?

by Eric Schwitzgebel

Yesterday Stephen Bannon, one of Trump's closest advisors, called the media "the opposition party". My op-ed piece in today's Los Angeles Times is my response to that type of thinking.

What Happens to Democracy When the Experts Can't Be Both Factual and Balanced?

Does democracy require journalists and educators to strive for political balance? I’m hardly alone in thinking the answer is "yes." But it also requires them to present the facts as they understand them — and when it is not possible to be factual and balanced at the same time, democratic institutions risk collapse.

Consider the problem abstractly. Democracy X is dominated by two parties, Y and Z. Party Y is committed to the truth of propositions A, B and C, while Party Z is committed to the falsity of A, B and C. Slowly the evidence mounts: A, B and C look very likely to be false. Observers in the media and experts in the education system begin to see this, but the evidence isn’t quite plain enough for non-experts, especially if those non-experts are aligned with Party Y and already committed to A, B and C....

[continued here]

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind]

Some facts (Updated 1/15/17)

There have been numerous news stories about packages I and others received this past summer. I am not sure that any of them capture just how troubled I have been by this. I have been so troubled, in part, because of its apparent connection with what I take to be a campaign of harassment by Brian Leiter. I think it is best if I turn my energies away from these events, and back to both my philosophical work and my efforts to improve the profession, but, first, I think it is worthwhile being clear about some facts:

1) I was sent a package of feces in the mail this summer, as were three other philosophers. This package arrived at my place of work with no postmark or return address. I discovered that this happened to the three other philosophers on October 6th.

2) The four of us are connected only in that we were entangled in a dispute with Brian Leiter two years previous. We had not met prior to Brian Leiter's attack on my work in July 2014. To this day, I have only met one of the four.

3) At least one of those packages was sent from the 60666 zip code, which is the zip code for O'Hare International Airport.

4) All of the packages were sent with excessive postage and no postmark. 

5) One package, sent internationally, had an undated customs form filled out incorrectly with fictional information, which some have claimed is linked to Brian Leiter. As it was filled out, it would not likely have been accepted over the counter at a post office.

6) That package was tracked for the first time at O'Hare International Airport around midday on June 23rd. 

7) Brian Leiter had a flight that left O'Hare International Airport on the afternoon of June 22nd. 

Agency Biopower: The Juridical Force Awakens

One of the most prominent features of biopolitics is the emergence of administrative law.  Created by statutory authority, numerous governmental agencies engage in rulemaking at a very granular level to interpret and apply broad statutory provisions.  For example, if a statute says that “banks” are to be regulated in the context of lending, an administrative agency might be asked to issue rules on whether payday lenders should be considered “banks” under the statutory definition.  Or, to adopt an example well-known from philosophy of law, suppose a federal law were to say “no vehicles in parks.”  The Park Service would be tasked with deciding what, exactly, constitutes a “vehicle.”  Is a skateboard a vehicle?  How about an actual jeep, minus its engine, to be used as part of a sculpture to honor veterans?  As the example illustrates, most of the actual regulatory power the statute has arises not in its vague provisions, but in the rules that interpret and apply those provisions.

Perhaps the best-known, recent real-world examples concern the Clean Air Act (CAA).  In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had the authority to – and was required to – regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the CAA.  The core question was whether carbon dioxide was a pollutant as defined by the CAA, which stipulates that the EPA has rulemaking authority to regulate emission of “any air pollution agent ... , including any physical, chemical, ... substance ... emitted into ... the ambient air,” and ought to do so when the pollutant  “cause[s], or contribute[s] to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”  If the EPA decides not to regulate such a pollutant, it needs to come up with a good reason why not, which the Court in this case concluded it had not.  The EPA was thus required to come up with rules about carbon emission for new vehicles.  More recently, in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA exceeded its regulatory authority in restricting various emissions from coal plants because it failed to consider the cost of implementing those regulations.  These cases point to the rise of biopower as a form of governance, as administrative agencies grow in power relative to other kinds of governance, and become the locus of the sorts of micro-regulations that Foucault identified as the “police” function.