Posts Tagged ‘debate’
“Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower”*…
Dan Davies took a ride in a silver machine…
A while ago, I was lucky enough to attend a presentation on a Google DeepMind project called “The Habermas Machine”. It’s a really intriguing use of the LLM technology – basically, you take a lot of people who disagree with each other and ask them what they think about an issue. Then you feed their answers into a model, which tries to produce a statement of minimal agreement that all of them might sign up to. They score the extent to which they do agree with it (which trains the model), and explain what it is that they don’t like about the statement. This second round allows the model to come up with another, better version, which also clarifies to the participants what the other side’s reasons are for disagreeing with them.
It’s called “The Habermas Machine” because it’s meant to, loosely speaking, do a similar job to Jurgen Habermas’ “Ideal Speech Environment,” In tests, there seems to be decent evidence that not only is the machine better than a human moderator at coming up with consensus statements, but that the machine-moderated process leads to more convergence of opinions among the actual participants. (I think I might have predicted this; the model obviously has a “flat” affect, and unlike a human being, isn’t always leaking clues from its intonation and body language about what it really thinks of the participants. That might suggest that as LLMs get better at simulating human responses, they might be worse for this purpose!)
There’s really a lot to say and think about this. But it’s Friday [as he wrote this] and I’m a facetious person, so instead I’m going to share the notes I’ve been making ever since seeing the presentation on which other philosophers and social theorists might also benefit from having machines made out of them.
The Giddens Machine – in accordance with the principle of double hermeneutics, it’s the Habermas Machine, but only for reaching agreement on interpretations of Habermas.
The Goffman Machine – after your side lost on the Habermas Machine, it comes along and generates a set of reasons why you shouldn’t feel so bad about that and should come back for another go.
The Bourdieu Machine – you type your views into it, and then it repeats them with slight and subtle adjustments to make you sound more middle class
The Fourcade/Healy Machine – it gives you a score, then makes you do the work of finding out how to change your views so as to increase your score. Finding equilibrium for the machine is your job now.
The Gambetta Machine – instead of finding a consensus, it selects the most awful version of each conflicting view, and then everyone switches to that in order to show how committed they are.
The Austin Machine – instead of telling the machine “I agree with this statement”, you have to tick a box saying “I hereby agree with this statement”.
The Grice Machine – like the Habermas one, but via conversational implicature it aims to create consensus among all the views that you haven’t expressed rather than the ones you have.
The Derrida Machine – everyone keeps asserting the same statements, but the AI brings them into agreement by changing the meaning of the words themselves.
The Crenshaw Machine – in each round the machine finds a new issue to divide up the group in a different way. Equilibrium is reached when everyone realises they’re on their own and need to get along with each other anyway…
A wry exploration of the possibilities of AI: “Fully automated social theory,” from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social
(Image above: source)
* Alan Kay
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As we delegate discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that the first production model of the DeLorean sports car rolled off the assembly line at the Dunmurry factory, located a few miles from Belfast City Centre in Northern Ireland.
“The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple”*…
An all-too-timely 2016 piece from philosophy professors Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse…
So much Political commentary seems to proceed by means of debate rather than report. This is an understandable consequence of new technology which makes engagement easy. Our heightened exposure to debate is a good thing, too. Open debate is democracy’s lifeblood. Yet popular political disagreement has taken on an odd hue. Rather than presenting facts and professing a view, commentators present views concerning the views of their opponents. And often, it’s not only views about opponents’ views, many go straight to views about opponents. Despite heated disagreements over Big Questions like healthcare, stem-cell research, abortion, same-sex marriage, race relations and global warming, we find a surprising consensus about the nature of political disagreement itself: All agree that, with respect to any Big Question, there is but one intelligent position, and all other positions are not merely wrong, but ignorant, stupid, naïve. And as a consequence, those who cling to these views must be themselves either ignorant or wicked. Or both.
A minute in the Public Affairs section of any bookstore confirms this: Conservatives should talk to liberals “only if they must” because liberalism is a “mental disorder.” Liberals dismiss their Conservative opponents, since they are “lying liars” who use their “noise machine” to promote irrationality.
Both views betray a commitment to the Simple Truth Thesis, the claim that Big Questions always admit of a simple, obvious, and easily-stated solution. The Simple Truth Thesis encourages us to hold that a given truth is so simple and so obvious that only the ignorant, wicked, or benighted could possibly deny it. As our popular political commentary accepts the Simple Truth Thesis, there is a great deal of inflammatory rhetoric and righteous indignation, but in fact very little public debate over the issues that matter most. Consequently, the Big Questions over which we are divided remain unexamined, and our reasons for adopting our different answers are never brought to bear in public discussion.
This brings us back to our original observation – there seems to be so much debate. Yet what passes for public debate is in fact no debate at all. No surprise, really. Debate or discussion concerning a Big Question can be worthwhile only when there is more than one reasonable position regarding the question; and this is precisely what the Simple Truth Thesis denies.
It would be a wonderful world were the Simple Truth Thesis true. Our political task simply would be to empower those who know the simple truth, and rebuke the fools who do not. But the Simple Truth Thesis is not true. In fact, it’s a fairytale—soothing, but ultimately unfit for a serious mind. For any Big Question, there are several defensible positions; it is precisely this feature that makes them big. Of course, to say that a position is defensible is not to say that it’s true. To oppose the Simple Truth Thesis is not to embrace relativism (which is itself a version of the Simple Truth view), nor is it to give up on the idea that there is truth; it is rather to give up on the view that the truth is always simple.
This intellectual distance is difficult because we feel invested in our own Big Answers. But it’s a fantasy to think that the billions of people with whom we disagree have all simply failed to appreciate the facts. This fantasy is easily dissolved once we come to realize that those who reject our own Big Answers often give good reasons for their views and against ours. We might not find ourselves convinced by their reasons, of course, but we can no longer see them as ignorant or foolish.
The lesson to draw is that there is a difference between being stupid and being wrong; the most important truths are often the most difficult to discern, even by the most careful and sincere inquirers. This lesson dismantles the Simple Truth Thesis and leads us to acknowledge that although there may be but one correct answer to each Big Question, there are several defensible views concerning which of the going answers is, indeed, correct. So if the Big Questions matter to us, we should be most eager to hear the reasons of our opponents. We should pursue real disagreement, with real interlocutors, not the cooked-up arguments against caricatured opposition on offer from the political commentary industry.
Democracy is the proposition that a just, peaceful, and morally decent society is possible among equals who disagree over Big Questions. Democracy tries to enable such a society by maintaining the conditions under which citizens could reason together, and, despite ongoing disagreement, come to see each other as reasonable. Citizens who see each other in this way can agree to share in the task of collective self-government despite ongoing and even growing discord over Big Questions. The Simple Truth Thesis repudiates this ideal. Accordingly, as our politics become more argumentative, they become less concerned with actual argument. Yet if we lose our capacity to argue with each other—to confront openly each other’s reasons—we will lose our capacity to see each other as equal partners in self-government, and thus we will lose our democracy…
If only: “The Myth of Simple Truths,” in @3QD.
(Image above: source)
* Oscar Wilde
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As we dig Diogenes, we might send exciting birthday greetings to Otto Binder; he was born on this date in 1911. An author of science fiction and non-fiction books and stories, and comic books, he is best known as the co-creator of Supergirl and for his many scripts for Captain Marvel Adventures and other stories involving the entire superhero Marvel Family. He is credited with writing over 4,400 stories across a variety of publishers under his own name, as well as more than 160 stories under the pen-name Eando Binder.
Indeed, it was as Eando that he wrote “I, Robot” is a scifi short story , part of a series about a robot named Adam Link, that was published in the January 1939 issue of Amazing Stories. Very innovative for its time, “I, Robot” was one of the first robot stories to break away from Frankenstein clichés. It was reprised in two different comic series, and adapted into episodes of The Outer Limits.
Isaac Asimov— who is famous for his own I, Robot and the series of novels that followed from it, was heavily influenced by the Binder short story. In his introduction to the story in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories (1979), Asimov wrote: “It certainly caught my attention. Two months after I read it, I began ‘Robbie’, about a sympathetic robot, and that was the start of my positronic robot series. Eleven years later, when nine of my robot stories were collected into a book, the publisher named the collection I, Robot over my objections. My book is now the more famous, but Otto’s story was there first.”
“Only in our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides”*…
Blake Smith on trail-blazing publisher Michael Denneny and his embodiment of his mentor’s– Hannah Arendt‘s– thought…
Michael Denneny, the recently deceased co-founder and co-editor of the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street , gay newspaper New York Native , and the gay publishing line at St. Martin’s Press, Stonewall Inn Editions, began his recently published collection of essays On Christopher Street with a quotation from his mentor, Hannah Arendt:
Only in our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. Living in a real world and speaking with one another about it are basically one and the same.
Denneny’s career as a gay cultural activist was a way of putting into practice Arendt’s thought as condensed in this citation…
…
Arendt argued throughout her work, although with critically shifting emphases, that the possibility of political freedom for society as whole depends on particular groups within it being able to constitute distinct “worlds” in which their members can exchange perspectives, debate their common interests, and face the wider “world” composed of other groups. That is, a healthy society is diverse in the sense of being made up of individual units like economic classes and religious and ethnic minorities (represented by associations, trade unions, churches etc.), which are themselves characterized by internal diversity and lively debate.
Diversity and debate prevent, in a logic familiar from Montesquieu and Madison, the emergence of a single all-powerful leader or stifling consensus. In such accounts, which form the basis for American political common sense today, we imagine minorities as homogenous interest groups, which, in the play of their rival ambitions, keep each other in check, through a kind of balance of power akin to that at work in international relations. Politicized minorities, each pursuing its collective interests, can, if their debates and rivalries are properly channeled, be a force for good in politics.
Arendt’s argument is substantively different. In her account, minorities are important not insofar as they are internally unified groups engaged in the play of countervailing interests and powers, but rather insofar as they are internally heterogeneous groups whose very diversity offers a sort of school in which citizens learn how to have judgment: the capacity to express and exchange ideas without appeal to fixed rules. Differences within “our own groups”—our everyday experiences of debates with other people “like us” in the spaces of our associational life (synagogues, union halls, gay bars, etc.) prepare us for the still more challenging experiences of disagreement in our wider political life, where we cannot necessarily trust that our interlocutors share our identities, experiences, and goals.
Indeed, the experience of uncertainty is constitutive of politics, as Arendt saw it. Politics is one of a number of domains, she argued, in which we cannot call upon, in the course of our mutual questioning about what is to be done, anything like a logical principle (2+2=4) that all rational beings might recognize or a universally agreed-upon norm that all, or nearly all, members of our community do recognize. In these domains we are obligated to, as she often says, “woo” each other, to practice the arts of rhetorical seduction—which does not mean in her account, that we are in debates over politics merely practicing sophistry.
Rather, we are—as we find ourselves constantly doing in our most quotidian, non-political conversations—appealing to each other to share perspectives (Look!, we say, don’t you see?), on the assumption that each of us is positioned differently, because of our experiences, knowledge, interests, etc., in relation to a field of objects to which we all refer. We assume, in other words, that our divergent perspectives are perspectives on something, on the same things, and that we can by discussing them, inviting our interlocutors into our position by rendering it in speech, and projecting ourselves through our imaginations into their own positions, come closer to a true picture of the situation…
…
…there is a danger that we may [Arendt argued], in the very exchange of perspectives, be speaking not at all to each other, that is, to specific interlocutors whose perspectives—and ultimately whose agreement—we desire (and thus whose disagreement we must tolerate), but rather to an abstract universal media pseudo-conversation, to the empty signifier of an invisible authority [and] one must admit that this peril characterizes our idle chatter on Twitter no less than the talk at cocktail parties and banal book reviews Arendt lamented in her day. In that sense it is not necessarily such a disaster if, for the moment, the possibility of a “national conversation” in media and politics seems to be suspended. Indeed, the whole point of Arendt and Denneny’s insight is to remind us that if we are to learn again how to speak to each other (and not merely speak in each other’s—perhaps merely virtual—presence), then participation in the life of real, concrete, internally diverse groups will be our classrooms…
Hannah Arendt, Michael Denneny, and the real value of diversity: “Living in Arendt’s World.”
* Hannah Arendt
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As we explore empathy, we might recall that it was on this date in 2015 that Cecilia Bleasdale sent her daughter Grace photo of a dress she intended to wear to Grace’s wedding. Celia thought that the dress, blue with black lace, would be perfect; but her daughter saw a white dress with gold lace. Grace posted the photo to Facebook, and the debate– blue/black or white/gold– broadened.
Then a friend uploaded it to Tumblr… and the argument went global. That post saw up to 840,000 views per minute. The next day, the retailer, Roman Originals (which confirmed that the dress was, in fact, blue and black), sold out of the model within 30 minutes.
It spread further. Celebrities posted and reposted, tweeted and retweeted (e.g., Taylor Swift, who saw blue and black and said she was “confused and scared,” was retweeted 111,134 times and liked 154,188 times); morning news shows covered the controversy…
Science has yet adequately to explain the phenomenon.
“Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument”*…
Through reading, champion debater Bo Sen learned that disagreement can be a source of good, not ill, even in our polarized age.
Nowadays, disagreement is out of fashion. It is seen as the root of our personal and political troubles. Debate, in making a sport out of argument, seems at once a trivial pursuit and a serious impediment to the kinds of conversation we want to cultivate. But in my first book, Good Arguments, I propose that the opposite is true. Students may train to win every disagreement, but they soon learn that this is impossible. Even the best lose most of the competitions they attend. What one can do is disagree better—be more convincing and tenacious, and argue in a manner that keeps others willing to come back for another round. In the end, the prize for all that training and effort is a good conversation…
He shares several recommendations, e.g…
Thinking in an Emergency, by Elaine Scarry
Scarry, one of my English professors at Harvard, is the rare scholar who can change how you move through the world. She has made a career of bringing language to the ineffable ends of human experience: pain and beauty. In Thinking in an Emergency, she places deliberation at the core of a democratic response to emergencies including natural disasters and nuclear war. Scarry argues that debate, both real-time and prospective, need not hinder action and can instead secure the resolve and coordination needed for rapid response. She warns against leaders who invoke catastrophes to demand that their populations stop thinking. In this era of calamities, natural and man-made, Scarry’s wisdom is essential: “Whatever happens, keep talking.”
…
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
Malcolm X learned to debate as a 20-something in what was then called Norfolk Prison Colony, a state prison founded on reformist ideals that fielded debate teams against local colleges such as Boston University. In his memoir, X describes the experience of finding one’s voice and communing with an audience as a revelation: “I will tell you that, right there, in the prison, debating, speaking to a crowd, was as exhilarating to me as the discovery of knowledge through reading had been … once my feet got wet, I was gone on debating.” For most people, debate is a pastime of school and university years. This memoir shows that one can make a career and a life from its lessons in fierce, courageous, and resolute disagreement.
…
When Should Law Forgive?, by Martha Minow
One question I struggle with in Good Arguments is when we should stop debating. Minow, a former dean of Harvard Law School, provides here a model of humane consideration on the limits of the adversarial ethic. Hers is an argument for accommodating forgiveness—the “letting go of justified grievances”—in the legal system. She builds the book as one would a spacious house, each area of the law—juvenile justice, debt, amnesties and pardons—a separate chapter in which readers are invited to stay and reflect awhile. Martha Nussbaum is illuminating on related topics in her critique of anger in Anger and Forgiveness, which elicited rebuttal from Myisha Cherry in The Case for Rage, an argument for the emotion’s usefulness in conditions of resistance. The need to balance dispute and conciliation, accountability and grace, cannot be transcended, only better managed.
Seven more recommendations at “The Books That Taught a Debate Champion How to Argue,” from @helloboseo in @TheAtlantic.
* Desmond Tutu
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As we put the civil back into civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that the Roman Catholic Church announced, via a notification from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the abolition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“index of prohibited books”), which was originally instituted in 1557. The communique stated that, while the Index maintained its moral force, in that it taught Christians to beware, as required by the natural law itself, of those writings that could endanger faith and morality, it no longer had the force of ecclesiastical positive law with the associated penalties. So… read on.
“In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of this world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods”*…
From a (somewhat sarcastic) 1896 essay (“The Art of Controversy”) by that gloomiest of philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer, advice that (sadly) feels as appropriate today as it surely was then…
1. Carry your opponent’s proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. The more general your opponent’s statement becomes, the more objections you can find against it. The more restricted and narrow his or her propositions remain, the easier they are to defend by him or her.
2. Use different meanings of your opponent’s words to refute his or her argument.
3. Ignore your opponent’s proposition, which was intended to refer to a particular thing. Rather, understand it in some quite different sense, and then refute it. Attack something different than that which was asserted.
…
The first three of “Schopenhauer’s 38 Stratagems, or 38 Ways to Win an Argument.” Via @TheBrowser.
[Image above: source]
* Arthur Schopenhauer, “The Art of Controversy“
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As we celebrate sophistry, we might recall that it was on this date (or near; scholars disagree) in 325 that Roman Emperor Constantine I convened a gathering in which all of Scopenhauer’s tricks were surely employed: the First Council of Nicaea. An ecumenical council, it was the first effort to attain consensus in the church through an assembly representing all Christendom. Its main accomplishments were settlement of the Christological issue of the divine nature of God the Son and his relationship to God the Father, the construction of the first part of the Nicene Creed, mandating uniform observance of the date of Easter, and the promulgation of early canon law.
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