Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Mayo Clinic disciplines doctor and professor for expressing "incorrect" views about transgender issues

The Academic Freedom Alliance correctly criticizes Mayo, and has provided a lawyer to vindicate the doctor's rights.  What an embarrassment for an otherwise reputable institution.  The fact that 'Republicans are currently running a vicious campaign of harassment against transgender people is no justification for abridging a medical professional's legal right to express his professional judgment.  (The comments at issue by Dr. Joyner are utterly banal, and clearly correct, which makes this even more bizarre.  Mayo deserves to lose "big time.")

Mayo Clinic disciplines doctor and professor for expressing "incorrect" views about transgender issues

The Academic Freedom Alliance correctly criticizes Mayo, and has provided a lawyer to vindicate the doctor's rights.  What an embarrassment for an otherwise reputable institution.  The fact that 'Republicans are currently running a vicious campaign of harassment against transgender people is no justification for abridging a medical professional's legal right to express his professional judgment.

"Conversation and Democracy"

A nice graduation speech by my law colleague Tom Ginsburg, who has spent his career studying democracies and constitutions.

Life in the American apartheid terror state

If you subscribe to the NYRB, this review essay by the historian Eric Foner is worth reading.  It's a good, graphic reminder of the horrors of American apartheid, for which affirmative action, before it devolved into diversity blather, was one very modest remedial measure.

The new best Szechuan restaurant in Chicago

This is it.  Learned of it through a visiting professor from Hong Kong.  Very casual, also BYOB.  The best Kung Pao Chicken and Twice Cooked Pork I've had in a long, long time.

Happy Memorial Day to U.S. readers!

Here's a story about the 1937 Memorial Day massacre of striking workers in Chicago.

97 years ago today Sholem Schwarzbard assassinated a Ukrainian nationalist and butcher of Jews

He was later acquitted by a French court.  A different world, still a stunning story.  (A longer, scholarly treatment here.)

The war on tenure (and abortion) comes to North Carolina

Philosopher David Austin (North Carolina State University) writes:

North Carolina House bill HB715 would eliminate tenure for all future UNC system faculty hires, replacing it with 1-4 year contracts.

The joint effect of the restrictions on abortion (SB20, effective July 1) and elimination of tenure would be enormous damage to NC's economy. Most women will not want to attend post-secondary education in states that restrict access to abortion. Most female faculty and those whose partners are women, as well as those who have female children, will want to avoid states that restrict access to abortion. Many businesses will leave or avoid such states. (If travel to another state or country to get an abortion can be criminalized by a woman's state of residence, business offers to cover any travel expenses won't help.) Some supporting detail is in the attached:   Download NCRestrictsAbortionTenure

I've seen little or no discussion in the media of the inevitable joint effects of limiting or eliminating tenure plus restricting access to abortion; maybe I missed it. I've looked for and not found comments by any economists of education. Perhaps they believe that it would be wasted effort because Republican legislators care only about their own re-elections and those who voted for them are ignorant or indifferent even if not favorably disposed towards the restrictions and the elimination.

Poitier meets Plato

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MAY 22--SEE UPDATE

From his 1964 album:

(Thanks to Rob Tempio for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  There is a digital version of the full album here.   (Thanks to Neil Jahren for the pointer.)

 

The Republican war on K-12 education: South Carolina edition

Here, with interesting history of race relations in South Carolina, and an appropriate skewering of Viktor DeSantis's slimy and stupid hitman Christopher Rufo.

(Thanks to Jason Stanley for the pointer.)

Silicon Valley, Elon Musk, and the popularity of eugenics

Interesting and creepy.  To be clear, I'm not wholly opposed to eugenics:  people like Elon Musk should not be allowed to reproduce.

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for the pointer.)

There should be severe liability for creating "counterfeit people" using AI

Philosopher Daniel Dennett in The Atlantic:

Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the “passing along” of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.

On the legal import, going forward, of Trump's liability for defaming E. Jean Carroll

Law professor Tobias Wolff (son of philosopher Robert Paul Wolff) explains it clearly here.

Trans men among the Marsh Arabs

An interesting story, courtesy of philosopher Galen Strawson.  As Professor Stawson notes, a far more civilized attitude than one finds in most "red" states in America these days.

More on American gun barbarism

According to this study,

The likelihood of knowing a gun violence victim within any given personal network over a lifetime is 99.85% (99.8% to 99.9%). The likelihood among non-Hispanic white, black, Hispanic and other race Americans were 97.1%, 99.9%, 99.5% and 88.9% respectively.

Email me if you've seen a similar study done for civilized countries with normal gun laws.

"Mass shooting tracker"

Here's a good resource for tracking how barbaric the United States is thanks to the gun craziness.  A "mass shooting" is any outburst of gun violence in which four or more people are shot.  The U.S. has nearly two mass shootings every day; in 2023 already, 376 people have been killed and more than 900 wounded.  That was obviously the intention of the "Framers" of the U.S. Constitution.  As a good originalist, however, I do believe everyone is entitled to own a single shot musket.

America is not a civilized country

The latest easily preventable gun massacre should confirm that, at least for sapient beings.  The odds, currently, of being massacred by random maniacs in America is relatively low:  1 in 16,0000.   Of course, in civilized countries, the odds are more like 1 in a million.  As we learn from decision theorists (they do serve a purpose, right?), we should consider both the risk of a bad event and how bad the event is.   In the latest easily preventable gun massacre in Texas, a 6-year old boy lost both his parents and his 3-year-old brother.  Maybe I'm weird, but that seems to me catastrophically bad.  Another set of parents lost both their daughters, who were 11 and 8.   Again, that seems to me catastrophically, life-wreckingly bad, but maybe I'm not good at decision theory.

In normal, civilized countries, when grotesque events like this occur, the government changes the law.  That's what happened in Australia, which shows that these incidents can easily be prevented.  In America, these incidents are not easily preventable because the country is not civilized:  many of its elected leaders are barbarians.  It is not complicated.

I do fear this country is sick beyond repair.  I would be glad to be wrong.

UPDATE:   Reader Jonathan Turner reminds me of these routines about America's gun craziness by Australian comedian Jim Jefferies:  here and here.

ANOTHER:  look at the lifetime odds for gun deaths in the U.S.!

Masks actually work for reasons we have long understood

This essay makes an important point:

For masks, are randomized trials an appropriate way of evaluating a basic engineered safety system in the first place? We don’t rely on such trials for seat belts, bike helmets or life jackets, and the oft-cited randomized trial of parachutes is an old running joke. Why is that so hilarious? What do the engineers know that doctors don’t?

 

In many scientific disciplines randomized trial methods are fundamentally inappropriate—akin to using a scalpel to mow a lawn. If something can be directly measured or accurately and precisely modeled, there is no need for complex, inefficient trials that put participants at risk. Engineering, perhaps the most “real-world” of disciplines, doesn’t conduct randomized trials. Its necessary knowledge is well-understood. Everything from highways to ventilation systems—everything that moves us, cleans our air and our water, and puts satellites into orbit—succeeds without needing them. This includes many medical devices. When failures like a plane crash or catastrophic bridge collapse do occur, they are recognized and systematically analyzed to ensure they don’t happen again. The contrast with the lack of attention paid to public health failures in this pandemic is stark.

 

"Wokeness" in Chile

Longtime reader S. Wallerstein, another man of the actual left in Chile, writes (a propos yesterday's post):

I have a friend, a feminist academic, with the equivalent of a tenured position in a Chilean university of excellent academic quality.   She has been a feminist activist since I met her 40 years ago, long before feminism became fashionable,  during the Pinochet dictatorship when it was,   if not exactly dangerous, at least not profitable.  

She complains about how woke the students and younger generation of feminists are, on how they emphasize trans rights as somehow more important than the issues that she is concerned with, unequal pay, unequal distribution of household work and childcare, domestic violence,    abortion rights.  etc., on how intersectionality dictates that her concerns as a middle class white feminist  are seen as trivial compared to the concerns of women from racial minorities, even though most Chilean women undoubtedly see themselves as white and have more or less the same concerns as she does.       

The pressures to conform are not as strong as those in the U.S., but woke is very present.   

Was the "Great Awokening" a global phenomenon?

Some evidence it was.

(Thanks to Benj Hellie for the pointer.)

North Carolina vs. Alaska

NC Supreme Court says legislators can pick their voters, while Alaska Supreme Court says voters should pick their representatives.   So democracy in elections for the House of Representatives is over in North Carolina, but secured in Alaska.

Trinity College's library will no longer be named after Bishop Berkeley...

...because he owned slaves.  Unlike Aristotle, he did not justify slavery, so one might have thought that would count in his favor.  More seriously, at the time he owned slaves, it was hardly uncommon for individuals of his class.  (Contrast the case of honoring Calhoun!)  Will this de-naming make the world a better place?   Was anyone in doubt in Dublin that chattel slavery was wrong?  Will scholars of Berkeley now apologize for writing about him?

Marx, ever the optimist, thought that things would be very different when we live in a "human" world, in which there are neither chattel- nor wage-slaves, in which people were not locked in life-and-death struggles for existence, and in which the human interest in creative work was allowed to express itself.  That must surely be right, but one might imagine that in such a humane world no one would care about dishonoring those who were otherwise great intellectual innovators because they were creatures of their times, because they acted exactly as their class position required.

Aly Corey, "Associate Director for Inclusive Learning" in the DEI office at Williams College, has apparently resigned from my fan club

Admittedly Dr. Corey must have led an exemplary life if having an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in music is the most embarrassing thing they have ever done.  Good to know "diversity" at Williams is in the hands of such a mature, balanced individual!

 

American exceptionalism: guns and economic inequality...

...yields this:  "The average American my age, in his mid-to-late 30s, is roughly six times more likely to die in the next year than his counterpart in Switzerland."

 

 

Marx was right, part 722

From Legislative Studies Quarterly:

This essay examines the relationship between legislators' class backgrounds and their votes on economic policy in the House of Representatives during the twentieth century. Like ordinary Americans, representatives from working-class occupations exhibit more liberal economic preferences than other legislators, especially those from profit-oriented professions.

 

Why economics today is like British food in the 1980s

An amusing essay; an excerpt:

In 1986, I left my native South Korea and came to Britain to study economics as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge.

Things were difficult...[b]ut the most difficult thing was the food. Before coming to Britain, I had not realised how bad food can be. Meat was overcooked and under-seasoned. It was difficult to eat, unless accompanied by gravy, which could be very good but also very bad. English mustard, which I fell in love with, became a vital weapon in my struggle to eat dinners. Vegetables were boiled long beyond the point of death to become textureless, and there was only salt around to make them edible. Some British friends would argue valiantly that their food was under-seasoned (err… tasteless?) because the ingredients were so good that you oughtn’t ruin them with fussy things like sauces, which those devious French used because they needed to hide bad meat and old vegetables. Any shred of plausibility of that argument quickly vanished when I visited France at the end of my first year in Cambridge and first tasted real French food.

Socialist philosopher Susan Neiman is not "woke"

Of course not.

(Thanks to Joshua Selby for the pointer.)

Not everyone is thrilled with Ken Griffin's $300 million naming gift to Harvard's Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

(Link now fixed)

Amusing and not surprising, since it is an embarrassment:

Theda R. Skocpol, a Government and Sociology professor and former GSAS dean, slammed the decision in an email to The Crimson.

“I am absolutely disgusted at the sale of the GSAS name to a multi billionaire who works in US politics today to undermine the foundations of liberal civil society, including free speech, and to eviscerate the essential trans partisan features of fully representative US democracy,” she wrote.

“This is a shocking and unnecessary sell out by Harvard and FAS leaders who, at the same time, claim to be worried about Harvard College’s acceptance of slavery in the 1700s,” Skocpol added. “Feel free to quote me.”

Georgia secedes from civilization

The Governor has signed a law permitting folks to carry handguns without a license or a background check.  That should work out really well!  Apparently if the Constitution had mentioned a "right to drive," there would be no licensing requirement for drivers either.

America is doomed.

Among the stuff ChatGPT makes up...

...are false accusations of sexual haraassment against innocent individuals!

College accreditation agencies now flexing their muscles for "diversity"

From CHE:

The six-year graduation rate for [California Lutheran University's ] Hispanic students, who make up 40 percent of its 2,800 undergraduates, is equal to that of white and Asian American students, at about 75 percent. That sets the university apart from most others: Nationally, about 54 percent of Hispanic students graduate within six years.

Despite that accomplishment, the university received from its accreditor in early 2021 a “notice of concern” finding that it wasn’t truly inclusive. Academic outcomes hadn’t similarly improved for Black students, for whom the six-year graduation rate is 69 percent, according to a report by the WASC Senior College and University Commission, formerly the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, one of the nation’s major institutional accreditors.....

The 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black [also a poor and economically marginalized--ed.] man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, was another catalyst for action by the Western commission. “What does the death of George Floyd have to do with what we do? Everything,” the agency said just days after Floyd’s death. Spurred by that event, the accreditor established an Equity and Inclusion Council to make those issues central to everything it does....

Harvard's entire faculty of arts & sciences not even worth three times more than the University of Chicago economics department

$125 million to name the economics department here, $300 million to name the entire graduate school of arts & sciences at Harvard.  The market speaks!

Reed on Rustin

This certainly makes a nice contrast with this.  Professor Reed writes:

Bayard Rustin’s commentary between 1965 and 1975 on race, class, and politics in the U.S. was sharply insightful and can be read profitably for cultivating a nuanced understanding of the crucial period between the victories won by the civil rights movement and institutional consolidation of the ethnic interest-group regime generally known as “black politics.”1 To the extent that naïve, inadequate, simplistic, or simply wrong narratives concerning that political moment figure significantly into current formulations of black political life, engaging with Rustin’s critiques can be a helpful corrective to mistaken or shallow assessments regarding the present as well as the past.

Good work if you can get it

Ibram Kendi, well-known "anti-racism" grifter, was paid $30,000 by Rutgers for a 30-minute meeting with some Rutgers students, and a one hour "moderated lecture" with a sympathetic Rutgers law professor at the Camden campus.  Plus, he demanded first-class airfare (from Boston to Philadelphia?).   The rich get richer, including in academe, and even when they have no content.  (I wonder whether Professor Reed, an actual black intellectual, has ever gotten a fee like this; I rather doubt it, since his views do not fit with the agenda of the ruling class.)

UPDATE:  A reader points out that, according to CHE, Jonathan Haidt, another dubious character (although not an enemy of academic freedom, unlike Kendi), was getting 30K per speech back in 2017! 

"Irrational exuberance" about AI

This seems right:

AI doesn’t have to be all that smart to cause a lot of harm. Take this week’s story about how Bing accused a lawyer of sexual harassment — based on a gross misreading of an op-ed that reported precisely the opposite. I am not afraid because GPT is too smart, I am afraid because GPT is too stupid, too dumb to comprehend an op-ed, and too dumb to keep its mouth shut. It’s not smart enough to filter out falsehood, but just smart enough to be dangerous, creating and spreading falsehoods it fails to verify. Worse, it’s popular enough to become a potential menace.

But a lot of other people are scared for a different reason: they imagine that GPT-5 will be wholly different from GPT-4, not some reliability-and-truth-challenged bull in a china shop, but a full-blown artificial general intelligence (AGI)....

AGI really could disrupt the world. But GPT-5 is not going to do any of that...

Jesus didn't rise from the dead, because no one rises from the dead

So why is a secular newspaper running an interview that treats this as a serious possibility? It's one thing for a Church newspaper to feature such an interview, but the New York Times?  Maybe they should now run an interview with a Hume scholar on Hume on miracles and the comparative worthlessness of "testimony" in this context.

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

The Trump indictment in NYC

A couple of perspectives:  skeptical and optimistic (with some caveats).  The latter is pretty convincing, since it is firmly grounded in the actual New York law in a way the former is not.

"How not to kill yourself"

Philosopher Clancy Martin discusses his own experiences.

(Thanks to Mike G. for the pointer.)

Robots coming to restaurants

Just as Marx expected, robots are starting to replace human workers in restaurants:

“Every restaurant chain is looking toward as much automation as possible,” said Phil Zheng of Richtech Robotics, an Austin-based maker of robot servers. “People are going to see these everywhere in the next year or two.”

Li Zhai was having trouble finding staff for Noodle Topia, his Madison Heights, Michigan, restaurant, in the summer of 2021, so he bought a BellaBot from Pudu Robotics. The robot was so successful he added two more; now, one robot leads diners to their seats while another delivers bowls of steaming noodles to tables. Employees pile dirty dishes onto a third robot to shuttle back to the kitchen.

Now, Zhai only needs three people to do the same volume of business that five or six people used to handle. And they save him money. A robot costs around $15,000, he said, but a person costs $5,000 to $6,000 per month.

Social (pseudo) Science

From CHE:

In complex areas like the study of racial inequality, a fundamentalism has taken hold that discourages sound methodology and the use of reliable evidence about the roots of social problems.

We are not talking about mere differences in interpretation of results, which are common. We are talking about mistakes so clear that they should cause research to be seriously questioned or even disregarded. A great deal of research — we will focus on examinations of Asian American class mobility — rigs its statistical methods in order to arrive at ideologically preferred conclusions....

Consider The Myth of the Model Minority (Routledge, 2008), in which Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin assert that “when researchers have examined Japanese and other Asian American workers in comparison with white workers with similar jobs, educational credentials, and years of job experience, the Asian American workers are found to be paid less, on average, and are less likely to be promoted to managerial positions.” But Chou and Feagin’s claim lacks any serious empirical evidence. Instead of directly citing published research from peer-reviewed journals, Chou and Feagin instead based their conclusion on a book by Tim Wise, a self-proclaimed “prominent antiracist” journalist who has no graduate training or any professional experience with evaluating labor market or socioeconomic data.

"Glacier Express" in Switzerland?

Have any readers taken it?  Any advice or comments welcome, you can either email me or post comments here.  Was it difficult to get reservations for seats together?  If one doesn't do the whole route, what portions are most interesting?   What should one know before doing it?  We are likely to try it in summer.  Thanks in advance.

"The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives": a discussion with Adolph Reed and historian Barbara Fields

Here (it really starts around the 7-minute mark).   There are also some references to this utterly scathing essay by Reed on "black public intellectuals".   An excerpt from the latter below the fold.

If you live in Wisconsin, vote for Janet Protasiewicz tomorrow...

...for a spot on the state Supreme Court.  This is hugely important for Wisconsin and for the University.  Although Wisconsin is, in reality, a "purple" state (it has one Democratic Senator, one Republican senator, for example, while the Democratic Governor won re-election by a modest margin), the Repugs in the legislature have gerrymandered themselves into a permanent majority--unless the state Supreme Court strikes down their anti-democratic plan to remain in power.  The court itself is evenly divided, 3-3, so whoever fills this spot will play a decisive role on a variety of issues, including gerrymandering and abortion.  Protasiewicz will make a real difference.  The Repugs in the legislature have also been starving the university system, which began under union buster Scott Walker as Governor, another reason why anyone who cares about public education needs to vote for Judge Janet tomorrow!

An AI researcher on what worries him: people, not AI

Some interesting thoughts.   What he should have said is that what worries him are people with the incentives produced by capitalist markets!

Federal judge in Arkansas says Supreme Court's Dobbs decision means Arkansas can criminalize adultery, masturbation and more

Informative analysis of a recent court opinion by constitutional law scholar Michael Dorf.

UPDATE:  ‘Twas an April Fools joke, a bit too subtle (and plausible).  

Trouble for ethical vegans and vegetarians

Plants "cry" (and animals hear them!).

(Thanks to Joshua Selby for the pointer.)

ChatGPT4: still not very good at logic puzzles

Philosopher Ned Hall (Harvard) tried again:  Download Ned Hall GPT4 logic puzzle attempt 3-26-23.  (Earlier try.)

For what it's worth, I gave GPT3 my jurisprudence exam question from last year; the answer was failing, and not even close.

Massive protests in Tel-Aviv and elsewhere in Israel

Live updates here.  Comments are open for readers with more information about what's going on.

20 years ago, the U.S. launched the criminal war of aggression against Iraq...

...and its perpetrators are still free, having never been punished.   Here's what I wrote about the whole insanity back in 2004:

Less than nine months after fundamentalist religious zealots inflicted mass casualties on the civilian population of the United States, and only about six months after the U.S. toppled the regime that harbored them, a country of no consequence or relevance to the safety of the United States--a country hated by the fundamentalist religious zealots for its secular ideology and its Western treatment of women, a country with a devastated economy and crippled military, a country that the U.S. and Britain regularly bombed (since it didn't even have sovereign control over all its own terriroty), a nation half of whose population were children, a country which the US outspent on military might 400 to 1--this country was suddenly declared the most pressing threat to the U.S. and world peace.

Less than nine months after fundamentalist religious zealots inflicted mass casualties on the civilian population of the United States, and only about six months after the U.S. toppled the regime that harbored them, a country of no consequence or relevance to the safety of the United States--a country hated by the fundamentalist religious zealots for its secular ideology and its Western treatment of women, a country with a devastated economy and crippled military, a country that the U.S. and Britain regularly bombed (since it didn't even have sovereign control over all its own terriroty), a nation half of whose population were children, a country which the US outspent on military might 400 to 1--this country was suddenly declared the most pressing threat to the U.S. and world peace.

"Woke" explained

A very perceptive essay by Freddie deBoer, a man of the actual left:

“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.