Category: Philosophy

The “Perceptually Divergent” Are Open to How Species Differ in Their Sensory Trade-Offs

(p. C1) That I found myself surprised at so many moments while reading “An Immense World,” Ed Yong’s new book about animal senses, speaks to his exceptional gifts as a storyteller — . . .

. . .

(p. C4) Yong’s book is funny and elegantly written, mercifully restrained when it comes to jargon, though he does introduce a helpful German word that he uses throughout: Umwelt. It means “environment,” but a little more than a century ago the Baltic German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll used it to refer more specifically to that sensory bubble — an animal’s perceptual world.

. . .

The human Umwelt will necessarily shape how we apprehend other Umwelten. “An Immense World” inevitably refers to the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s foundational essay on this struggle, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

But some humans might be more open-minded than others. A number of the sensory biologists Yong meets are perceptually divergent, seeing color differently or having difficulty remembering familiar faces: “Perhaps people who experience the world in ways that are considered atypical,” he writes, “have an intuitive feeling for the limits of typicality.”

When it comes to sight, there’s a trade-off between sensitivity and resolution; humans tend to have extraordinary visual acuity during the day but have a much harder time seeing at night, while animals with better night vision don’t register the crisp images at a distance that we do. “Senses always come at a cost,” Yong writes. “No animal can sense everything well.” The world inundates us with stimuli. Registering some of it is taxing enough; fully processing the continuous deluge of it would be overwhelming.

For the full review, see:

Jennifer Szalai. “An Enthralling Tour Of Nonhuman Reality.” The New York Times (Thursday, June 23, 2022): C1 & C4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 22, 2022, and has the title “‘An Immense World’ Is a Thrilling Tour of Nonhuman Perception.”)

The book under review is:

Yong, Ed. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms around Us. New York: Random House, 2022.

Most Journalists No Longer Aspire to Objectivity

(p. B1) In 1979, two journalists got into an argument. More than four decades later, they haven’t settled it.

The subject of their disagreement was journalistic “objectivity,” a notion that goes back at least to the 1920s, when some of the more high-minded newspapers and magazines were trying to distinguish themselves from the scandal sheets and publications led by partisan and sometimes warmongering publishers.

In one corner, Alan Berger. In 1979, he was a 41-year-old media columnist for the Real Paper, an alternative weekly that had emerged from a rift at its predecessor, Boston Phoenix. Before he started watch-dogging the press, Mr. Berger had grown up in the Bronx, attended Harvard University and taught a class at M.I.T., in French, on the poet Charles Baudelaire.

His target in the debate over objectivity — which has come roaring back to life in the political storminess of recent years — was Tom Palmer. Back then, Mr. Palmer was a 31-year-old assistant national editor of The Boston Globe, meaning he belonged to the establishment and was thus a ripe target for the Real Paper.

. . .

(p. B4) His former protégé, the national correspondent Wesley Lowery, argued in a widely circulated New York Times opinion essay that objectivity mirrored the worldview of white reporters and editors, whose “selective truths have been calibrated to avoid offending the sensibilities of white readers.” Mr. Lowery, who ended up leaving The Post for CBS News, suggested that news organizations “abandon the appearance of objectivity as the aspirational journalistic standard, and for reporters instead to focus on being fair and telling the truth, as best as one can, based on the given context and available facts.”

That same argument has found an embrace at some of America’s leading journalism schools, as well.

“We focus on fairness and fact-checking and accuracy, and we don’t try to suggest to our students that opinions they have should be hidden,” said Sarah Bartlett, the dean of the City University of New York Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. “We embrace transparency.”

. . .

Mr. Palmer also never quite let the argument go. He appointed himself a kind of genial in-house watchdog at The Globe, eventually known for his persistent emails to reporters and editors he thought had allowed their liberal views to infiltrate their copy.  . . .

Needless to say, he remains unpersuaded by the arguments against his cherished ideal. They “were dead wrong back then,” he emailed me, “and I believe are dead wrong even more so today.”

“Journalists are simply not smart enough and educated enough to change the world,” he continued. “They should damn well just inform the public to the best of their abilities and let the public decide.”

He also said, ruefully, that he believed his side was losing. The notion of objectivity “was declining before Trump, and that era removed it from the table completely,” he wrote. “I have doubts it will ever come back.”

For the full commentary, see:

Ben Smith. “A 1979 Fight Over Ideals Is Still Going.” The New York Times (Monday, October 11, 2021): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated October 11, 2021, and has the title “Two Journalists Started an Argument in Boston in 1979. It’s Not Over Yet.”)

Some Venture Capitalists “Act as Mentors,” Some Install Seasoned Veterans as C.E.O.s, and Some Are “Founder-Friendly,” Allowing Genius “to Do Its Work”

(p. C4) . . . Mallaby never quite settles on the story he wants to tell. He introduces the book by laying out what he intends to do: “to explain the venture-capital mind-set” and “to evaluate venture capital’s social impact.” This mind-set, he says, revolves around the “power law” of his title — the idea that the distribution of phenomena is not “normal” but skewed. Instead of a bell curve, picture a long tail, where “winners advance at an accelerating, exponential rate.” Adapt or die, sink or swim — there’s no middle ground. This is why V.C.s like to talk about “grand slams” and “moon shots”; Peter Thiel says that a fund’s top investment should generate returns so spectacular that it will outperform everything else in the fund put together.

This, clearly, isn’t the kind of logic that has much use for steady, incremental growth, to say nothing of a flourishing middle class. You might therefore wonder about the “social impact” of venture capital, which Mallaby deems to be, on the whole, good. He concedes that “V.C.s as individuals can stumble sideways into lucky fortunes,” or can sometimes do unhelpful things. But he is ultimately bullish on what they have to offer: “Venture capital as a system is a formidable engine of progress — more so than is frequently acknowledged.” That engine, Mallaby reminds us, has funded such ventures as the development of synthetic insulin and, more recently, plant-based alternatives to ecologically damaging meat.

. . .

He gives examples of the different kinds of funds, with their various personalities and philosophies. There are V.C.s who see it as their role to act as mentors and coaches to inexperienced founders. There are V.C.s who insist on installing seasoned outsiders at start-ups to serve as C.E.O.s. There are also “founder-friendly” V.C.s, who promise to be hands-off, allowing genius, no matter how unorthodox or weird, to do its work.

For the full review, see:

Jennifer Szalai. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Funder-Friendly Look at Venture Capital.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 1, 2022): C4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 31, 2022, and has the title “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; ‘The Power Law’ Is a Funder-Friendly Look at the World of Venture Capital.”)

The book under review is:

Mallaby, Sebastian. The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future. New York: Penguin Press, 2022.

“People Are Now Coming to Their Own Conclusions About Covid”

(p. 3) Lauren Terry, 23, thought she would know what to do if she contracted Covid-19. After all, she manages a lab in Tucson that processes Covid tests.

But when she developed symptoms on Christmas Eve, she quickly realized she had no inside information.

“I first tried to take whatever rapid tests I could get my hands on,” Ms. Terry said. “I bought some over the counter. I got a free kit from my county library. A friend gave me a box. I think I tried five different brands.” When they all turned up negative, she took a P.C.R. test, but that too, was negative.

With clear symptoms, she didn’t believe the results. So she turned to Twitter. “I was searching for the Omicron rapid test efficacy and trying to figure out what brand works on this variant and what doesn’t and how long they take to produce results,” she said. (The Food and Drug Administration has said that rapid antigen tests may be less sensitive to the Omicron variant but has not identified any specific tests that outright fail to detect it.) “I started seeing people on Twitter say they were having symptoms and only testing positive days later. I decided not to see anybody for the holidays when I read that.”

She kept testing, and a few days after Christmas she received the result she had expected all along.

Though it’s been almost two years since the onset of the pandemic, this phase can feel more confusing than its start, in March 2020. Even P.C.R. tests, the gold standard, don’t always detect every case, especially early in the course of infection, and there is some doubt among scientists about whether rapid antigen tests perform as well with Omicron. And, the need for a 10-day isolation period was thrown into question after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that some people could leave their homes after only five days.

“The information is more confusing because the threat itself is more confusing,” said David Abramson, who directs the Center for Public Health Disaster Science at the N.Y.U. School of Global Public Health. “We used to know there was a hurricane coming at us from 50 miles away. Now we have this storm that is not well defined that could maybe create flood or some wind damage, but there are so many uncertainties, and we just aren’t sure.”

Many people are now coming to their own conclusions about Covid and how they should behave. After not contracting the virus after multiple exposures, they may conclude they can take more risks. Or if they have Covid they may choose to stay in isolation longer than the C.D.C. recommends.

And they aren’t necessarily embracing conspiracy theories. People are forming opinions after reading mainstream news articles and tweets from epidemiologists; they are looking at real-life experiences of people in their networks.

For the full story, see:

Alyson Krueger. “Covid Experts, the Self-Made Kind.” The New York Times, SundayStyles Section (Sunday, January 23, 2022): 3.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 21, 2022, and has the title “So You Think You’re a Covid Expert (but Are You?).”)

Could Principled Investors Make the Walt Disney Company Great Again?

Robert Nozick defended firms that maximize profits subject to ethical side constraints. Presumably the ethical side constraints include not capitulating to totalitarian governments that suppress free speech. The recent “meme” investors in GameStop and AMC sparked in me the question whether principled investors loyal to ethical side constraints could return the Walt Disney Company to the principled greatness of Walt Disney, the man?

(p. 1) It has been a year since Mat Bowen, who was the pastor of a small church in Gibson City, Ill., had the dream — the one where Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, urged him to buy Dogecoin.

Mr. Bowen had just begun to dabble in investing. He soon discovered WallStreetBets, the online forum on Reddit where throngs of small investors were plotting to buy shares of GameStop, the troubled video game retailer, in a bid to teach Wall Street a lesson. Some hedge funds had bet that shares of GameStop would fall. Instead, they took off, as the investors banded together last January to drive the price up more than 1,700 percent.

Caught up in the frenzy, Mr. Bowen bought GameStop, too. In July [2021], he quit the church to become a full-time trader, convinced he was joining a fight against financial injustice.

The beliefs underpinning last year’s meme stock phenomenon are stronger than ever. For a large number of individual investors, the stock market has become the battleground on which they join forces to right perceived wrongs and fight the powerful. So much so that when the stock market seesawed this past week, many small investors were undeterred. Falling prices were another opportunity to buy more shares of their favorite companies.

“The reason I am still in this, and the reason I am willing to ride these stocks to zero, is for my fellow citizens,” said Mr. Bowen, who received his master’s degree in divinity (p. 7) at the Princeton Theological Seminary. He cast the so-called meme stock fight in moral terms. “The battle of good versus evil is not just limited to the walls of a church or a synagogue or a mosque,” he said.

. . .

Jesus Gonzalez was drawn into the meme stock trade by what he saw as a power imbalance. Mr. Gonzalez, 22, had invested in stocks off and on as a teenager, but “AMC and GameStop are different from any other play in the stock market,” he said. “We have never seen a congregation of retail investors who have collectively come together on the internet and formed the largest, most powerful decentralized hedge fund in the world.”

Mr. Gonzalez, who graduated from Arizona State University with a bachelor’s degree in finance last month, is buying more shares of GameStop and AMC, even though his $220,000 portfolio is off 37 percent from its November [2021] high, he said.

His 34-year-old sister, Ruby Gonzalez, a behavioral health therapist who works at Phoenix Children’s Hospital and is studying to become a nurse, followed her brother’s lead and invested most of her savings in the two companies. “I want to change market manipulation,” she said.

For the full story, see:

Tara Siegel Bernard, Emily Flitter and Anupreeta Das. “How GameStop Turned into a Fight for Good vs. Evil.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, January 30, 2022): 1 & 7.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 29, 2022, and has the title “Buy GameStop, Fight Injustice. Just Don’t Sell.”)

Robert Nozick’s libertarian masterpiece is:

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974.

Emerson’s Buoyancy and Resilience in Adversity

(p. C5) Life compelled Emerson to become something of an expert on resilience. As a young man he lost the love of his life, his wife Ellen, to tuberculosis when she was just 19. His oldest son, Waldo—a joyful child who seemed to concentrate in himself what was most uninhibitedly life-loving in his father—died of scarlet fever when he was 5 years old.

. . .

In the essay “Power,” Emerson writes that we carefully watch children to see if they possess “the recuperative force.” Those who instinctively retire to their rooms in sorrow when they’re slighted, miss the prize or lose the game will be at a serious disadvantage in adult life. “But,” Emerson continues, “if they have the buoyancy and resistance that preoccupies them with new interest in the new moment,—the wounds cicatrize, and the fiber is the tougher for the hurt.”

When Waldo died, Emerson needed that kind of buoyancy and resistance to overcome the greatest sadness of his life.

. . .

Emerson’s resilience was shaped by his conviction that we are mortal and there is no other life than this. Nothing can redeem the time when you did not plunge forward and do what you had to do. The moral quality Emerson commends above all others isn’t love, faith or patriotism but a commitment to work. “But do your work and I shall know you,” he writes in “Self-Reliance.”

Emerson’s commitment to rapid recovery from loss isn’t gentle or humanitarian. But it is classically American in its insistence on affirming the future over the past. For all our faults, Americans are still people who look ahead, scope the territory, move forward. When we fail at something, we give it one more go and maybe get it half right.

For the full essay, see:

Mark Edmundson. “What Emerson Can Teach Us About Resilience.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 19, 2021): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date June 18, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

Emerson’s most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” can be found in:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self-Reliance and Other Essays. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993.

Critical Race Theory Rejects Enlightenment Rationalism and the Declaration of Independence

(p. A15) . . ., relatively few Americans—including those who regularly denounce it—know much about what critical race theory is. It originated in law schools in the 1970s and has since become a sprawling movement. To find out more about it, I turned to “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” co-written by one of the movement’s founders, Richard Delgado. He writes that critical race theory “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

. . .

Because the Declaration of Independence—the founding document of the American liberal order—is a product of Enlightenment rationalism, a doctrine that rejects the Enlightenment tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation.

For the full commentary, see:

William A. Galston. “How Adherents See ‘Critical Race Theory’.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 14, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 13, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Tata’ Review: From Homestead to Hegemony.”)

The book co-authored by a founder of critical race theory that is mentioned in the passage quoted above is:

Delgador, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York: NYU Press, 2017 [1st ed., 2001; 2nd ed., 2012].

When Athens Cancelled Socrates

(p. A15) A commitment to open expression has always defined liberalism, which gradually expanded our First Amendment protections. But now we see many liberals abandoning that principle, perhaps because they are no longer liberals in any meaningful sense of the term. How could they be, if they want tech barons to police our online reading? Facebook recently decided to stop blocking posts that suggested a “lab-leak” origin of Covid, but at the same time the company has been boasting of its efforts to downrank or “shadow-ban” accounts that share “misinformation” (in other words, they make it difficult for readers to find those accounts, without telling the account owners).

We sorely need a reminder of the follies and crimes of censorship. In “Dangerous Ideas,” Eric Berkowitz, a journalist and lawyer, offers a global history that identifies some recurring patterns in the suppression of free thinking. For starters, crackdowns almost inevitably happen when societies confront overwhelming crises. Philosophy flourished in ancient Athens, where free males (at least) enjoyed intellectual liberty, but after the Athenians suffered military defeat and a devastating pandemic, they canceled Socrates. Then Plato’s “Republic,” putting words into Socrates’ mouth, laid out a program for absolute control of speech and thought, anticipating in detail modern totalitarianism. Reading Plato, Mr. Berkowitz recognizes Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

. . .

What emerges from “Dangerous Ideas” is that ideological terms like blasphemy, subversion and hate speech are impossible to define. Thus there are never clear guidelines for censorship, which is inevitably inconsistent and often absurd. “We really do not know what is demanded of us,” protested a czarist censor jailed for making a wrong call. Facebook moderators can only be fired, but face a similar quandary.

For the full review, see:

Jonathan Rose. “BOOKSHELF; The Follies Of Censorship.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, June 08, 2021): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 7, 2021, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Dangerous Ideas’ Review: The Follies of Censorship.”)

The book under review is:

Berkowitz, Eric. Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2021.