The unbearable asymmetry of bullshit

 from the department of anti-link-rot-action 

Somewhat at random it has been my custom to follow the blog of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics in my RSS reader, and occasionally I would even feel moved by the spirit of enlightenment to offer up a comment to the august minds philosophizing there. Sadly the blog now seems to be in a state of permanent technical failure, effectively removing these comments from public view. My cacheing system has worked nicely though, so I guess it's up to me to take over the hosting from here on. I was particularly pleased with this comment, which pulls together my thinking on attention, agnotology, peer review and bullshit, written in response to this article by Brian Earp:

The key problem with bullshit that enjoys a certain "truthiness" is attentional: its presence is a time-wasting distraction from the good stuff. The agnotological processes whereby e.g. the tobacco companies, or climate change denialists, skew "debates" by creating false controversy is well-studied. In theory scholarly publishing should be relatively resistant to this process by the diligent application of peer review, but this merely displaces the reader's attentional process to a consideration of the judgement of the peer reviewers, potentially also prone to the retransmission of bullshit. The detail and verbosity of scholarly refutation amplifies the attentional problem.

Whilst freedom of expression worthy of the name must surely include the freedom to bullshit, the solution surely lies in maintaining reputational systems that offer the user efficient filtering systems that enable the basic command "never show content by this author again." It would be an error to universalise such judgement, for we all have our own foibles and tolerances. For example the Facebook system assigns a single "interest score" to each post which is then used to rate each post for all users. Twitter's "follow/unfollow" mechanism, which delegates filtering to the judgement of each individual user is much closer to what is required. The Pirate Party's attempts to implement "liquid democracy," whereby rank and file members anoint experts as delegates on any particular issue is also worthy of study.
Drinking at the commenting firehose at a heavily-trafficked site can be made less overwhelming using ranking systems (see Slashdot). And so on.

Frankfurt's book is of course itself somewhat bullshitty, devoting as it does, a substantial part of its rather slender discussion to a lengthy argument establishing that bullshit is synonymous with humbug. (What is humbug?) But hey! It's a fun cite on any reference list.

Harry Frankfurt seems a most charming man. This interview is a better outline to his thought than the book. He has humbly acknowledged elsewhere his surprise that his university press wished to work up his essay into a slender book:

On the ignorance of moral philosophers

 Over the years my online reading has expanded to encompass several philosophical blogs. Of course we all love (phil) knowledge (sophy). So I suppose by a philosophical blog I mean a blog written by someone formally engaged in the activity promulgated by university philosophy departments.
Now in the course of this, I've started to note a pattern in philosophical discourse, in which the author feels free to devise some fairly simplistic example,* and then uses it to reason towards some questioning of a universal value. Here is a recent example, written by Richard Chappell, a philosopher interested in morality at the University of York. In it, he questions the idea that people are equally worthy of moral consideration by inviting us to consider our actions faced with Gandhi and Hitler (as personifications of good and evil presumably) and a single dose of a painkilling drug. I didn't like this, and submitted the following comment:

1) Who was responsible for stock control of the analgesic drugs? Poor job. Most well-established analgesics are cheap. Even with more resource-intensive treatments, there are usually ample rational criteria for selecting patients in whom the treatment would be most beneficial, other than their wealth or putative moral status.
2) The safest, most practical, and most moral course of action is to treat everyone, Hitler, Gandhi (who was no saint), Gilles de Rais, whoever, with as much professional élan as you can muster. In the British Army Medical Corps, for example, there is a certain ethical pride in treating all casualties optimally, whether friend or foe. It's called respect for the Geneva Convention. Would you like to rescind it? And more generally, to do otherwise, in the healthcare domain, is potentially an assault on the patient's right to life. Or perhaps you're planning to do away with human rights as well?
3) In a world in which even professors of moral philosophy question the moral equality of every human being, it is particularly important to be known for trying to treat everyone as well as possible, should you yourself need treatment one day. Imagine a judgmental doctor who considered moral philosophers worthless blowhards and treated them less favourably in some way. That would be awful.

Of course, M. Chappell has no obligation to publish any remark of mine, though I note that he has posted ten other comments, all more cosy to his way of thinking. Setting this comment up has proved somewhat tedious, but I post it here anyway on the general principle that such rejected comments are the most important ones to publish. And Chappell's ideas must be classed in that flora of delicate organisms which survive only under laboratory-controlled conditions, with little, if any, relevance to contemporary problems.

===
*Stevan Harnad posted a particularly objectionable example of the genre on his Google+ profile recently, inviting the following "thought experiment":
"You are a driver of a runaway train hurtling towards a set of points. You have a switch that can send the train one way or another, but you can't stop. On one track your child has been tied to the rails. On another, someone else's child. What do you do?"
This was presumably designed to evoke contemplation of justice and family values, but my first reaction was: "Well, who's going around tying children to railway lines?" and "err, given the supposèd urgency of the situation, how come you've got this perfect information on the identities of the children ahead?"
But such refusal to join in the philosophical game I fear makes me an unsuitable playmate in this playground.
I dislike all this for the useless waste of time and energy it represents. It is misguided. There is no shortage of real world ethical and moral problems. Why not use your talents and energy to discover and describe real things that have actually happened, then reason about them?
===
Update 28/1/19 The trolley problem is everywhere. I suspect people are finding it a useful pre-packaged discourse on the problems of self-driving cars. I doubt if it's the most effective way into consideration of road danger reduction issues. Still, cars that respect all road traffic rules? Bring 'em on.
I particularly liked this quote, by an engineer working at X, Google's autonomous vehicle division: "the answer is almost always ‘slam on the brakes'". To which one might add: "Don't go too fast in the first place."

A consultation with a social librarian

    I came upon GoodReads again this morning, and decided to sign up and give it a go—I've been yearning for some medium-light stuff in English to complement my worthy trawl through the French classics, currently La Peste.
    GoodReads is like Facebook for book lovers: 25 million users have shared their literary preferences, and, using the power of the social graph, once you do that too, those magical inklings about what you "didn't know you didn't know" become yours for the taking.
    This technique worked dramatically for me. Told I needed to rate 20 books to start receiving recommendations from the site, I set off, but was being presented with digital screeds of books I'd never heard of, and didn't even care that I hadn't. After scrolling through many pages of this, I finally lighted upon Richard Feynmann's Surely you're joking Mr Feymann?, gave it a five star rating (heartfelt: I even bought it for a nephew last Christmas), and from that moment on, my universe at the site changed completely, and I started to be presented with much more plausible choices of stuff that I might actually want to read. I was reminded that I have yet to tackle much of Dostoyevsky and Kafka for example.
    There was a slight dip when I came to rating my preferences in sport, where, as a simple matter of attentional survival (84kb PDF), I limit my reading strictly to cycling. Amidst a morass of recommendations treating on American-rules "football" (this though the ball is hardly ever kicked), baseball, and basketball, cycling was nowhere to be seen. This time I had to resort the the site's search tool: a search and a click on Tim Krabbé's The Rider sufficed to transform the site once more into friendly territory.
    It's a pretty awesome site, it has to be said. So now the problem is the more familiar "so many books, so little time." But my impression is that the site offers a powerful attentional tool, enabling ready surmise of populist preference, whilst easily forcing it to turn to the interest at hand (say, by specifying philosophical works). For an autodidact this is invaluable. For example, you'd seen references to the 19th century philosopher Schopenhauer, but didn't know where to begin; the GoodReads recommendation looks like a pretty palatable place to start. And unlike at Amazon, the GoodReads reader reviews generally seem non-trivial and sane.