News bits: AOC comments on tyranny; Digital tyranny commentary; Digital tyranny update

An article in The Hill quotes AOC's comments about a rising threat of authoritarianism coming from the US Supreme Court:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Sunday warned of an “authoritarian expansion of power” by the Supreme Court after it released several controversial opinions in it’s last week of the term.

“The courts, if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and, frankly, dangerous authoritarian expansion of power in the Supreme Court,” Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“Which is what we are seeing now, from the overturning of abortion rights to the ruling that discrimination and, frankly, stripping the full personhood and dignity of LGBTQ people in the United States. … These are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court,” the New York Democrat said.

Note her argument that the court is centralizing power in itself. A couple of law experts who analyzed the flow of power coming from the radical decisions find a pattern of generally withdrawing power from the executive and legislative branches and from citizen's civil liberties. 

Power then generally flows to special interests, including brass knuckles capitalists, Christian nationalists, kleptocrats and the Republican Party itself. The power flows are not precisely controlled, but the general thrust is toward some form of corrupt authoritarianism, corrupt Christian theocracy and corrupt single-party politics dominated by Republican elites.

Thoughts of the day: Always keep eyes fixed on where power flows from and to. Look for winners and losers. Authoritarians rarely or never look for win-win power flow scenarios. They play zero sum politics and look for win-lose scenarios.

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Digital tyranny commentary

Several posts here have focused on the sophisticated, all-encompassing digital tyranny that China has pioneered. Chinese dictators have achieved a relatively complete development and implementation of total digital tyranny. It's not just a matter of putting cameras up everywhere to watch for possible political opposition. The goal of the tyrants is far more encompassing and intrusive. 

In China, every cell phone must be trackable for location, purchases and identity of people who communicate or go online to do anything. Every cell phone contains means, e.g., apps, designed to monitor everything and to coerce people to perceive, act and think in support of what the dictators tell them to see, do and believe. Digital tyranny amounts to a vast, sophisticated social engineering project. This is cutting edge cognitive biology and sociology/social behavior science put in service to authoritarianism. There is nothing like this anywhere else on Earth. 

The Nazis in 1930s and 1940s Germany would die of envy at what the Chinese have been able to do and are clearly going to do. What the Chinese dictators are trying to do is build a tyranny that cannot be challenged from the inside. It is hard to imagine how the Chinese people could rise up and overthrow the dictators when every move they make and every person they interact with is monitored.

The BBC writes in a 2019 article: 

The Chinese Communist Party has gained the ability to spy on more than 100 million citizens via a heavily promoted official app, a report suggests. Analysis of the Study the Great Nation app found hidden elements that could help monitor use and copy data, said phone security experts Cure 53. The app gives the government "super-user" access, the security firm said.

The app pushes out official news and images and encourages people to earn points by reading articles, commenting on them and playing quizzes about China and its leader, Xi Jinping. Use of the app is mandatory among party officials and civil servants and it is tied to wages in some workplaces. Starting this month, native journalists must pass a test on the life of President Xi, delivered via the app, in order to obtain a press card which enables them to do their jobs.

On behalf of the Open Technology Fund, which campaigns on human rights issues, Germany cyber-security firm Cure 53 took apart the Android version of the app and said it found many undocumented and hidden features. In its lengthy report, Cure 53 said Study the Great Nation had "extensive logging" abilities and seemed to try to build up a list of the popular apps an individual had installed on their phone.

The app also weakened encryption used to scramble data and messages, making it easy for a government to crack security. "The app contains code resembling a back door, which is able to run arbitrary commands with super-user privileges," said the report.

Adam Lynn, research director at the Open Technology Fund, told the Washington Post, which broke the story: "It's very, very uncommon for an application to require that level of access to the device, and there's no reason to have these privileges unless you're doing something you're not supposed to be."

In China, there is nothing the Chinese government does that it is not supposed to be doing. That's what dictatorship is. 

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Digital tyranny update

Putin has taken note of the ongoing advance in dictator tactics and technology in China. Since Putin started his mass murder and destruction campaign in the Ukraine, he has vastly stepped up his efforts to set up his own digital tyranny infrastructure in Russia. The NYT writes:

Cracking Down on Dissent, Russia Seeds a Surveillance Supply Chain

Russia is incubating a cottage industry of new digital surveillance tools to suppress domestic opposition to the war in Ukraine

As the war in Ukraine unfolded last year, Russia’s best digital spies turned to new tools to fight an enemy on another front: those inside its own borders who opposed the war.

To aid an internal crackdown, Russian authorities had amassed an arsenal of technologies to track the online lives of citizens. After it invaded Ukraine, its demand grew for more surveillance tools. That helped stoke a cottage industry of tech contractors, which built products that have become a powerful — and novel — means of digital surveillance.

The technologies have given the police and Russia’s Federal Security Service, better known as the F.S.B., access to a buffet of snooping capabilities focused on the day-to-day use of phones and websites. The tools offer ways to track certain kinds of activity on encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal, monitor the locations of phones, identify anonymous social media users and break into people’s accounts, according to documents from Russian surveillance providers obtained by The New York Times, as well as security experts, digital activists and a person involved with the country’s digital surveillance operations.

President Vladimir V. Putin is leaning more on technology to wield political power as Russia faces military setbacks in Ukraine, bruising economic sanctions and leadership challenges after an uprising led by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner paramilitary group. In doing so, Russia — which once lagged authoritarian regimes like China and Iran in using modern technology to exert control — is quickly catching up.

“It’s made people very paranoid, because if you communicate with anyone in Russia, you can’t be sure whether it’s secure or not. They are monitoring traffic very actively,” said Alena Popova, a Russian opposition political figure and digital rights activist. “It used to be only for activists. Now they have expanded it to anyone who disagrees with the war.”

The authorities are “essentially incubating a new cohort of Russian companies that have sprung up as a result of the state’s repressive interests,” said Adrian Shahbaz, a vice president of research and analysis at the pro-democracy advocacy group Freedom House, who studies online oppression. “The spillover effects will be felt first in the surrounding region, then potentially the world.”

Take heart…

You’re not slower, you’re maybe just smarter. 😮

Interesting article on BigThink.com a couple of days ago, challenging how IQ has always been measured. 

Bottom line: Faster information processing (i.e., “thinking speed”) is not necessarily the key to intelligence.

Key Takeaways:

• A new study challenges the belief that higher intelligence scores are associated with faster information processing.
• It also reveals a link between problem-solving ability and differences in brain connectivity and synchrony between the frontal and parietal lobes.
• The findings suggest that there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy in cognitive processes, highlighting the importance of slower and more effortful thinking for solving difficult problems and making better decisions. 

Full article here.

I don’t know but this article makes me, and my frequent second-guessing, feel kinda good.  How about you?  Any IQ stories to tell us about?  Have you ever been measured?  When, where?

Democratic justices blast majority opinion on student debt

This is an unusual situation where Democratic Supreme Court justices harshly criticize radical right Republicans for judicial over-reach to say the least. Elena Kagan wrote the Democratic dissent in JOSEPH R. BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL., PETITIONERS v. NEBRASKA, ET AL.  The issue in the case is whether the Secretary of Education has authority under the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 (HEROES Act) to depart from the existing provisions of the Education Act and establish a student loan forgiveness program that will cancel about $430 billion in debt principal and affect nearly all borrowers. In her dissent, Kagan wrote:

In every respect, the Court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our Nation’s governance.

I

The Court’s first overreach in this case is deciding it at all. Under Article III of the Constitution, a plaintiff must have standing to challenge a government action. And that requires a personal stake—an injury in fact. We do not allow plaintiffs to bring suit just because they oppose a policy. Neither do we allow plaintiffs to rely on injuries suffered by others. Those rules may sound technical, but they enforce “fundamental limits on federal judicial power.” Allen v. Wright, 468 U. S. 737, 750 (1984). They keep courts acting like courts. Or stated the other way around, they prevent courts from acting like this Court does today.

If the plaintiff has no such stake, a court must stop in its tracks. To decide the case is to exceed the permissible boundaries of the judicial role. That is what the Court does today.

The plaintiffs here are six States: Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina. They oppose the Secretary’s loan cancellation plan on varied policy and legal grounds. But as everyone agrees, those objections are just general grievances; they do not show the particularized injury needed to bring suit. And the States have no straightforward way of making that showing—of explaining how they are harmed by a plan that reduces individual borrowers’ federal student-loan debt. So the States have thrown no fewer than four different theories of injury against the wall, hoping that a court anxious to get to the merits will say that one of them sticks.  The most that can be said of the theory the majority selects, proffered solely by Missouri, is that it is less risible [laughable] than the others. It still contravenes a bedrock principle of standing law—that a plaintiff cannot ride on someone else’s injury.

II

The majority finds no firmer ground when it reaches the merits. The statute Congress enacted gives the Secretary broad authority to respond to national emergencies. 

The majority picks the statute apart piece by piece in an attempt to escape the meaning of the whole. But the whole—the expansive delegation—is so apparent that the majority has no choice but to justify its holding on extrastatutory grounds. So the majority resorts, as is becoming the norm, to its so-called major-questions doctrine.

The tell comes in the last part of the majority’s opinion. When a court is confident in its interpretation of a statute’s text, it spells out its reading and hits the send button. Not this Court, not today. This Court needs a whole other chapter to explain why it is striking down the Secretary’s plan. And that chapter is not about the statute Congress passed and the President signed, in their representation of many millions of citizens. It instead expresses the Court’s own “concerns over the exercise of administrative power.”

But assume the opposite; there is, even on that view, nothing like those circumstances here. (Or, to quote the majority quoting me, those “case[s are] distinguishable from this one.” Ante, at 23.) In this case, the Secretary responsible for carrying out the student-loan programs forgave student loans in a national emergency under the core provision of a recently enacted statute empowering him to provide student-loan relief in national emergencies. Today’s decision thus moves the goalposts for triggering the major-questions doctrine. Who knows—by next year, the Secretary of Health and Human Services may be found unable to implement the Medicare program under a broad delegation because of his actions’ (enormous) “economic impact.”

Similarly unavailing is the majority’s reliance on the controversy surrounding the program. Student-loan cancellation, the majority says, “raises questions that are personal and emotionally charged,” precipitating “profound debate across the country.” Ante, at 22. I have no quarrel with that description. Student-loan forgiveness, and responses to COVID generally, have joined the list of issues on which this Nation is divided. But that provides yet more reason for the Court to adhere to its properly limited role.

From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint. At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent. In saying so, and saying so strongly, I do not at all “disparage[]” those who disagree. Ante, at 26. The majority is right to make that point, as well as to say that “[r]easonable minds” are found on both sides of this case. Ante, at 25. And there is surely nothing personal in the dispute here. But Justices throughout history have raised the alarm when the Court has overreached—when it has “exceed[ed] its proper, limited role in our Nation’s governance.” Supra, at 1. It would have been “disturbing,” and indeed damaging, if they had not. Ante, at 25. The same is true in our own day.[1]

The majority’s opinion begins by distorting standing doctrine to create a case fit for judicial resolution. But there is no such case here, by any ordinary measure. The Secretary’s plan has not injured the plaintiff-States, however much they oppose it. And in that respect, Missouri is no different from any of the others.

What one sees here is an indication of the radical right's increasing reliance on the major questions doctrine. That doctrine allows the Supreme Court to bring congressionally delegated spending authority for major laws into question. That means that congress can write a law and delegate authority about how the spending is implemented to the federal agency involved, e.g., loan forgiveness in a national emergency as is the case here.

When Kagan mentioned the possibility of nullification of spending authority for Medicare, she was not pulling that out of thin air. One of the core targets for radical right government domestic spending haters is Medicare, along with Medicaid and social security. The student loan forgiveness at issue here is fairly small game, ~$430 billion. What the radicals really want to hunt is the bigger game like Medicare, Medicaid and social security. This case marks a precedent on the road to killing the really big targets.

In essence, what Kagan is doing here is bluntly warning us about what is to come if the radical right remains dominant in the Supreme Court.  

Footnote:

1. The Hill writes about the response of the radical right chief justice Roberts to Kagan's bitter dissent:

Roberts takes aim at liberal justices in 

defending Supreme Court’s legitimacy

Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion striking down the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan ended with a note taking aim at the court’s liberal justices in defending the Supreme Court’s legitimacy.

Roberts, in response, took issue with Kagan’s take.

“It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticize the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary,” Roberts wrote.

Kagan’s dissent was joined by fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Kagan read portions of her dissent aloud from the bench, a rare occurrence that signals the significance of the justices’ disagreement.

“Reasonable minds may disagree with our analysis — in fact, at least three do,” Roberts wrote in his student debt decision, referencing the dissent.

Can you feel the temperature rising in the Supreme Court? I can. At least Roberts and Kagan are still openly saying they are not criticizing each other personally. They are just disagreeing on what this court is doing. For some that criticism can be seen as questioning the court's legitimacy because, e.g., it makes the Republicans on the court look like partisans taking an active part in advancing the Republican Party and its dominant ideology agendas.

News bits: Potential impacts of affirmative action; On the Schiff censure; Gene therapy update

A NYT article discusses the limited impact that affirmative action has had in college admissions for Black and Latino students in view of the vast magnitude of underlying problems for most students. The NYT writes:

But the effect of race-conscious admissions was always limited to a relatively small number of students. For the vast majority, these schools are not an option — academically or financially.

Many head straight into the work force after high school or attend less selective universities that do not weigh race and ethnicity in admissions. At least a third of all undergraduate students — including half of Hispanic undergraduates — attend community colleges, which typically allow open enrollment.

“This is the unseen group,” said Josh Tovar, the principal at Memorial Pathway Academy, a high school for at-risk students and new immigrants in Garland, Texas. “Everyone sees the kid that is No. 1 ranked with 110 G.P.A. going to M.I.T. No one sees my boy that doesn’t have parents — that lives with Grandma, that came to me at 17, with five credits, and graduates.”

Fewer than 200 selective universities are thought to practice race-conscious admissions, conferring degrees on about 10,000 to 15,000 students each year who might not otherwise have been accepted, according to a rough estimate by Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford University. That represents about 2 percent of all Black, Hispanic or Native American students in four-year colleges.  

Yet, for many students, the biggest barriers are practical: applying to, paying for and completing college.

Based on that, it's reasonable to think that the greatest impacts would include (i) on high score minority students who the top 200 schools can no longer target for acceptance based on race, (ii) academically typical minority students who wind up in for-profit schools that pile huge debt on their students, and (iii) in view of the Supreme Court's ruling, employers who now feel pressure to shy away from affirmative action in their hiring practices. 

Something about this does not feel good. It points to a sick society, broken families and lives and lots of financial distress. Time will tell how this plays out.  

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The House of Recriminations update: A report I read yesterday asserted that House Republicans voted twice to censure Adam Schiff because they are mad at him. The first vote failed because 20 Republicans refused to go along with censure. Upon hearing about that, DJT flew into a rage and publicly threatened to primary all 20 of those Republicans in 2024. In the second vote, all 20 voted to censure Schiff. Some of the Republican nitwits referred to censure as a vote to censor. 

Also on the House of Recriminations agenda is impeaching Joe Biden and several members of his administration. We have some real idiots and thugs in congress.

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Gene therapy update: The WaPo writes about a new gene therapy approval:

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a treatment that uses gene therapy to treat severe hemophilia A, a rare and sometimes fatal blood disorder.

The new drug, Roctavian, could save people with the severe form of the disease from a lifetime of frequent injections. The drug’s maker expects about 2,500 of the estimated 6,500 Americans with severe hemophilia A to be eligible to receive the drug with its initial approval.

Roctavian will cost $2.9 million for a single infusion; Hemgenix, which treats another form of hemophilia, costs $3.5 million per use, according to Reuters. Still, scientists say the technology will be a crucial part of 21st century medicine.

Gene therapies are often too expensive for the patients they could help, said Fyodor Urnov, a genetics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

He sees several paths to lowering the cost of gene therapies. The field is new, and the infrastructure to produce treatments may get cheaper. There’s also a need for “academic, nonprofit paths to developing and delivering” genetics-based medicine, Urnov said.

I agree that there is an urgent need for “academic, nonprofit paths to developing and delivering” genetics-based medicine (and all other kinds of medicine). Honestly, how can it be possible for new gene therapies and drugs be a crucial part of 21st century medicine at the prices capitalists demand and get. That's just plain nuts. The capitalist for-profit system does not work except for the few capitalist elites who benefit a lot. 

Although Urnov says that the gene therapy is new, that's malarkey. My dissertation research in the 1990s was related to developing gene therapies. The field is not close to new. It has been painfully slow to develop, in part because of the cost and partly because of biological and technical complexity. Recent technical advances are opening treatment possibilities, but unless costs are contained, this will remain mostly medicine for rich people. This is something that capitalism cannot and will not deal with equitably.

News: Supreme Court -- religion above other liberties; Weaponizing fear; Consciousness science update

The Republican Christian nationalists on the Supreme Court are openly hostile to, among other groups that their Old Testament God hates, the LGBQT community. That is core CN dogma. Other core dogma is that religious practice at home, in church and in commerce trumps all other concerns and liberties. When Christianity clashes with anything else, Christianity wins. This is what it means to be theocratic. Many news outlets are reporting about a massive gut punch the Republican CNs delivered to the LGBQT community today. This one really kicks secularism in the groin good and hard. 

The Supreme Court decided 6-3 in favor of a web designer in Colorado who wanted to have the choice to not design websites for clients “celebrating marriage she does not endorse.” Once again, one clearly sees Christians bitching and whining about LGBQT people and wanting legal authority to openly discriminate against non-heterosexuals in commerce. Now bigoted, intolerant Christians have a big chunk of the legal authority they have been fighting to get for decades. The decision, 303 CREATIVE LLC ET AL. v. ELENIS ET AL., is based on these facts and reasoning:

Lorie Smith wants to expand her graphic design business, 303 Creative LLC, to include services for couples seeking wedding websites. But Ms. Smith worries that Colorado will use the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act to compel her—in violation of the First Amendment—to create websites celebrating marriages she does not endorse. To clarify her rights, Ms. Smith filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction to prevent the State from forcing her to create websites celebrating marriages that defy her belief that marriage should be reserved to unions between one man and one woman. 

CADA prohibits all “public accommodations” from denying “the full and equal enjoyment” of its goods and services to any customer based on his race, creed, disability, sexual orientation, or other statutorily enumerated trait.

Before the district court, Ms. Smith and the State stipulated to a number of facts: Ms. Smith is “willing to work with all people regardless of classifications such as race, creed, sexual orientation, and gender” and “will gladly create custom graphics and websites” for clients of any sexual orientation; she will not produce content that “contradicts biblical truth” regardless of who orders it; Ms. Smith’s belief that marriage is a union between one man and one woman is a sincerely held conviction; ....

Held [meaning the holding or rule of the case]: The First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees. Pp. 6–26.

 

(a) The framers designed the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to protect the “freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think.” ....

(b) Applying these principles to the parties’ stipulated facts, the Court agrees with the Tenth Circuit that the wedding websites Ms. Smith seeks to create qualify as pure speech protected by the First Amendment under this Court’s precedents. ....  

(c) Colorado now seems to acknowledge that the First Amendment does prohibit it from coercing Ms. Smith to create websites expressing any message with which she disagrees. Alternatively, Colorado contends, Ms. Smith must simply provide the same commercial product to all, which she can do by repurposing websites celebrating marriages she does endorse for marriages she does not. ....

The three Dems on the court dissented, with Sotomayor commenting:

Five years ago, this Court recognized the “general rule” that religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage “do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law.” Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Comm’n, 584 U. S. ___, ___ (2018) (slip op., at 9). ....

Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. Specifically, the Court holds that the First Amendment exempts a website design company from a state law that prohibits the company from denying wedding websites to same-sex couples if the company chooses to sell those websites to the public. The Court also holds that the company has a right to post a notice that says, “‘no [wedding websites] will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages.’” Ibid.  

“What a difference five years makes.” Carson v. Makin, 596 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) (SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 5). And not just at the Court. Around the country, there has been a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities. New forms of inclusion have been met with reactionary exclusion. This is heartbreaking. Sadly, it is also familiar. When the civil rights and women’s rights movements sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused. Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate. The brave Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims.  

“Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people.”

In this case, the CNs fused religious freedom into 1st Amendment free speech rights. Over time, the openly bigoted CN wealth and power movement will file lawsuits to expand the scope of commerce that is religious belief reflected as free speech. I don't have a feel for how far this will go, but I suspect it will be pretty far. This case seems to be a very big deal. It marks damage to secular democracy and a major step toward authoritarian theocracy. Just look at the flow of power here, i.e., tolerant pluralist secularism → bigoted Christian fundamentalism.

That was 2016

I wonder if they still support him

Most probably still do

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The red state murder gap: The Guardian reports about the weaponization of fear of crime by the radical right:

Republicans claim Democrats can’t keep us safe – crime data disagrees

Studies show that states with higher murder rates are those that vote red even as conservatives stoke fear about crime

Be it congressional campaigns or defending Donald Trump from his many legal entanglements, Republicans have kept up a consistent message to the US: Democrats can’t be trusted to keep you safe.

Third Way, a center-left thinktank, has found that states which voted for Trump in the 2020 election had overall higher murder rates than those which supported Joe Biden. This trend, called the “red state murder gap”, has been consistent for 20 years. The pattern remains the same even if the most populous county in each red state is excluded – undercutting an argument common on the right that large cities, which tend to be led by Democrats, are to blame for homicides. 

What’s harder to tease out is why this split exists, and even the degree to which political factors are to blame for it.

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A 25 year-old wager about the science of consciousness is settled: Vox writes:

In 1998, at the conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), the neuroscientist Christof Koch made a bet with the philosopher David Chalmers: by 2023, science would be able to explain how the brain’s tangle of neurons gives rise to the phenomenon we call consciousness. The winner would get a case of wine.

Koch was a professor of cognitive biology who helped pioneer the mechanistic study of the “neural correlates of consciousness,” which maps the relationship between brain activity and subjective experiences. He believed that consciousness was fundamentally measurable and that it was only a matter of time before science identified how it arose in the brain.

Chalmers was both a philosopher and cognitive scientist who was skeptical that science would be able to build explanatory bridges between neural correlates in the brain and the subjective experience of consciousness. Famously, he called consciousness “the hard problem,” which he believed was sufficiently challenging to keep any explanation of consciousness at bay for at least a quarter of a century.

At the 26th ASSC conference this past weekend, 25 years after the initial wager, the results were declared: Koch lost. Despite years of scientific effort — a time during which the science of consciousness shifted from the fringe to a mainstream, reputable, even exciting area of study — we still can’t say how or why the experience of consciousness arises.

.... as part of a $20 million project supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, a series of “adversarial experiments” were designed to pit theories of consciousness against each other, including global workspace theory (GWT) and integrated information theory (IIT).

GWT imagines consciousness as a theater: The brain is populated by a crowd of local information streams, but only what gets broadcast to the whole crowd — put onstage — becomes conscious. IIT identifies consciousness with the degree of, yes, integrated information, represented by the Greek character phi (Φ). The more phi, the more consciousness.

Preliminary findings from one Templeton-sponsored gauntlet comparing GWT and IIT were presented at the recent ASSC conference and ultimately used to settle the Koch/Chalmers bet. Six independent laboratories followed a shared protocol designed to test how well each theory could predict brain activity. IIT fared slightly better than GWT, but neither made entirely accurate predictions. This uncertainty was enough to make Chalmers the victor, while scattering researchers off to update the theories or consider new ones altogether.

Meanwhile, Karl Friston, the world’s most-cited living neuroscientist, has an idea called the free-energy principle. Stripped of all the math, it suggests that the behavior of all living systems follows a single principle: To remain alive, they try to minimize the difference between their expectations and incoming sensory input. (Other terms for that difference include surprise and free energy.) In this model, human brains minimize surprise by generating internal models that predict the outside world. Here, consciousness is basically the experience of an internally generative model complex enough to imagine states of the world that have not yet happened.  

Still, some neuroscientists argue that we are living in the dawn before a theory of consciousness arises, like those who lived in the time shortly before Darwin’s theory of natural selection. This paints the current field as “pre-paradigmatic,” a term developed by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn to describe an immature science where competing schools of thought do not share the same basic understanding of their subject. Everything from methodologies to metaphysics can differ in a pre-paradigmatic science of consciousness.

Looks like we're not quite there yet, to put it mildly.

Law news bits: Supreme Court hands religion a big win; Affirmative action gets killed

In a unanimous decision, GROFF v. DEJOY, POSTMASTER GENERAL, the Supreme Court gutted the existing standard that employers had to meet to accommodate religious practice by employees. The old standard was that an employer could reject a workers’ request related to religious observance if it imposed more than a minimal burden or “de minimis cost,” on the company’s operations. The new standard is that the employer must accept an employee's request for religious accommodations if the request imposes less than an undue hardship. An undue hardship exists “when a burden is substantial in the overall context of an employer’s business.” 

As usual, the court punts on defining what a substantial burden in the overall context of the business means:

.... we do not write on a blank slate in determining what an employer must prove to defend a denial of a religious accommodation, but we think it reasonable to begin with Title VII’s text. .... Here, the key statutory term is “undue hardship.” In common parlance, a “hardship” is, at a minimum, “something hard to bear.” .... But under any definition, a hardship is more severe than a mere burden. So even if Title VII said only that an employer need not be made to suffer a “hardship,” an employer could not escape liability simply by showing that an accommodation would impose some sort of additional costs. Those costs would have to rise to the level of hardship, and adding the modifier “undue” means that the requisite burden, privation, or adversity must rise to an “excessive” or “unjustifiable” level.

Notice the circularity in the court's reasoning. One can imagine that a blast of lawsuits in the coming years will flesh out the meaning of undue hardship. The law itself, Title VII, specifies that an employer can reject an accommodation that rises above to the level of an undue hardship. This decision make sense in that regard. But Title VII itself does not define undue hardship, probably because it is undefinable. The lawsuits will continue.

This is an interesting decision that seems to pit brass knuckles capitalist dogma against Christian nationalist theocracy dogma. Also interesting is a separate concurrence the three Democrats wrote and signed. The Dems also tried to wrestle with the definition but they too could only deliver a goose egg:

To be sure, some effects on co-workers will not constitute “undue hardship” under Title VII. For example, animus toward a protected group is not a cognizable “hardship” under any antidiscrimination statute. Cf. ante, at 20. In addition, some hardships, such as the labor costs of coordinating voluntary shift swaps, are not “undue” because they are too insubstantial. See 29 CFR §§1605.2(d)(1)(i), (e)(1). Nevertheless, if there is an undue hardship on “the conduct of the employer’s business,” 42 U. S. C. §2000e(j), then such hardship is sufficient, even if it consists of hardship on employees

Just the facts ma'am

A quick description of the facts is helpful here. A postal worker wanted to have Sundays off for religious observances. The USPS signed a deal with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays. That caused the worker to not show up on Sundays when he was scheduled. His absences on Sundays led co-workers to quit, transfer or cover for him. He eventually resigned because he felts he was being forced to chose between his work and his religious practice. He then sued the Postal Service for discrimination. 

So here we get one example of what is not an undue hardship, i.e., other co-workers quitting, transferring or covering for one worker's religious accommodation. But at this point, it is clear to me that an employer of big enough size has to accommodate a worker's religion request, even if it causes other workers to quit. A big question therefore is, how big does an employer need to be before it is an an undue hardship when at least other employee quits? One can imagine how this is going to play out in the courts over a period of years.

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Affirmative action nuked: In Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, the Supreme Court nuked race based admissions for both public and private colleges. The decision was all six Republicans in favor and the three Dems opposed and dissenting. The Republicans held that Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The WaPo discusses the decision: 

The Supreme Court on Thursday held that admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that relied in part on racial considerations violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, a historic ruling that will force a dramatic change in how the nation’s private and public universities select their students.

Roberts said the admissions programs at Harvard and UNC “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

But he added that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”  

In her dissent on Thursday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s lone Latina justice, wrote that it is “a disturbing feature of today’s decision that the Court does not even attempt to make the extraordinary showing required” to reverse precedent.  

“Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits," Sotomayor wrote. "In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”  

The probable upshot, ~95% likely in my opinion, is that Asian and White student enrollment will significantly increase, while Black and Latino enrollment will decrease by roughly the same amount.

Always looking for balance, one good thing about this that we should never again see the likes of an affirmative action failure like the disgrace called Clarence Thomas. He just voted his future self out of the running. Guess that's sort of a crappy silver lining. ☹️