DOGE vs The World

On Monday, Democrats finally returned from the weekend and took aim at Elon Musk’s DOGE unit for hacking into federal computer systems at sites including Treasury and USAID. Chuck Schumer’s obsessive focus on tariff-driven inflation mercifully ended after Trump backed down from his trade war. This illustrates how Schumer is a serious downgrade from Harry Reid. But he’s finally focused on the problem. He gave a good floor speech laying out the problem and promising action.

The most immediately meaningful step of the day came from former Pomona philosophy major and current US Senator Brian Schatz: “Until and unless this brazenly authoritarian action is reversed and USAID is functional again, I will be placing a blanket hold on all of the Trump administration’s State Department nominees.” Cabinet-level appointees like Marco Rubio can’t be subject to holds, but this will block undersecretaries and other underlings. Last year I gave Schatz’ Leadership PAC $2500, so he’d have more money to buy influence in the caucus, and he’s using the power well.

Musk’s control of these computer systems can’t last long, because the collective power of the entities that don’t want him to have control is vast. Do the Detroit automakers and Musk’s tech industry rivals want the Tesla CEO controlling payment systems? The nation’s air traffic controllers received his job-threatening buyout offers the day before the DCA crash, and nobody associated with aviation can want further nudging from him. Whatever the Supreme Court may have been aiming to do in previous decisions, an AI-loving CEO who immediately started hacking all the government systems to get his way is likely too chaotic to serve those aims.

Many people are calling Musk’s action a coup, but it’s really more of a hack. If one of us somehow hacked into Treasury Department computer systems, that would be legally the same as what Musk and the DOGE team is doing. Congress has the power to determine how federal money is spent. Billionaire friends of the President do not, and no legal process has empowered Musk to do so. Whatever impunity the Supreme Court gave the President doesn’t apply to him. He can steal data and create massive disruptions by blocking payments, but that doesn’t change legal property rights. It just means he’s committing a giant crime.

Lawsuits to stop Musk are already filed, and more to punish him will likely appear soon. The Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have filed suit in to keep Musk out of the federal system. Trump can pardon Musk for crimes, but not for the vast civil liability he incurs from hacking into many people’s private data. A suit for data theft at the level of the entire US population could wipe out even Musk’s massive wealth.

For now he’s the richest man in the world. That combined with billionaire privilege and exceptionally powerful friends gives him powerful defenses against attack. But all that power is fragile. His money is dependent on the market continuing to price Tesla at exorbitant levels. His political connections depend on his relation to Trump, and if Trump decides he’s a political liability and turns on him it’s over.

Two stories of the last few years come to mind. Sam Bankman-Fried peaked in a similar way, and Musk has been even more flamboyant in his criminality. I wonder if Musk is taking dopamine reuptake inhibitors like SBF did – compulsive gambling and other risky behavior are potential side effects. There’s also Vladimir Putin, who followed his success in helping Trump win an election with a disastrous invasion of Ukraine. Men don’t need weird Bay Area research chemical to wreck themselves with mad gambles – yes-men and ludicrous power may be enough.

The scientific image

Perhaps I differ from other naturalistically-inclined philosophers in that the range of sciences from chemistry to cell biology is what I was raised with. My impression is that most naturalists who have roots in the natural sciences come from physics, psychology, or something related to evolution.

This goes back to my earliest upbringing. Dad’s whole journey from deep poverty in India to being a chemistry postdoc in the US happened because he could understand huge molecules from the atoms up. He would often speak with reverence of RB Woodward’s synthesis of vitamin B12. There were periodic table posters on the walls of the houses I was raised in; I ate off periodic table placemats.

There’s that famous Wilfrid Sellars line about philosophy reconciling the manifest image with the scientific image. The scientific image seems a lot more familiar to me than many people’s accounts of the manifest image. To me the scientific image is less physics and equations than the periodic table and the way mitochondria make ATP. I like how it helps me understand what’s going on in nature.

I thought I would be a scientist until the second semester of organic chemistry at Harvard. The big molecules just perplexed me, and my teachers generally shrugged and smiled at the inelegance of their interactions. These things are discovered in the lab, not derived elegantly from chemical principles. Dad could sometimes still just see what the molecules would do; I could not. I was falling madly in love with philosophy at the same time, and I followed my heart.

Elegant explanations often emerge from the sciences that philosophers know best – physics, psychology, evolutionary stuff. I like elegant explanations, and those sciences connect well to philosophically interesting issues. But I know that mostly science is going to be the big messy slog of Dad trial-and-erroring his hypotheses about reactions in the chemistry lab until he comes home for dinner.

My Christmas present

My Christmas present from the Journal of Nietzsche Studies was a nice remark about “Zarathustra’s Moral Psychology.”

Patrick Hassan's review notes “the philosophical, literary, and historical labor” needed for understanding Zarathustra. As an undergraduate, I did that labor and found the Humean theory of motivation and powerful responses to its contemporary opponents. “On the Despisers of the Body” as anticipates Korsgaard; “On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions” anticipates McDowell. Here’s Hassan on the volume as a whole:

Many essays skillfully draw out the issues of contemporary interest and demonstrate Nietzsche’s relevance to ongoing fundamental philosophical debates. The editors are to be commended for their careful selection of quality essays in this respect.

For example, Neil Sinhababu convincingly argues that Z provides the most compelling critique in Nietzsche’s corpus of various rationalist theses; for instance, that reason is central to explaining moral motivation, moral knowledge, moral agency, and moral subjecthood. As Sinhababu presents Nietzsche’s brand of sentimentalism — a tradition more frequently addressed in the Anglophone world by way of figures such as Hume, Hutcheson, and Smith — it has the conceptual resources, moreover, to resist contemporary rationalist objections as they arise in the work of those such as Christine Korsgaard and John McDowell.

The volume is Loeb and Ansell-Pearson’s Cambridge Critical Guide to Zarathustra. 

Joe Biden, into the sunset

Joe Biden has chosen to end his career. He gives the Democratic nomination to Kamala Harris. The sunset in Lanta, where my boat arrived today, seemed a fitting tribute. 

Having dealt with declining abilities by becoming a great team player, he listened to his teammates, and took one for the team. He had been running behind basically all the Democratic Senate candidates. Energetic campaigning would help, but it was clearly beyond him. When the starting pitcher is exhausted, you bring in a relief pitcher – it's an easy baseball decision.

Harris will be the Democratic nominee. Because Biden won all the primaries basically unopposed, the delegates are overwhelmingly Biden delegates. They're selected for loyalty to Biden and doing what they're supposed to – Team Biden doesn't want a chaos delegate voting for someone else. I expect herd behavior towards Harris.

The Harris campaign has a ridiculously good setup. Republicans attacked Biden's age and infirmity. Now they have the 78-year-old against the 59-year-old. Democrats attacked Trump's criminality. Their new candidate is a prosecutor. The final anti-Trump GOP candidate was Nikki Haley. It's easy for me to imagine Haley-to-Harris crossover voters.

If you let Republicans concentrate on building a smear campaign over many years, it will defeat anyone. It defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. But in 2008, when they had everything prepared for a showdown with their hated Hillary, Democrats nominated someone who was not at all Hillary. Republicans didn't know what to do and lost big. Harris has never really been Republicans' top target, so Democrats have a fresh candidate three and a half months from the election. This is good.

Obviously, nothing is assured. I always have reservations about California Democrats for President. They gain power by consolidating support within the party, not by winning over swing voters. My dream candidate is Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who keeps winning big in her swing state.

I have no idea where the race is overall because the polls are very unreliable. The GOP primary polls tell the story. They make error after error overestimating Trump's margin by like 7%. And finally in Michigan they overestimate Trump's margin by over 15%! This may be the year where the low response rate problem really becomes unmanageable. (Nate Silver can't say this, because he would would be saying "Don't come to my poll aggregation site.")

Nancy Pelosi's hand in this is clear. Asked to quantify her responsibility for Biden's decision, one House Democrat up for re-election said "50%". Her people were pressing Biden, and her lack of an official role gave her special freedom to act directly. She called Biden on Saturday afternoon; that night he gathered two close friends to draft his statement. As soon as I realized that she wanted him out, I did too. She is always right about these kinds of things.

I was initially surprised to hear that Pelosi wanted an open convention. But of course! If the Republicans aren't certain about the nominee for a little while (with some getting thrown off by their own conspiracy theories), they can't attack as effectively. Keeping some mystery in the air makes for a more exciting convention and bigger media spectacle.

And of course, it will be Kamala. Joe's delegates are voting. Nancy always knows where her votes are.

Einstein the Philosopher

Einstein took so long to win a Nobel Prize because the committee saw the theory of relativity as philosophy rather than science. Walter Isaacson's Einstein biography tells the story.

William Ostwald nominated Einstein in 1910. He "cited special relativity, emphasizing that the theory involved fundamental physics and not, as some Einstein detractors argued, mere philosophy." One detractor was the anti-Semite Philipp Lenard, who had an "animosity to the type of 'philosophical conjecturing' that he often dismissed as being a feature of 'Jewish science.'"

This is why Einstein's Nobel Prize was for the photoelectric effect rather than relativity. Svante Arrhenius, presenting the award, said of relativity, "this pertains essentially to epistemology and has therefore been the subject of lively debate in philosophical circles." Arrhenius then continued, "Einstein’s law of the photoelectrical effect has been extremely rigorously tested by the American Millikan and his pupils and passed the test brilliantly."

Philosophers set themselves up to be wrong when they think of themselves on the model of Immanuel Kant, who got the wrong answers to the questions about space and time that Einstein got right. I'm happy to take what the physicists were willing to give us, and call Einstein the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. That would answer the question of whether philosophy makes progress.

Edmonds on the Vienna Circle

David Edmonds' "The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle" is the kind of history that can change one's views of philosophical research programs simply through biography. 

For all its historical significance, the Vienna Circle was financially threadbare and short-lived. When it started in 1923, Austria was experiencing the economic hardships of post-WW1 Europe (German wheelbarrows-of-cash hyperinflation was just before that.) Good philosophers were barely getting by and not eating well. But it was still a convivial and energetic environment for working out a new empiricist approach to philosophy together. My favorite character in the book was Otto Neurath, the big warmhearted social scientist / social organizer / socialist who signed his letters with a cartoon of an elephant drawn to express his mood. 

Politically, they were the left-wing philosophical movement of their time and place, sharing an ideology of cosmopolitan scientific empiricism with people like Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. Living in bohemian Red Vienna, many (like Neurath) joined up with lefty movements against the rising fascism of the era. Nazi-aligned obscurantists like Heidegger were their right-wing opponents. This doesn't map on to the analytic-Continental divide as recently understood – Rudolf Carnap's essay attacking Heidegger ends with praise for Nietzsche, whom Carnap admires for his empiricism and for the poetry of Zarathustra. 

Hitler ended everything. In 1936, Moritz Schlick was shot by a former PhD student who told the court that the murder was important for fascist ideological reasons, and thus avoided serious punishment. As Nazi power rose, Jewish members mostly got out alive, thanks to connections with academics outside. But everyone had to scatter, and the Vienna Circle was broken. 

In 13 ill-funded years, the empiricists of Vienna created a lot. But their empiricist project had barely gotten started before the Nazis showed up and everybody had to run. Many philosophical movements that later criticized logical positivism had far more funding and far more time, and many of those have left us with less. 

Their empiricism barely had time to develop. Where might it go if developed further? Verification conditions don't provide a good criterion of meaning, but maybe understanding? Does a phenomenalist metaphysics have more life in it than currently believed? Do the stripped-down epistemology and metaphysics of logical positivism allow for moral realism? I think the answer to the last of these is yes, and I think Carnap and Schlick and Neurath would be excited to find out.

Anwar's Triumph Over Rectal Absurdities in Malaysian Politics

Congratulations to Malaysia and its new Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, at the end of a bizarre and triumphant 25-year journey unlike anything else I've heard of in politics. 

Back in 1998, Anwar was Finance Minister, and had won international recognition for getting Malaysia through the Asian financial crisis. Worried that Anwar might be getting too powerful, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed had him arrested on sodomy charges. The alleged victim testified under oath that the charges were actually false, and a semen-stained mattress that supposedly had Anwar's DNA was retracted from evidence when the chemist proved untrustworthy. Nevertheless, Anwar was sent to prison in 1999 until his conviction was overturned in 2004.

Anwar returned to politics as a forceful critic of Mahathir's successor, Prime Minister Najib Razak. In 2008, Anwar was accused of forcible sodomy by top aide Saiful Bukhari. When people asked burly 24-year-old Saiful how the slender 61-year-old Anwar had physically overcome him, Saiful downgraded his former accusations to "homosexual conduct by persuasion", still a serious crime under Malaysia's Islamic government. It was soon revealed that Saiful had gone to Najib's apartment on June 24, shortly before the alleged sodomy of June 26, two days before he filed the police report and was medically inspected on June 28. 

The case went to trial in 2010, with the contents of Saiful's rectum becoming the central topic of Malaysian politics for over a month. I will spare you the gory details. But if you want to look up articles with headlines like "Saiful’s rectum was EMPTY, doctor tells court" and "Saiful inserted plastic in anus, court told" and consider the expert testimony on how the contents of rectums change over time, the internet is open to you.

Anwar was acquitted. But in 2014, a Court of Appeal overturned the acquittal. Anwar was imprisoned for five years without a new trial, because this is Malaysia. 

Around that time, Najib stole $700 million from the government's national investment fund. (When people asked why $700 million had suddenly appeared in his bank account, he tried to pass it off as a gift from a Saudi royal.) He was denounced by former Prime Minister Mahathir, whose own corruption hadn't risen to such extreme heights.

Anwar wanted to defeat Najib, and there was one way to do it. He teamed up with Mahathir, who had imprisoned him on false sodomy charges 20 years before. The men agreed on a deal where Mahathir would become Prime Minister first, and make the still-imprisoned Anwar his successor. As the 2018 elections approached, fear arose that Najib wouldn't respect a close election defeat, and violence would result. But Anwar's reformists and Mahathir's old connections proved unstoppable. Their new Harapan coalition won 121 out of 222 seats, a resounding victory that Najib had no way to overturn. Anwar was freed from prison.

In 2020, Harapan fell apart, and Malay ethnic nationalist leader Muhyiddin Yassin became Prime Minister. Anwar became Leader of the Opposition, in part because Mahathir was 95 years old. On November 20 of this year, new elections resulted in a hung parliament, with Anwar's regenerated Harapan the biggest party at 82 seats. On November 24, Mahathir had lost his seat in Parliament, Najib was serving his corruption sentence at Kajang Prison, and Anwar became the Prime Minister of Malaysia.

"Reliable Route" in Erkenntnis, Hume's is-ought gap successfully crossed

 I'm delighted to announce that “The reliable route from nonmoral evidence to moral conclusions” has been accepted for publication in Erkenntnis. Here’s how it begins:

"There is a reliable route from nonmoral evidence to moral conclusions. Progress through its three stages relies fundamentally on inductive inference. First, we divide up the psychological processes generating belief so that their reliability in generating true belief is statistically predictable. Second, we measure their reliability – the proportion of true beliefs they generate. Third, we infer probabilities of truth for moral propositions from the reliability of the processes generating belief in them. The three parts of this paper map out the three stages of the reliable route."

Part 1 discusses what processes of belief-formation are, how to individuate them, and how to use their reliability in reasoning. Processes are things like visual perception and wishful thinking. Since we know that visual perception is more reliable than wishful thinking, we change beliefs that we think were formed by wishful thinking, but we generally keep beliefs that we think were formed by visual perception. James Beebe and Jack Lyons’ work on the generality problem for reliabilism helps one imagine such belief-forming categories defined with scientific precision, perhaps with equations predicting how likely it is that beliefs caused through various processes under various environmental circumstances are true.

Part 2 discusses how to determine the reliability with which moral beliefs are formed. We can’t assume any moral truths in determining the reliability of the processes, or else the reliable route would be circular. I offer two ways to infer the reliability with which nonmoral beliefs are formed, beginning from entirely nonmoral information. First, reliability can be inductively inferred from that of similarly generated nonmoral beliefs. (Most metaethical theories have the same or similar processes generating moral and some nonmoral beliefs, often a form of intuition or perception.) Second, contradictory moral beliefs push processes generating them towards unreliability, regardless of which belief is true. 

Part 3 begins as we've derived things like this in the first two parts:

Process P, which generates belief in moral proposition M, has truth ratio T.

(T is the proportion of true beliefs generated by P, with parameters filled in)

We can now revise beliefs in M accordingly. There’s some kind of probabilistic Moore’s Paradox in saying “M, and there’s an 0.1 probability that M.” If we’ve always been confident in M, but P alone generates belief in M and it has truth ratio 0.1, P is essentially a cognitive bias on moral judgment and we should give up belief in M. Similarly, if we discover that one of our moral beliefs is formed by processes especially reliable in generating nonmoral belief, we should become more confident in it. If we gave it up because it conflicted with another moral belief that we now discover was unreliably formed, we should return to it. 

Inductive inference takes us all the way to moral truth. We empirically discover the reliability with which we generate various nonmoral beliefs, inductively apply these observations to similar cases in which moral beliefs are generated, and infer probabilities of truth for similarly generated moral beliefs.  Using the reliable route, we cross Hume's famous gap between is and ought, on the power of induction alone. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, rest in peace

Geopolitical events are always work of many, but the end of the Cold War was above all the decision of one man – Mikhail Gorbachev. He made the ending much better than it could have been for the world as a whole. For that, he deserves the world's thanks.

Gorbachev rose to power in 1985. The power he held was like that of a medieval king surrounded by nobles. He was capable of autocratic rule, but he needed the Politburo's support to operate successfully and avoid overthrow. His most distinctive policies were generally aimed at making Communism less bad. The buzzwords of his early rule were glasnost (openness, largely meaning freedom of speech) and perestroika (restructuring, often involving decentralization of power away from Moscow). 

As things progressed, he let the Eastern European nations ruled from Moscow go their own way. Germany appreciates him for letting the East reunite with the West. With a few exceptions close to home (the Baltic states and South Caucusus) he generally avoided using violence to maintain a Moscow-ruled empire. Nations outside the USSR left the Warsaw Pact, and most became democracies. The other Soviet Republics became independent from Moscow, and generally seem to have done better than in the USSR days, but with a wide range of outcomes.

Things went badly for Gorbachev and for Russia in the early 1990s. He overcame an attempted coup with the support of frequent rival Boris Yeltsin, who thereby gained the upper hand. Yeltsin set himself up to rule 1990s Russia, while Gorbachev would be out of power as the USSR vanished under him. Yeltsin's rule was marked by economic chaos, corrupt privatizations, a return to autocracy, and the choice of Vladimir Putin as his successor.

While things in Russia went poorly, the collapse of the USSR was good for the rest of the world. Letting most of the former Warsaw Pact go its own way without a fight dramatically reduced the amount of violence that Moscow could order. The time of the US and the USSR sowing proxy wars across Asia, Africa, and Latin America came to an end.

Ending the Cold War reduced risk of total nuclear annihilation. Obviously the nuclear weapons are still there, but conflicts between two sides with big nuclear arsenals are the most dangerous, because that's where the apocalypse logic of Mutually Assured Destruction gets all the missiles in the air. Gorbachev simply disbanded one of the sides, so we're less likely now to die in nuclear war. 

Overall, Gorbachev was as good a man, and much a force for good in the world, as one could hope for a leader of the USSR to be. He loved his wife Raisa. He made a more peaceful world; may he rest in peace.

Renegotiate NAFTA, get baby formula shortage

America's baby formula shortage is the result of Donald Trump's cunning approach to the politics of trade. He kept his promise to renegotiate NAFTA by putting sweet deals for all his favorite corporate interest groups into NAFTA's replacement, the USMCA. The dairy farmers wanted the US baby formula market to themselves, and they got it.

Why were they so focused on baby formula? The main ingredient in baby formula is powdered milk, the unusual dairy product that lasts forever. Dairy producers have natural advantages in their local fresh milk markets since the product is perishable, but powdered milk can come from a much wider range of places and times. So they want trade restrictions to block out foreign powdered milk. (This is from Sarah Taber, a wonderful source of agriculture-related political information.)

What happens when you've restricted baby formula imports, and one of your major baby formula production plants gets contaminated? We're finding out now.