Commerce and philosophy

"I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person." -Apology

An excerpt from Ezra Klein's new book, Why We're Polarized, explains how social media (which are commercial ventures) contribute to political polarization.  They cater to people's sense of their identity.  A flavor of Klein's excerpt (which is worth reading in its whole):

To post that article on Facebook is to make a statement about who you are, who your group is, and, just as important, who is excluded.
In political media, identity is affirmed and activated with slightly more oblique headlines. But the underlying dynamic is the same: This public figure that you and everyone in your group loathe said something awful. This poll came out saying you and your group are going to win or, better yet, that your out-group is going to lose. This slashing column explains why you’re right about everything and why your opponents are wrong.
[...]
When I entered journalism, the term of art for pieces infused with perspective was “opinion journalism.” The point of the work was to convey an opinion. Nowadays, I think a lot of it is closer to “identity journalism” — the effect of the work, given the social channels through which it’s consumed, is to reinforce an identity.
But an identity, once adopted, is harder to change than an opinion. An identity that binds you into a community you care about is costly and painful to abandon, and the mind will go to great lengths to avoid abandoning it. So the more media people see that encourages them to think of themselves as part of a group, and the more they publicly proclaim — through sharing and liking and following and subscribing — that they are part of a group, the deeper that identity roots and the more resistant the underlying views become to change.

The bad online social dynamics that result from this are all well-known and widely loathed by now, but it got this way because it was profitable for the social-media companies to form their algorithms in this direction.  It is, in other words, what the market demands, and they're meeting that demand.

In an intellectually bankrupt culture, the natural result is the highly-polarized toxicity.  (For reasons I've given time and time again, a very large share of the blame for this goes to what I now term a structural dishonesty in the intellectual culture of leftism; the only question for me is whether this structural dishonesty is subtle, or whether it is blatantly obvious.)  (Other examples of structural dishonesty would be authoritarian regimes, such as those in China and Iran, that censor and punish dissenting voices.  No question in these cases how blatantly obvious the dishonesty is.)

The point I'll jump right to: Commerce is neither good nor bad, per se.  It is how well-ordered the commerce is, vis-a-vis the needs and care of the soul.  I'm not really saying anything new here, but I think social media toxicity and polarization are explained by the principle involved.  Social media algorithms are directed toward user pleasure or utility, but the dollar - the bottom line - does not discriminate between the higher and lower pleasures.  A pleasure that is triggered by having one's prejudices reaffirmed is a lower - base and ignoble - pleasure.  A pleasure related to the perfection of one's intellectual capacity is a higher pleasure.

For example: if you spend all of your cable news viewing time only on Fox News, or only on CNN, you get your political-identitarian preferences satisfied, and the companies'/advertisers' bottom lines get served, but the effects are blatantly toxic.  (I regard MSDNC as a lower level (akin to the sewer if the other two are the gutter) of 'news and opinion' presentation entirely - pleasurable to the toxic/twitterized/AOC left, and repulsive to just about anyone else.)  If, on the other hand, your interest is in dialectic - of obtaining the widest story or context or breadth of opinion or input - then you'll divide your time between these sources as well as plenty of other diversified non-cable-news sources.

J.S. Mill not only famously distinguished between the higher and lower pleasures - captured in his famous phrase "Better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" - but (and this is part of the wider context with which this higher/lower distinction has to be dialectically integrated) he also said of opinion polarization:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form. (On Liberty)

Not only is this essentially a formulation of the Dennett/Rapoport Rules a century-plus in advance, it's also a principle I hope over time, with thorough-enough research, to be able to exemplify in my own philosophic practice.  Tying these points together with a figure much-smeared in blatant defiance of Mill/Dennett/Rapoport, Ayn Rand, let's have a look at what Rand has to say about money (a point where she seems to be especially smeared by her enemies if not sometimes or often merely innocently misunderstood by others):

So you think that money is the root of all evil? . . . Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? [...] 

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

A strawman version of Rand - e.g., this one in "the world's most popular philosophy [sic] blog" - would excise Rand's praise for money-making from the philosophic context in which it is embedded.  The context is indicated in part by the "see also" cross-references in the "money" link I've provided and quoted from, and is contained in full in the whole of the Lexicon - the virtue of rationality most fundamentally, and the virtue of productiveness more proximately.  I once encountered an online Rand-basher who quoted from the "money speech" (excerpted above) the following one line: "The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality."  (To treat this quotation in isolation from the wider context of Rand's work is par for the course for Rand-bashers.)  The strawman version hyperlinked above (also par for that loathsome course, and which also implicitly if not explicitly recklessly smears the Ayn Rand Society scholars (e.g.) as "imbeciles") characterizes Rand's ethics as being a money-grubbing one in stark contrast to Nietzsche's evident disdain for market values.  But Rand's philosophy was consistent between Atlas Shrugged (where one finds the "money speech") and her earlier novel The Fountainhead.  John Galt and Howard Roark are each in their own way Rand's concretized-in-art ideal men.  And as is well-known to readers of The Fountainhead, Roark was committed so much to his own creative vision that he turned down a major commission, resulting (for the time being) in his firm shutting its doors.  The wealthiest character in the novel, Gail Wynand, is a foil to the heroic Roark, a man ultimately destroyed by having pandered to the mob/his "livelihood."

Put another way: Roark (and by implication her other heroic figures) regarded money-making as virtuous as long as it was virtuous, i.e., expressed the higher nature and possibilities of humans, including creative independence and integrity.  Rand's commitment to such noble ideals, as against the base, is made explicit in her discussion of that "noble soul" passage from Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil Aphorism 287) with which she originally planned to introduce The Fountainhead and then reintroduced/discussed in its 25th anniversary edition.  The Randian hero is a lover of self in the Aristotelian sense (for Aristotle, the "noble soul" is the great-souled or magnanimous man), a connection that a leading Nietzsche translator and interpreter, Walter Kaufmann, drew in his editor's footnote to Aphorism 287.

Which is to say, to neatly tie the various themes of this post together, that to combat social media toxicity in particular and commercial crassness in general, the market participants could do considerably better to aspire to the ideals espoused by Aristotle, Nietzsche and Rand - and to aspire to greater virtue/nobility/wisdom/understanding/dialectic/etc. generally (as with Socrates, Mill, Rapoport and Dennett).

Impeachment and philosophy

I'll begin this post with a timeless quote from Plato's Republic, Book V:

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils,-- nor the human race, as I believe,--and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard thing.

(In other words, why can't political rulers be more like this guy?)

The reason that the nation is in this mess is because the advice contained in the above has been flouted so thoroughly.  As I've pointed out many times already, all the major American framers were philosophical-enough people to be founders and/or members of the American Philosophical Society.  We don't have anything like that in the politician class right now.  As few as four years ago, Sen. Rubio declared in a presidential candidate debate that "we need more welders and less (sic) philosophers," apparently to the approval of the audience (while philosophy-major Carly Fiorina, also on the stage, didn't even rebut).  (To Rubio's credit, he later acknowledged value in philosophy.)

I think the American people are well aware that partisan hypocrisy is front and center - perhaps the issue - of this whole impeachment thing.  What the American people aren't agreed upon, is which of the two sides is the worse offender in the partisan-hypocrisy department.  (It's the other side, of course.)  But I think they're all quite aware that were the party roles reversed, the parties would be singing quite a different tune.

All the Senators signed an oath of impartiality.  This oath is belied what I believe to be a statistically impossible scenario: that 100 seriously impartial people would somehow almost all vote along party lines.  So let's dispense with any notion that impartiality is a serious factor in all this.  [Edit: an alternative explanation is that the political Left and Right have differing information-processing protocols, a different can of worms....]

Just about the only person prominently involved in this process who has an air of credibility and impartiality is Prof. Dershowitz, who has made arguments that certainly raise some serious questions and concerns, and are of historic import.  Dershowitz has said (on Cuomo Primetime, twitter, and elsewhere) that his argument has been twisted by critics into one he didn't make, and when he says something like that, it should tell the critics that they need to be more careful - or, as I like to put it, to bend over backwards in the name of fairness and context-keeping.  (As in: Dennett/Rapoport Rules.  For instance: Rand-bashers invariably encounter pushback from Rand-fans that the bashers are misrepresenting Rand's position.  That should be a red flag for any fair-minded person that the bashers need to get more careful and (even better) backwards-bending, but the bashers invariably don't do this - they disregard the pushback - a further and more serious red flag about their intellectual character.)

With that background, let's consider numerous facts:

By all appearances - and no one seems to contest this in good faith - Trump conditioned Congressionally-appropriated military aid to Ukraine on Ukraine's president announcing investigations, notably into '20 Dem aspirant Joe Biden and his relation to the energy company on the board of which his son sat.

It also appears that Trump got various ideas about Biden's apparent conflict of interests - something his son was warned about by people connected to Secretary of State Kerry among others who wanted no such involvement, BTW,  - from Sean Hannity's show.  Hannity's show is a cauldron of (partisan) theories about Democratic corruption (in addition to endless Trumpian talking points).  As the previous hyperlink indicates, Trump/Hannity's enemies regard these theories as kooky conspiracy theories, but Hannity was essentially proven right about the Obama/Comey FBI's partisan FISA abuse (about which Hannity/Trump's enemies were most incurious until it became too obvious to ignore any longer).  And given the partisan nature of all this, it's not like Trump/Hannity's enemies weren't involved in conspiracy-theorizing themselves about Trump/Putin collusion, debunked by the Mueller Report.  (See Greenwald for how bad this makes these conspiracy theorists/allies/enablers look.)

So it's not like Hannity doesn't have some credibility and that his/Trump's enemies don't lack a good deal of credibility themselves.  And by appearances Trump accorded Hannity's (crucial-context-omitting) claims about Biden/Burisma more credibility than it deserved.  It speaks (poorly) to Trump's flaky political-belief-formation processes which rear their ugly head elsewhere.  According to Trump's July 25 phone call with President Zelensky, the Biden/Burisma situation sounded "terrible" to him.  Now, unless there is good evidence that Trump had good evidence available to him that the Biden/Burisma situation was probably not as corrupt as he expressed in the July 25 call that it could be, then he has some legitimate pretext (in his mind, supposedly or presumably) on national security and corruption grounds for wanting investigations initiated.  The House's impeachment managers have presented a case to the contrary, i.e., that Trump did or should have known better.  And a faulty-belief-formation-process "out" here doesn't exactly work in his favor, fitness-for-office-wise.

But even granting this "out," the manner and method by which Trump conditioned this aid on investigations is the most disturbing aspect of all this.  He apparently kept it as much under wraps and related to as few people as possible, and he involved his private attorney Rudy Guiliani in it.  Rudy's involvement in this appears not to have been along policy or national-security-related lines, but along personal and partisan-political lines.  Legitimate interests in Ukraine-related corruption could have involved more fully and transparently people in his agencies and in Congress.  But it appears that he tried to hide this aid-conditioning as much as he could, which points to a culpable knowledge that this quid pro quo (and that's what it is) is dirty and accordingly wouldn't pass policy muster.  Bolton referred to it as a "drug deal" to suggest how sleazy and corrupt it is.  From plausible and fair-minded arguments I've seen, it constitutes (to this or that extent) an abuse of power.

That's where the Dershowitz Argument comes in: does an abuse of power as such constitute an impeachable/removable offense?  Here's where non-partisans should balk, as Dershowitz has vigorously been suggesting.  Dershowitz holds that there needs to be something more to the action, namely the committing of crimes (hence his support for Nixon's impeachment), else the abuse-of-power criterion is too vague and malleable, and too exploitable (i.e., abuse-able in its own right) by partisans of the opposing party.  (Note: he seems to leave open the possibility - which would be consistent with the 'consensus' of other legal scholars - that purely self-dealing motives in a non-criminal but abusive act is enough to impeach/remove.)  Dershowitz raises historical examples - notably President Lincoln's partisan-election-related actions releasing Union soldiers from the battlefield to vote for his party in an Indiana election.  (Is there any serious doubt that had Trump done likewise, today's Demo-rats would call for his impeachment?  I recommend carefully chewing over this question.  Further, given the tenacity with which Dershowitz argues his case, it's pretty much inevitable, given the opportunity, that he will bring the Lincoln example up for consideration by the legal scholars ganging up on him.  (He brings it up here on CNN [shorter youtube version here] and it's not addressed.  How friggin' hard can it be to address, I wonder?))  Republicans like to point to Obama's hot-mic moment where he offers a quid-pro-quo to Russia about missile defense - "I'll have more flexibility after the election."  (Having heard about this back then, I found it cynical and typical of the D.C. Swamp, and a cause for political embarrassment, but I don't recall the prospect of impeachment entering my mind.  As I said, it seemed all too typical.  [Edit: And what's more, Trump was supposed to be an antidote to the Swamp; so much for that hope.])

I don't know whether this warrants Trump's removal from office.  At the moment I assign it about a 50/50 probability.  For me to think that measure is warranted, the probability should be at least 2/3.  I do think it shows that Trump is ethically and/or epistemically unfit to be president.  Up until this Ukraine episode, I was almost enthusiastic about his beating the obviously-bad Demo-rats/leftists in 2020.  (Indeed, I even boldly predicted his '20 victory given the alternative which the American mainstream would have ample reason to find odious and ridiculous.)  My hope is that they nominate a candidate who is not so loathsome and idiotic that we're left with Trump as the default option.

And Demo-rats have to be on the hook for so much of the intellectual bankruptcy and corruption in all this.  Relevant points:

(1) This is the same party that bent over backwards to be unfair to, i.e., to blatantly dishonestly smear, Brett Kavanaugh.  You want to talk abuse of power, extreme bad faith?  What business did Demo-rats have agitating and demanding that his accuser be given a nationally televised Senate judiciary committee platform, once they had in hand and knew about Leland Keyser's debunking testimony?  ("Believe women" doesn't extend to Keyser, a woman....)  Or their extensive efforts to gaslight the public with their "we believe Ford" or question-begging "believe survivors [i.e., accusers]" stuff both before and after the assault-allegation hearing?  Appropriate retribution for this effort at personal and career destruction is loss of another SCOTUS seat, if not a presidential acquittal.

(2) This is the party that bent over backwards not to know what was wrong with Crooked Hillary's unauthorized server setup and the consequent mishandling of 110 classified documents.  The legal authorities have declined to bring charges, but no one that I know of has contested the point that anyone who engages in such behavior should not have a security clearance - something that should be a major consideration in whether she is objectively disqualified from holding the office of the presidency.

(3) Certain arguments made by the House impeachment managers can be thrown right back at them - namely, about pulling levers of power where so much as even a scintilla of corrupt partisan political intent is involved.  (That was their pushback against Dershowitz's argument about mixed motives, i.e., in between pure national-interest motives on one end and pure self-dealing motives on the other.)  In making the House case on the Senate floor, Schiff claimed that Trump is "scared to death" of facing Biden in 2020.  Well, Demo-rats are scared to death of having to face Trump in 2020.  Using selective presentations of evidence, Schiff peddled the Trump/Russia collusion narrative ever since early 2017.  (BTW, his many references to the June '16 Trump Tower meeting, between Trump aides and the Russian lawyer promising dirt on HRC, don't establish collusion claims but they do establish the extent to which Trump and his son are willing to deceptively/dishonestly spin.)

As for manager Nadler, he's been caught dead-to-rights on video from back during the Clinton impeachment saying on the House floor that impeachment should be bipartisan; this is obvious prima facie evidence that Nadler's motivations this time around are partisan-political and not purely in the nation's interests.

As for manager Jeffries, he's referred to Trump as the "Grand Wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," itself a claim beyond the pale of honest discourse and clearly indicating an animus and prejudice that would distort his motives for impeachment.

And let's face it, if the Demo-rats are too fucking lazy or dishonest to mount a clear non-strawman counter-argument against the eminently non-partisan Dershowitz, enough to get his recalcitrant mind to relent rather than be coerced into agreement (through dubious 'consensus'-mongering or whatever), then have they really cleared the hurdle that they ought to clear in order to convince 2/3 of the American people of their case?

And that's another thing - both parties but Demo-rats in particular (there isn't much of a case for a moral equivalence here, however odious the Republicans get at times) have so squandered trust and credibility that I can't treat the House managers' case as having been presented in full good faith ("with all due respect..." etc.).  They've cried wolf too many times about how bad Trump and his supporters are, their treatment of Kavanaugh belies any professions to concern for justice and fairness, they look the other way when Crooked Hillary mishandled classified info, etc.  If Trump were to be removed, consider that this empowers these intellectually and morally corrupt people, and that is the wider context in which impeachment- and removal-related arguments should be considered.  (As for those sometimes-odious Republicans, are they even going to censure Trump for his underhanded and dirty aid-withholding?  Do they deserve to lose control of the Senate where the 2-per-state format heavily benefits them already?)  The notion that he would need to be removed from office in order to restore some sense of honor and decency to our politics . . . I think that ship had already sailed some time ago.  The American people are getting the politics they deserve, commensurate with an intellectually bankrupt culture.  Plato is right.  (See the "philosophy ffs," "philosophy for children," and "p4e" tags, and this blog's masthead hyperlink, for leads to the solution.)

[Addendum 2/2: NOTE that my treatment both of the facts of Trump's case and of the Dershowitz Argument is provisional - I am fallible af especially on matters such as legal theory that are outside my area of expertise - and I'm still taking in the for-and-against arguments [e.g.] as they keep emerging.   I will likely have more to say on this in coming posts.  I'm wary about exactly how much leeway, short of the "committing a crime like Nixon did" standard, the Dershowitz Argument gives to a president who - of course? - believes his political interests are aligned with the nation's.  So this Argument and other facets of this case don't altogether sit well with me.  (Note that the just-linked argument links to this pro-impeachment letter signed by over 800 legal scholars.  Now, this passage doesn't sit well with me: "[Trump acted] for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress."  Except that there's a separation of powers in which Congress and the President can differ about what is in the national security interests.  My (fallible) ring-of-truth detector tells me that this passage isn't worthy of politically impartial legal scholars and I'm pretty sure a Dershowitz would also pick right up on this point immediately.)  I'd like to add that one of my favorite moments of the Senate proceedings was when John Rawls was mentioned in connection with Dershowitz's "shoe on the other foot" test.  Would that there were a lot more such moments in politics.  (Why only Rawls, and not also Plato, Aristotle, et al?  In a Fox interview in the last day or so, Sen. Cruz mentions one of his classes at Harvard taught by Dershowitz, someone else [not Michael Sandel, though (surprisingly?)], and "world famous philosopher" Robert Nozick.  I liked that moment, as well.)  The Rawls & shoe-test point was about (justice-as-)fairness, and the complaints from both sides about the unfair processes in the houses the other party controlled, speaks volumes.  Let's say that the House Democrats were to say to the House Republicans, "Okay, put your fairness demands on a list, we'll make every effort to meet them, and when we do, you sign your names to the list so that you have no complaints about process going forward."  And then imagine the same scenario with the opposing Senate parties.  The thing is, the demands of "fairness" would mean - in both cases - a more long, drawn-out process that in this political context both parties seem to want to avoid.  (Elections are fast approaching, see.  An avowed socialist candidate leading in the nomination betting markets, whom the DNC would rather not see nominated and (conversely) the GOP would probably prefer to see nominated, has had to sit through these proceedings in D.C. as the Iowa caucus approaches, see.  [Don't think for a second that Nancy Peloser's motivations for the month-long delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate, or the Senate 'rats demands for prolonged process notwithstanding a very predictable outcome, have nothing to do with this.  BTW, Peloser & Co. showed their unserious hand when she used and gave out many souvenir pens at the signing ceremony.])  Hence the "rushed" process in both instances.  Applying a fairness test, do they really have a basis for complaint for what the other side was doing in the respective houses they controlled?  Will they come clean that maybe the proclaimed fairness considerations and the political considerations can't be reconciled here?]

[Addendum 2/12: Note that the second impeachment article - "obstruction of Congress" - is so obviously bullshit that even Mitt Romney dismissed it while voting to convict on the first one (which is what anyone really cares about).]

[Addendum #2, 2/12: Good discussion going on here, in the linked argument signed by legal scholars, and in the comments section, coming from both Trump's opponents and defenders.  One thing I think is for sure: the vast majority of the American people just aren't in an epistemic position to understand with full and clear finality that Trump should be removed from office for his Ukraine-related actions.  I still don't know how Dershowitz's example of Lincoln is answered, by the signed letter or elsewhere.  I still don't see how his actions are in a fundamentally different category than a number of other things other presidents have done without raising an impeachment stink.  I do know that the Demo-rats spent 3 years squandering all credibility and good will, for which they arguably deserved, as a political matter, to lose the impeachment case.  I'm still not clear on whether just any verifiable abuse of power is impeachable, or if it is best left for the most obvious and severe abuses and that this should be left up to the (obviously partisan, obviously politically-motivated) discretion of the members of Congress.  Anyway, the lesson Demo-rats should but won't learn from all this is that their best shot at beating Trump is not to be so loathsome, dishonest, etc. themselves; their sense of desperation and panic in the current primary nominating process is palpable, but they and their allies/enablers/ilk in academia, media, and elsewhere brought this on themselves through years upon years of dishonesty and hubris.  Had they ever shown the remotest amount of decency and good will in their attacks on Rand, I might feel the least bit sorry for them.  Their complaints related to lack of justice, fairness, honesty, etc. of Trump and his defenders ring all too hollow and hypocritical.  BTW, this year's census should help to highlight further that the Demo-rats' efforts to benefit politically from illegal immigration need not happen through the ballot box directly such as by getting these immigrants registered and voting, but through population-based apportionment of House seats.  (They also hope to capitalize on illegal immigration, not just by refusing to create much if anything in the way of disincentives against it - if anything, it's just the opposite - but by smearing people who oppose it, like Trump, as racists. That includes Peloser crying that the border wall - which would only prevent illegal border crossings, mind you - is "an immorality" and is "about making America white again."  You might get a sense from this alone about what I mean by 'rats spending years squandering credibility and good will.)  Not that this House-seat-stealing scheme - also an electoral-vote-stealing scheme - helps them with the Senate, thank goodness.]

Addendum to earlier '1619 project' post

The earlier post: The very premise of "the 1619 project"

[Addendum 1/27: This helps to contextualize things more and makes the NYT project appear less destructive than I have been led to believe.  (The main objections by Wilentz and others are to Nikole Hannah-Jones' lead essay/toxic thesis.)  In any case what I take exception to is the notion - the very premise of the Project, as I've said - that white-on-black racism is in the nation's "DNA," however huge a problem it still is (and it is...).  (And if slavery/racism is America's Original Sin, are we in the territory of religious belief here, articles of faith?  Compare with Christian 'Original Sin' dogma.)  As I've been suggesting throughout this blog's history is that this and other huge problems is at root intellectual/philosophical, and I find the state of the debate on these problems to be deplorable in some degree or other.  A go-through of the SEP article on socialism has confronted me with the reality that the state of the public debate on this subject is pretty deplorable and that there is plenty of blame to go around (including the authors of the article themselves who almost come across as oblivious to the myriad counterpoints raised many times by defenders of capitalism or critics of socialism, including the much-despised/smeared Rand and her profound take on the human mind/intellect as the most important/powerful/valuable means of production).  I plan to have more to say on this before long; for now I'll just say that I have tempered my more or less sweeping view of socialists as low-intellectual-character shitbags as distinct from not-unusually-flawed human beings with limitations in knowledge and problem-solving.  Still, how to explain the debacle of 20th-century attempts at (state-planning) socialism in the face of critiques by Mises, Hayek and others; that debacle stems in great part by the attempt to forcibly impose a 'solution' on so many recalcitrant minds, when human problem-solving capacity was not up to the task of embracing the 'solution.'  (Actually, I still see big-time vice here on display in the anti-dialogue AOC & ilk, but this is a politician rather than scholar, i.e., she's low hanging fruit.)]

What quality Rand scholarship looks like

I've just had the pleasure of reading the first chapter of Volume Three of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies Series, Foundations of a Free Society: Reflections on Ayn Rand's Political Philosophy (2019).  It is by Darryl Wright (one of the members of the Society's steering committee), and is titled, "The Place of the Non-Initiation of Force Principle in Ayn Rand's Philosophy."  It is available as a free sample at the book's website.

(Polemical paragraph...)
It puts all the Rand-bashing hackery ranging from sloppy to reckless out there in a very different light.  Rand-bashing (as distinct from fair and honest criticism, which I anticipate in the later chapters of this book; the bashing basically characterizes Rand as a cruel hack herself who appeals only to pimply adolescents) is all blatantly dishonest, every last bit of it, and every Rand-basher qua such, without exception, is a blankety-blank lowlife.  Here is just one recent example of it at reddit's badphilosophy subreddit, a forum which purports to highlight and ridicule the myriad examples of usually-amateurish thinkers and ideas falling afoul of respectable and serious philosophical practice (supposedly Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are egregious offenders in addition to Rand).  The blankety-blanks at the askphilosophy and main philosophy (sic) subreddits are little better when it comes to Rand.  (Reddit as a whole is toxic/leftist/structurally dishonest in its political aspect; its upvote/downvote model - itself structurally dishonest - is a lower-pleasure-indulging popularity contest rather than a truth-seeking mechanism.) There is no excusing said behavior given all the scholarship that's been available for decades now from professional philosophers/scholars demonstrating that Rand can be understood adequately by competent and careful interpreters, and the bashers will be judged accordingly in the eyes of history.  They have obstructed progress on the wider consideration of crucial neo-Aristotelian philosophical themes (as are in evidence in Wright's article, Den Uyl and Rasmussen's work, Tara Smith's book, Sciabarra's work, etc.).  Speaking of which, Volume Four of the Society's series, in preparation, is specifically focused on Rand's comparative relation to Aristotle, the man whom no one but philosophically ignorant STEM-lords and whatnot dare to bash (and whom, as the man said of his teacher Plato, not even the wicked have the right to praise).

One of the virtues of Wright's article is to situate Rand's thought within certain themes and controversies in philosophy as they've been traditionally approached.  It is particularly memorable how Wright masterfully summarizes (and it is only a summary or condensation) Rand's epistemology or theory of proper cognitive functioning - which, as any serious student of Objectivism knows, makes fundamental reference to the role of hierarchy and context in knowledge-formation.  I like his reference not just to concept-formation but concept-maintenance, an active ongoing process that incorporates new information.  It had always struck me as a bit odd how Rand and Objectivists would speak of the formation part without explicitly referencing the maintenance part.  Bashers might say that this is an example of Objectivists' being sloppy and incomplete, but the Objectivists (most of them, usually) are implicitly if not explicitly intellectual perfectionists doing the best with what time and resources they've got, no thanks to the so-called professional mainstream.

An example of where Wright ties themes in Objectivism to 'mainstream' disputes occurs on p. 38, footnote 26, where he brings up the familiar notion of observation being "theory-laden."  He ties this to the 'Objectivism-speak' about the "prior context of general knowledge that guides the assimilation of the evidence."  Another fine example of Wrights tying-in of themes is his characterization of Rand's concept of knowledge as awareness (Rand uses the phrase "mental grasp") as distinct from 'justified true belief.'  I remember back in the day (the previous century most likely, probably on Jimmy Wales' MDOP) first being introduced to the interpretation of Rand's conception of knowledge as awareness, and it had always struck me as very plausible or correct given the difficulties that arise with the traditional 'justified true belief' formulations.  It strikes me as one point on which epistemologists might take a helpful cue from Rand/Objectivists/Peikoff.  (Wright more than once references lecture 1 of Peikoff's Induction in Physics and Philosophy course, a lecture which also made a favorable impression on me.)

Wright raises an example of an item of genuine knowledge as follows:

"A concept classifies together a potentially unlimited class of the referents to which it applies, and an inductive generalization similarly purports to identify the attributes of or relations among an unlimited set of particular instances. For instance, a statement such as “The human body absorbs vitamin D from sunlight” condenses a wide body of (ultimately perceptual) evidence and applies to an unlimited number of cases past, present, and future." (p. 35)

“The human body absorbs vitamin D from sunlight” is as incontrovertible an item of knowledge as any, which should tell you right off that skeptics are in the weeds and shouldn't be taken seriously.  The only issue of real concern is the how for arriving at/validating such an item of knowledge, which is a yuuuuge topic but . . . well, to apply the principle of induction here I'm going to go to the Series page at UPitt Press's website, click on the Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology (2013) link, go down to the sample link at the same location I found the Wright piece's sample link at the Foundations of a Free Society link, and voila, Gotthelf's article, "Ayn Rand’s Theory of Concepts: Rethinking Abstraction and Essence."  See?  Induction works.

One word to note in Wright's paragraph above - one that caught my attention when Peikoff used it in one of the early lectures of his Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand course - is the word "condenses."  What conceptual knowledge/awareness does is to condense the vast range of perceptual observations/awareness, with higher-order abstractions or also what Rand terms abstraction from abstraction, condensing the more rudimentary concepts into broader classifications and ultimately into organized theories or sciences or episteme.  This condensation-function of concepts is referenced directly by Rand with her discussion of unit-economy.  I apply the principle of unit-economy a lot in my postings when I provide contextualizing hyperlinks so that all the content doesn't have to be reproduced in one blog post (since blog posts can get long enough as it is...).  They serve more as a file-folder (using Rand's imagery) to reference as the need arises.  (It helps to organize one's mental contents really well, in order to make the recall function that much more useful/effective.)  It's a very nice principle to have induced and to apply, since contextualization of bold and controversial-sounding claims (e.g., Rand-bashers qua such invariably are scum) is fucking great.

It should be pointed out that Wright's article situates Rand's principle of the non-initiation of force within her broader philosophical theory, i.e., it contextualizes it for purposes of what follows in the book.  The whole point of Rand's having formulated an epistemological theory (explicated in fuller detail in Peikoff's works, most importantly OPAR) is a practical one: in order for a human being to flourish most effectively, the human must exercise the conceptual/knowing faculty most effectively, for which the human requires a systematic guide for operating, i.e., for organizing mental contents.
This has something to do with the principle of dialectic, what Sciabarra identifies in fundamental terms as the art of context keeping, which has fundamentally to do with mental integration, which fundamentally guides the principle of the wikipedia hyperlinking format as I'm sure Wales was well aware of.  I mean, heck, Wales' introduction to Objectivism was the Lexicon.  Note also that Rand's description of the fundamentality of philosophy in human cognition is exactly-correctly reflected in the hierarchical fundamentality of philosophy in wikipedia's hyperlink structure.  So to recap: Wales induces an organizing principle from the Lexicon, applies it to the now-widely-used wikipedia, proves Rand right about philosophy's fundamentality, and the Rand-bashers have what to stand on, exactly?  Zilch.  Well, they do have a point (by accident) about her polemics (most notably her Kant ones), but they're way bigger offenders themselves in that regard, so they still lose.

As one might have induced from the above, the above organizes and condenses a lot of principles into a few paragraphs, buttressed by the presumptively-knowledge-expanding function of internet hyperlinking.  (In the internet age, what's the Rand-bashers' excuse, or the excuse for blatantly ignorant opinion-formation generally?)  The perfectionistic/perfective condensing habit takes cultivation and effort to form and maintain, and that effort is one of focusing one's mind, and it is this act of focus that is the irreducible fundamental element of human volition or free will.  As I'm sure Wright explains in full detail in his next chapter in Foundations for a Free Society, "Force and the Mind," and as Peikoff explains in detail in lecture 8 ("The Evil of the Initiation of Force") of his Objectivism Through Induction course, physical force is antithetical to this volitional knowledge-formation-and-maintenance process.

Force is the partly or wholly successful attempt to substitute the free and independent judgment of a person's mind/intellect with someone else's, and that is antithetical to the cognitive requirement of objectivity, i.e., of the necessary processing of mental contents for knowledge and decision-making in the service of one's life/flourishing.  (Rand introduces this point in the language of objectivity or of the objective/intrinsic/subjective triad in her essay, "What is Capitalism?" of which no one has even attempted a rebuttal in 50+ years, it's that definitive and final in the essentials.)  Rand uses the term "physical force" to emphasize that it is a physical action that severs the relation between the victim's (free) thoughts and (coerced) actions - the closest thing to an actual real-world duality or opposition between the mental and the physical, if you will.  See also my recent posting, "The core libertarian principle explained" for more.

To wrap up: now that this post has provided a flavor of what quality, clue-having Rand scholarship and Randian method looks like, we can safely flush the willfully clueless Rand-bashers down the toilet and safely give serious Rand scholars the attention and consideration they (and Rand) deserve.  (2019's other "scholarly," university-published (yikes) Rand book, leftist scumbag Lisa Duggan's Mean Girl, provides the definitive contrast case, right down to the blatantly dishonest smear that is its title.  [The gullible ignoramuses in the comments section of a new video with Scumbag Duggan, in which they slime and smear Rand as a sociopath and her admirers as gullible ignoramuses, without showing the least bit of effort at rudimentary fairness and mutual/empathetic understanding - it's like they go out of their way and bend over backwards not to make such an effort - should take a good, hard look at themselves.])  Both the (abnormal) bashers and the (normal) critics tend to say things about how Rand just isn't rigorous or systematic enough in her writings to be taken seriously as a philosopher (or as a world-historically great or important philosopher at least on the level of, say, a Rousseau or a Marx if not a Spinoza or Nietzsche), but the case of Wright and others shows that anyone who studies the relevant materials carefully can identify and explain the rigor and systematicity in Rand's thought.

[Addendum: I've mentioned/link a number of Peikoff's courses but the one that any serious student or reputable scholar of Objectivism needs to be familiar with, just on the basis of its name alone if nothing else, is his Understanding Objectivism one (also in book form).]

[Addendum #2: re Rand's anti-Kant polemics referenced above (and again now), I will at some point address what appears to be an unacceptable part of the ethical theory as he presented it - though not really a part of neo-Kantian ethical theories I've been exposed to, just as with his infamous argument against lying to protect the innocent from a prospective murderer (as distinct from a duly contextualized virtue of honesty that rationally compels taking deceptive measures to protect the innocent from the murderously wicked). What would be unacceptable is that Kant appears to hold the view that continuing life in an indefinitely miserable state rather than committing suicide is the morally preferable option.  That's what Rand gleans from the one passage of his that she ever quotes at any length (from the Groundwork, and which is contained in her "Kant" Lexicon entry just again linked - "It is a duty to preserve one's life..."), about the man who is miserable but continues on out of a sense of duty.  Alternative and perhaps overly charitable readings of the passage are that he's merely applying the otherwise helpful inclination/duty distinction ("duty" meaning the morally obligatory recognized by the actor as such, grounded in Kant's theory in the Categorical Imperative(s) [about which Rand is unacceptably silent all the while she bashes him]).  The Aristotelian virtuous person/character is one for whom virtuous action and desire are harmoniously integrated, where (employing Susan Wolf's terminology as applied to life's meaning) subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness (or perhaps the noble or fine or kalos).  Why not say that remaining alive but miserable, or truth-tellingly exposing the innocent to the murderously wicked, is to treat one's own or the innocent's humanity merely as a means to a theoretical abstraction?  Or, is Kantian ethical method (re: e.g., respecting humanity as an end-in-itself) an empty formalism as some critics have claimed, unless supplemented or contextualized by things other ethical theories consider important?  [Note: I need to study Parfit's impressive-looking synthesis of Kantian with other ethical theories, although a maximally impressive theory would incorporate virtue ethics, of which Aristotle is the most prominent/influential exponent.]  That being said, see my "Core libertarian principle explained" link where principles widely recognized as 'Kantian' or 'deontological' are employed, although in a context that's foundationally Aristotelian/eudaimonist.  [General note about standards for effective polemics, especially philosophical ones: They should follow those Dennett/Rapoport Rules as a matter of habit, which implies that characterization of X should rise to the standard of what seasoned scholars of X accept as accurate (which is how so many anti-Rand polemics can be dismissed from the get-go; the proper standard there might be, "Would Darryl Wright or other Ayn Rand Society scholars or Leonard Peikoff take it seriously?"), and they should be done at enough length to uproot all the assumptions that lead to a complex theory worth polemicizing against.  I've pointed to Mises' polemics against Marxism/DiaMat as an example of how to do polemics, and while they meet the length requirement, I'll have to look at how his characterizations hold up after I go through the high-paywalled Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx published last year.  But he is quoting directly from Marx's condensation/summary statement of historical materialism in the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy....]]

Intellectual bankruptcy and climate change

Some blog-context: How is a layperson to assess climate change? and Wallace-Wells & The Uninhabitable Earth (and actionable steps) and the intellectual bankruptcy tag

My original idea for this post's title was something along the lines of, "Willfully blind climate change deniers," or perhaps even "Willfully blind climate change denying motherfuckers," either of which followed by an introduction of the following image with something like, "For instance, this motherfucker right here":

But I'm gonna try my best to write this without a bunch of expletives - I've been told it puts off potential readers, as though they couldn't handle expletives, or they look for whatever piss-poor excuse not to read well-argued points, or whatever, I just about don't gaf at this point; the fact that the intellectually-bankrupt twitter gets tons of attention while philosophy blogs in general (irrespective of expletive-to-reasoning ratios) do not, speaks plenty of volumes already (about the intellectual bankruptcy about which I will be speaking here).

I'm gonna try to write this without expletives even though the topic of intellectual bankruptcy generally makes me hopping mad.  And I use the image of the current President because the very fact that he ever became president is indicative of the intellectual bankruptcy.  The Framers of the country weren't intellectually bankrupt, but their legacy has been squandered.  If the country weren't so intellectually bankrupt (and as a dialectician/context-keeper one has to imagine the not just the implications of this conditional but also the presuppositions, which I'll get to as well), we'd have had good enough elected leaders (actual leaders, not the fake kind) that no one would feel the need to turn to a Donald Trump in desperation.

Despite a recent about-face (of the Trump kind, which we have every reason to discount), Trump has a long, exhaustively documented history of intellectually-reckless climate change denial.

The number of man-hours of time and attention wasted on shit garbage like "it's cold here in January, so much for climate change" is probably so off-the-charts as to disgust any decent person.  (Meanwhile, it's summertime in the southern hemisphere/Australia.)

Or how about: "the climate has always been changing, how is this any different?"  Just about as low as it gets by any respectable standards of belief-formation.

Anyone with belief-formation processes so screwed-up as to produce the gobs of Trumpian climate-denial tweets, cannot be trusted to form any credible beliefs (outside of their area of expertise, that is; I'm sure Trump had to have some pretty decent belief-formation processes when it comes to which real estate deal is worthwhile, although even there I "somehow" manage to have some doubt).

Here's a big, probably the biggest part of the problem: climate change being an unavoidably political subject, people from all over the political spectrum have every good reason to distrust the belief-formation processes of those they disagree with.  Political discussion is especially intellectually-bankrupt given that it involves decisions about how to coerce other people (irrespective of or against their considered independent judgment, etc.).  So naturally that's going to encourage a lot of bad-faith arguments for one's policy preferences (a nice euphemism for coercion).

One should probably expect about as much intellectual bankruptcy in a politics-related discussion as just about anything else, save perhaps for religion-related discussions where the canons of logic and evidence espoused by philosophers and/or scientists are routinely flouted.

(People tend to seek meaning in a silent universe, see - and that gives rise to an excrement-ton of wishful thinking.  You'd probably have to consult the philosophy of religion literature for the least-toxic treatments of the subject, and there you are likely to find a whole lot of uncertainty at best, a lot of maybe-not-successful attempts at conceptual clarification, a lot of speculation, etc.  In my personal context the most advanced treatment is the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, where my pretty-reliable ring-of-truth heuristics have told me that it ultimately most likely comes down to a matter of faith that a trio-omni god would create a world like this one containing an excrement-ton of morally-pointless animal suffering in addition to this or that facet of what is now being termed the human predicament [about which I'll have more to say in another post], all of which a trio-omni god would have sufficient reason for creating but which reasons are mysterious and inaccessible to us.  I thought the treatment of the problem of suffering in the Oxford Handbook was close to deplorable, BTW, particularly in its taking seriously the notion that human corruption would be a reason even for animal suffering.  But you should read it for yourself to see if I'm off-base.)

Getting back to the main problem: many people have good reasons to distrust the values and epistemic practices of a great many of their political (and/or religious) Others.

And the main cause for people having such good reasons is that all too few people habitually internalize the canons of reason and evidence espoused by philosophers and scientists.

I've written about all the deplorable practices (leading, not surprisingly, to a wide range of deplorable beliefs) of political leftists who squander whatever credibility they might have had on climate change and other issues with their approach to the subject of capitalism.  (If you want my hunch about this, it has basically to do with rationalization for envy of those with superior talents; when capitalism led to a ballooning both of population and of living standards across the board, what really ticked off the enemies of capitalism is that all the abundance wasn't "shared" more equally.  Nozick also offers pointers in the direction of a psychologically-based diagnosis of anticapitalist pathology.)  The worst offenders in this anticapitalism bunch would be the Rand-bashers, those who willfully refuse to have a fair dialogue about Rand's philosophy.  (See the excremental "scholarship" of Scumbag Duggan for the "state of the art" in this loser genre.)

So when you have rabidly, dishonestly anti-capitalist folks crying wolf about (how capitalism is causing) climate change, many others have abundant reason to discount or ignore their latest wolf-crying.  And as the crying-wolf fable shows, it's kind of a goddamn shame that the boy is ignored when a real wolf is around.

As for the Climate Change Issue, it's one I've followed as a layperson for close to 30 years now; it became something of considerable interest when Rush Limbaugh in his early books would say how it's, well, a hoax, along with the ozone hole (now not really an issue - once governments implemented policies opposed by Rush & Co.).  I still listen to Rush semi-frequently, and he's still pushing the it's-a-hoax line, mixed in (unfortunately and toxically) with other useful insights he has about the bias and corruption of the "drive-by media" to name a major example of what he actually does build his credibility profile upon.  (See, as one glaringly obvious instance of the bias/corruption, the context-erasing "fine people on both sides" hoax that CNN et al peddled to its audience and for which CNN has refused to demonstrate any accountability.  Or how about the New York Times' ill-fated 1619 Project.  Or how these peddlers of fake news twisted Trump's criticism of fake news into a criticism of a free press. And people are now supposed to trust these media sources when it comes to climate change or anything else?)

(Also, Rush has built what credibility he has upon his championing of the American (and capitalist) values such as "rugged individualism," family values, limited government, etc., that the left, with its march through the institutions, is making every effort to pervert or destroy.  As with pretty much anything political, media figures such as Rush get a lot more mileage out of the values they espouse than about what factual or scientific claims they make.)

The left is selective about which experts to consult on which topics.  Like clockwork they'll cite the "97 percent of climate scientists agree" line, but then (also like clockwork) when it comes to minimum wages or rent control they ignore or discount the expert reasoning of economists, also often along with smears of free-market advocates along values-lines.  (If a libertarian says that it really isn't the business of the state to coerce people in their economic decisions, or that there is a principle of subsidiarity that directs people toward non-state remedies to social ills before turning to the force-wielding state only as a very last resort, the left translates that as being heartless, sociopathic - probably an admirer of Ayn Rand's fictional heroes.)

Now, as I've said, I've followed the climate-change issue as much as a layperson could, for nearly 3 decades, or pretty much the time that it's been a big political topic.  And I've heard every which argumentative fallacy coming from what for simplicity's sake I'll term the Right.  (After hearing Rush and consulting 'Conservative Book Club'-type recommended books on climate change and ozone depletion, it wasn't long before I figured out that unless I were to make these subjects a full-time study requiring PhD-level learning in the relevant science(s), this stuff was going to be well above my pay grade.  Cue STEM-lord chest-beating....)  For a great long while the main tactic of the political Right was to be "skeptical" about the climate prediction models.  Another tactic, after time went on, was to highlight the overreaching and alarmism of those who were saying that the polar ice caps could melt by the year 2000.  Another tactic was to be "skeptical" that humans are the primary contributors to present-day climate change.  ("The climate's always been changing....")  Then the tactic was to say that it wasn't warming as much as the 'scientific consensus' (really, a range of opinion widely accepted by the experts) was saying.  Then there was the so-called warming pause that lasted for all of maybe 2 decades (but which had a precedent some half a century earlier, amid an overall warming trend).  Then the tactic was the smear the "hockey stick" authors in what was termed the Climategate controversy.

The worst of this bunch of right-wingers might be the religious fundamentalists who deny that the tri-omni god would facilitate humans making the planet uninhabitable.  (They also have a cognitive bias about a wished-for afterlife, or even an End of Days, that would lead them to discount the importance of planet habitability.)  There is also an unequivocally terrible epistemic practice on the Right when it comes to the science of evolution, to the extent that some 2 out of 5 rightists will affirm that humans were created in their present form within the last 10,000 years.  (Actually, it's roughly 2 in 5 Americans.  The numbers on the Right/GOP are even worse.)  The politicians of the Right enable and coddle this blatant epistemic malpractice, sometimes by directly engaging in it themselves.

So the way I'd put it is that there are plenty of huge trust and credibility deficits in politics to go around.  After all the lies and smears promoted by those on the left, why should those on the right believe them when it comes to climate change?  And after the lies and smears peddled by the Right (an obvious recent one being Obama-birtherism - also peddled by one Donald Trump in the early 2010s), what reason do leftists have for believing them on climate change or anything else?

I've already pointed out the solution to this whole trust-problem, which is philosophical education (i.e., education in the canons of logic and evidence traditionally espoused by philosophers, particularly standards of dialectic exemplified by the likes of the Rapoport/Dennett Rules, ffs already).  It doesn't mean the leftist take on doing philosophy, such as smearing Rand by claiming she's not taken seriously by the community of philosophers.  (The relevant criterion here would be what those who are actually experts in Rand's thought have to contribute to the philosophical discussion going forward, seeing as how Rand isn't around to speak for herself.  Anyway, the case of Hospers just on its own gives lie to the standard leftist smear, even before we take a look at the philosophy professors involved with the Ayn Rand Society.)  It doesn't mean a toxic take on philosophy and science that is widespread on the Right, which is to discount academics and experts in these fields.  (I do share their opinion when it comes to the systemic/structural dishonesty of the academic left, but it's a mistake to regard that crowd of losers as defining the academy as a whole [although it's a pretty serious mark against] - just as it is a mistake to regard the epistemic criminals of the Right as defining the Right as a whole [although it's a pretty serious mark against].)

Is it possible for the public comprised mostly of laypersons to gave a serious, honest, informed, high-signal-to-noise-ratio discussion of climate change?  Perhaps it is - it would be greatly enhanced by the aforementioned suggested program of philosophical education (along with minimal scientific, historical and economic literacy) - but here's something that might really (ahem) light a fire under everyone's asses as it hits home more and more:

The concern, of course, is that the point at which these infernos hit closer and closer to more and more people's homes, it will be too late to do anything about it.  (If there's anything in your episteme that suggests that the billions of animals perishing horribly in these infernos is Divine Providence, chances are you are a culpable contributor to the problem.)  As the ignored-by-Trump-&-Co. scientists have been saying, some amount of future climate change is already locked in by the rising atmospheric CO2 levels, so chances are the infernos will get worse before we find any ways to make it better.  (And that warming pause that the deniers were touting?  The scientists have an explanation for that: the oceans as heat sinks - and the oceans can only absorb so much, and even if they do, the effects on ocean life are probably not good.)  Just how patient shall we be about AI and/or alternative energy sources for mitigating this problem?

A lot (but far from all) of the disagreements about climate change and other issues is attributable to human fallibility and uncertainty.  See for instance the comments section of that "Trump about-face" link at the top of this post.  (Here it is again.)  Aside from the standard deplorable and gutter-level stuff you might expect to find in a typical politically-charged comments section, you have "advocates" and "skeptics" alike pointing to sites with domain names like realclimatescience.org and realclimatechangescience.org, domain names which are of no use when they take opposite positions on the topic, whatever abundance of links and data appear at either.  Again, how is a layperson to sift through all that, to be able to distinguish the real science from the junk?  So many people on both sides are not only not equipped to deal with the subjects at the pay-grade level required, but they come to the discussion with their usual left- or right- biases that have them treating their own experts as definitive and the opposing ones as discount-able.

One of the few things an epistemically virtuous layperson can do, is to look at metadata about the state of the discussion or debate.  I take it that there is real debate among real experts about climate change, but that this debate bears little if any resemblance to the public/political "debates" (represented by the now-twice-linked comment thread, the basic form of which you probably have seen dozens if not hundreds of times before, so you may not really need the refresher since there really isn't anything to learn or observe in the comment thread other than about human cognitive behavior/biases).  From my experience, your typical leftist uses shitty lousy argumentation tactics because the ideas/positions they're defending are typically lousy, but that may not be an infallible heuristic.  (There are plenty of folks offering lousy arguments for libertarianism, capitalism, Objectivism/Randism, all of which I take seriously.  [Are there lousy arguments for a basically Aristotelian episteme or dialectic?  I'm not used to seeing such things, and not even clear on what they would look like.  The first thing that pops to mind is arguments by Thomists employing - well, probably abusing - Aristotelian concepts to rationalize dubious sexuality-related positions in Christianity.  Tossing off is contrary to your telos, you see.])

[Edit: a hypothesis I'll float here is: bad ideas/positions will, over time, result more and more in lousy and dishonest tactics in defending them or smearing or ignoring the opposition/refuters.  In the case of far-left ideas - anything basically to the left of a Rawls-ish position - the systemic/structural dishonesty of the left basically had to take hold for good after ca. 1974 with Nozick's libertarian treatise including smackdowns of what he showed to be obviously bad far-left ideas/positions (as though Rand didn't already accomplish the same thing in 1957, although Nozick sealed the deal for any academic-type researcher after he demonstrably did his homework and went from leftist to libertarian/pro-capitalist).  I include in this sweeping intellectual indictment of far-leftists one G.A. Cohen whose argumentative techniques always struck me as dubious (something something Marxist technique turning commonsense and full-story-telling on its head, perhaps enough to make the best dialectical thinkers like Aristotle want to vomit), and who never addressed the basically-Randian point about the unbreakable tie between mind/intellect/freedom and property rights; and I note that Mack's libertarian/capitalist rebuttal of Cohen some 2 decades ago has been the last word as far as I can tell.  (Note also in this context the absence of leftist recognition of Sciabarra's exhaustively researched dialectical-libertarian work going on 2 decades and counting now, as I've mentioned before.  This non-recognition could very well be used as Exhibit A of systemic/structural leftist dishonesty.  It's one thing for the Rawl-ish 'liberals' not to be up on the finer points of dialectical method vis a vis capitalism, but leftists have no such excuse after the (in)famous Marxian appropriation of dialectics.)  So to restate: bad ideas will encourage bad techniques among their supporters, especially as time goes on and rebuttals come in; good ideas don't encourage this dynamic among their supporters although that doesn't mean that they won't still attract some bad/dishonest adherents (the ones whom the adherents of the bad ideas will (dishonestly) treat as the symptomatic of the (non-existent) badness of the good ideas, probably in addition to concocting outright smears of the good adherents/supporters).  This pattern has repeated so many times as to be unmistakable, or so my floated hypothesis in the context of gobs of previous observations suggests....  I also find it prima facie unacceptable for Rawls not to have countered Nozick's 50-page commentary on Rawls' theory in any remotely comparable way, and the pattern will continue to repeat until proponents of any ideas significantly to the left of (say) Milton Friedman ever address (head-on, in good faith) the basically-Randian point; adopting the standpoint of Rawls' Original Position or Nagel's impartiality, whatever their merits, won't justify statist coercion against non-force-initiating producers, especially in light of the unmistakable pattern of free markets raising living standards indefinitely and across the board.]

"The climate's always been changing" is either a mechanism for shutting down honest inquiry in someone's mind, or a good-faith invitation in someone's mind to inquire into how it might be different this time.  (While you can't rule out the latter, usually it's the former.  After all, any reputable climate scientist already accepts that the climate's always been changing, so that can't be what's in contention.  The rate of change is actually relevant.)  That the warming theory adopted by the IPCC is probably the best explanation for a vast web of data should probably be taken by a layperson as the default position departures from which require a really good argument that takes into account all the data (i.e., not evading the whole of the context) as well any actual and anticipated objections/counter-arguments.

As I pointed out in my Jan. '19 blog post ("How is a layperson..."), it would really be nice if there were a highly-publicized debate between (say) Michael Mann and (say) Richard Lindzen, for the benefit of laypeople and policymakers.  Why hasn't this happened?  If the debate on its merits really is over - if the IPCC report is pretty much the most definitive context-keeping picture we have right now of the climate situation - then how hard could it possibly be to get the uncoerced agreement of advocates and "skeptics" alike?  While I've personally experienced on many occasions dishonest leftists closing off the possibility of fair debate about Rand or capitalism, how pray tell does this dynamic play out when it comes to climate discussions, exactly?  The Right/"skeptics" accuse the Left/warmers of using various tactics to shut down debate, but my ring-of-truth heuristics tell me that this doesn't ring true about the climate debate because the central claims being made aren't made by those in the social sciences and humanities - people who can be expected to be promoting a political agenda - but by those in the STEM disciplines (which are then seized upon and amplified by the leftists in their usual dishonest ways in order to promote the anti-capitalism policy framework/mentality they were dishonestly promoting already).  Fine, don't pay any attention whatsoever to Al Gore - he's a messenger one might have any number of reasons to shoot - but how about a Michael Mann?  Is there something the "skeptics" have to employ against him other than dishonest/ context-disregarding smears?

So, to wrap up:  Yawning trust deficits.  Intellectual bankruptcy.  Philosophical literacy.

More in re: Huemer: "Please don't be Aristotelian"

"When and how would Aristotle - or more specifically, an Aristotelian - exercise the virtue of sardonic wit?" (asks UP)  "When it's all in fitting proportion and harmony, at the right time, in the right place, in the right measure, a phronemos will tend to figure it out over time.  Like, duh.  (If that means smoking a bowl to get warmed up, then so be it.)" (answers UP)

If there's one thing I learned in philosophy fight club, it's that those who go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line - er, uh, Aristoteles of Stagira, top student of Platon and tutor to Alexander the Great, founder of such systematic disciplines as dialectic, propositional logic, biology, psychology (let's just say De Anima, which I will get to in just a moment), whose theories took some nearly 2000 years for other thinkers to supersede, etc. etc. and whose most lasting and greatest contribution to philosophy as done today is found in the all-important area of ethics, perhaps along with the topic I'll cover next - those who dare denigrate this man as a philosopher have their work cut out for them to say the least.  He keeps getting misrepresented (and like an axiom accepted in the process, etc., as Rand points out) and each time he keeps getting back up.  Compare the shoddy treatment of Aristotle by a Bertrand Russell vs. the clue-having approach of a Christopher Shields & Co. at the Stanford Encyclopedia, just to get a small sampling of the oft-recurring picture here.

How would one be able to spot a first-rate metaphilosopher, BTW?  I have only semi-developed ideas toward systematic and reliable criteria in this regard.  Note that I begin with "dialectic" above, which (presented in a less famous book of writings known as the Topics) is philosophically fundamental to Aristotle's method of approach to any number of life's biggest questions, which yielded great (sprawlingly learned) results then and which I believe can be of timeless and lasting usefulness for human thinkers and actors.  ("Be cognitively and practically perfectionistic ffs.")

So, I'd like to apply Aristotelian method as exemplified in De Anima to contemporary pseudo-disputes in philosophy of mind - specifically, the "question" of whether some kind of substance dualism is necessary to understand the mind-body relation.  (A dialectic approach is by its very nature reactive against dualisms where they are posited....)  On the some-kind-of-dualist side (in the present day, not to mention the most famous and infludential mind-body dualist, Descartes) is David Chalmers, on the some-kind-of-Aristotelian/hylemorphist side is Daniel Dennett, noted atheist (doesn't believe in that supernatural tri-omni God, that's for sure) and (buzzword alert) philosophical naturalist (who might be thereby easily caricatured as a practitioner of scientism, for which see the not-unrelated Rapoport/Dennett Rules [bad news for leftists: advantage Rand & libertarianism]).

Now, Aristotelian-style hylemorphism - coming from the Greek roots for "matter" and "form" - says in basic essence that the soul is the form or organizing principle of a material body (and which in its most mature or developed or perfected activity or energeia - this also seems indispensable to what's Aristotelian proper - also serves as the final cause or telos or (in the case of humans) eudaemonic destiny of the organism).  And the point when it comes to philosophy of mind is that the soul or organizing principle ('mind' in the case of humans; 'sentience' in mentally less complex forms of consciousness) is inseparable from the body, both in the metaphysical sense (of things like dependence of one substance or substrate upon another), and in the conceptual sense (i.e., we can't coherently and sensibly conceive of the body-processes and soul-processes going on apart from one another, because their very nature as matter-principle and form-principle, and their functional and/or teleological explanations are inseparable from one another, and perhaps some other considerations).

My sardonic suggestion is this: dualism as represented by Descartes is a metaphysically inferior and magical-thinking-involving, and Aristotelian-style hylemorphism is not only the superior position but is just plain more commonsensical.  I mean, for fuck's sake already.

Now, there's this phrase sometimes or often thrown about in philosophy of mind discussions: "neural correlates of consciousness."  Now, everyone considerably learned has heard about the phrase "correlation doesn't imply causation."  So "neural correlates of consciousness" are not to be taken to mean neural causes of consciousness.  We wouldn't want to bias our terminology/framing illictly on behalf of a monocausal-dependency-relationship position (complicated by free will, which is a distinct but not unrelated issue), now, do we?  But what, then, does "neural correlates..." do in framing terms if not to indicate that it's a mere correlation or some 1:1 correspondence at best but we would be too quick in our framing to attribute any form of causation to this relationship (and which is perhaps merely put together in thought by habit of association, as Hume might put it)?

So "neural correlates" doesn't help us when some better alternative - let's just pull it out of my ass and call it "neural substrates of consciousness," say - is available to us, now, does it.  And what reason is there not to go with the commonsense understanding that what we have here is consciousness and its neural substrate (which is inseparable from what the hoi polloi might call a central nervous system [ffs already, do the folk really have more wisdom on this topic than the academic hairsplitters and would that be surprising?]).

So it wasn't until modern technology of scientific discovery that we find out in detail about these neural . . . this neural substrate of conscious states whereas before in the history of thought - not within the Aristotelian tradition, mind you, but in traditions of thought where true metaphysically real magic is believed to occur or explain the observed - it was not understood "how" the body would be the one and only container of the soul or mind.  (This "how" might be a simplified version of the famous so-called hard problem of consciousness as Chalmers formulates/frames it.)  But Aristotelian hylemorphism explains how in principle this (mutual?-)dependency relationship (body/matter and soul/form) is not only possible but inescapably necessary.  We just need to get careful in how we formulate mental or subject-perspective or first-person predicates on the one hand, as distinct from (but not altogether dualistically opposed to) how we formulate physical or third-person predicates on the other.

But here is how the first-person and third-person perspectives are inseparably linked in the hylemorphic framework: The MRI machine (say) locates some kind of activity in some portion of the brain and this is (causally) associated with the person's inner mental experience which only that person has direct or any other sort of full access to.  (Empathic pain at another's pain is very much associated with the others' first-person pain-access, but it's a different sort of unwanted mental state, what we might usually say is emotional pain rather than physical pain or bad-sensation.)  This is a commonsense distinction (what I experience on the one hand; what data the MRI picks up on the other), but it doesn't lend any support that I can see to a dualistic framing.  First-person experience is distinct from third-person observation or explanation, is all.

And it seems to me like Descartes, in his otherwise admirably independent-minded zeal to free his thought from scholastic-ish dogmas of a petrified 'Aristotelianism,' ditched the hylemorphic and biologically-based teleology baby along with the cosmic-teleology bathwater, and in the process came up with what must ultimately be deemed a shitty philosophy of mind (with magical thinking about the pineal gland as putative 'locus' of the [coincidental? incidental? occasional? parallel? wtf?] 'interaction' being the icing on the cake).

(On TV now, News channel headline: "Warren accuses Sanders of Sexism."  Really?  That's what gets the mass interest?  Genuinely fascinating... (Also, does Demo-rat Rep. Hakeem Jeffries not see how he's in self-parody mode whenever he uses the phrase "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," like in his latest, "Putin wants to artificially install his buddy Trump once again at 1600...".  This in addition to stuff like "Grand Wizard of 1600...".  The guy's a clown.))

Prof. Huemer likes common sense, he presumably prefers sophisticated explanations for common sense positions should tend to be preferred over the alternatives, we see how sophisticated treatments of the mind/body distinction (ugh) can run afoul of common sense, we can see how Cartesian or other dualism has fundamentally bad or misleading framing of the "problem" whereas Aristotelianism offers a compelling a dialectically-complete solution to the problem (read: compelling explanatory understanding of the phenomena taking systematically into account all the contributing and entailed phenomena), and yet Huemer chides those of us who identify (in serious and fundamental and quite-well-supported ways) as Aristotelian?  (If it's the term "Aristotelian" that's problematic, then: where would an intellectually-perfectionistic/dialectically-complete approach to philosophy of mind lead if not hylemorphism?  Alternatively: how does a non-caricatured (i.e., not eliminative-materialist but rather substrate-reductionist) Dennett not basically have the last word on the "problem"?)

[Addendum: just to make sure that the pro-hylemorphism point is sufficiently battered home: We might hear a dualist say something to the effect of, Well, the component or constituent parts of an organism don't have mental experiences.  The nerve fibers being impinged aren't the subjects of the pain; the organism is.  So that's why we are left to wonder how it is that at organism-scale all these non-conscious components end up giving rise to something conscious?  A parallel question arises with respect to free will: how can an organism composed of mechanically-determined components end up, at organism scale, having free will or self-direction capability?  And yet in both cases the Aristotelian seems to have the answer - that the person raising the question has already given the answer!  IOW: When we speak about what happens at organism-scale, we're already contextualizing what it is that's going on with the component parts such that we can't simply treat the nerve fibers being impinged upon in isolation from the explanatory framework (something something survival value and then also observations about the most mature or developed condition/activity of the organism [self-actualization in the case of humans, etc.]).  In this explanatory framework, the nerve fibers being impinged upon just is the efficient cause - the causing event - of the organism's pain-sensation.  One might say from the third-person explanatory standpoint that it just is the (locus of) the organism's pain-sensation (whether or not the organism is ever aware of the causal explanation).  (Hint: an Aristotelian might bring up distinctions in explanation or causal account as appropriate/fitting for the subject matter., without ruling out multiple accounts applicable to the same phenomena - hence, for example, why he says there are characteristically four distinct causes at work in nature, all interdependent but all contributing something irreducibly distinct and transferable across multiple phenomena.  (The wood constituted by wood molecules serves as a material principle or cause, a formal cause at the level of the wood's principle of organization, and this wood can be put to use either in a boat or in a house - a transferability characteristic.  The principle involved in nervous system tissue appearing across numerous instantiated organisms even though nervous system tissue is by no means easily transferable with present technology, is another example of the fourfold-causal principles at work at and what levels of explanation.)]

[Addendum #2: This is another can of worms, but Huemer basically says "Please don't be an Objectivist (Ayn Rand devotee)."  His interpretation of the content of Randian egoism varies quite a lot from mine (vetted by that Rand-and-dialectics guy at the head of that now-university-published Rand journal).  (The "hypothetical Objectivist" he describes is nothing like the actual friends-of-friends-of-Peikoff I had the great pleasure of real-time interacting with in person this past year; nothing noble-soul- or benevolent-sense-of-life-like about disintegrating a homeless person who adds two seconds to one's commute time.  Like, duh.)  I guess it's these sorts of variations in interpretations that can at least sometimes be philosophically interesting or instructive (as in: better application of Dennett/Rapoport Rules, please; too much failure at this throughout the history of philosophy and thought generally), which is why 'History of Philosophy' can remain a lively field.  Shouldn't we at least be up to snuff as to what/how a (representative figure like a) Christopher Shields understands as being 'authentically Aristotelian', if one isn't particularly interested in spending the bulk of one's scholarly time combing the history-of-philosophy scholarly literature?  (In the case of Rand/Objectivism, the leading scholarly authority around today would be Peikoff, so it helps to have a clue about this guy's input on what's what in Objectivism if one is to issue forth any sort of authoritative-sounding opinions about Rand/Objectivism.  This is by Ayn Rand's own public attestations in 1976 (Ayn Rand Letter) and 1980 (open letter of recommendation appearing in 1997's Letters of Ayn Rand) about Peikoff's expertise in her philosophic thought, no less.)]