Seen in passing on Facebook today:
Understand science, and you’ll understand religion.
(In particular, I’d say, cognitive sciences, and human evolution.)
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Today’s topics:
- How Republicans accuse Democrats of being anti-family, while voting against programs to help families;
- How about updating the Constitution?;
- Will A.I. kill meaningless jobs? Why not?
- David Brooks on why not to fear A.I.
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It boggles my mind how Republicans can claim that *Democrats* are anti-family, when it’s they who vote against programs to help families.
LA Times, Justin Talbot Zorn and Mark Welsbrot, Opinion, 4 Aug 2024: Opinion: Why is the ‘pro-family’ GOP blocking legislation that would help lift many kids out of poverty?
Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance told Megyn Kelly last month that Democrats are calling for an end to the Child Tax Credit because they are “anti-family and anti-kid.” Vance, who has courted controversy for calling Democrats the party of “childless cat ladies,” then declared, “We should send the signal to the culture that we are the pro-family party, and we’re gonna back it up with real policy. We’re the party of parents, we’re the party of kids.”
Republicans are using Vance’s kids and families rhetoric to convince voters to choose them in November, but they are failing when it comes to backing it up. In fact, they’re actively opposing important legislation to help children and parents.
On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would expand the Child Tax Credit — the very policy that Vance has championed and just accused Kamala Harris of opposing. Vance didn’t show up for the vote. Killing the proposal was a loss to roughly 16 million children in low-income working families, who would have benefited from about $700 in tax relief this year. Estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities show that the proposal would have lifted at least 500,000 children above the poverty line and raised the family incomes for at least 5 million more poor children.
Hypocrisy? It’s probably subtler than that, I would guess, something about how Republicans think helping children is about policies that encourage people to have families, and giving them more votes (as JD Vance has been floating), and not about government spending in any which way. But I’m speculating. They should put their money where their mouth is. Republicans, generally, would rather spend money on defense — more jets; bigger bombs — than social programs, even those that might benefit families, and children. Maybe that’s how they think they are protecting children, never mind all the ones actually starving in inner cities, or in Appalachia.
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A notion I’ve seen before: update the Constitution. Other countries have. Everything must change, given changing circumstances and knowledge (as I’ve said about morality). But conservatives, almost by definition, venerate the past (as ancient as possible), and would never agree to even considering this. (Even though, ironically, they don’t actually adhere to the Constitution, as I’ve often noted.)
Vox, Sean Illing, 3 Aug 2024: Is the United States in self-destruct mode?, subtitled “The crisis is in the Constitution.”
Here’s a strange question: What if the greatest threat to the United States is our own Constitution?
Even if you think the American Constitution is the most brilliant political document in human history (and it arguably is), it was written in the late 18th century, which means it’s a product of a very different world than the one we currently inhabit.
America was an agrarian slave society at the time of the founding. The citizenry was confined to white, property-owning males. People lived in small, self-contained communities. All of these anachronisms are reflected in the Constitution, not just in the treatment of race but in the structure of the government itself. The Electoral College, the unrepresentative Senate, the Supreme Court — these are all deeply undemocratic institutions and they’re becoming unsustainable in an increasingly polarized society.
We could change the Constitution, of course, but there’s a problem. While the Constitution is open to revision, the truth is that it has become almost impossible to revise. The result is a political system that feels permanently stuck.
Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at UC Berkeley and the author of a new book called No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States. Chemerinsky’s book makes a pretty convincing case that we’re in trouble if we don’t find a way to seriously reform — or even rewrite — the Constitution.
Sample from the interview:
Sean Illing
What are the biggest problems with the Constitution at this moment?
Erwin Chemerinsky
Right now I would say the Electoral College and two senators per state are what pose the greatest threat to democracy. But if you asked me what was the worst choice historically, I’d say it was what the framers did with regard to slavery and race — that has haunted this country from the beginning.
Yes, for all the sins committed in America’s past, conservatives simply don’t want to hear about them, or let children know about them.
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NY Times, Emma Goldberg, 3 Aug 2024: Will A.I. Kill Meaningless Jobs?, subtitled “And is that so bad?”
This has been a theme of Harari’s: the need for everyone to work will drop as productivity rises, via AI and other technologies. Thus, siphon off that productivity into a universal basic income, and whatnot. This piece begins, as so many effective pieces do, with an anecdote.
When Brad Wang started his first job in the tech industry, right after college, he marveled at the way Silicon Valley had turned the drudgery of the workplace into a sumptuousness of game rooms, nap pods and leafy hiking trails. This is what it must have felt like to be a guest showing up for a party at Jay Gatsby’s house, Mr. Wang thought.
But under the glitz was a kind of hollowness. He hopped from one software engineering role to another, toiling on some projects that he felt were meaningless. At Google, he worked for 15 months on an initiative that higher-ups decided to keep pursuing even though they knew it would never launch. He then spent more than a year at Facebook on a product whose primary customer at one point described it to the engineers as unhelpful.
Over time, the pointlessness of his work began to incense Mr. Wang: “It’s like baking a pie that’s going right into the trash can.”
There is a long tradition in the corporate world of clocking in only to wonder: What’s the point? During the pandemic, tens of thousands of people joined the subreddit page r/antiwork to share quips about rejecting drudge work and, in most cases, all work. In the 1990s, “Office Space” parodied the grind of corporate life, making famous the sentiment: “It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.” Long before that, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” followed a law clerk — the original quiet quitter — who responds to every one of his boss’s demands by saying “I would prefer not to,” until he is put under arrest, and, eventually, dies.
This is an example of a fundamental way in which society might change, a way that few people (except for some science fiction writers, though not all of them) anticipate, and a way that most people would reject.
Long piece with comments by David Graeber and Kevin Kelly.
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Perhaps this cues this next piece. The past week the NY Times published a series called “Don’t Tell My Friends, But…”, in which various Times columnists explain what they think everyone else is wrong about. To me, it’s an inviting series of pieces that challenge conventional wisdom, which in my worldview, is usually about tribal mentality, and not — shall we call it “enlightened”? — understanding of reality. There are several others I’ll get to, though I’m not sure I agree with them all.
NY Times, David Brooks, 31 July 2024: Many People Fear A.I. They Shouldn’t (free link)
A lot of my humanistic and liberal arts-oriented friends are deeply worried about artificial intelligence, while acknowledging the possible benefits. I’m a humanistic and liberal arts type myself, but I’m optimistic, while acknowledging the dangers.
I’m optimistic, paradoxically, because I don’t think A.I. is going to be as powerful as many of its evangelists think it will be. I don’t think A.I. is ever going to be able to replace us — ultimately I think it will simply be a useful tool. In fact, I think instead of replacing us, A.I. will complement us. In fact, it may make us free to be more human.
Many fears about A.I. are based on an underestimation of the human mind. Some people seem to believe that the mind is like a computer. It’s all just information processing, algorithms all the way down, so of course machines are going to eventually overtake us.
This is an impoverished view of who we humans are. The Canadian scholar Michael Ignatieff expressed a much more accurate view of the human mind last year in the journal Liberties: “What we do is not processing. It is not computation. It is not data analysis. It is a distinctively, incorrigibly human activity that is a complex combination of conscious and unconscious, rational and intuitive, logical and emotional reflection.”
Yes, this last para is the key point. The human brain evolved for survival, and is not a data-processing machine; it relies mostly on various heuristics that we call intuition, or common sense.
