Machines + Society #10: What's the point? / beware of Spotify / a whip and olive oil
machines + society
Mako Shen | May 31, 2020
“I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.”
-Mary Oliver (full poem
here
)
This month’s post is of a more (meta-)philosophical bent. I’m going to be talking about moral values and why we should be both more skeptical of group consensus and more reflective in our personal moral values. The loose tie-in to technology is that all the most important debates, whether over NSA surveillance or human gene therapy, make sense only when we have a clear conception of moral values. Mostly, though, I think it’s a really important thing to think about once in a while.
What’s the point of it all?
The Old Testament tells us ‘thou shalt not steal’ (Exodus 20:15). The Olympic Games fosters our admiration of strength, agility, and grace. Winnie the Pooh teaches us that friendship is a form of unconditional presence.
Our values are carefully molded by institutions. Rarely, we question these values, shattering and reforging them for our own purposes.
It is mostly good that we inherit our values. It has meant that most people make a natural line at the grocery store, and that they give food to those in need. The fact that we all inherit a related set of values has also enabled the shared ideology needed to create a civilization. But there are major problems with relying on group values. For one, our collective morality right now is very likely wrong. For two, group values give little guidance to the inevitable strange situations that present themselves.
(Note that values are hard to precisely define but suffice it to say for now by ‘values’ I mean the measures by which we ground our judgement about situations and people. For instance, if I value autonomy and I like driving, then I like laws that let me drive anywhere because it provides a high degree of autonomy. If this isn’t satisfying, you can read more online.)
Let’s go with the first thought: many things we thought were good, we have now decided are actually very bad. Most people in Ancient Greece thought that slaves were good (notably, Aristotle thought some people were just slaves by nature); Immanuel Kant, arguably the most influential philosopher during the Age of Enlightenment, thought that illegitimate children could be justifiably murdered (and that masturbation was far worse than suicide); the 28th U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson, was happy to have several government agencies segregated once again by race. Aristotle, Kant, and Wilson were all popular in their heyday and are still fairly well regarded.
These perspectives seem ridiculous, and yet they were seen as obvious and self-evident as recently as a hundred years ago (and still are in certain circles). It is worth emphasizing that this wasn’t just the opinion of your racist uncle, drunkenly spilled once every thanksgiving, but it was what pretty much everybody thought at the time. We all thought that women shouldn’t vote, beating children is fine, homosexuality’s a sin etc. And if you think that you personally, with your tolerant, (presumably) small-l liberal, kombucha-swigging (now I’m really just talking to myself) values would not have fallen victim to these racist bigoted sexist ideas, then you need a reality check.
What do you think the chances are that what we hold dear in high society right now is precisely right?
This idea is closely tied to the notion of our expanding moral circle. In the beginning, the only morally important people (according to Western philosophy) were wealthy old Greek men, and gradually their children, wives, and slaves became things that mattered too. If we extrapolate using this perspective, it seems that we would do well to incorporate animals into our moral circle.
Let’s consider our personal values.
In The Farewell, a recent film about a Chinese-American family that decides (in accordance with some Chinese customs) not to tell the Grandmother she is terminally ill, there’s a beautiful scene. The granddaughter Billi, played by the impetuous Awkwafina, confronts her mother about her grandfather: “You didn’t even tell me he was sick. So it felt like he just… vanished suddenly— and I come back [to China] and he’s just… gone.”
Billi rails against the family’s judgement, and in the climactic teary-sniveling farewell to her grandmother, nearly confesses the truth. Instead, she holds her tongue.
Like Billi, we are all at some point faced with a decision with no obvious ‘right’ choice. How important is the grandmother’s right to know about her illness? What about the fact that she herself did the same illness-hoodwink to her sister? These are questions that each individual has to answer for herself.
Our lives may rhyme with each other, but they don’t repeat. Nothing suggests that what Billi chose to do would be right for you. These decisions depend on both details of the situation and your values. If you hope to make the right decision (or at least the decision least likely to be regrettable), then it really helps to be clear on what the criteria are.
Yet we see so many instances of value confusion. There’s the stereotype of the investment banker who spends his career worshiping money, only to find that what he really yearned for was autonomy, which costs very little. I have a friend who is in medical school, driven there because he thought it would make his parents happy. It did, but now he is desperately unhappy and utterly uninterested in the subject matter.
——————
In the course of your life, if your values are not shattered and reforged, then you aren’t learning. No one is born with true insight, and wisdom is gained through the careful observation of mistakes.
Here are some questions I like that probe values:
How important are other people? How do animals compare? Do we have concrete fundamental rights that must be respected? Why?
What role does suffering play in our existence? Is it inevitable? How should we treat it in our lives? What causes our suffering?
What is the character of human nature? To what extent is it possible for us to change?
How do you seek purpose? Can you say how humanity should seek purpose?
What does it mean to live a good life? What about for you specifically?
If you would like a challenge, sit down and try to articulate your answers to the questions that stand out most to you. Talk about it with someone who will listen. If you want, email me, and I’ll do my best to engage.
It’s really quite difficult to formulate a coherent philosophy (many of these questions have been contentious for hundreds of years) and what I have found most helpful is reading cogent arguments from various perspectives and observing my intuition.
I’ve found a few ideas particularly useful in thinking about my values.
Haidt’s conception of the six moral foundations (all of our moral intuitions can be segmented into concerns about Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression). It’s not bulletproof, but this model is very useful.
Harsanyi’s veil of ignorance. In brief, you should make decisions affecting other people as though you had an equal chance of being assigned any social role. For instance, consider a policy that would leave your zipcode much wealthier by providing free housing and taxing all other zipcodes. Selfishly, you would probably want this policy. It may even be that your zipcode is full of hardworking people who help the city a lot, lightening your conscience a bit. But under the veil of ignorance, everyone is equalized, and there’s only a small chance you’d live in the same zipcode, and a large chance that you’ll have to pay more tax. So you shouldn’t approve of this policy.
The parable of the poisoned arrow, from the Buddhist Pali Canon. In brief, many metaphysical thoughts are not helpful.
The Four Noble Truths. Suffering in life is inevitable. The root of this suffering is desire. Suffering can be ended by relinquishing desire. There is a path to relinquish desire. (The words ‘suffering’ and ‘desire’ are mediocre approximations here to what I believe the Buddha intended).
The distinction between values of abstinence and values of aspiration. This was explained to me by a monk. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not sleep with your neighbor’s spouse. These are values of abstinence and are found aplenty in society. Cultivate compassion. Be humble in your opinions. Show gratitude to those around you. These are values of aspiration and are useful in a different way.
—————
Another really important point. You are not the beliefs that you profess, nor the books that you read; you are the sum of your repeated actions. I don’t care if you memorized Silent Spring or can summon statistics about rate at which polar ice-caps are melting— if you don’t stop driving your SUV and eating beef, then you are not an environmentalist.
It is far easier to pledge fealty to ideas than it is to manifest these ideas in one’s life. The real test is in the latter.
(Enough from my soapbox. Enjoy the links.)
📰 Assorted Links 📰
What I'm Reading
Image source: Sky news.
Let Hong Kong move to America. “The basic idea is to allow cities or counties with shrinking populations or labor forces to opt-in to a new visa allocation system. The recipient of a place-based system would get a five-year visa allowing them to live and work legally in the United States, contingent on maintaining residence in their designated community. After five years, the visa would convert to unrestricted, permanent residency.” Additionally, under the Sino-British Joint Declaration to the people of Hong Kong, the UK is obliged legally (if not morally) to uphold the rights of its citizens.
The latest Hong Kong Security Law criminalizing dissent is really really bad. From The Nation: “What is lost is the feeling that Hong Kong’s future could be an open question. China’s apparent answer marks the beginning of a new disorientation…” More here.
Related: U.S. Military Support for Taiwan: What’s Changed Under Trump? In general, stronger support: “In the past nine months, U.S. ships have sailed through the Taiwan Strait six times. During the Obama administration, passages were far less frequent, at just one to three times per year. Even though the Taiwan Strait is an international waterway, China is sensitive to the U.S. military’s presence and considers any transits of U.S. ships through the strait “provocative actions.”
U.S. restricts Chinese Journalist working visas to 90-day limits. This is bad for both sides— Chinese journalists can’t report facts leading to an increasingly distorted view of the U.S. There is already a lot we don’t know about what the Chinese elite think of the U.S. and this will almost certainly confound it. U.S.-China relations seem to be at their worst in a while.
On the Spotify-Joe Rogan Deal and the Coming Death of Independent Podcasting. I’m very leery about Spotify’s recent moves to take control of the podcasting world. In Matt Stoller’s words: “Spotify is directly mimicking Google and Facebook, and attempting to roll up power over digital audio markets the way Google and Facebook did over the internet. It has already done so in music. Here’s Rolling Stone, reporting on Spotify’s exploitation of its public utility platform of music distribution to organizes payola-style extortion against artists.”
New York Times is building its own first-party data platform that is supposed to be more privacy-friendly. The notable VC Balaji Srinivasan is and has been critical in response: “the New York Times Company… is a multibillion dollar corporation, focused at the most senior levels on the use of technology to drive customer growth and revenue metrics.”
Miscellaneous:
Marina Abramović “is a Serbian American conceptual and performance artist, philanthropist and art filmmaker… To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience… [she] placed on a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use in any way that they chose; a sign informed them that they held no responsibility for any of their actions… Among them were a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, olive oil, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet.” “In 1988, after several years of tense relations, Abramović and Ulay decided to make a spiritual journey that would end their relationship. They each walked the Great Wall of China, in a piece called Lovers, starting from the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle. As Abramović described it: "That walk became a complete personal drama. Ulay started from the Gobi Desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye." It gets stranger.
Centenaire Pidgin: Dakar’s latest language: “Most of the Chinese merchants in Centenaire are Mandarin speakers from Henan province. They spend long hours in their shops, interacting with their Senegalese employees and customers who come from Dakar and other parts of Senegal… a unique language, which we have dubbed Centenaire Pidgin, serves as the lingua franca of the market.” (H/t ML. Still looking for a better article on this).
*Everything on ‘Naked and Afraid’ is real— and I lived it. Gripping read.
*The EMH Aten’t Dead. This article about the Efficient Market Hypothesis is way more interesting than the title suggests. “A century ago, investors started noticing they could consistently pick up bargains by running very simple formulas over stock prices. The most famous is the ‘value investing’ approach developed by Ben Graham, and used by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. There was a genuine, big old inefficiency in the markets, and these guys had a great time exploiting it…. But this is like trying to use a stone-age axe against a fighter jet. The Ben Graham information asymmetry has long since disappeared because…markets are efficient(ish)!”
*Springer just made a bunch of textbooks (typically >$70) free to download. Now you can read Introduction to Programming with Fortran on your kindle!
List of games that the Buddha would not play. “Games on boards with 8 or 10 rows… Playing with toy carts… Guessing at letters traced with the finger in the air or on a friend’s back.” Note that I don’t think Gautama Buddha would have felt that strongly that his disciples absolutely not play these games.
The myth of 1 g/lb: Optimal protein intake for bodybuilders. (It’s actually more like 0.66 g/lb).
Germans get the party started at physically distanced drive-in rave. Warning: much honking involved.
I have found my favorite Harvard professor: “"I proved that P equals NP, and then I gave the proof to an extra from “Blade Runner” in exchange for what I later discovered was not, in fact, a lock of Nicolas Cage’s hair. I used object-oriented programming languages but only called static methods because abstraction is oppression and only The Man uses virtual function tables. I’ve lived a thousand lives, and I have the carpal tunnel syndrome to prove it.” James Mickens is both hilarious and legendary.
*There’s evidence that Benjamin Franklin was a double agent. Plus a philanderer and a generally manipulative person. Short video. [H/t GX]
Salesforce uses RL to simulate different tax policies. They admit their economic assumptions are a bit simplistic, but the idea is promising.
Movie of the month
Yi yi - by Taiwan’s visionary auteur Edward Yang. It begins with a wedding, ends with a funeral, and grasps the subtlety all in-between. It follows three generations of a Taipei family haunted by what all that might have been.
“‘Yi Yi’ is a film about so many different things (the inescapability of regret, the architecture of modernity, the way that old loves turn into the most beautiful music) that it feels shortsighted to say that it’s a film about any of them. The older we get, however, the easier it becomes to appreciate Yang’s swan song as a bittersweet acknowledgement of the very shortsightedness that it can inspire.” [review]
Somehow, it’s free on YouTube.
🎧 Music 🎧
Highlights:
Necessidade — Castello Branco. Warm and touching: the same love that comes, goes, comes, goes, comes, goes, full by itself. (H/t AC).
Someday — Julia Jacklin. The original is by The Strokes, but Julia Jacklin pours in her own fistful of wist. The result is something more beautiful altogether.
Bach’s Passacaglia in G minor.