Philosophy journals and the Bannon tactic of "flooding the zone with shit"

You might be aware that I have publicly shamed the leadership of the journal Philosophical Psychology for publishing a race science paper that pretends to argue for the value of free inquiry but is actually an unscientific rehearsal of long-debunked arguments for (among other things) racially-segregated education. I’ve been accused by the stealth-alt-right Heterodox Academy of being a “cancel culture” bogeyman.

I'd like to push back a bit on the framing of my objection to Cofnas's article. People are saying that I targeted it because I don't like or disagree with it. While it's true that I don't like it and disagree with it, I also don't like and disagree with dozens of articles that are published in my field every month. But I've never started a petition against any of them. This is not simply a matter of dislike or disagreement. To my mind, that framing is a bit like saying that epidemiologists dislike or disagree with the conclusions drawn by anti-vaxxers, or that climate scientists dislike or disagree with the conclusions drawn by climate skeptics. I should add that this is not a wild comparison, as Cofnas himself has flirted with climate skepticism and compared climate scientists to defenders of Jeffrey Epstein.

Instead, what I would say is that I found Cofnas's policy suggestions repugnant -- in particular, his claim that government should "devote money to programs that are tailored to the strengths of different groups." This is obviously just code for racially segregated education. Essentially, he wants to overturn Brown v. Board of Education. (He has claimed in several venues that he doesn’t support segregation, but he has yet to explain how that is consistent with a call for such programs.)

So I took a look at the reasoning backing Cofnas's suggestions and found it argumentatively very weak. In my criticisms of Philosophical Psychology and Cofnas's paper, I have focused almost entirely on that reasoning, not the repugnant conclusions that Cofnas draws from it. Moreover, to my knowledge, Cofnas has yet to offer a single response to these criticisms. On top of that, I have not once called for Cofnas to be sacked or suspended. I have said that he should suffer reputational damage for publishing extraordinarily bad research, but that is -- I think -- entirely appropriate in response to extraordinarily bad research.

Just to rehearse some of the more obvious and egregious error's in Cofnas's paper, here's a list:

(1) He simply assumes that broad folk races (white, black, Asian) are biological categories. This is a long-refuted fallacy.
(2) He conflates broad folk race categories with the fine-grained cladistic approach to genetic inheritance that practicing scientists actually use, which enables him to pretend that there is scientific support for his highly speculative claim that, "in a very short time," scientists will discover the genetic explanation for the race gap in IQ scores.
(3) He scoffs at environmental explanations for the race gap in IQ scores without taking seriously many serious contenders. In my original commentary on his paper, I pointed to housing segregation and ecological racism, with specific reference to lead poisoning. It's well-established that lead is a neurotoxin that is especially damaging to the development of intelligence. It is also well-established that impoverished people and racial minorities are especially likely to be exposed to lead poisoning. The recent case of Flint, Michigan, is a dramatic example, but the problem is much more widespread. To put this in context, the removal of lead from paint, gasoline, and other supplies has been credited with the massive drop-off in violent crime in Europe and North America during the 20th century. To simply ignore such a serious and plausible environmental explanation for at least some of the race gap in IQ is either deeply irresponsible or outright deceptive.
(4) The simple fact of the matter is that what Cofnas's paper calls for (free inquiry) was not in danger to begin with. Real scientists (psychologists and geneticists, among others) have been happily pursuing their inquiries into intelligence and related topics for decades. Cofnas is not himself a scientist and could not pursue such inquiries even if he wanted to -- at least not without completely retooling his disciplinary training. So what inquiry, exactly, does he think is stymied or blocked? The only plausible answer is: racist policy recommendations. But if that is what he wants to defend, then he should just come out and say it, rather than hiding behind a facade of caring about science.

There are many more problems with the paper that I won’t enumerate right now. I've helped catalogue some of them in a letter sent to the editors of Philosophical Psychology, though they have yet to respond to that letter despite their explicit call for rejoinders. The irony of this situation is not lost on me. I have also contacted as many of the members of the editorial board of Philosophical Psychology as I could. However, some of them do not seem to have publicly-available email addresses, and at least one is — as far as I can tell — literally dead. This is not a well-run journal.

The normal editorial responses to publishing an article that clearly and egregiously fails to meet the standards of peer-review are things like apology, correction, and retraction. In cases where the paper essentially depends on its errors to support a call for racially-segregated schooling, resignation of the leadership of the journal also seems appropriate. That is why I wrote the petition, not simply because I disagreed with or disliked the paper's conclusions.

One might still ask, however, why not just write a rebuttal and submit it for peer review in the same journal? I don't think that that is an appropriate response for several reasons. First, the decision to publish Cofnas's paper, along with the other leadership problems mentioned above, erased any confidence I had in the leadership of Philosophical Psychology. Second, I don't regard Cofnas's paper as a genuine contribution to the scholarly discourse. Instead, I see it (for the reasons spelled out above) as a Trojan horse that aims to introduce reactionary political and policy ideas into the mainstream. Rebutting it via the normal channels would only legitimize it, thereby helping it to succeed in its nefarious aims. So, because Cofnas's paper is not a genuine contribution to the scholarly discourse -- because it's a Trojan horse -- it does not merit a normal response such as a rebuttal.

People like Cofnas take their cue from Steve Bannon: their strategy is to "flood the zone with shit." What that means, in practice, is that if sincere scholars spent their time responding in the normal way to everything these people produce, we would have time for little else. The "flood the zone with shit" strategy puts real researchers in a double-bind. If we don't respond, their work seems to have gone un-refuted. If we do respond, we waste time that would otherwise be spent on serious scholarly inquiry. Moreover, if we respond, we draw additional attention to their bogus views. In academia, citations are the coin of the realm. So by bothering to refute them we -- as a side effect -- boost their signal and increase their clout. They know this, and that's one reason why they use the "flood the zone with shit" strategy.

It's really quite clever, I'll admit.

Shame on Philosophical Psychology

If you’ve been paying attention in recent months, you’ll be aware that a small but vocal group of resentful young men has been pushing various right-wing causes in philosophy. In most cases, they have been confined to message boards, social media groups, and blog comments. However, in December of last year, Philosophical Psychology, a well-regarded journal in the field, published “Research on Group Differences in Intelligence: A defense of free inquiry.” The author is Nathan Cofnas, a PhD candidate in philosophy at Oxford University.

If the title of the paper sounds a bit worrying, the abstract and the main body of the paper are worse. Cofnas argues that differences in mean IQ between racial and ethic groups (especially whites and blacks in the United States) are most likely due to genetics, and that philosophers and other researchers will soon have to come to grips with this alleged fact.

Cofnas’s argument is essentially an argument by elimination: if no plausible non-genetic cause for different group means can be found, then the only reasonable thing to do is infer a genetic cause. He asks whether any plausible non-genetic causes have been proposed and proceeds to try to debunk all of them. Leaving aside the quality of his argumentation for each specific debunking attempt, it is clear that Cofnas is not taking seriously the full range of proposals that already have been offered. To illustrate just one, consider ecological racism. For decades, the United States has been highly segregated along racial lines. That means that people who live in some neighborhoods may be subject to greater degrees of environmental harms than others. In particular, there are well-documented racial disparities in lead poisoning (see, among others, this, this, and this). Lead exposure, especially in utero and during development, is a known neurotoxin. It leads, in particular, to lower adult IQ levels (see, among others, this, this, and this). How much of the race gap in IQ scores is due to differences in childhood lead exposure? I don’t know, but I would be astonished if the answer were zero. And ongoing environmental discrimination such as the lead water crisis in Flint, Michigan indicates that the problem is likely to continue into the future.

Cofnas’s paper does not mention lead poisoning, not even in a footnote. Is he unaware of this entire field of research, or is he pretending that it doesn’t exist? I don’t know, but here’s a perhaps more important question: are the editors and referees at Philosophical Psychology ignorant of this entire field of research, or are they pretending it doesn’t exist? If I had to take a guess, they are unaware and therefore incompetently reviewed Cofnas’s paper. I hereby call on Philosophical Psychology to retract the paper and elaborate a plan to more competently review future submissions with such politically and socially explosive implications. Until they do so, I call upon philosophers to boycott both submitting to and refereeing for Philosophical Psychology.

Having a sense of humor as a virtue

I think that having a sense of humor is a complex virtue that requires the ability to occupy all three corners of the producer-consumer-object triangle. Brief entry at The Conversation.

Draft review of Katsafanas's "The Nietzschean Self"

I'm working on a review of Paul Katsafanas's The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious. Here's a draft. It'll have to be cut down by about 50%, but I figured some folks might like to see the extended version.

Philosophical engagement with Nietzsche in the English-speaking world began in earnest in the 1970s with Walter Kaufmann’s translations and commentaries. It matured in spurts, with significant book-length contributions by Alexander Nehamas (Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Harvard University Press, 1985), Maudemarie Clark (Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1990), John Richardson (Nietzsche’s System, Oxford University Press, 1996), and Bernard Reginster (The Affirmation of Life, Harvard University Press, 2006). Paul Katsafanas’s The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious marks a consolidation of half a century of scholarship. Whereas previous commentators have often been mesmerized and distracted by the words and phrases Nietzsche italicizes (amor fati, ressentiment, pathos of distance), Katsafanas focuses on the less flashy but more essential components of his moral psychology: consciousness and the unconscious, drives, values, willing, the self, and freedom. The book is organized into eight main chapters bookended by a succinct introduction and a comparison with the moral psychologies of Kant, Hume, and Aristotle. Along the way, Katsafanas engages illuminatingly with both contemporary philosophical work (including both commentary on Nietzsche and non-historical work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and moral psychology) and Nietzsche’s intellectual predecessors and successors (especially Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, and Freud). In this review, I summarize the main arguments of the book and offer some criticism.

In two chapters on consciousness and the unconscious, Katsafanas argues that Nietzsche aligns the distinction between conscious and unconscious with the distinction between conceptual content and nonconceptual content. This initially-puzzling equation stems from Nietzsche’s account of language and the way that linguistic communication feeds back on the thoughts it expresses. According to Nietzsche, consciousness arose from the social need to communicate our thoughts, desires, feelings, and emotions. Mental states that did not need to be communicated remained unconscious, while those that demanded communication had to be articulated and regimented in mutually-understandable tokens. Such regimentation tends to simplify the content of the now-conscious mental states and, in some cases, may falsify them by forcing their jagged contours into Procrustean categories. If this is right, conscious thought must be conceptually articulated, but — contrary to Katsafanas’s interpretation — unconscious thought may but needn’t be conceptually articulated. Imagine, for example, someone who says (and therefore conceptually articulates the thought that) the tablecloth is blue. An hour later, she is no longer thinking or talking about the tablecloth, but presumably her unconscious thought that the tablecloth is blue retains its conceptual structure.

In chapter 4, Katsafanas refines the conception of a Nietzschean drive developed in his earlier work, arguing that a drive is a disposition that induces a signature affective orientation, which in turn leads the agent both to engage in a characteristic range of actions and to take herself to be warranted in so doing. Rather than prompting actions directly, then, the agent’s drives entice her to act in characteristic ways by putting her in a frame of mind in which reasons for acting thus appear salient and relevant while other reasons do not. Someone’s sex drive, for example, leads her to see the object of her affection as alluring and attractive, which in turn makes it seem reasonable to pursue that person. Katsafanas also attributes to Nietzsche the stronger claim that drives, via the affective orientations they induce, influence the content of experience itself. In particular, an agent’s drives lead her to see ambiguous evidence as confirmation that a drive-consilient action is warranted. Someone in the grip of an aggressive drive, for example, will tend to see another person’s quick smile as a sneer of contempt that calls for an angry retort rather than as a friendly gesture that calls for a gentler response.

In chapter 5, Katsafanas defines values in terms of drives, arguing that an agent values something just in case she has a drive-induced (positive) affective orientation toward it and doesn’t disapprove of that very orientation. Values are thus a proper subset of the moods, emotions, and affects induced by drives. If this is right, then drives both include and explain values. They include values because the affective orientations that they systematically induce (when not disapproved of) constitute valuations; they explain values because they lead the agent to find warrant for acting in ways that express her values.

Chapter 6 on willing without a (faculty of the) will is one of the only places where Katsafanas resorts to periodization, arguing that while Nietzsche accepts a version of hard incompatibilism in his early works, he shifts to a sort of Spinozist compatibilism in the middle and late works. Is the will the only moral psychological phenomenon about which Nietzsche changed his mind? That would be a curious coincidence. In any event, Katsafanas argues that, while the mature Nietzsche rejects the Kantian idea that it is possible to suspend the influence of motives during reflection and deliberation, someone’s choice is not uniquely determined by the weighted set of her motives because conscious reflection and deliberation interpret motives, and in so doing potentially modulate both their force and their direction. This point is best-attested in Nietzsche’s discussions of suffering, which, he says only motivates aversive action when it is not given meaning; once a meaning is bestowed on suffering, people even seek it out. Nietzsche thus allows a causal role — albeit a supporting rather than starring role — for reflection and deliberation in agency. Katsafanas sells short the novelty and interest of this interpretation when he labels it the ‘vector model’ (160). This is not merely a matter of summing up vectors, with the will adding or subtracting its bit in the context of the larger vectors associated with drives, affects, and desires. Rather, on this view, conscious deliberation modulates both the force and the direction of the agent’s motives. In the language of vector geometry, it functions as a scalar, dot product, or cross product.

One problem for this account of conscious reflection’s role in action arises from the timescale on which it is meant to occur. Katsafanas persuasively argues against expecting punctate episodes of reflection to have much effect in the moment, but he does want reflection to exercise its influence over the course of days and years in an individual’s lifetime. I suggest that this is neither sufficiently social nor sufficiently distal. In most of the passages Katsafanas cites to support his interpretation (D 38, D 103, GS 58, BGE 225, GM III.28), one person’s reflection modulates the motivational economy of other people. Indeed, Nietzsche seems to think that this kind of influence is typically intergenerational, making the appropriate timescale that of decades and centuries, not days and years. The under-socialization of Katsafanas’s interpretation is also evidenced by the fact that only one chapter of the book (chapter 8) is explicitly devoted to the social dimensions of moral psychology.

Chapters 7 through 9 cover Nietzsche’s conceptions of the self, its relation to society, and the kinds of selves that count as either great or free. Katsafanas uses values as a bridge from drives to selfhood, arguing that — while there is a minimal sense in which someone’s self just is their values (cf. Strohminger & Nichols, “The Essential Moral Self,” Cognition, 2014) — Nietzsche has a notion of unified selfhood according to which unity obtains when the agent acts on their values and wouldn’t disapprove of that action were she to learn more about the etiology (though not necessarily the consequences) of her motives. For example, a professor who teaches logic effectively but is motivated, unbeknownst to herself, by a resentful desire to rebuke her father’s illogical political attitudes would count as unified if learning about this hidden motive would not reduce her pride in her teaching but disunified if it would undermine her pride. In defining unified selfhood using a counterfactual conditional with an epistemic antecedent, Katsafanas attributes to Nietzsche the position that selfhood is a modally robust good (Pettit, The Robust Demands of the Good: Ethics with Attachment, Virtue, and Respect, Oxford University Press, 2015). Unlike the majority of other commentators, he conceives of unified selfhood not as a matter of harmony among an agent’s drives or values, but as harmony between their drive-motivated actions and their conscious reflection in nearby possible worlds. Katsafanas further argues that, for Nietzsche, only behavior that springs from a unified self counts as genuine action, rather than mere behavior. While he sometimes vacillates between a stronger version of the counterfactual (if the agent were to gain knowledge of etiology, she would still approve of her action) and a weaker version (if the agent were to gain knowledge of etiology, she wouldn’t disapprove), his view is attractive both as an interpretation of Nietzsche and as a self-standing philosophical theory (Doris, Talking to Ourselves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency, Oxford University Press, 2015).

This account of the unified self enables Katsafanas to make sense of Nietzsche’s frequent praise for exemplary agents who manage to navigate a unified course of action despite embodying contrary drives. As long as someone approves of their actions in a modally robust way, the drives and affects that conspire to produce those actions can be a bit of a mess. However, Katsafanas might exaggerate the difference between the within-drives harmony views of other commentators and his own between-drives-and-reflection view. After all, if someone’s drives are sufficiently disordered, she is almost certain to end up acting in ways that express motives that she either disapproves of or would disapprove of were she to learn more about their etiology.

Some unified selves also exemplify what Nietzsche calls greatness or freedom. Katsafanas argues that the former are those individuals who are lucky enough to have a significant impact on their societies and cultures through uptake of their values. By contrast, the latter — regardless of their social impact — don’t just satisfy the counterfactual conditional but actually go through the work of tracking down the etiology of the motivations of (enough of) their actions; they make a point of making the antecedent of the counterfactual true. Katsafanas again undersells the novelty and interest of his position here. Not only does he manage to connect drives, through values and conscious reflection, to the self and freedom, but also he does so in a way that explains the value of self-knowledge: successfully engaging in inquiry into one’s own motives while maintaining an affirmative affective stance partly constitutes Nietzschean freedom. And the prospects of such inquiry are significantly boosted if the agent embodies the distinctive Nietzschean virtues of curiosity (Alfano, “The Most Agreeable of All Vices: Nietzsche as Virtue Epistemology,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2013) and high-spirited contempt (Alfano, “A Schooling in Contempt: Emotions and the Pathos of Distance,” in Philosophy Minds: Nietzsche, Routledge, 2017).

One might worry that Nietzschean freedom thus characterized is too easily got. What are we to say, for instance, about the insouciant self-scrutinizer who blithely affirms his own actions regardless of what he learns about the etiology of his motives? In chapter 9, Katsafanas argues that Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power provides substantive constraints to the motives someone can genuinely affirm. The account of will to power on offer is complicated, and readers unfamiliar with Katsafanas’s earlier work may find this chapter difficult to follow. The basic idea, though, is that willing is always a matter of seeking to overcome resistance through action. To the extent, then, that the insouciant self-scrutinizer’s actions fail to seek out or to overcome resistance, they will fail the will-to-power test and hence not be candidates for affirmation, whether actual or counterfactual.

For anyone teaching a seminar on Nietzsche or the history of moral psychology, I can recommend without reservation putting The Nietzschean Self on your syllabus. It may be possible to write a better book on Nietzsche’s moral psychology, but no one has done so yet.

Youtube self-radicalization as a bespoke transformative experience

Philosopher Laurie Paul recently published a book about transformative experiences, which she understands as events that change someone's personality or values. If Nina Strohminger is right that one's self is to a large extent identified with one's values, then going through a transformative experience means becoming a different person.

Typical examples of transformative experiences could be classified as Big Honking Deals. Becoming a vampire. Going to war. Having a child. Enduring a severe mental disorder. But transformative experiences can also occur more slowly and without attracting attention. Though the typical examples are relatively short, time-stamped encounters characterized by trauma, drama, or melodrama, other transformative experiences happen more slowly. You move to a new town and slowly find yourself rooting for their football team, even though you used to despise the whole sport. You lose a friend and eventually realize that you deeply disagree with them about religion, even though you went to the same church. You go to college, major in sociology, and find yourself one day earnestly utterly the word 'differance'.

In this post, I'm interested in another such slow-burning transformative experience: self-radicalization on Youtube. Youtube serves videos to browsers. In some cases, it simply delivers the link someone enters in their url bar. In other cases, it delivers the Google-determined answer to a query the user enters in Youtube's search bar (Google owns Youtube). While the algorithm that determines the answer is proprietary, we know that it is highly similar to the PageRank algorithm, which in turn resembles a Condorcet voting procedure in a social network. In still other cases, Youtube suggests videos to a user based on the videos they previously watched and the videos subsequently watched by other users who also watched (most of) the videos they watched. Such individualized recommendation processes rely on what's called profiling: building up datasets about individual users that help predict what they think, like, and care about. The algorithms that power these recommendation systems are powerful, relying on hidden Markov models, deep learning, and/or neural networks. 

These algorithms are built to optimize a variable chosen and operationalized by their coders. In most cases, that variable is engagement: the likelihood that the user will mouse-over, click on, like, comment on, or otherwise interact with an item. Eli Pariser and others have pointed to the ways in which optimizing for engagement (rather than, say, truth, reliability, sensitivity, safety, or some other epistemic value) leads to social and political problems. PageRank and its derivatives can be gamed by propagandists, unduly influencing election outcomes. Even when no nefarious plots are afoot, engagement is at best a loose proxy for epistemic value.

One especially worrisome consequence of optimizing for engagement is the possibility of creating bespoke transformative experiences that radicalize viewers. It's already been argued that conspiracist media such as Fox News has radicalized a large proportion of the Baby Boomer generation. Fed a little hate, they kept watching. The more they watched, the more hate they imbibed and the less connected with truth they become. Over time, Fox ceased to be the contemptible fringe and was usurped by Breitbart, Newsmax, and Infowars. Now Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are in the White House advising the Trump administration.

I lay a great day of the blame for this at the feet of Rush Limbaugh and the Baby Boomers who half-intentionally poisoned their minds with his bluster and bullshit on AM radio throughout the 1990s. (Remember "America under siege?") But what worries me now is that the general-purpose, mind-poisoning transformation that the Baby Boomers suffered is being individualized and accelerated by the recommendation algorithms employed by Google. Engagement tracks people's emotions, which can be positive or negative. Recent studies suggest that both nascent right-wing white nationalists and nascent Islamist terrorists are increasingly learning to hate by following a string of Youtube recommendations that take them from incredulity to interest to fascination to zealotry. If this is right, then an additional side-effect of optimizing for engagement is the creation of a small but determined group of extremists bent on revanchist politics and revolutionary violence.

Somebody call Sergey Brin.

Follow all of the Alt- and Rogue- Government Twitter handles

As a philosopher, I tend to expect that my research might be socially relevant in 3 to 21 generations. Unless cryogenics speeds the fuck up, I won't be around to see it. Nothing's perfect.

In this post, though, I have something to say that's relevant yesterday: you need to follow all of the Alt- and Rogue- government Twitter handles. Here are the ones I know of, as of 27 January 2017:

@Altforestserv, @alt_fda, @RogueNASA, @AltHHS, @ActualEPAFacts, @AltUSDA

There will be more.

Here is why you need to follow them: the Trump administration has issued gag orders to many government agencies that are meant to supply citizens with the truth. Officially, they are now meant to clear everything they say to media, on social media, etc. with the administration.

Let me be clear: THIS IS NOT NORMAL. In fact THIS IS HOW CRIMINALS TREAT THEIR VICTIMS. I've spent the last year studying the ways in which knowledge gets distributed in social networks. One very clear pattern is that hubs in star networks tend to abuse their power. A star network is a communication network in which one actor controls whether and to what extent each of the other actors is able to communicate (about what) with other members of the network. Star networks are associated with all the evils. Sexual predators are often the hubs in star networks (DJT, anybody?). The reason is obvious: if A knows that B sexually assaulted C, A will be wary of B. But if B can limit the communication (or, more importantly, the extent to which communication is trusted) between A and C, B can undermine A's wariness.

Star networks are also associated with a variety of other sorts of malfeasance, including financial fraud, academic fraud, and terrorism. The point is that the hubs of star networks have immense power. Not all of them abuse it (e.g., many medical doctors and therapists), but many of them do.

The Trump presidential administration is a classic example of an abuser of hub power. In the last few days, this administration has insisted that scientific branches of government cease all independent communication with the public. All communication is meant to flow through the White House. This is the equivalent of your abusive boyfriend saying that you can't talk with any of your other friends now; anything you want to say has to go through him. 

If we put up with this, we are the moral equivalent of a "friend" who says, "You say your boyfriend hits you, but no one else told me that. In fact, lots of his friends said that you're a lying bitch."

Don't fall for it.

Fortunately, you don't have to navigate this new landscape alone. Into the breach, we have the Alt- and Rogue- institutional accounts. These will be essential for organizing against the Trump administration.