The human experiment must continue

I was struck the other day by the quality and cultural energy of this music video:


I'm no big fan of Taylor Swift, nor pop music in general, but this video is a great reminder of the absurd and glorious experimental project that the human race is engaged in.

The most compelling aspect to this production is the backup-dancers. I don't have much interaction with this industry, but it's clear that there exists a massive army of people in the US (and elsewhere) who labor and perfect a type of artistic expression that is, at its peak, a marginal contribution towards the overall visual experience. These videos are built around superstars, of which there are few. But they are staffed by backup dancers whose individual talent and drive seems undiminished by their servant role.

Despite what philosophers might say, nobody really knows what humans should do or how we should act. I view the entirety of human existence as an experimental discovery process, with economic, cultural and scientific progress occurring spontaneously via the scrum of civilization.

At the risk of making a bizarre claim, it's this beautifully chaotic and random dance that humanity is engaged in that argues strongly towards a massive investment in asteroid detection and defense capabilities. Asteroids are one of the most obvious forms of existential risk, and the simple fact is this: unless the earth develops defense capabilities, eventually we will be annihilated by an asteroid. Prematurely ending the human experiment, and denying future generations the opportunity to progress along the goofy and wonderful path of artistic and scientific expression would be a damn shame.

Anyone who cares deeply about art, science, ethics, and human flourishing should take a good long look at what global obliteration means for these values, and consider prioritizing efforts to develop asteroid detection and defense capabilities. Call your Congressman and Senators. Learn about the issue. Talk to your friends. And most importantly, help the B612 Foundation fund the Sentinel Mission.

Abolishing Time Zones is an Important Step in Humanity's Development

Matt Yglesias has written an article making the case against time zones:


I've been saying this for years, and aside from the practical benefits of having a global time (after transition the compliance cost savings in the aerospace industry alone would be staggering), the philosophical benefits are also noteworthy. A single global time would be an important step towards the institutionalization of cosmopolitanism, and a nice reminder that our species is hurtling through space on a single spaceship statistically vulnerable to existential catastrophe.

Along a similar line, switching our timekeeping systems to base-10 (i.e. units of time partition into 10 sub-units, instead of 12, or 60 or whatever) would also be a beneficial reform. The path-dependence of this one might be too much to overcome, however.

Top Five Most Important Public Policy Issues

1. Establishing modular, independent, resilient and sustainable permanent non-Earth colonies.
2. Asteroid defense
3. Eliminating age-related pathology
4. Poverty (insufficient human capability due to lack of resources)
5. Ecological destruction

Are Zoos Morally Okay?

Over the years zoos have successfully repositioned themselves to be educational and research institutions affiliated with the environmental conservation movement. This is a far cry from their original incarnation as a more carnivalesque freakshow designed to trigger awe, wonder, and even fear.

With the animal rights movement and an increased concern for animal welfare, zoos are put in an awkward position. Imprisoning animals and depriving them of their capability to flourish in settings with limited human interaction is clearly an increasingly challenging thing to justify. Offsetting this morally questionable dimension of zoos are the potential upsides. Now of course, to hardcore animal rights advocates, no amount of social benefit makes zoos morally justifiable. But let's take a look.

Most often you'll hear arguments about protecting endangered species. I'm not too familiar with the effectiveness of zoos in this regard, but it seems unlikely this point is all that effective in the light of massive structural forces like economic growth, habitat destruction, etc. And the types of animals that are deemed worthy of zoo protection aren't necessarily those that are most crucial from an ecological integrity perspective. My suspicion is that much of the conservationist rhetoric surrounding zoos is a marketing strategy designed to maintain the institutional and historic inertia of zoos.

The educational mission of zoos is the strongest argument for a social benefit potentially large enough to offset their moral problems. Showing young children in a directly-experiential way that there exists a larger world out there is a great way to build up cosmopolitan and environmentalist ethics.  Whether the cheapness of air travel, the growth of information on the internet, and the explosion in popularity of nature-themed entertainment like Planet Earth makes this benefit of zoos more replaceable and thus zoos less morally justifiable is an open question.

Aging is Wrong

"But we should probably start planning everything in advance. Right now, nobody is going to behave as if it’s going to happen. If you actually managed to do it, one day, society would be completely off-guard."  

"That’s true, but I am not going to tackle each individual problem—pensions, kids, resources—that might arise in a post-ageing society. I prefer to help people focus on the fact that we’ve a problem today, a really rather bad problem. That is that 100,000 people every fucking day are dying of ageing. That’s the important thing, not worrying about hypothetical problems.

Unfortunately, people are programmed to find reasons why it would be a bad idea to defeat ageing. This is mainly because they fear the unknown, since the world would be very different without ageing."

That's from a great interview with gerontologist Aubrey de Grey about aging and life extension. It doesn't delve much into his specific approach the the problem of ageing, but contains some excellent insight into the marketing challenges in his field.

A Feminist Defense of the Taxi Cartel

In most major US cities, the taxi industry is highly regulated, mandating all sorts of service standards and ownership rules. Unsurprisingly, many of these rules seem to be designed to restrict the supply and innovation of new market entrants, thereby protecting incumbents (taxi drivers and taxi companies) by keeping prices high and revenue streams secure. The flip-side of this arrangement is that for most people, getting someone to drive you around in a car is more difficult, more expensive, and less convenient than it otherwise would be.

With the rapid adoption of smartphones, a few upstart companies (Uber, Sidecar, Lyft) are attempting to break into the field, offering consumers the promise of radically convenient transportation options through gps-hailing and ridesharing. These innovations threaten the high wages of incumbent taxi operators, and currently an ongoing political battle is being waged in cities across the country to negotiate the entry and potential disruption of the industry.

In general I've been very sympathetic towards the disruptors: they're bringing technology to an outmoded industry, they're helping usher in the 'service-and-flow' economy (also known as the sharing economy), and most importantly they're helping to increase the real income of city-dwellers by reducing the price and increasing the accessibility of transportation.

Most of the pushback I've heard defending the status quo typically revolves around either concern for the livelihoods of taxi operators, or safety. The first point is silly: existing taxi operators have no substantive claim on special wage supports compared to any other service sector, and the gains realized from reform would mostly flow to consumers, of which there are many.

Up until recently, I've been content to brush off safety concerns as basically a 'bootlegger and baptist' phenomenon: cartel defenders talk about ensuring minimum safety standards and the moral solemnity of taxi drivers, but that's just a marketing ploy to keep themselves well-protected from competition.

However, in a recent conversation on this topic I was a bit thrown off by a safety-based argument I hadn't truly considered: that because I was a man my framing and analysis of this issue had led me to undervalue the potential safety issues of a more unregulated taxi industry. The habit of getting into a random car with a total stranger without a second thought is a social achievement that's been built up over time in part because of government's explicit backing of taxi operators. Any potential change in this situation runs the risk of undermining the relationship of trust implicit between taxis and riders. It would probably only take a few highly-publicized murders or sexual assaults for a new unregulated technology-mediated taxi industry to lose trust and collapse.

The International Space Station is Valuable, But Not For Scientific Research

Photo Credit: Popsci

Premier political science blog The Monkey Cage (now at the Washington Post) has a nice analysis of the research contributions of the International Space Station, showing a definite trend towards increasing scientific output. This bucks a set of conventional wisdom that sees the ISS as basically a massive waste of public funds. According to critics, manned space flight is an inefficient way of doing science in space--robots like the ones currently cruising around Mars are just as capable but at lower cost and risk. You know what? I agree. But that's not the point.

The history of space exploration has its origins in the timeless human virtues of competition, exploration, and greatness. Scientific research as its driving purpose came later, after the cold war, after easy appropriations and political clout dried up. The obvious link between the scientific community (necessary to build rockets and spacesuits) and space exploration made "research" an obvious marketing strategy to keep money flowing. But for the millions of kids and adult dreamers who are inspired by NASA and the story of humans pushing the last frontier, publishing statistically significant research results are at best a nice byproduct.

Space exploration is valuable for its own sake because it's one of the clearest examples of humanity flourishing on a global scale. With this in mind, the observation that ISS is producing more and more scientific research actually reveals a deeper accomplishment: we're getting better at keeping people alive in space. The true success of ISS is generating operational know-how about living in space. The less time ISS crew devotes to maintenance, repairs, upkeep etc., the more time they have to do other activities, like science. But who's to say that research is the best way to spend that space surplus? If robots can do the scientific stuff better, perhaps tourism or asteroid mining or competition for historical greatness is a better use of space-time.

Happiness is a Side Effect, Not an Outcome to Pursue

Adbusters Magazine must be spinning in its grave vegan-powered washing machine. That was my first reaction when I saw that the tiny country of Bhutan is scrapping its emphasis on "gross national happiness" as an alternative to GDP. Bhutan has gained a strange notoriety in various leftist circles for fully embracing this weird and subjective measure, but it never quite lived up to its intellectual appeal.

The idea that GDP doesn't measure everything a country (and its citizens) cares about is self evident. Measures of environmental quality, capabilities, inequality, and the millennium development goals are all attempts correct for this basic fact. And clearly happiness is good and countries should want their citizens to be happy. But focusing on happiness is a bit like cheating: it ignores a lot of necessary complexity by trying to skip directly to the end of the game.

For one, making interpersonal comparisons of happiness is tricky. For example, the conventional wisdom that the richer people get the more leisure they enjoy is not always what we observe. As incomes go up, the opportunity cost of not working increases, making leisure more costly. Decisions individuals make about how best to pursue a good life are often idiosyncratic and counter-intuitive.

Most generally, actively pursuing end goals is often not the most effective way of achieving them. In situations with high causal density, simple intermediate goals inform decisions about process much better. A nice example might be the values caring parents try to instill in their children. Constantly emphasizing happiness or "doing what you love" is very likely less effective at promoting long-run flourishing than an intermediate process goal like "try your absolute hardest at whatever you do" or "never give up". Nobody would suggest that "grit" should be the goal of life, yet those who have it in spades invariably have better life outcomes.

Similarly, GDP seems to work pretty well as this sort of intermediate process goal for countries. Nobody truly believes GDP is an end in itself, but because it sits at a nexus of many causal factors, it's a natural concept for public policy to prioritize.

Should Organized Labor Return to its May Day Roots?

Heart of the Beast Theater celebrates May Day in Minneapolis Photo Credit: Minnesota Public Radio

In honor of May Day, here's a great quote by Rad Geek (via Roderick Long) critically evaluating the current incarnation of the holiday:

"May Day is a celebration of the original conception of the labor movement, as expressed by anarchist organizers such as Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons, Benjamin Tucker, and others: a movement for workers to come into their own, by banding together, supporting one another, and taking direct action in the form of boycotts, work stoppages, general strikes, and the creation of workers' spaces such as local co-operatives and union hiring halls. The spirit was best expressed by John Brill's famous exhortation to "Dump the bosses off you back"--by which he did not mean to go to a government mediator and get them to make the boss sit down with you and work out a slightly more beneficial arrangement. "Dump the bosses off you back!" meant: organize and create local institutions that let you bypass the bosses. Negotiate with them if it'll do some good; ignore them if it won't. The signal achievements of the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th century were achievements in this spirit: the campaigns that won the 8 hour day and the weekend off in many workplaces, for example, emerged from a unilateral work stoppage by rank-and-file workers, declared by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, and organized especially by the explicitly anarchist International Working People's Association, after legislative efforts by the National Labor Union and the Knights of Labor failed. The stagnant, or even backsliding, state of organized labor over the past half century is the direct result of government colonization and the ascendancy of government-subsidized unions.

This is a pretty harsh public choice story about the recent history of the labor movement: gains in legitimacy and state support have backfired by opening up new opportunities for special interests (i.e. capitalists) to seize control over the levers of power, constraining labor's freedom to demonstrate and fight. Although this seems undeniably true, it's probably not the whole story concerning labor's decline (technology & globalization mattered, for example), and it almost certainly undervalues the social benefits of widespread access to safe, stable channels for airing labor disputes. Increasing organized labor's capacity for radical action would almost certainly see a concurrent response from businesses in the form of more capricious firing and workforce intimidation.

Amartya Sen and the Capability Approach

From Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's fantastic online education site Marginal Revolution University. They blog at Marginal Revolution.

The Frontier of Ethics

Ethics is a really complicated and diverse field, but one of its most interesting historical features has been the steady widening of the boundaries of various ethical systems. As the world has developed and globalized, we've seen people start affording moral weight to things that were previously ignored: individuals belonging to other racial groups, individuals in other countries or regions, individuals with different religious beliefs, animals, etc. Excluding the question about the moral status of animals and biological systems, one can't help but conclude that someday the domains of most ethical frameworks will expand to encompass every human being. This vision, called cosmopolitanism, is already realized in a host of issues today. Climate change is probably the best example, but stuff like human rights, global poverty, prevention of global pandemics, and world-destroying asteroid protection also count.

Photo Credit: Secular Student Alliance

Recognizing that the world is getting more cosmopolitan begs the question: what comes next? What other ethical frontiers (e.g. "expanding moral circles") are out there? Certainly the species boundary is a big one: what is the moral status of animals? Should dogs factor into our moral calculus? What about bugs or bacteria?

Another boundary that isn't fixed is pegged to technology: as new technology develops, novel ethical dilemmas will emerge. What is the proper use of cloning, genetic engineering, and biological enhancement? To what extent should we limit fabrication technologies that could be used to make weapons? How will new communications technologies disrupt incumbent political, social, and economic structures?

Photo credit: Don Davis

The list goes on. But although there are many dimensions of ethics that will remain dynamic forever, I'm not actually convinced cosmopolitanism represents the endpoint it's usually portrayed as. It's obviously true that cosmopolitan ethics encompasses every human being on Earth. But there's another important set of human beings whose ethical status is ambiguous: humans that haven't been born yet. What is the ethical status of the welfare of humans living 100 years from now? 500 years? 1000 years? In policy terms this issue is known as the discount rate, and it underlies a shockingly large set of contemporary issues. Strange then that it receives almost no explicit attention in the political discourse, the popular philosophy literature, or in undergraduate philosophy programs.

I'd like to delve into this topic in the future, but for now a good start might be to identify what the new endpoint of this temporal frontier of ethics might be. I suggest something like the equal weighting of all humans into the future; a discount rate of zero. Call it "chronocosmopolitanism." Now obviously the practical implications of affording equal moral weight to someone alive today and someone living in 10,000 years is... tricky and ridiculous. But it's an important limit case that can serve to frame this debate.

Fukuyama on the State

Francis Fukuyama, who has a great blog publicly noodling ideas around for his next book, raises some interesting questions about political science:

Studies of non-democratic countries focus on issues like authoritarian persistence, meaning that the focus still remains the question of democracy in the long run or democratic transition. In other words, most people are interested in studying political institutions that limit or check power—democratic accountability and rule of law—but very few people pay attention to the institution that accumulates and uses power, the state.

This blog post is largely over my head, but at least some of what he's wondering about may have a simple explanation: measuring and assessing a state's capacity to act is much more difficult than measuring the set of actions that a state limits. Fukuyama's saying that there are two perspectives when studying state institutions: the negative (what an institution constrains) and the positive (what an institution can do). The negative perspective is easy because there are clearly defined measurement boundaries: if the actions your institution is meant to limit are occurring, something is wrong.

The positive perspective, on the other hand, is trickier because its measurement boundaries are more open-ended and probabilistic: just because an institution can act in a certain way doesn't mean it actually will. This means we can't trust only real-world outcomes to paint a full picture of an institution's capacity. To get the whole story we must develop some counterfactual theory about how things might work, using assumptions and whatnot. I imagine this prospect probably turns off a lot of researchers.

Settlers of Catan is a Great Social Science Model

Brad Pummer at Wonkblog recently had a great article describing the potential of MMO computer games to serve as laboratories for economics researchers (epidemiologists too!). While video games can test theories by facilitating controlled experiments, other leisure activities like board games can help us interpret social science theories.

A theory (or model) is basically just a simplified version of the world, one that sorts details that are important for explaining a phenomenon from unimportant details. Among social scientists, there's a big cleavage between those who believe social phenomena is best explained by structural and contextual forces, and those who believe agency-based explanations are the way to go. This cleavage, which exists on a continuum, is roughly analogous to the philosophical question concerning the degree to which humans posses free will. A great example of this rift that's been in the news recently is the media coverage of the presidency: are presidents successful because they happen to be in office when the context is favorable (i.e. economic cycles, historical patterns, demographics, etc.), or do they succeed because they made the right decisions and possess good leadership qualities.

Settlers of Catan is an intellectually fascinating board game because it demonstrates a broad range of heady concepts from economics, political science, psychology, game theory, and probability theory. The basic game consists of 3-6 players competing to grow their small economies by constructing roads, settlements, cities, and various random-payoff and positional goods. Players collect tradeable resources based on the geographic location of their infrastructure: the game board consists of randomly-distributed tiles corresponding to resource-producing biomes. Each tile's productivity also varies randomly using a probability distribution.

Settlers is great because it shows how incredibly difficult it is to develop an adequate social science theory that actually has predictive accuracy. Explaining the outcome of any particular match is tough: did the victor win because of favorable initial geographic conditions? Did they have perfect strategy and bargaining logic? Perhaps they won because their opponents were irrational? Maybe they would have lost 9 times out of 10, but they just got lucky? Because it's impossible to re-play games with identical initial conditions and dice rolls, controlling for variables is impossible, meaning we'll never know for sure. Sometimes a specific variable will be so extreme--godly spot placement, miraculous dice rolling, brain-dead opponents--that predicting the winner is possible. But those situations only happen occasionally; most of the time variables are moderate and so isolating any one cause is tricky. The difficulty in establishing causation in a simple German board game with a limited number of variables shows how hard social science is, which studies the messy real world.

Algorithms Do It Better

One of the best things I've read all week was this great debate between Sam Harris and security expert Bruce Schneier over the merits of profiling in the context of TSA airport security checkpoints. I like Sam Harris, but his position justifiably gets destroyed by Schneier. A taste:

I’ve done my cost-benefit analysis of profiling based on looking Muslim, and it’s seriously lopsided.  On the benefit side, we have increased efficiency as screeners ignore some primary-screening anomalies for people who don’t meet the profile.  On the cost side, we have decreased security resulting from our imperfect profile of Muslims, decreased security resulting from our ignoring of non-Muslim terrorist threats, decreased security resulting in errors in implementing the system, increased cost due to replacing procedures with judgment, decreased efficiency (or possibly increased cost) because of the principal-agent problem, and decreased efficiency as screeners make their profiling judgments.  Additionally, your system is vulnerable to mistakes in your estimation of the proper profile.  If you’ve made any mistakes, or if the profile changes with time and you don’t realize it, your system becomes even worse.

It's worth reading the whole thing to better understand the many ways Harris is mistaken, but of particular interest to me is the general philosophical approach Harris takes in defending a profiling regime. He thinks it's merely common sense to profile because not doing so neglects statistical information based on demographics. In his view a security system confronted with a white European wheelchair-bound grandma should consider the probability she's a terrorist (tiny) and quickly update its screening procedure accordingly (by devoting less attention to her). Conversely, a young Semitic-looking man would attract more scrutiny because he's in a riskier demographic category. On the face of it this seems rational, just as employers operating with limited information might discriminate on the basis of race when hiring. But doing so is almost always not worth it, and here's why: the logic changes when you move from considering a single one-off interaction to a system involving repeated interactions. In a system like airport security, blind rules or algorithms become necessary because the costs of constantly updating your information quickly becomes exorbitant.

What Harris is really upset about is an unfortunate byproduct of adherence to blind maxims or algorithms: the perverse outcome. If our security system doesn't update based on demographic statistics, it's unavoidable that we'll have ridiculous situations like the grandma thing occur from time to time. But here's the rub: if we think we can be clever and have it both ways (say, by relaxing our adherence to our algorithm in obviously perverse cases) it results in a worse system overall. Why? Because the experts we put in charge of making the decision almost always opt to override the algorithm too often. This problem has been called the "case of the broken leg" by psychologist Paul Meehl, and is described in Ian Ayres' wonderful book Super Crunchers. Although it requires a more sophisticated understanding of how systems work, we must recognize that in the context of airport security algorithms work better, even though it means accepting a certain minimal amount of perversity.

Adherence to Identity Trumps Policy Coherence

We all know the ethical and political preferences of individuals and political parties are often not consistent or logically coherent. But how can we explain these deviations? The simplest answer is that parties, like individuals, are pluralistic entities with many competing impulses. Action is the result of complex bargaining processes among internal coalitions and is highly contingent on contextual factors and chance. But that doesn't get us very far when trying to explain specific instances of ridiculous ideological contradiction (like how Republicans oppose market efficiency-increasing pollution taxes). An interesting explanation that seems to be gaining currency is a general formulation of the idea of cultural cognition: basically that beliefs and preferences are driven largely by adherence identity and group.

Matt Yglesias has a great blog post about conservative opposition to zoning deregulation in Hollywood that perfectly illustrates the idea: the policy preference for regulation-free markets is trumped by the cultural allergy to urban density and its associations (bicycles, Democratic voting patterns, liberal new urbanist principles, young people, diversity, etc.). For more on this idea check out Jonathan Haidt's new book The Righteous Mind.

Obnoxious Advertising and Retaliation

I recently stumbled across this interesting quote by the graffiti artist Banksy sharing some thoughts on advertising:

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."

The best way to read this quote is as a normative statement concerning the boundaries of J.S. Mill's harm principle, which basically says people should be free to do what they want as long as they're not harming other people. Mill did not consider offensive acts necessarily harmful, and didn't view coercive action to reduce mere offense as morally justified. According to Banksy, many advertisements in public spaces, by virtue of their aggressive and meddlesome nature, do violate the harm principle and thus forfeit their right to physical integrity.

Presumably Banksy thinks it's okay to deface ads in public spaces only because the economic and social policies that encourage them are morally lacking. Ideally he should want a different set of rules that match up with his conception of what a public space should look like.

Banksy's analysis comes to some foolish conclusions: by extending the boundaries of the harm principle to include offense, we're left with an almost infinitely broad rule. City dwellers are constantly looking at random stuff that has been created by other people with various purposes in mind. What separates marketing activity from other sorts of advertising, like political advertisements, notifications about public services, and marketing material for cultural events? Is a business that's offended by the signs and posters displayed by striking workers in a picket line morally justified in defacing or destroying them? Banksy would probably say no, even though they follow from the logic he sets up. Frankly speaking, our modern urban society would fall apart if everybody went around asserting ownership or control over anything that offended them. I think it's more likely that Banksy just doesn't like the aesthetics or symbolism of most corporate marketing, and he's indulging in some poorly-considered rhetorical nonsense.

So what about our system as it stands today? Could we actually have a setup now that gets pretty close to an optimal arrangement, based on the median attitude towards graffiti in public spaces? Let's think about it. If Banksy got his wish and the harm principle was extended to make retaliation for offensive ads fair game, several things would happen. First, the returns on physical advertising would collapse: anybody spending money to design and implement physical advertisements would probably see them defaced or destroyed immediately. We would likely see fewer ads in easy-to-deface places, and more ads in hard-to reach places, like buildings. This would dramatically increase the barriers to entry for smaller firms and non-commercial groups wishing to advertise--probably not the most open and democratic outcome!

Even while dramatically raising the costs of advertising for most groups, Banksy's vision would paradoxically see the costs of amateur graffiti crash to zero. In easy-to-reach areas, this would create a emphatically non-aesthetic mess of tagging and retaliatory defacing. The website 4chan is an interesting social experiment in anarchic anonymous collaboration, but I'd rather not see the same dynamics played out on corner store windows across the country.

With our current setup, graffiti is a serious enough crime as to deter most potential offenders, keeping our buildings and public surfaces relatively clean. We have ads in public spaces, but often the really terrible ones are targeted by the individuals and groups most affected--homeowners, local businesses, neighborhood groups, etc. Additionally, a certain set of die-hards will always be willing to risk getting caught defacing bad advertising in order to make their point. It seems like tweaking some regulations on the margin is the way to go if we're concerned about overly-intrusive ads in public spaces. Or maybe we could just go camping.

The Horror of Freedom

These RSA Animate videos just get better and better:

Quote of the Week

Philosophers Julian Baggini and Peter Fosl on group agency:

It may seem strange to consider things like corporations or nations or mobs or social classes as agents, but the issue often arises in reflections about whether one should make judgements that attribute collective responsibility. People did speak of the guilt of the German nation and demand that all Germans contribute to war reparations after World War I. When the government of a truly democratic nation goes to war, because its policy in some sense expresses "the will of the people," the country arguably acts as though it were a kind of single agent. People also, of course, speak collectively of the responsibilities of the ruling class, corporations, families, tribes, and ethnic groups. Because human life is populated by collectives, institutions, organizations, and other social groupings, agency can sometimes be dispersed or at least seem irremediably unclear. These "gray zones," as thinkers like Primo Levi (The Periodic Table, 1975) and Claudia Card (The Atrocity Paradigm, 2002) have called them, make determining agency in areas like sexual conduct and political action exceedingly difficult.

There are three ways of understanding how we talk about collectives as agents. One is that it's just mistaken and that collectives cannot be agents. The second is that collectives are agents in some alternative, perhaps metaphorical sense – that they are like real agents but not quite the same as them. The third is that collectives are as much agents as individual people, who are themselves perhaps not as singular, cohesive, and unified as many would like to believe.

From The Ethics Toolkit: A Compendium of Ethical Concepts and Methods.

Social Science for the Masses

I try to listen to podcasts fairly regularly, because I love the medium. They tend to be short, snappy, and can fill previously unused time with rewarding intellectual stimulation. I also get a lot of my book recommendations from podcasts: many non-fiction authors will do radio shows as part of their publicity process. It's fun to hear thinkers engage in verbal thrust and parry as well; too often writing is the only means of communicating information for academics and public intellectuals.

Recently I've discovered a fantastic new podcast: EconTalk hosted by Russ Roberts, an economist at George Mason University. Episodes consist of incredibly substantive interviews of scholars discussing social science topics. The podcast manages to snag lots of eminent thinkers (past guests include Gary Becker, Cass Sunstein, Nassim Taleb, and William Easterly) as well as more obscure researchers who have lots to say but access to few popular communications mediums (besides perhaps blogging). The quality of the interviews is probably the best I've ever heard (sorry Tom Ashbrook), and despite the host's strong libertarian leaning, the intellectual discourse is fair and sincere.

Archives on iTunes go back several years, and they're definitely worth combing through to pick out topics of particular interest. Philosophy Bites, a similar podcast dealing with philosophical questions, is also a fascinating way to hear academics share their insights.

Power Players: Amartya Sen

Check out this great interview by Al Jazeera English:



Amartya Sen is a true polymath whose intellectual contributions are quite possibly unmatched by any other living person. A Nobel laureate, he made major headway in incorporating normative concerns (like poverty and gender inequality) back into the economics discipline. He is a giant among political scientists for his contributions to social choice theory (a quantitative subfield concerned with preference aggregation, example: voting). Lately he has focused on philosophy, probably establishing himself as the most important contemporary philosopher since John Rawls with his capabilities approach to measuring justice.