Tag: politics

Authority

“… In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

“I bow before the authority of special [people] because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. […] there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subbordination.”

—Mikhail Bakunin, What is Authority?

Direct action

“Proceeding with the belief that in every situation, every individual and group has the possibility of some direct action on some level of generality, we may discover much that has been unrecognised, and the importance of much that has been underrated. So politicalised is our thinking, so focused to the motions of governmental institutions, that the effects of direct efforts to modify one’s environment are unexplored. The habit of direct action is, perhaps, identical with the habit of being a free [person], prepared to live responsibly in a free society.”

David Wieck (1962), The Habit of Direct Action (quoted by Colin Ward, 1973)

Kropotkin on philosophy

“… in what respect does the philosopher, who pursues science in order that he may pass life pleasantly to himself, differ from that drunkard there, who only seeks the immediate gratification that gin affords him? The philosopher has, past all question, chosen his enjoyment more wisely, since it affords him a pleasure far deeper and more lasting than that of the toper. But that is all! Both one and the other have the same selfish end in view, personal gratification.”

(From An Appeal to the Young by Pyotr Kropotkin)

Brands

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch

 

CBT versus counselling. Mental models versus mental rules. Bayesianism versus everything. There are lots of brand wars in psychology which stifle the development of theory and lead to tedious arguments. This does get recognised in print now and again. Here are some examples.

The first comes from a discussion of the ACT-R theory (Anderson, 2007, p. 19):

“… this book is not about ACT-R; rather I am using ACT-R as a tool to describe the mind. […] We may be proud of our ACT-R models and think they are better than others […] but we try not to lose track of the fact that they are just a way of describing what is really of interest.”

Later (p. 239) Anderson cites Herbert Simon, who complained that

“… ‘brand names’ tend to make difficult the analysis and comparison of […] mechanisms or the exchange of knowledge between research groups. […] Physicists did not divide quantum mechanics into the Heisenberg Brand, the Schrodinger Brand, and the Dirac brand.”

Another example, from sociology: a book on social class (Wright, 1997, p. 34):

“Readers who are highly skeptical of the Marxist tradition for whatever reasons might feel that there is no point in struggling through the numbers and graphs in the rest of this book. If the conceptual justifications for the categories are unredeemably flawed, it might be thought, the empirical results generated with those categories will be worthless. This would be, I think, a mistake. The empirical categories themselves can be interpreted in a Weberian or hybrid manner. […] As is usually the case in sociology, the empirical categories are underdetermined by the theoretical frameworks within which they are generated or interpreted.”

References

Anderson, J. R. (2007). How can the human mind occur in the physical universe? Oxford University Press

Wright, E. O. (1997). Class counts: student edition. Cambridge University Press.

Datamining to catch terrorists

Apparently it wouldn’t work, say the following groups of the US National Academies:

in this book: Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Assessment.

[via The Register]

Peter Wilby on Yachtgate

(New Statesman, 27 October 2008):

…

My mind goes back now, not only to Cripps, but also to the 1930s when politicians, aristocrats, diplomats and businessmen met at country house weekends and decided Hitler was quite a decent chap who should be allowed to have most of what he wanted; and to the early 1960s when half the ruling class seemed to be involved in weekend sex orgies, complete with specially hired prostitutes, on country estates.

Those matters concerned only the Tories, but this one now involves both government and opposition, showing, in the northern phrase, how they all piss in the same pot. The details, obscured by denials and counter-denials, will escape most voters. But there is a sense, perhaps more in the middle class than the working class, that a super-class of rich people lives on a different planet from the rest of us and most politicians have been bought by them.

While the rest of us get screwed, our rulers, enjoying parties and freebies, making deals and exchanging gossip, are too busy to care.

Robin Cook’s resignation speech (17 Mar 2003)

(Full text over here.)

… It is not France alone that wants more time for inspections. Germany wants more time for inspections; Russia wants more time for inspections; … The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner—not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.

…

The threshold for war should always be high. None of us can predict the death toll of civilians from the forthcoming bombardment of Iraq, but the US warning of a bombing campaign that will “shock and awe” makes it likely that casualties will be numbered at least in the thousands…

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term—namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create? …

… I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but 12 years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted. Yet it is more than 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.

… Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq. That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.

… On Iraq, I believe that the prevailing mood of the British people is sound. They do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator, but they are not persuaded that he is a clear and present danger to Britain. They want inspections to be given a chance, and they suspect that they are being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration with an agenda of its own. Above all, they are uneasy at Britain going out on a limb on a military adventure without a broader international coalition and against the hostility of many of our traditional allies.

… It has been a favourite theme of commentators that this House no longer occupies a central role in British politics. Nothing could better demonstrate that they are wrong than for this House to stop the commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support…

Katharine Gun

Interesting elaboration of the story over at New Statesman.

The Lords discussion around the time of the discontinuation of the case is helpful for picking up the context (over at Hansard). I found this intriguing, from Lord Wright of Richmond:

“I believe I am right in recording that following the Ponting case a counsellor was appointed to help individuals in the intelligence and security agencies—I think I am right in remembering that that included GCHQ but it may not have done—faced with crises of conscience about intelligence matters. Can the noble and learned Lord tell us whether that post still exists; whether the counsellor was used in this case; and whether Mrs Gun consulted him? If not, I suggest that the existence of a counsellor, if he is still in post, is brought to the attention of all employees in the security and intelligence agencies.”

Not sure what this counsellor does. Is the idea that you go with a crisis of conscience and they give you a dose of CBT to cure it?