James Madison's Defense Against Human Nature

“The government cannot endure permanently if administered on a spoils basis. If this form of corruption is permitted and encouraged, other forms of corruption will inevitably follow in its train. When a department at Washington, or at a state capitol, or in the city hall in some big town is thronged with place-hunters and office-mongers who seek and dispense patronage from considerations of personal and party greed, the tone of public life is necessarily so lowered that the bribe-taker and the bribe-giver, the blackmailer and the corruptionist, find their places ready prepared for them.” Theodore Roosevelt, 1895

Mob: (Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, 155) the mob is not the industrial working class or the people as a whole, but it is “the refuse of all classes”; citing Arendt, the mob is “the riff-raff of bohemians, crackpots, gangsters and conspirators”; James Madison: impetuous mobs are factions, which he defined in Federalist 10 as a group “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community”, wherein (i) factions arise when public opinion forms and spreads quickly, but (ii) they can dissolve if the public is given time and space to consider long-term interests rather than short-term gratification

An article The Atlantic recently published, America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare, is one in a series that asks if democracy is dying. The author, Jeffrey Rosen, argues the barriers that Madison helped design to prevent mob rule have failed. Rosen argues that Madison tried to design a representative democratic form of government that would avoid the fate of “ancient and modern confederacies,” which had fallen to rule by demagogues and mobs. Madison felt that direct democracy would always fall to demagogues who stir mob passions on their way to political power. Madison wanted to avoid government where “passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. . . . . Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

Rosen writes:

Madison and Hamilton believed that Athenian citizens had been swayed by crude and ambitious politicians who had played on their emotions. The demagogue Cleon was said to have seduced the assembly into being more hawkish toward Athens’s opponents in the Peloponnesian War, and even the reformer Solon canceled debts and debased the currency. In Madison’s view, history seemed to be repeating itself in America.

Madison referred to impetuous mobs as factions, which he defined in Federalist No. 10 as a group “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Factions arise, he believed, when public opinion forms and spreads quickly. But they can dissolve if the public is given time and space to consider long-term interests rather than short-term gratification.

The US Senate was intended to be an institution to cool inflamed mob passions that would invariably arise from the House. Mechanisms to cool mob passions included a Senate comprised of natural aristocrats chosen by state legislators. And, instead of directly electing the President, “the people would vote for wise electors—that is, propertied white men—who would ultimately choose a president of the highest character and most discerning judgment.”

Rosen describes the failure:

What would Madison make of American democracy today, an era in which Jacksonian populism looks restrained by comparison? Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized—and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.

The polarization of Congress, reflecting an electorate that has not been this divided since about the time of the Civil War, has led to ideological warfare between parties that directly channels the passions of their most extreme constituents and donors—precisely the type of factionalism the Founders abhorred.

The executive branch, meanwhile, has been transformed by the spectacle of tweeting presidents, though the presidency had broken from its constitutional restraints long before the advent of social media. During the election of 1912, the progressive populists Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson insisted that the president derived his authority directly from the people. Since then, the office has moved in precisely the direction the Founders had hoped to avoid: Presidents now make emotional appeals, communicate directly with voters, and pander to the mob.

From the very beginning, the devices that the Founders hoped would prevent the rapid mobilization of passionate majorities didn’t work in all the ways they expected. After the election of 1800, the Electoral College, envisioned as a group of independent sages, became little more than a rubber stamp for the presidential nominees of the newly emergent political parties.

Rosen goes on the describe other phenomena that foster mob rule, e.g., (i) media polarization, (ii) social-media platforms that spread misinformation and inflame partisan differences, and (iii) the physical sorting of people into communities of like-minded citizens. He sees no short-term solution to the problem. Free speech cannot be suppressed, so dark free speech (lies, deceit, unwarranted opacity, irrational emotional manipulation, etc) is now a permanent fixture. It is also coming from America's enemies, especially Russia and China, so the social damage is impossible to accurately assess.

Rosen mentions a potential at least partial remedy that Madison proposed: “The best way of promoting a return to Madisonian principles, however, may be one Madison himself identified: constitutional education. . . . . Framers themselves believed that the fate of the republic depended on an educated citizenry.” Regarding public education, the Funders, Rosen and this channel are similar pages. Rosen and the Founders, looked to education about how the Constitution and government work.

This channel adds to that, education in cognitive biology and social behavior. Without at least a modest understanding of the human mind and how it works or fails to work, any defense against the dark arts of opacity, propaganda, lies and unscrupulous manipulation will be incomplete and probably much less effective than it could be.

This is a link to other articles in the series.

B&B orig: 1/1/19

The Effects of Lobbying

An invitation to dinner. The invitation describes “requested contribution levels” of $5,000 or $2,500 for PACs and $1,000 for individuals. The event is hosted by several PACs representing the health care insurance industry—the companies Aflac and Cigna and the professional associations America’s Health Insurance Plans and the National Association of Insurers and Financial Advisors. All four of these groups gave $5,000 to the Representative’s campaign plus $5,000 to the Scalise leadership PAC in the 2018 cycle. What is the return on the investment here?

Research on the effects of campaign contributions and lobbying is an ongoing topic for research and has generated a rather large body of often conflicting literature. There is probably more than a little self-interested bias in the mix. Cost-benefit effects are hard to pin down, with most research showing little or no significant effect on legislation or the value of a corporation. One study found that reduced campaign contributions increased the likelihood of corruption in congress. That researcher pointed out that even the definition of corruption is open to dispute.[1] The data on campaign contributions and effects is all over the place and so are the measures used to gauge the effects, good or bad.

A recent paper, Fundraising for Favors? Linking Lobbyist-Hosted Fundraisers to Legislative Benefits, finds evidence that lobbying groups sometimes seem to prompt legislators to introduce amendments the group wants. This study relied on “uncommon data sources and plagiarism software to detect a rarely observed relationship between interest group lobbyists and sitting Members of Congress. Comparison of letters to a Senate committee written by lobby groups to legislative amendments introduced by committee members reveals similar and even identical language, providing compelling evidence that groups persuaded legislators to introduce amendments valued by the group. Moreover, the analysis suggests that these language matches are more likely when the requesting lobby group hosts a fundraising event for the senator. The results hold while controlling for ideological agreement between the senator and the group, the group’s campaign contributions to the senator, and the group’s lobbying expenditures, annual revenue, and home-state connections.”

A complex issue: This approach to analyzing the effect of money and lobbying on legislation points to the complexity of the issue. Studies that try to find benefit to a contributor by looking at the value of a corporation may be missing a much larger point. That approach is described by one group: “We identified dates of key campaign finance regulatory decisions and measured changes in stock prices of firms affected by those decisions. These decisions immediately affected hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate giving, but they have no apparent effect on the markets valuation of the long-term profitability of firms. This conclusion suggests that the fundamental critique of campaign finance in America – that donations come with a quid pro quo and extract very high returns for donors – is almost surely wrong.”

If one looks for effects on stock prices of big companies, the return on investment could very well be nil, but that doesn't mean an actual return is nil. Impacts of legislation can be hard to see, hard to assess, and/or take years to bear fruit, e.g., have future value by preventing reduced revenues in future years or by making it harder for competitors to enter a market a company wants to defend. Also, corporate value measures ignore social effects that are distant from immediate stock price changes.

Studies of campaign contributions and lobbying impacts on society appear to be limited. One study observed that the slush funds business organizations used to influence and distort regulations in the 1960s and 1970s caused a strong public reaction that led to strict accounting and reporting requirements in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (Joan T.A. Gabel et al., Letter vs. Spirit: The Evolution of Compliance into Ethics, 46 AM. BUS. L.J. 453, 459–60, 2009). That evidence suggests the American public did consider corruption a significant problem, at least for businesses doing business outside the US. Presumably, that attitude extended to businesses doing business with politicians in the US.

The public trust factor: Poll evidence indicates that public trust in democratic institutions has fallen in recent decades. Trust in congress is fairly low, running at about 40%, which is up due to increased republican trust in the republican congress. Presumably that will reverse to some extent once democrats take control of the House this week.

Poll data indicates that the millennial generation, roughly, people born 1980-1997, are losing faith in democracy, not just liberal democracy. One source reports that about 30 percent of millennials think it’s essential to live in a democracy, while about 75 percent of Americans born in the 1930s believed that.

Perception of corruption associated with campaign contributions and lobbying is a factor in the loss of public trust in congress. That loss of trust damages faith in liberal democracy, and in turn, that is correlated with an increase in acceptance of the corrupt authoritarianism that characterizes President Trump’s governing style. It is reasonable to think that in this case, correlation probably reflects causation to some non-trivial extent.

If that is basically true, then measures of the effects of campaign contributions and lobbying on public trust in democratic institutions is a component that must be included somehow for the measure to have better context and meaning. Ignoring the fact that many American see campaign contributions as a corrupting force, whether that is mostly true or false, cannot be ignored. The appearance of corruption has real impacts on the stability and well-being of the American experiment in liberal democracy.

Footnote:
1. The definition of corruption that study used was: “The abuse or misuse of public office or trust for personal rather than public benefit.” That definition was stated to embrace “aspects of the public interest and public office definitions, and also refers to incentives in a manner that echoes market-based definitions.” One can wonder what abuse, misuse, public trust and personal benefit mean. All those terms are open to dispute.

B&B orig: 1/2/19

Just What Is Life?

Author: honey the monster

So I was discussing markets and economies with someone, and I characterized them as "alive"

This was of course met with skepticism, but it raised some very good discussion.

I'd like to share some of it here and see what y'all think. It in the end has to do with the parameters, the boundaries of life itself.

First of all, I make the this distinction (i'm quoting from a discussion)

i make the distinction between life and sentience, and i think it's an important one. I don't believe there is evidence of sentience simply because something reacts. It has to *experience* the sensation. And we may have different ideas about what that means - it's qualia, but it is entirely within the realm of possibility, and even likelihood that lower level forms of life are not sentient at all. they have no "experience" in any sense that could be meaningful. They react just like gravity does - it doesn't mean it's necessarily sentience - just biochemical reaction that says nothing about experience.

So to me, life and sentient life are two distinct concepts. The former includes the latter but would also include things that can't be demonstrated to be sentient, like a starfish, or a venus flytrap.

I don't believe there is evidence of markets being sentient. But I maintain they fit the important qualifications for life. Or at least a compelling illusion "as good as the real thing" which I'll go on to explain.

They are adaptive, evolving, largely irreducible and only partly predictable. They grow. They react. They even provisionally reproduce.

I believe that everything lots of life touches, takes on that life. a government. an economy, an ecosystem/habitat, a social grouping, actually anything complex and vaguely self organizing.

basically what i'm saying is markets are ultimately collections of people by way of behavior and as such they take on the organic properties of the life that is driving them - but in a way that is only partly predictable from its components - it has "a life of its own" in other words.

and see, i see that as literally, if only because i don't see the meaningful difference between this phenomena, as explained in complex adaptive systems theory and the complexity sciences and life, which exhibits those same properties. CAS encompasses it all.

And here's why, philosophically, why i'd disregard, in some cases, the distinction between a thing and its mimic.

and here's a philosophical question that has direct bearing on this.

If an illusion is a perfect representation of a thing, how is it meaningfully not the thing?

I believe a fully articulated illusion is as good as the real thing.

the reason i do is because our entire perception is filtered through our senses and our cognition, meaning everything we see is not real, but a reflection perhaps, of real - the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.

Ergo, reality as we understand it, is an illusion of reality to varying degrees of perfection. Because cannot truly, directly examine reality, but only indirectly. We see the shadows - its reflection.

But if we treat those as real, then mustn't we also treat any other exquisitely formed illusion as real - absent any meaningful material difference?

So what do you all think?

B&B orig: 1/3/19

The 2020 Presidential Race Is On: Lying Will Be Prominent

It is definitely election season again. The unique, indescribable stench is in the air. This bizarre incident comes to us from the fact checking site Snopes.

Does a photograph circulating in the interwebs really show a piece of racist memorabilia in Elizabeth Warren's kitchen or is it a lie? Here's a photo of what is really on Elizabeth Warren's kitchen cabinet:

Here's the photo as a Fox 'news' person Tomi Lahren Tweeted:

Here's the rating that Snopes gave this excellent story:

Who did this? No one seems to know. It could be Russian trolls. It could be Chinese trolls. It could be Trump supporters. Snopes comments this started with "4Chan and the r/The_Donald section of Reddit, but it was also promoted to a larger audience by Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren (who later deleted her tweet on the subject)."

This isn't harmless or funny: Thing is though, some people will unshakably believe that Warren is a racist from now until the November 2020 elections. And even for people who initially believed it and then changed their minds, they will retain a bit of a negative impression of Warren but not know just quite why, and probably will not even be aware of it. The negativity can express itself unconsciously. That's just how the human mind works. That is why we can expect to see an endless ocean of lies coming from at least from Trump and his supporters, America's enemies, and other activist American populists and activist republicans.

How many lies like this will at least appear to come from the left? Who knows. It won't be zero. If nothing else, the Russians and Chinese know how to sow social discord and distrust in American political institutions, both parties, and democracy in general.

B&B orig: 1/9/19

Philosophy of Science: Popper vs. ????

Author: dcleve

I was having a dispute with @Ted Wrigley on the Religion channel, as to whether Fine Tuning is a question that can be investigated by science. I THINK that Ted was advocating for a "no". Along the way, he rejected the Popperian boundary condition for science, and claimed that Popper was dismissed in philosophy of science today. Most such conversations end up timing out on the 7 day thread limit, and this one did as well.

This, I think, is a question of interest to other participants on this board, so I am bringing it here. :-)

My last several posts were providing examples of empirical tests of spiritual claims. There were four in this post: https://disqus.com/home/channel/religion/discussion/channel-religion/another_bad_objection_to_one_of_the_best_arguments_for_gods_existence/#comment-4271260531

They included that divine authorship should be infallible, divine creation should pass the Problem of Evil test, and special creation should demonstrate both ecosystem and biochemical optimization for each species. I also included the Problem of Numbers for reincarnation, so they weren't all optimization tests. Ted's comments reference some of these points, he zeroed in on the Problem of Numbers.

Here is Ted's final post:

The ability to make a hypothesis is by no means the same as the ability to test it empirically; that's the distinction I'm trying to get across here. It's also the distinction that Popper was trying (and failed) to get at with the notion of 'falsifiability.' As Popper saw it, we can never 'prove' that a theory was 'true' (because there was always the possibility that some test of the theory might fail in the future), so the best we can do is to keep trying to falsify theories. The more we try — and fail — to falsify a theory, the more confident we are that the theory actually works. But Popper recognized that — to use his framework — some theories simply could not be falsified, meaning that there was no way to construct empirical tests that would definitively show them to be false. That became a major focus for Popper and the people who follow him: identifying and rejecting unfalsifiable theories.

Now of course (as I keep saying), Popper's theories failed. They failed on two points:

— Behavioral pragmatics: scientists simply do not work the way Popper says they should. They make theories and try to apply them, but they rarely try to falsify the work of others, and they almost never try to falsify their own work. In fact, scientists rarely throw out any theory if it can be adjusted or amended to work again.

— Theoretical deficiencies: in order to make the concept of falsifiability work, Popperians have to make a priori assertions about which theories are and are not falsifiable. In that sense, Popper's theory itself is unfalsifiable, since it relies (effectively) on a subjective judgment call. Popper himself eventually realized this problem, though he never really found a way to address it within his framework.

But those theoretical problems aside, Popper's insight is correct: certain theoretical propositions simply do not fall within the purview of empirical science. The issue (as I tried to show with the 'problem of numbers' discussion), is that no empirical evidence can be brought to bear, because the question itself cannot be rigorously operationalized. You can certainly whip up some evidence, as you did by pointing to the fact that people put through certain kinds of hypnotic regression claim to experience multiple past lives... But the original theory of reincarnation is so poorly defined (analytically speaking), that I can simply redefine terms over and over to salvage the central principle. Now that's not bad, mind you — done well that is effectively the process of philosophical hermeneutics — but there is no way to get an empirical handle it.

In order to operationalize research, we have to make assumptions, and those must be valid assumptions. That question of validity is usually non-problematic within the material world, because the assumptions themselves can be treated as testable theories in their own right. But even if we take 'past life' regression as a genuine experience, how could we find empirical evidence that would allow us to distinguish between various different interpretations?

I mean, let's say that someone (Person X) does a regression and remembers being a Roman soldier in Britain. Moreover, X remembers that as a Roman soldier, he buried some object under a particular stone bridge; and then when we go to that particular bridge and dig, we find that particular object buried there. That's pretty astounding evidence, granted, but evidence of what exactly? One person says that X was that Roman soldier in a past life; another person says that X travelled back astrally and communed with that soldier in the past; a third person says that X connected with the universal oversoul, which gave him access to the memories of that soldier. What empirical evidence could we possibly find that would help us differentiate between those three theories? I mean, you've been working on the assumption that there must be a one-to-one correspondence (only one soul can inhabit one body at any one time), which sounds reasonable enough, but how would you validate or justify that assumption if someone questioned it?

Testing something empirically doesn't mean merely finding evidence; it means using evidence to differentiate one theory form another. Where we cannot do that, we cannot do empirical science.

B&B orig: 1/12/19

The Corroding Impact of Corruption on Civilization

Former President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico: A kleptocrat? Probably.

The New Your Times reports on an incident of corruption that occurred in Mexico some years ago. The NYT writes:

The allegation landed like a bombshell in the United States: One of the world’s biggest drug kingpins had paid a $100 million bribe to the former president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto.

Yet in Mexico, the claim — made on Tuesday in a Brooklyn courtroom by a former ally of the drug lord, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo — was met with barely a shrug.

The news did not lead any of Mexico’s major daily newspapers on Wednesday. Nobody raised the issue at the morning news conference of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, usually a daily billboard of the nation’s most pressing political issues.

Mexicans were far more concerned with quotidian [mundane] matters, such as whether they would be able to refuel their cars — a gas crisis has crippled supplies around the country — and whether the new government would get the votes it needs to create a new national security apparatus, part of its plan to curb violence.

Ensuring justice is done “is not in our hands,” said Dolores Haro, 59, who was eating lunch at a taco counter in Mexico City on Wednesday. She said most people she knew had more pressing worries, like the gas shortage.

And allegations of corruption — even on such a monumental scale — are not that surprising, added Pedro Rodríguez, 28, a marketing executive eating at the same counter.

“We Mexicans are no longer shocked,” he said. “We know that there won’t be a response.”

If this is evidence that the Mexican people have become accepting of the inevitability of corruption in their country, could that happen in the US? Given the deep corruption of the Trump administration, that possibility looks far less remote than it did just three years ago.

Thieves: In her book, Thieves of State, Sarah Chayes described in ghastly detail the kleptocracy called Afghanistan and how corruption rendered any US efforts at nation, democracy and civil society building as utterly futile right from the get go. My review of <em>Thieves</em> includes this:

It turns out that kleptocrats like Qayum and his kleptocrat brother, president Hamid Karzai and the rest of the entire Afghan government know two things very, very well. First, they present themselves as a safe, rational, sincere refuge in the face of a vicious throat-cutting population. Chayes was terrified for a long time and another Afghani kleptocrat Chayes worked with did that number on her to keep her on a short leash. Kleptocrats need to keep outsiders like Chayes from directly interacting with average Afghanis as much as possible. Outsider and even leaders speaking directly to the people that non-leader kleptocrats have feared for centuries.

Second, all high level kleptocrats learned to speak English. They work hard to learn the jargon and acronyms that Western minds want to hear. On other words, they tell us exactly what we wanted to hear. The poison sounded so true and rational because it sounded so much like us.

It took years before the US even came to understand the deep degree of systemic corruption in Afghanistan and how it neutered all US efforts in that country. To some extent, the US fostered the corruption by directly supporting known kleptocratic oligarchs and politicians, thus earning the US the hate of many average Afghan people. To the extent there are forces in Mexico working against corruption, they are probably fighting a bloody, losing battle. The forces of civilization are betrayed at the very top of the Mexican government.

An existential threat?: Is corruption an existential threat to civil society and maybe even the human species? Corruption arguably is destabilizing because it invariably leads to a very small group of very wealthy people or families with the rest living with low to modest income.

Is global corruption a global problem? Seems so.

The redder, the more corrupt - 2017 data

Is wealth distribution in the US what Americans think it is? No, and it is going in the opposite direction from public desires.

2010 data - the 2017 tax reform bill further redistributed wealth from the bottom to the top

Does that distribution of wealth reflect honest government, corruption or some combination of the two? Opinions will differ.

B&B orig: 1/1719