moments from the bar exams

1. Overheard in the hallway: [Mandarin, mandarin, mandarin] Terry stop [mandarin, mandarin, mandarin] . . .

 

2. Girl: "When I run out of time on a multiple choice, I always spend the last two minutes filling in all the remaining answer bubbles with my one particular letter."

 

Guy: "And what is the letter you recommend?"

 

Girl: (Sincerely emphatic) "I can't tell that! It's a secret!"

 

Guy: "Um, you realize this thing isn't graded on a curve, right?"

 

Girl: "Okay, it's C."

 

3. (two rows in front of me, day 1): Blue screen of death halfway through the afternoon essay section.

 

4. (two rows in front of me, day 3): Girl faints dead away, hits the floor, crash resounds through the room. Everybody stares on dumbfounded. Nobody gets out of their seat, and nobody says a word. I ask the people in front of me-- "Is she breathing?". No answer, more blank looks. Proctor ambles over, looks at girl for a half second--now lying under the table--, starts waving, still says nothing, doesn't actually check the girl out. Unfortunately, the "a girl is potentially dying on the floor" wave does not communicate urgency in any way, in part because the proctors don't want to be distracting or anything. I ask again, "is she breathing?" More blank looks, no answer, nobody seems to know what's happening or what to do. So, I get out of my chair during the bar exam (which is not done, apparently for any reason at all, ever) to try to see what's happening, and because I do not trust that there are any remotely competent people on the scene. I would want anyone to do the same for me. The girl is fine. Nobody can quite believe that I actually got out of my chair. I was literally the only one. Really? If nothing else, is nobody at least curious to know whether someone is bleeding to death or dying 10 feet away from them? Is the bar exam actually that important?

 

Curious event, really. I'm not sure what it all means. Was I just silly to get up? Should I have just trusted that the girl was okay and/or in good hands, despite the lack of any apparent evidence to that effect?

 

Oh, and in case you're wondering, the girl was fine. She recovered in a minute and was back typing away in another two.

 

5. (story related by friend)

 

Twenty computer screens in a section suddenly go dim, indicating a lack of power. Bar-taking friend calls over a technician and points this out. Tech says, "If your computer isn't working, you must handwrite your exam. I cannot help you." Friend insists that this is actually likely to be a fixable problem. Tech insists back. Tech supervisor walks over, bends down, inserts plug back into the socket it had been kicked out of by some careless guy in the section. Twenty computers restored to full AC power; problem solved. Three cheers for people who are incompetent at the fairly simple job they have. Three cheers for people who couldn't give a damn to be competent or care about your problem.

 

And there are more, but I am on 8 hours sleep i the last 4 days (give or take a few hours), and about to crash...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Expert Colleges

I think it was Stephen Law who said that the argument from authority is the "best of all the fallacies." It's a good line which hints at some of the trickiness of dealing with expertise: appeals to and arguments from expertise can sometimes be rationally proper and legitimate, even if such appeals can also sometimes figure in fallacious forms of reasoning (and so give us the name of a fallacy). In a nice little piece appearing on the New York Times's philosophy blog, Garry Gutting pushes a bit farther yet, arguing that the failure to respect expertise can sometimes be a sort of rational mistake. In particular, Gutting argues that, if you think that someone is an expert in some domain, then you have a prima facie reason to accept their judgments within the scope of their expertise, and you make a mistake to dismiss their judgments out of hand, or on the basis of your own admittedly non-expert judgments. Gutting makes a particular target out of right-wing climate-change deniers, but he might have picked other examples, our politics being, as it happens, full of the ignorant and irrational and just plain silly.

Now, I think that Gutting is basically correct as far as he goes. But it is one thing to sort out the philosophy of the matter and another to sort out the politics. What should we do about the fact that many of our politicians fail to treat authorities or experts in the way that they rationally ought? There are, after all, real stakes here: we are all potentially subject to bad public policy when our political leaders trade rational assessments for anything less. Climate change policy is, so to speak, only the tip of the iceberg.

I suppose we might seek to re-engineer the American mind to be in all respects more rational and more demanding of rationality. But of course that goal, even if it is not to be dismissed as hopelessly utopian, will only be achieved in the very long term--and, in the meantime, we have to live under laws and policies now, whether those policies be rational or not. What is needed now is some way to systematically inject relevant expertise into the political conversation at every turn, and to do so in a way that is not seen as reflective of partisan bias.

That is, of course, not a small order, but I have an idea which might work, and in the near- to medium- term. The idea is rough and half-formed and vague in spots, but I offer it here nevertheless. My idea is this: institute a series of colleges of domain experts. (It should be pointed out that I am using the word "college" in a slightly archaic sense-- think more "College of Cardinals" and less "The College of Wooster.") These colleges would not be brick-and-mortar institutions; they would consist of networks of experts--economists, scientists, academics--who would be called upon, periodically, to render opinions on discrete survey-type questions posed to them. (So, the questions might be like this: does man-made climate change exist? is evolution a true theory of biological origins? is the national debt a national crises at the present?) These networks would be deliberately broad and large--broad and large enough to avoid the accusation that the members are particularly beholden to any one political party--and membership would not be dependent on appointment by any political figure. (Already, this proposal should be seen as distinguishable from Presidential advisory panels and and blue-ribbon committees and policy czars--the usual way in which we attempt to inject expertise into politics.) Ideally, these colleges will be instituted through an official act of some kind, either an act of Congress or (more do-ably) a unilateral act of the President, which will further give them some automatic status and relevance, and more status and relevance than, say, an opinion poll conducted by a media outlet which may or may not be viewed as partisan. Once created, these colleges would represent an opportunity for the systematic injection of relevant expertise into policy discussions of all sorts.

The monetary cost to creating this kind of institution would be virtually nil, if the periodic polling of experts is conducted online, for example; and there is no proposal here that the experts in question would do any research or report-writing especially for anyone; they would just each answer short questions based on the state of the relevant science in general. The point would be to improve the state of knowledge of the politicians and policy-makers by getting the policy-makers up-to-speed on what are the conventionally-accepted truths known to the relevant experts; the goal is not to supplant that policy-making or generate yet more unread reports and recommendations from blue-ribbon panels and special working groups. Moreover, there is no reason in advance why one or another political party should oppose the expert-colleges idea. Partisans of both political parties harbor suspicions that those on the other side of the aisle are sometimes naive and parochial, and both parties should, in consequence, welcome the opportunity to force their opponents to face the facts in a grown-up way. Indeed, we all should welcome the opportunity to inject more facts and rationality into public discourse.

The ignorant, irrational and silly could still improperly ignore or dismiss the experts, of course, and surely many would. But if all the participants to the political conversation knew in advance that these experts could not be dismissed as simply the special selectees of either a partisan media or a political opponent, if the expert opinions were presented succinctly enough to be readily grasped and understood, and if the colleges in question had a sort of public institutional standing of the sort envisioned, we might just manage to create a sort of standing systematic pressure to engage and confront such expertise as rationally ought to be engaged. If such pressure exists today, it exists in an ad hoc way only; perhaps a pesky reporter or a political opponent will dig up some relevant expertise and force some attention where it belongs, but, then again, perhaps she won't. The creation of standing, institutional pressure to confront relevant expertise might be but a small improvement for our public policy discourse, but it would, at least, be more than we have now, and would be pressure in the right direction.

new(ly posted) scholarship

Here is a link to a short (8 page) paper I wrote last December, in case it's of any interest. The abstract is as follows:

This short and rough 8-page draft attempts an original reflection on the normative concept of coercion, and compares and contrasts two philosophical methodologies for approaching the task of philosophically illuminating the concept of coercion (or for that matter, any normative concept). Especially, the "extractive approach" is identified, explained, and rejected; this is the attempt, in fact common throughout philosophy, to understand a concept by distilling a (pre-concept) essence from its instances. Through counterexample, the paper argues that the usual results of the extractive approach in the case of coercion can all be shown as inessential to the category; the paper argues against understanding coercion as having to do necessarily with threats, contingency announcements, bad intentions, successfully restricting options, causing any kind of belief in the victim, or the notion of seeing reasons to act otherwise than one is coerced to act. Instead, the thesis is advanced that coercion is essentially about wrongly determining a person in some way, an admittedly abstract, general notion that does not already contain a theory of just precisely when a person is wrongly determined. This thin, minimal account is defended--despite its thinness and minimality--as having several theoretical virtues: especially, it makes fruitful sense of disagreement between people who may disagree as to the coerciveness of particular cases, and it gives us an appropriate sense for the natural stakes of coercion. In the end, it is argued that, even if my particular formulation is unconvincing, these are the sorts of things that should primarily be demanded of any philosophical illumination of a concept.

test post

This is a test. This is only a test. (I'm trying to see how it works to post to the blog directly from my email account. I tried doing that on my last post but the effect was weird (I've since edited it to make it format correctly).)

 

about drugs and value and Sam Harris

Sam Harris comes out in favor of drugs, which doesn't bother me per se--I avoid anything stronger than aspirin, myself, but I'm for the conversation--, but then there is his first paragraph, which does bother me a bit:

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.

The problem with this formulation is that it represents "altered consciousness" as a reason of some sort, as if just any kind of altered consciousness was worth achieving as such. But of course that's just crazy: skinning your shin will alter your consciousness, but that doesn't make shin-kicking even presumptively worth doing.

Of course, Harris clearly recognizes that there are some kinds of consciousnesses worth having and some kinds worth avoiding, and so he surely doesn't mean to stake the claim that there is something special about altered consciousness as such. But then, kluge formulations aside, what should we say about the distinction between forms of altered consciousness worth having versus those forms of consciousness worth avoiding? If there is value to be located, it is in whatever gives the ground of that further distinction; and that ground, on pain of vicious circularity, can't be consciousness-altering itself. That is, there has to be some way we mark the distinction between forms of altered consciousness worth having v. worth avoiding which isn't itself dependent on the very idea of altered consciousness.

There is a view that would do the trick here. We might say that the items in the list of valuable things -- friendship, reading a good novel, having a meaningful conversation -- are in fact sources of intrinsic value, not valuable because of the state of consciousness they ideally effect, but valuable for their own sake. If we do say this, then we can make further sense of a distinction between better and worse forms of consciousness as having something to do with the connection to those deeper sources of value. So, we say, roughly: those forms of consciousness worth having connect to intrinsic goods, and the rest don't. Unless we say something like this, we will have a puzzle as to how to mark the relevant distinction between better and worse forms of consciousness at all. In any case, it won't do to treat the idea of "altered consciousness" itself as having intrinsic value or being a reason or giving rational purposes. I might have friendships, and read good books, and seek out good conversation because all of those things are themselves worthwhile, but I surely don't seek these things because they are instrumental in achieving some sort of "altered consciousness" whose value is an opaque mystery.