Some Thoughts on Political Reasoning and the Rationality and Morality of Politics

Stuff just keeps falling on the trail

Political reasoning (Germaine's definition, v. 1.0): Unconscious and conscious thinking about political issues and policies in view of cognitive and social psychological factors, including perceptions of relevant reality, truths and facts, personal ideology, personal morals, ethics or values, self-identity, social identity, and social institutions and norms the individual identifies with; it can be mostly rational by being reasonably based on significantly or mostly true objective reality, truths and facts and thinking or logic that reasonably flows from objective reality, truths and facts; it can be mostly irrational by being based on significantly or mostly false perceptions of truths and facts and/or significantly or mostly flawed thinking or logic, wherein what is reasonable or not is assessed from the point of view of service to the public interest (as I tried to 'objectively' define the concept)

In his 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, psychologist Steven Pinker discusses some context and suggests some tactics that might help rationalize politics to some extent relative to what it is now. This discussion is based on chapter 21, Reason.

He argues that although humans operate with cognitive and emotional biases that sometimes leads to error, that does not mean that (i) humans are completely irrational, or (ii) there is no point in trying to be more rational in our thinking and discourse. He argues that both ideas are false. Bias and error happens but not all the time because if that were the case, it would be impossible for anyone to say we are subject to bias and error. He argues: “The human brain is capable of reason, given the right circumstances; the problem is to identify those circumstances and put them more firmly in place.”

Fact checking: Pinker asserts that despite a common perception of America being in a ‘post-truth era’, that is false because societies have always been subject to lies, deceit, unsupported conspiracy theories, mass delusions and so forth. He points to the rise of fact checking in response to the rise of Trump as evidence of social progress. Poll data indicates that about 80% of the public is open to the idea of journalists questioning politicians, pundits and special interests about fact accuracy in live interviews. Fact-checking is increasingly popular with the public and complaints are increasing in cases where when fact checking is not made available.

In that regard, Dissident Politics is at or near the leading edge in advocating public refusal to listen to sources with an undeniable track record of chronic lying without real-time or near real-time fact checking. The cognitive power of unchallenged lies is too much to allow it to go unchallenged for any significant period of time. It makes sense to prefer a linguistic tactic called the truth sandwich to blunt the at least some of cognitive power of lies and deceit.

Moral irrationality: Pinker points to steady social progress citing the court case, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), a Supreme Court civil rights decision that struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage. He asserts that “moral irrationality” can be outgrown. By casting interracial marriage in terms of being morally irrational, he incorporates conceptions of what is morality rational and what isn't in his conception of social progress. That is an important point because it correctly sees politics as a matter of not just ice-cold facts and logic, but also hot moral values.

The affective (emotional-moral?) tipping point: Pinker argues about rationality and mindset change:

Wherever we get upset about the looniness of public discourse today, we should remind ourselves that people weren't so rational in the past, either.

Persuasion by facts and logic, the m

ost direct strategy, is not always futile. . . . . Feeling their identity threatened, belief holders double down and muster more ammunition to fend off the challenge. But since another part of the human mind keeps a person in touch with reality, as the counterevidence piles up the dissonance can mount until it becomes too much to bear and the opinion topples over, a phenomenon called the affective tipping point.

Pinker goes on to point out that once something becomes ‘public knowledge’ disbelievers begin to hit their personal affective tipping point and change their minds. That is in accord with evidence that Americans who disbelieve human-caused climate change are slowly changing their minds, one at a time. But that sort of mindset change also depends on each person's subjective cost-benefit assessment of the social damage they will incur for changing their minds. As one can see, assigning rationality and irrationality to political thinking is very complicated and fraught with ambiguity. That complexity and ambiguity is the very fertile soil that tyrants, liars, kleptocrats, oligarchs, deceivers, mass murderers and other brands of bad leaders take root and grow in. Therein lies the main source of unnecessary human misery, poverty, misery, racism, bigotry, hate and bloodshed that litters human history. That is an inescapable aspect of what it is to be biologically, psychologically and sociologically human.

Debiasing thinking and fostering critical thinking: Pinker observes that the “wheels of reason turn slowly” and it makes sense to apply torque to two sources of influence, public education and the professional media. He observes that although some or many people have been arguing for better teaching of critical thinking for decades, that job is tough:

People understand concepts only when they are to think them through, to discuss them with others, and to use them to solve problems. A second impediment to effective teaching is that pupils don't spontaneously transfer from one concrete example to others in the same abstract category. . . . . With these lessons about lessons under their belts, psychologists have recently devised debiasing programs that fortify logical and critical thinking curricula. They encourage students to spot, name and correct fallacies across a broad range of contexts. . . . . Tetlock has compiled the practices of successful forecasters into a set of guidelines for good judgment . . . . These and other programs are provably effective: students newfound wisdom outlasts the training session and transfers to new subjects.

This is extremely encouraging because it says that at least some people can learn to be more rational if they want to, and mental traits that facilitate rational, critical thinking have been identified and thus directly addressed in the teaching. There is no data that says that only some people can become more politically rational. If Peter Berger in his brilliant little 1963 book, Invitation to Sociology, is right, there is nothing this observer can see that prevents the building of powerful social institutions that hold objective facts, less biased political reasoning and critical thinking as the highest moral or ethical values.

Some such institutions may exist now, probably mostly scattered, fragmented academic groups, but they are not yet powerful influences on mainstream American politics and society. That needs to change. Those institutions need to be built ASAP.

Along those lines, there is reason for encouragement. Pinker argues:

Many psychologists have called on their field to “give debiasing away” as one of its greatest potential contributions to human welfare. . . . . As one writer noted, scientists often treat the public the way Englishmen treat foreigners: they speak more slowly and more loudly. Making the world more rational, then, is not just of training people to be better reasoners and setting them loose. . . . . Experiments have shown that the right rules can avert the Tragedy of the Belief Commons [what’s rational for every individual to believe can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon] and force people to dissociate their reasoning from their identities. . . . . Scientists themselves have hit on a new strategy called adversarial collaboration, in which mortal enemies work together to get to the bottom of an issue, setting up empirical tests that they agree beforehand will settle it (citing Psychological Science, 12, 269-275, 2001).

From this observer’s point of view, Pinker is right that if psychologists can teach debiasing, it would be one of its greatest potential contributions to human welfare. Things are not as bleak as the news would have it. Humans still have a chance to outgrow their self-destructive tendencies, even if the toll along the way is in the hundreds of millions or billions of lives.

So, is that assessment too optimistic? Or, are humans doomed to an ultimate fate of enslavement, misery and maybe even self-annihilation with complete species extinction?

B&B orig: 2/15/19

Chapter Review: Humanism

In Humanism, chapter 23 in Steven Pinker’s 2018 book Humanism Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, Pinker lays out his arguments that the ideal of humanism is superior to other ideologies or belief systems that lay claim to being best for humanity, and its morality and long-term well-being. Broadly speaking, humanism is a movement that enlightens the meaning of life and morals based on non-supernatural grounds.

Humanism holds, among other things, that ethical and moral values derive from human needs, empirical evidence and rational analysis leads to knowledge of the world. Progressive cultures “working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness.” Collectively, all of that refers to what can be called human flourishing. Based on the historical and scientific evidence he relies on, Pinker firmly rejects the notion that humans must look to any God for deep meaning, morality, happiness, fulfillment or social progress. Instead, humanism is based on principles such as impartiality, e.g., ‘your interests are as good as mine’, to provide a secular basis for morality. In that conception moral sources, everyone has an equal right to major concerns such as life, safety, health, free expression and social and emotional attachments, all of which contribute to human flourishing. Major humanistic concerns include blocking major social influence by “rational sociopaths” and to justify human needs we morally ought to respect.

Balancing conflicting morals and desires: This aspect of Pinker’s vision of humanism is fully in accord with the balancing of moral, freedoms and other conflicts the B&B anti-bias ideology advocates:

Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure and fulfillment . . . . . At the same time, evolution guarantees that these desires will work at cross-purposes with each other and with those of other people. Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

(emphasis added)
That is a bit of 3rd party validation for the balancing act that the anti-bias ideology is significantly based on.

The utilitarianism objection refuted: Humanism has been criticized as blind utilitarianism, which could lead to bad outcomes such as euthanizing some unlucky people to harvest their organs for the good of a greater number of others who need new organs. Pinker argues that human flourishing is not a humanistic utilitarian morality of just seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number, as the happy organ harvesters would have it. Instead, humanistic morals are evaluated by the consequences of our actions. One can say that lying is bad and immoral, as B&Bs anti-bias ideology posits, but there are times when the consequence of a lie justifies itself. For example, it is defensible or good to lie to a person seeking to do a bad thing, e.g., murder someone, to prevent the worse thing, i.e., the murder. In this regard, humanistic ethics and morality are pragmatic and rationally flexible according to circumstances. In a sense, that reflects a rational anti-ideology ideology.

That said, Pinker admits that humanism has a strong utilitarian streak in it, but that is not a lethal flaw. He argues that well-known utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill came to the conclusion that slavery, cruel criminal punishments and even animal cruelty were all bad and outside acceptable bounds of utilitarianism. Apparently, evolution has conferred on most members of the human species a common belief that some things are just not right and they draw lines: “That’s why in practice, humanism and human rights go hand in hand. . . . . since people can always spin doctor their selfish acts as benefiting others, one of the best ways to promote overall happiness is to draw bright lines that no one may cross.”

Pinker also points out that historical evidence shows that when cultures, or people of different cultures, come in contact and they need to get along, the human tendency is to converge on humanistic values, e.g., I won’t kill you if you won’t kill me. He cites the origin of American constitutional church-state separation: “The only way to unite the colonies [with incompatible religions and practices] under a single constitution was to guarantee religious expression and practice as a natural right.

Competing moral frameworks refuted: Pinker asserts that when people are being rational, culturally diverse and need to get along, they converge on humanism. Theistic morality holds that God’s morals are right and supernatural rewards and punishments await depending on how one behaves. For believers in an immortal soul, that can loosen attachments to humanistic morals. The reward for punishing heretics and infidels can lead to immortal rewards, while slackers are forever punished.

Another anti-humanist mindset, romantic heroism, is equally daffy and just as dangerous, if not more so. Romantic heroism arose from 19th century romantic heroism, and continues today as authoritarian populism (Donald Trump), neo-fascism (Trump again), neo-reaction and the alt-right (definitely Trump). This mindset holds that morality lies in “purity, authenticity and greatness of an individual or a nation.”

Some who don’t fully profess to adhere to theistic morality or romantic heroism nonetheless see their value by providing a theistic, heroic or tribal psychological basis to argue that humanistic humanism cannot sustain a nation or society for the long run. Pinker’s criticism of that thinking is blunt and historically correct: “It’s a short step from the psychological claim to a historical one [but]. . . . . the moral, psychological and historical arguments are wrong.”

Other points: Pinker discusses several rationales in opposition to humanism. For example, he discusses and rebuts attacks based on the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. He argues that God of the Gaps arguments to account for what we do not yet understand about consciousness is logically flawed. Our current state of incomplete understanding in no way opens a rational door for any God or immaterial soul: “Nothing that we know about consciousness is inconsistent with the understanding that it depends entirely on neural activity. . . . . the phenomena of consciousness look exactly as you would expect if the laws of nature applied without regard to human welfare. If we want to enhance that welfare, we have to do it ourselves.”

No immaterial soul or anything else immaterial. Dualists will definitely take exception to that brazen assertion.

Pinker discusses and criticizes Nietzsche at length, arguing that he was and still is a mortal enemy of humanism. He considers Nietzsche to be a major force behind modern resurgent authoritarianism, nationalism, populism and fascism: “Nietzsche argues that it is good to be a callous, egotistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. [quoting Nietzsche ] ‘I do not point to the evil and pain of existence with the finger of reproach, but rather entertain the hope that life may one day become more evil and more full of suffering than it ever has been. . . . . Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly. . . . . Thou goest to woman? Don’t forget thy whip.’”

That sounds very anti-humanist. Pinker asserts that Nietzsche is riddled with logic flaws and has no moral authority to speak for anyone other than himself. Despite that, Pinker observes: “Nietzsche is among the most influential thinkers of the 20th century and continuing into the 21st. Most obviously Nietzsche helped inspire the romantic militarism that led to the first World War and the fascism that led to the Second.”

Regarding theistic morality and secular morality, Pinker comments:

The Euthyphro argument puts the lie to the common clam that atheism consigns us to a moral relativism in which everyone can do his own thing. The claim gets it backwards. A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests . . . . For this reason, many contemporary philosophers . . . . . are moral realists (the opposite of relativists), arguing that moral statements may be objectively true or false. It’s religion that is inherently relativistic. . . . . Not only does this make theistic morality relativistic, it can make it immoral.

To support this, Pinker points out that, for example, the Old Testament includes admonitions permitting immoral behavior including mass rape, genocide, death for homosexuality, death for talking back to one’s parents and death for working on the Sabbath. He describes modern believers’ response like this: “Today, of course, enlightened believers cherry-pick the humane injunctions while allegorizing, spin doctoring, or ignoring the vicious ones, and that’s just the point: they read the Bible through the lens of Enlightenment humanism.” In his view, religion is morally relativistic compared to the moral realism that flows from humanism. His reasoning seems rather sound.

B&B orig: 2/23/19

Chapter Review: Complex Adaptive Systems, Chaos and Prediction

Chaos

Reductionism: According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “reductionists are those who take one theory or phenomenon to be reducible to some other theory or phenomenon. For example, a reductionist regarding mathematics might take any given mathematical theory to be reducible to logic or set theory. Or, a reductionist about biological entities like cells [or a human brain] might take such entities to be reducible to collections of physico-chemical entities like atoms and molecules. The type of reductionism that is currently of most interest in metaphysics and philosophy of mind involves the claim that all sciences are reducible to physics. This is usually taken to entail that all phenomena (including mental phenomena like consciousness) are identical to physical phenomena.”

This is a review of chapters 1 (What is Complexity?) and 2 (Dynamics, Chaos, and Prediction) of Melanie Mitchell's 2009 book, Complexity: A guided Tour. The book is easy to read and is written for a general audience. It limits discussion of mathematics to what is necessary to understand general concepts. The complex, difficult to define concepts that Mitchell discusses in chapters 1 and 2 are critical to understanding the implications of complexity research for proper understanding of humans as individuals and as they operate in societies. One implication is that knowledge from complexity science apparently contradicts some aspects of a very common and persistent belief, reductionism, about how the world works.

Complex adaptive systems -- complex collective behavior:In chapter 1, Mitchell describes complex systems. Complex systems ranging from the behavior of army ants, a person's immune system or a human brain to a whole society, economies and the internet all constitute complex adaptive systems (CAS). Although there is not yet a single definition of complexity or CAS, they share traits that help describe them. A key trait is that all CAS exhibit complex collective behavior where each individual component follows simple rules of behavior with no central leader or controlling source. The individual components include nerve cells in a brain, individuals using the the internet and how people behave in economies.

Another common trait of CAS is their capacity to process signals and information that arise from both internal and external sources. Behavior is thus influenced arising from both internal and external environments. Another CAS trait is complex behaviors that adapt to changing real world conditions in unpredictable ways despite a lack of central system control. Based on those three common traits, Mitchell proposes two definitions for a CAS:

1. A system in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behavior, sophisticated information processing, and adaption via learning or evolution.

2. A system that exhibits nontrivial emergent and self-organizing behaviors.

In this definition, emergence refers to the idea that although the rules that guide behaviors are simple, that generates complex behaviors in unpredictable ways. In this sense, observable behavior is emergent from the CAS as a whole.

Dynamic systems and chaotic (non-linear) systems: Systems such as the solar system, a beating heart, a human or animal brain, the stock market and global climate are dynamic systems because they change over time. The study of dynamic systems led to the finding of chaotic systems, which are systems where a even a miniscule uncertainty about a full understanding of a system in its initial state can lead to massive errors in predictions about behaviors or subsequent states of the system. The upshot is that any small error about a chaotic system’s initial state will lead over time to huge errors in predictions of future states and behaviors. In essence, prediction becomes impossible over time.

An aspect of chaotic systems is that the whole is different from the sum of their parts and inputs are not proportional to outputs. That is called being non-linear. One linear system, or nearly linear, is a cup of sugar mixed with a cup of flour. The two components are unchanged and thus linear. A cup of baking soda and a cup of vinegar is non-linear because the components change and give off carbon dioxide fizz. Most systems in nature are non-linear. Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam put it like this: “Using a term like nonlinear science is like referring to the bulk of zoology as the study of non-elephant animals.” Apparently not much in nature is linear.

This aspect of chaos is what contradicts reductionism, which holds that future behaviors and states of various systems can be predicted if enough can be known about a system in advance. That is simply not true. That can never happen due to unavoidable, inherent uncertainty in trying to fully understand any chaotic system at any point in time. Tiny initial errors will lead to massive errors over time. The figure below shows how a tiny difference in an initial parameter, x0 = 0.2 vs x0 = 0.2000000001 eventually leads to different outcomes that are unpredictable.

The political upshot: Politics is a chaotic or non-linear system in any given country. Predictions about what will happen and how policies will play out over time cannot be predicted very far in advance. Existing evidence is that the best humans can predict events up to about 5 years in advance. After that, predictions fade into the chaos of random events and become mere blind guesses. Ideologues who assert their ideology is best for the long run cannot know that to be true. That kind of belief is faith, not a matter of truth.

B&B orig: 2/27/19

China: A Deep Surveillance State

Deep state: “In the United States, the term ‘deep state’ describes a form of cabal that coordinates efforts by government employees and others to influence state policy without regard for democratically elected leadership. . . . . Deep state was defined in 2014 by Mike Lofgren, a former Republican U.S. congressional aide, as ‘a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process.’ It has become a key concept of the ‘alt right’ movement as expressed by Steve Bannon and Sean Hannity.”

Surveillance deep state: In China, a system to assign social standing and to regulate or control citizen behavior and ultimately belief, characterized by (i) constant monitoring of citizen movement, and financial, social and other personal and interpersonal activity, and (ii) controlling behavior using a ‘social credit system’ that (a) rewards personal, social, financial and other behaviors the government wants to encourage, and (b) punishes behaviors the government wants to discourage. Depending on their score, in essence, their social standing, citizens with high social credit scores earn varying degrees of access to good schools and universities, public transportation, financial services, travel visas, high paying jobs (or any job), the internet and any other good or service the government chooses to include in the social credit system. Computers running algorithms analyze citizen behavior as it flows in, e.g., from surveillance cameras, GPS movement tracking of cell phones, internet social interactions, or from cell phone purchases, and the system then rewards or punishes by adjusting credit scores. Control of beliefs flow naturally from public acquiescence to the social credit system, e.g., as unconsciously rationalized by the human mind in the face of no other choice. In theory, this form of behavior and belief control can apply to dictatorships, democracies and any other form of government that can or is forced to accommodate a similar social credit system. -- Germaine

Chinese policewoman using facial-recognition sunglasses linked to artificial intelligence data analysis algorithms while patrolling a train station in Zhengzhou, the capital of central China's Henan province

An article in the current issue of The Week magazine discusses China's social credit system, Chinese government progress in getting the system up and running and how it works. The Week writes: “China's 1.4 billion people are getting ‘social credit’ scores that rate their trustworthiness — and determine their place in society. . . . . All that data is fed into a computer algorithm that calculates a citizen's trust score. Take care of your parents, pay your bills on time, and give to charity and you'll be rewarded with a high rating, which can get you access to visas to travel abroad and good schools for your children. Run a red light, criticize the government on social media, or sell tainted food to consumers and you could lose access to bank loans, government jobs, and the ability to rent a car. Beijing aims to have the program running by 2020; pilot versions are underway in some 30 cities.”

The system is being put in place “partly, it's because China wants to better control its freewheeling and poorly regulated economy, now the world's second largest. A social credit system will let the government easily punish business people who sell toxic baby formula or rotten meat, as well as bureaucrats who take bribes.”

The system works in part “by monitoring the wealth of data generated by citizens’ smartphones. Many Chinese have given up on cash and almost exclusively use their phones to pay for goods and services — $5.5 trillion in mobile payments are made in China every year, compared with about $112 billion in the U.S.”

Data analysis works like this: “An algorithm assigns users a score between 350 and 950. The higher the number, the more perks you get. Low scorers have to pay larger deposits to do things like reserve hotel rooms, and they can be shut out of first-class seats on trains and planes. . . . . Personal factors weigh heavily — the degrees you hold, how much time you spend playing video games, and even the scores of your friends. So if your rating drops, your friends have an incentive to shun you, lest their scores dip too.”

The technology exists, but needs to be integrated into the system. “Some apartments already use facial recognition to unlock doors, and a growing number of restaurants let customers ‘smile to pay’. As more apps roll out, they will feed their data into a new government surveillance program called Sharp Eyes, a reference to the Mao Zedong–era system of neighbors informing on one another. Security cameras, ubiquitous in stores and on street corners, will be integrated into that surveillance platform, and artificial intelligence will analyze the mountain of video data.”

If the algorithm makes a mistake, “the consequences will be dire.” For example, when one person “entered an incorrect account number when paying a fine, the result was a blanket ban from all travel except the worst seats on the slowest trains.”

Chinese people cooling off at the beach - assuming they have the credit score to get there and to be there

The Wall Street Journal comments in an article today: “As hundreds of millions of Chinese begin traveling for the Lunar New Year holiday, police are showing off a new addition to their crowd-surveillance toolbox: mobile facial-recognition units mounted on eyeglasses. China is already a global leader in deploying cutting-edge surveillance technologies based on artificial intelligence. The mobile devices could expand the reach of that surveillance, allowing authorities to peer into places that fixed cameras aren’t scanning, and to respond more quickly.”

Examples of criminals the police have spotted using the AI-linked facial recognition glasses exist. “While the technology is probably useful in catching criminals, it could also make it easier for authorities to track political dissidents and profile ethnic minorities . . . . By making wearable glasses, with AI [artificial intelligence] on the front end, you get instant and accurate feedback,” Mr. Wu said. “You can decide right away what the next interaction is going to be.”

Given the collectivist culture of the Chinese people, most people accept the credit system and believe it is mostly good for their society and country. With that mindset, it is hard to see how a system like this can ever be dislodged.

Could this be the basis of a thousand year civilization? Is this the inevitable fate of societies and the human species, collectivist or individualist?

B&B orig: 2/7/18