Politicians knowingly make promises they have no intention of delivering on, because it's how they get elected and stay elected. At best, even if they do genuinely want the same things they're promising they'll pursue they know they haven't a chance in hell of getting most of their agenda items off the ground.
Like spies, politicians are effectively paid to lie - even your favorite politician lies to you. If you watch a politician you'll get a much more accurate read of what they're about than if you listen to them.
Try putting your politicians on mute and looking at their voting records. Look at the bills they sponsor. Look especially at the unsexy bills like spending authorizations, and you can find a truer picture of what they support.
Bernie isn't as left as he appears to be. Obama wasn't much of a reformer either. He governed as a functionary. Change indeed.
Hillary by any account was right of Obama based on her record. In 2005 she introduced an anti-flag burning law, just for example, and perhaps more importantly, she's the quintessential war candidate, having never found a war she didn't want to sign other people's kids up to fight.
You can expect Biden to govern like Obama did which won't work now. Compromising with Republicans now is like compromising with a sack of rabid badgers. Biden isn't the guy you want having your six in a knife fight. He's ill equipped to deal with them.
Forget the rhetoric.
Politicians don't run on truth, they run on promises, and promises are fungible in politics.
Sunday, March 8, 2020
"Truth"… some brainstorming
We talk a lot about truth here, on Germaine’s political blog. I’m going to go rogue and infiltrate it with some dastardly philosophy. (Apologies Germaine. ;) My quest: A search for the correct definition
of “truth.”
Truth is an interesting concept. Saying that truth is “the absence of
falsehood” seems like too simple a definition to me and does not get at the
essence of what I am looking for. I
rather fancy one of Webster’s definitions:
3a : the property of being in accord with fact or reality
but I still feel that such a definition does not tell the
whole story. Why? Because all realities are not created equal. I think I might have mentioned that before
here. Who’s to say whose reality is more
legitimate, more real, than another’s?
To the person experiencing something, it becomes their reality, their “truth.” So in that sense, truth seems to have the ability to be relative / subjective / malleable. Ouuu.
Can we equate the word “truth” with the word “fact?” What makes something a fact versus a truth? What’s the difference? When I think about trying to define “fact”
(or even “truth”), I think it is “a something that can be no other way than
what it is.” “…can be no other way than what it is??” There’s an interesting phrase. Many things can be other ways than what they
are and still be a “factual / truthful something.” Take a simple example like an aluminum
can. It could be open, closed, full,
empty, crushed, to name a few ways it can “be.”
Granted, it’s still a can, but not that “can be no other way than what
it is.” It can be many qualifying ways, while maintaining its “can-ness.”
Let’s forget cans for now.
When looking for a bottom line definition of truth, maybe I need to add the
element of time into the mix. A “truth”
is something that “can be no other way than what it is at any given moment in
time.” This could be what I’m looking for, yet I still don’t feel happy with my
definition. I’m saying that truth, and
by extension a fact (or would that be the other way around?), can be a fleeting
thing, some kind of dynamic thing, a variable.
And so, by this train of thought, it certainly can’t be something
absolute. Some would say I’m over complicating it, but I’m just trying to get to the truth of what is truth?
In my mind, it seems like truth should be an absolute concept.
And some “truths” do not change
at any given moment in time. For example,
the concept of the number three. It cannot be something other than what it
is, no matter how much time passes.
Numbers can be represented in the physical (perceptual), but they are comprehended
in the mental (conceptual). Could this
be a key element in understanding truth?
Would it be right to say that truth is a concept (mental) supported by
precept (physical)? This sounds pretty
good but we know from jury duty that circumstantial (inferred) evidence (i.e., missing
hard evidence) doesn’t necessarily get to the “actual” (uh-oh, I’m introducing
a new variable) truth of some matter. It
seems that I am back to square one, saying that truth can vary based on one
person’s mental conception, versus another’s.
No, this argument does not fly either.
Does truth depend on some kind of “majority opinion” to be
valid? No. Opinions can vary from society to
society. But if we all agree that a certain
color, such as green, is truly green,
no matter what the society in question says, then that must be some kind of “absolute
truth.” We can measure the frequency of
that color and it will always show “green”
on the scale. A colorblind person may
not see green but would likely agree that what everyone else sees is what we
will define as “green,” based on the measurement. An immutable "truth consensus” is reached, no
matter what anyone else says.
So does the ability to measure something and always get the same results play into “what is truth?” I think I am getting closer but can I think
of any exceptions to the rule? Are there
any truths that cannot be measured? How
about the notion of “love?”
For example, I may declare that I love someone and the truth
of that matter could only be measured
by others in how I treat that so-called loved one. An outside observer not familiar with me
personally may see me scold my loved one, or do something mean to them, and
claim that I “truly” do not love that person, based on observed behavior at
that moment in time. But I could declare
that their measurement / analysis of the situation would not be the truth. Because they are not me, they have no way of knowing how true my feelings
of what I call “love” are. Such “love
truths” are personal, not accessible by an outside observer, but we personally believe
them to be “truths” nevertheless. I
still have to ask, what about these feelings make them “a truth?”
At what point does something become “true”… or “true enough?” If something is 50.001% true, is it truth? Conversely, if something is 49.999% not true,
is it not truth? Can something be
partial truth? We hear it all the time:
Well, that’s partially true. But this is not getting me any closer to
understanding truth, and if it is relative or absolute. I want to understand the essence of truth,
after all the fluff has boiled off.
Some would say I need to drag the God concept and religion
into the mix. But to me, that only
confuses the question and muddies the waters.
And it makes me feel like I’m grasping for straws. Scrap this idea.
So, which is it? What
is truth? Is truth relative or absolute? Is there some kind of bottom line definition
when it comes to truth? If so, please
state it for me. My definitions seem to
be all over the board. I’ve done a lot
of describing, but not any bottom-line defining. Maybe, like good and evil, that’s the best we
can do, try to describe it, when contemplating “truth.”
Maybe that’s why Webster referred to it as a “property.” I do think it can be both relative and
absolute. How do you know which it
is?
Help me out and give
me your thoughts on “what is truth” and “how can we know it?”
(Please excuse any typos and non-sequiturs in my stream of
thought. :) Feeling too lazy to review. :(
Election Tactics 2020: Infiltrate and Smear
Eric Prince - sleazeball and 007 wannabe
The war of dark free speech and sleaze is intensifying. We at new levels of extreme sleaze and lies the Trump Party and the president are willing to engage in to stay in power.
“WASHINGTON — Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.
One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.
Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.
Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation — detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union — has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.”
Everything that people in a democratic campaign say will now be misconstrued and ruthlessly used against them. The real power of dark free speech to destroy democracies and the rule of law will become clearer in the coming months. We live in interesting times.
Conservative Attacks on Inconvenient Science Continue
The president's minions are inserting lies about climate science into various official documents. The New York Times reports:
These lies and the intended deceit is part the president’s administration. They are aligned with his belief that climate change is a hoax. It is therefore fair and reasonable to add these lies to his total under the ‘buck stops at the top’ theory of government accountability. For the record, the president’s total of false and misleading statements was 16,241 at the end of year three.
Conservative and populist hostility to both inconvenient science and inconvenient truth and their tolerance of the blatant debasement of both are anti-democratic, authoritarian, corrupt and deeply immoral. Trump and Trump Party conservatism-populism seem to thrive in this anti-truth and anti-science political milieu.
“An official at the Interior Department embarked on a campaign that has inserted misleading language about climate change — including debunked claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial — into the agency’s scientific reports, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The misleading language appears in at least nine reports, including environmental studies and impact statements on major watersheds in the American West that could be used to justify allocating increasingly scarce water to farmers at the expense of wildlife conservation and fisheries.
The effort was led by Indur M. Goklany, a longtime Interior Department employee who, in 2017 near the start of the Trump administration, was promoted to the office of the deputy secretary with responsibility for reviewing the agency’s climate policies. The Interior Department’s scientific work is the basis for critical decisions about water and mineral rights affecting millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of acres of land.
The wording, known internally as the “Goks uncertainty language” based on Mr. Goklany’s nickname, inaccurately claims that there is a lack of consensus among scientists that the earth is warming. In Interior Department emails to scientists, Mr. Goklany pushed misleading interpretations of climate science, saying it “may be overestimating the rate of global warming, for whatever reason;” climate modeling has largely predicted global warming accurately. The final language states inaccurately that some studies have found the earth to be warming, while others have not.
He also instructed department scientists to add that rising carbon dioxide — the main force driving global warming — is beneficial because it “may increase plant water use efficiency” and “lengthen the agricultural growing season.” Both assertions misrepresent the scientific consensus that, overall, climate change will result in severe disruptions to global agriculture and significant reductions in crop yields.”
These lies and the intended deceit is part the president’s administration. They are aligned with his belief that climate change is a hoax. It is therefore fair and reasonable to add these lies to his total under the ‘buck stops at the top’ theory of government accountability. For the record, the president’s total of false and misleading statements was 16,241 at the end of year three.
Conservative and populist hostility to both inconvenient science and inconvenient truth and their tolerance of the blatant debasement of both are anti-democratic, authoritarian, corrupt and deeply immoral. Trump and Trump Party conservatism-populism seem to thrive in this anti-truth and anti-science political milieu.
Saturday, March 7, 2020
Chapter Review: An Evolutionarily Informed Study of Moral Psychology
“Philosophers, research scientists, and scholars across the academy have been wrestling with how to define, measure and think about morality for thousands of years. .... Why is it that the study of morality such a difficult task? .... While the human mind is not usually considered an impediment to scientific progress, it may present particular barriers to accurate models of the nature of morality and moral psychology. This is not the first research question that has been hampered by the fact that science is done by humans. Often, the problem is that we have a powerful intuition or perception of how the world seems or ought to be that gets in the way of scientifically understanding how the world really is. .... Here and elsewhere, the fact that human intuition or perception does not well map the real world has made humans worse at real science. .... Whatever the specific design of our psychology turns out to be, results have been collected that make it very hard to believe that this design is simply a machine for uncovering the objective truth of the world.”--Max Krasnow, Moral Psychology: A Multidisciplinary Guide, 2017, page 29
The 2017 book Moral Psychology: A Multidisciplinary Guide, edited by Benjamin Voyer and Tor Tarantola, is an academic publication intended to begin a process of unifying research on the extremely and subtle difficult topic of morality. Chapter 2, An Evolutionarily Informed Study of Moral Psychology, was written by Max Krasnow, an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard.
This book is written for an academic audience of researchers and scholars who pursue the study of morality-related topics such as what morals are, where they come from and why, and what they do. To advance knowledge to a higher level, researchers in a range of disciplines including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology, cognitive biology, neuroscience and computer science need to become more aware of what other disciplines are doing and have discovered. This book will generally be quite difficult for a lay audience to understand. Given the complexity of morality, convergence and merging of knowledge from all disciplines will be necessary to move knowledge from its current level of infancy to a basis that can accelerate progress. Right now, progress is painfully slow.
Krasnow’s first reason for the reality disconnect is that it is often the case that knowing objective truth is completely irrelevant to survival. A human who understands that gravity is a distortion of space-time has no survival advantage over another who knows enough to not to walk over the edge of a cliff or fall out of a tree because things that are not supported by the ground or a tree will fall to ground, which that can hurt a lot. In such situations, random mutations will lead to increasing survival fitness, but not necessarily increasing objective knowledge. This evolutionary pressure applied to morals and moral behavior.
Krasnow’s second, related reason is that there is an evolutionary pressure asymmetry in penalties for some mistakes in perceptions of reality. A well-known example is the fear and automatic defense response. A person mistaking some ground-level movement caused by a breeze for a snake and jumping away, suffers only a minimal loss of effort to avoid a non-existent threat. Here the goal isn't objective accuracy. The goal is not getting bitten by a snake. By contrast, the penalty for ignoring a movement that turns out to be a snake can inflict a very high penalty for being wrong if the person gets bitten.
In terms of cooperative behavior with strangers, usually considered to be a moral thing to do, tentative, limited cooperation can lead to more cooperation. That can lead to a higher payoff if the stranger turns out to be trustworthy. If the stranger is untrustworthy from the outset, the penalty for misplaced trust is low. In Pleistocene times (about 2.6 million years ago until about 11,700 years ago) when morals are believed to be shaped most prominently, people lived in small groups and everyone knew everyone else. Under those social conditions, cheaters were spotted pretty fast. A significant level of cheating was not possible for long. By contrast, in modern times a Ponzi scheme that runs for years is possible because people don't know each other. Ponzi schemers play on the normal human default tendency to trust. Presumably, most people would consider a Ponzi scheme to be immoral to at least some extent.
Krasnow’s third reason focuses on the fact that humans are inherently social creatures. We cooperated in groups to survive and that meant engaging social behaviors that helped the group to survive. Thus appearances to others that a person in the group is cooperative and does good deeds, even if no payoff is obvious, typically leads to social acceptance in the group. That social acceptance enhances the good person’s survival fitness. Thus, beliefs, behaviors and opinions that signal pro-social cooperativity can conflict with the objective world but nonetheless still be selected for. Krasnow points out that this is tricky. If a pro-social acting person is seen to be insincere, it tends to dampen social acceptance. People tend to distrust phonies. Krasnow comments: “In the moral domain, the selection pressures responsible for our moral sentiments -- our concern for the sick, our outrage at the oppressor, etc. -- may be more about what these sentiments signal to others than anything to do with objective truth seeking.”
Krasnow argues that those three reasons are why we often disconnect morals and moral beliefs and behaviors from objective reality: “Taking these points together -- that the objective truth is often fitness irrelevant, that the right kind of error is often ecologically rational, and that the adaptive problem is at least sometimes about changing someone else’s behavior -- helps suggest a program for an evolutionarily informed study of human moral psychology. The first task is to identify the major filters -- that is, the adaptive problems -- that components of moral psychology have been designed to solve.”
The 2017 book Moral Psychology: A Multidisciplinary Guide, edited by Benjamin Voyer and Tor Tarantola, is an academic publication intended to begin a process of unifying research on the extremely and subtle difficult topic of morality. Chapter 2, An Evolutionarily Informed Study of Moral Psychology, was written by Max Krasnow, an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard.
This book is written for an academic audience of researchers and scholars who pursue the study of morality-related topics such as what morals are, where they come from and why, and what they do. To advance knowledge to a higher level, researchers in a range of disciplines including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology, cognitive biology, neuroscience and computer science need to become more aware of what other disciplines are doing and have discovered. This book will generally be quite difficult for a lay audience to understand. Given the complexity of morality, convergence and merging of knowledge from all disciplines will be necessary to move knowledge from its current level of infancy to a basis that can accelerate progress. Right now, progress is painfully slow.
Why morals are not intended or needed to reflect objective truth
Assuming that evolutionary forces shaped morals and moral behavior, Krasnow argues there are three closely related reasons that morality does not need to reflect objective truth. That does not mean that morals and behaviors that morals motivate are nonsense or useless. Disconnect from objective truth reflects the severely limited data processing bandwidth of the human brain in the face of an essentially infinitely complex world. That world includes humans, human societies, and technology and environments that change over time.Krasnow’s first reason for the reality disconnect is that it is often the case that knowing objective truth is completely irrelevant to survival. A human who understands that gravity is a distortion of space-time has no survival advantage over another who knows enough to not to walk over the edge of a cliff or fall out of a tree because things that are not supported by the ground or a tree will fall to ground, which that can hurt a lot. In such situations, random mutations will lead to increasing survival fitness, but not necessarily increasing objective knowledge. This evolutionary pressure applied to morals and moral behavior.
Krasnow’s second, related reason is that there is an evolutionary pressure asymmetry in penalties for some mistakes in perceptions of reality. A well-known example is the fear and automatic defense response. A person mistaking some ground-level movement caused by a breeze for a snake and jumping away, suffers only a minimal loss of effort to avoid a non-existent threat. Here the goal isn't objective accuracy. The goal is not getting bitten by a snake. By contrast, the penalty for ignoring a movement that turns out to be a snake can inflict a very high penalty for being wrong if the person gets bitten.
In terms of cooperative behavior with strangers, usually considered to be a moral thing to do, tentative, limited cooperation can lead to more cooperation. That can lead to a higher payoff if the stranger turns out to be trustworthy. If the stranger is untrustworthy from the outset, the penalty for misplaced trust is low. In Pleistocene times (about 2.6 million years ago until about 11,700 years ago) when morals are believed to be shaped most prominently, people lived in small groups and everyone knew everyone else. Under those social conditions, cheaters were spotted pretty fast. A significant level of cheating was not possible for long. By contrast, in modern times a Ponzi scheme that runs for years is possible because people don't know each other. Ponzi schemers play on the normal human default tendency to trust. Presumably, most people would consider a Ponzi scheme to be immoral to at least some extent.
Krasnow’s third reason focuses on the fact that humans are inherently social creatures. We cooperated in groups to survive and that meant engaging social behaviors that helped the group to survive. Thus appearances to others that a person in the group is cooperative and does good deeds, even if no payoff is obvious, typically leads to social acceptance in the group. That social acceptance enhances the good person’s survival fitness. Thus, beliefs, behaviors and opinions that signal pro-social cooperativity can conflict with the objective world but nonetheless still be selected for. Krasnow points out that this is tricky. If a pro-social acting person is seen to be insincere, it tends to dampen social acceptance. People tend to distrust phonies. Krasnow comments: “In the moral domain, the selection pressures responsible for our moral sentiments -- our concern for the sick, our outrage at the oppressor, etc. -- may be more about what these sentiments signal to others than anything to do with objective truth seeking.”
Krasnow argues that those three reasons are why we often disconnect morals and moral beliefs and behaviors from objective reality: “Taking these points together -- that the objective truth is often fitness irrelevant, that the right kind of error is often ecologically rational, and that the adaptive problem is at least sometimes about changing someone else’s behavior -- helps suggest a program for an evolutionarily informed study of human moral psychology. The first task is to identify the major filters -- that is, the adaptive problems -- that components of moral psychology have been designed to solve.”
Book Review: Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop
Hi Germaine, I've not been around for awhile, but I stumbled on a book review, and interview with the author, which the regulars on this site might find of interest. I've put it up on another discussion thread as well, that being the News View group, and you may just want to, if you choose to put this up, refer them to that link (https://newsviews.online/2020/03/07/book-review-breaking-the-two-party-doom-loop/), or publish on this blog the following submission:
If you're intrigued by the review, here's an interview with the author:
https://www.salon.com/2020/03/07/can-multi-party-democracy-break-us-out-of-the-doom-loop-of-american-politics/
Finally, here's a recent Youtube video of a Drutman giving a talk on the book's argument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xVSnScjBCU
Can America Break Free from the Two-Party Doom Loop?
There is a growing consensus that the American political system is no longer the gold standard it once was. The United States ranks outside the top 20 countries in the Corruption Perception Index. U.S. voter turnout trails most other developed countries. Congressional approval ratings hover around 20 percent, and polling shows that partisan animosity is at an all-time high. It doesn’t take a social scientist to see that our legislatures are increasingly defined by gridlock and gamesmanship.
It’s always tempting to think that the next election will turn things around, and for both Republicans and Democrats to believe that our country would course-correct if only they could elect more of their own. But what if the problem isn’t the people on the other side of the aisle? What if the two-party system itself is creating a vicious cycle, making government less effective and driving us apart?
That’s what Lee Drutman argues in Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop. Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at New America, writes that moving to a multiparty democracy can create fair representation, reduce partisan gridlock, lead to more positive incremental change, and increase both voter turnout and voter satisfaction. And through concrete reforms, like implementing ranked-choice voting and expanding the size of the House of Representatives, Drutman lays out the path forward.
Go to link for the full review:
https://www.salon.com/2020/03/07/can-multi-party-democracy-break-us-out-of-the-doom-loop-of-american-politics/
Finally, here's a recent Youtube video of a Drutman giving a talk on the book's argument:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xVSnScjBCU
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