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Archives for April 2018

Private Data as Currency

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After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Mark Zuckerberg was called before the United States Congress to be grilled for political points. It is not yet clear what political payoff Congress will receive from the event; but Zuckerberg made $ billion. It is not clear what, if any, action congress will take in response to the matter, but there are some interesting subjects here. I will focus on the idea that private data is a currency.

When I signed up for Facebook, I quickly realized that the deal was quite simple: Facebook would squeeze every droplet of data from my online activities, siphon them up for processing and monetize the results. In return, I would get access to certain Facebook services. Google also offers a similar deal—in return for the data blood they can suck out of my online life, they offer various useful services. I had no delusions that my data would not end up in the hands of third parties so that they could exploit it for monetary gains or other, more nefarious, purposes. Naturally, neither Facebook nor Google put it in these terms. Facebook, for example, makes a rather large production of how they respect our privacy and tout their suite of privacy controls. When Facebook gets caught doing what it does, Zuckerberg or his minions engage in an apology tour, wringing their hands at how naïve they were to put their trust in some wicked organization. Then they go back to monetizing the data and crafting new apology algorithms.

It might be suspected from what I have just said that I have no issue with what Facebook and other companies have done. After all, it seems that they acted exactly as I expected. However, this does not entail that I agree with their actions. To use an analogy, when I go into the woods behind my house, I expect the ticks to try to get on me and drink my blood. I do not, however, approve of these actions. This is because they are stealing my blood and only giving a risk of disease in return.

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But, if allowing the ticks to drink my blood somehow yielded a meaningful advantage to me, such as improving my resistance to diseases (rather than exposing me to them), then I would certainly consider striking a “deal” with the ticks—it could be worth trading some blood for something useful. This is my relation to Facebook—I am trading some digital blood for some useful services. Unlike ticks, the people of Facebook are intelligent—so I can strike a meaningful deal with them. The key question is sorting out what sort of deal would be rational and ethical.

While Facebook and Google say that many of their services are free, there is no such thing as a free service (to modify the old saying)—the user trades something of value for something of value. There is obviously nothing inherently wrong with an exchange—one might even argue that is how reality works even in terms of basic physical laws. As such, Facebook, Google and others should not be criticized for engaging in receiving value in return for their services. However, by presenting them as free they are being disingenuous. Going back to the tick analogy, imagine that Tammy the tick said she would give me resistance to diseases for free by biting me, but left out the part that she would be sucking some of my blood. This is what Facebook and company do: they profess to offer a free service, then extract value from the users.

It could be said that just as a person should know that Tammy the tick will suck blood, one should know that the “free” Facebook is really paid for by allowing Facebook to profit from user data. The easy and obvious reply is that people should not be expected to know that “free” services come at a cost; such exchanges should be made openly. If Tammy the tick made it clear she would take some blood in return for disease protection, then I could enter an informed deal. Likewise, if Facebook was clear about the money it makes off its users and how it does so (without, of course, revealing key trade secrets), they could enter an informed deal. If ticks could really grant disease resistance, it could be quite reasonable to trade a little blood for this advantage. Likewise, users who know what they are yielding to Facebook and other companies and regard it as worth the real cost would find it quite reasonable to enter such deals. This does, of course, require that these companies are honest about their business model: they are not free, users are paying in the currency of private data.

While our economic system is built on power imbalances and intentionally maintained ignorance, a rational and ethic deal requires that users know the value of what they are giving up. To use an analogy, if Tammy the tick could exchange my blood with other vermin for far more than the value of the disease resistance she offers, then I am being ripped off—Tammy is exploiting me. But, if Tammy is honest about her blood profits and makes it clear that she is earning them through her efforts, then the deal can still be rational and ethical. Going back to Facebook, if they are clear about what my data is worth to them in terms of profits, then I can enter a rational and ethical deal by deciding if what I give up is worth what I get. Obviously enough, for Tammy the tick and Facebook to make a profit, they must give the user less value than what they receive—but this is a matter of capitalism and not a special matter for companies like Facebook.

If private data is looked at as a currency, Facebook, Google and other data dealers who offer goods and services for data could and should work out an honest payment system. Just as a person can select various goods and services based on their monetary costs, users should be able to do the same in terms of the privacy costs. To illustrate, a user might have the option to provide Facebook with the bare minimum of data needed for the account to exist and get in return the bare minimum of services. A user could elect to upgrade their services in return for giving Facebook broader permission to monetize their data.

It could be argued that the value of private data cannot be calculated like a currency, so this could never work. The easy and obvious reply is that Facebook and Google already monetize privacy—they are aware of the value of the data. While the value can fluctuate and vary between people, this is no different from any other commodity or currency that is assigned value. As such, it is time to end the lie of “free” services and put the private data dollars on the table for all to see. The question that remains as to what the private data currency should be called. While it might be amusing to say “Google has got me by the privates”, “privates” would thus obviously be a bad choice. So would “P coin”, “P dollars” and anything involving “P” (though Trump might be intrigued by “P” as a currency). Perhaps Privcoin? Hmm, that would allow the “Privycoin” joke. Well, the naming must be left to the folks in marketing.

 

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Minibrains, Lobsters, & Fetuses

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Researchers have created what are popularly known as “minibrains” and more formally known as cerebral organoids. As the popular name implies, the typical minibrain is a pea-sized collection of a few million human neural cells. A full human brain consists of about 85 billion cells. These minibrains are typically spawned by transforming human skin cells into the neural peas.  As should be imagined, these minibrains raise serious ethical concerns.

One of the main concerns is that since minibrains are human neural masses, they could have or develop consciousness and thus feel or even think. Since moral status often rests on mental attributes, this means that these entities might someday possess a moral status. The challenge is, of course, determining when they achieve that status. This is the classic philosophical problem of other minds: how do I know that other entities feel or think as I do?  Interestingly enough, this problem also applies to a food favorite of my home state of Maine, the lobster.

Thanks to thinkers like Descartes, animals have long been regarded as biological machines that do not have minds or, in some cases, even feel. While scientists now tend to regard higher animals as capable of feeling and even thinking, lobsters are generally seen as being pure automatons that neither feel nor suffer. However, there has been some concern expressed about the suffering of lobsters and Switzerland has banned the boiling of live lobsters. The moral justification is, of course, that boiling lobsters alive is unnecessary suffering. Oddly enough, few take the next obvious moral step: if boiling them is wrong, then killing and eating them would also seem to be wrong.

I am inclined to think that while lobsters are not mentally complex, they do feel pain. The reason for this is basically the same reason I think you feel pain: reasoning by analogy. I know that I, as a living thing, feel pain and dislike it. I note that you, as another human, are like me. So, I infer that you also feel pain and probably dislike it. While lobsters are rather different from me, they do have some similarities: they are alive, they interact with their environment, they have nerves and so on. As such, they probably feel pain as well. It must be noted that there are those who deny that humans think or feel—so denying this of lobsters is not particularly odd. Naturally, the relative simplicity of lobsters does suggest that they do not have a depth of feeling; but pain would seem to be among the simplest of feelings.

The moral concerns about the minibrains and the lobsters arise, as noted above, from their alleged ability or potential to feel. The epistemic concern is, of course, how to know this. As should come as no surprise, the same concerns arise about fetuses in the case of abortion: the epistemic and moral problem is knowing when the zygote gains moral status. Obviously, if lobsters can have moral status, then fetuses would also get it rather early in the development cycle—at least at the point when they have a nervous system at least as complex as a lobster.

In the case of the minibrains, scientists want to use them for research that is advantageous to humans. This can be morally justified on utilitarian grounds: the advantages gained from the possible suffering of the minibrains is outweighed by the gains to science. In the case of the lobsters, those who eat them would argue that their enjoyment in eating lobster meat outweighs the suffering of the lobster.

In both these cases, it is a matter of competing interests: the minibrains and lobsters presumably would prefer to avoid suffering and death, while the humans want to experiment on or eat them, as appropriate. The same sort of reasoning also applies to abortion: there are competing interests between the woman who wishes to have an abortion and the interest of the fetus in not dying. While it can be contended that the fetus has no idea of interests, the same can be said of simple minibrains and lobsters. As such, the same moral reasoning can be applied in all three cases: it is competition between the interests of a fully developed person and an entity that is significantly inferior in capabilities. As such, the ethics of the minibrains seems to have already been addressed in terms of the ethics of how we treat animals and the ethics of abortion. This, of course, means that there is no resolution—but it is hardly new territory.

 

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Confederate Monuments, Again

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The city of Memphis recently took down two Confederate statues, prompting retaliation from the Tennessee state legislature. While this Republican driven imposition on local government seems to be within the law, there is also the question of whether the removal is right or not. While there are various arguments advanced to defend keeping Confederate monuments in place, I will consider two: the appeal to heritage and the appeal to history. While the two are similar, they are distinct enough to warrant considering them separately.

Heritage is something inherited from the past and, in this context, it would be a feature of the culture. While the term usually has a positive connotation, it is neutral in actual meaning since a heritage might include terrible things. In terms of how heritage differs from history, a heritage belongs to a specific group and is thus limited. History, though it is about particulars, belongs to everyone and more will be said about this latter.

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The appeal to heritage argument is typically quite simple: Confederate statues are part of the heritage of certain people, heritage should be preserved, so these statues should be preserved. The obvious challenge is showing that this sort of heritage should be preserved.

One way to do this is to own the evil of the Confederacy, specifically the fact that it existed to defend slavery. This is, of course, part of the heritage of the United States as whole. This approach obviously justifies the preservation of such monuments to evil as Auschwitz. Unfortunately for this approach, these statues praise their subjects rather than condemning their misdeeds and memorializing their victims. Obviously enough, defenders of these monuments generally do not own the evil that is the heritage of America as such they are advancing a narrative that is contrary to the facts of history and more will be said about this later. As such, the heritage argument only has merit if the truth of the heritage is owned. To embrace a sanitized version is to reject the facts of history. This, appropriately enough, takes us to the appeal to history.

History, in the sense of Herodotus, is not merely the recording of events but their analysis. History, as an academic discipline, is supposed to be as neutral as possible. Unlike heritage, which is inherited by specific people, history is for everyone. As should come as no surprise, appealing to historical value can be a very reasonable way to argue for preservation of artifacts.

It is easy enough to make a case for preserving artifacts of terrible and evil events. As noted above, Auschwitz is rightly preserved as an historical site—it is a place of great significance. The same is true of memorials to victims of lynching. These examples show that historical value is consistent with moral value judgments, so the Confederate monuments could be defended on the grounds that keeping them preserves history.

In terms of preserving these monuments, the key concern is the justification of the preservation. It could be claimed that the monuments are being preserved in a neutral manner: they are simply historical artifacts preserved because they are old and supposedly significant. While some monuments to the dead were constructed after the war, the vast majority of Confederate monuments were raised during the Jim Crow era and obviously intended to send a statement to African Americans. As such, claims about historical value have little merit—unless the argument is that the tools of intimidation from the Jim Crow era should be preserved as relics of evil.

A rather obvious problem with arguing that these monuments are neutral historical artifacts is that they clearly honor the subjects—while a statue can have historical value, merely representing an historical figure is obviously not a good reason to preserve them. We do not, for example, have statues for Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer or mass shooters simply because they are historically important. Interestingly, there is a statue for Benedict Arnold that honors his heroism before he became a traitor.

If the statues are defended in terms of moral values, it would have to be claimed that slavery, treason and racism are good and should be honored. This is absurd on the face of it, though certainly appealing to modern racists.

One interesting variation on the appeal to history argument is the erasing history argument. This argument is that the monuments should not be removed because doing so would erase history. There is usually an analogy made to ISIS and how they endeavored to destroy various historical sites.

While historical artifacts should be preserved, this argument is easy enough to counter. As already noted above, the monuments are not historically significant in the sense being claimed. They were constructed during the Jim Crow era to send a message to African Americans. As such, they would be worthy of preservation in a manner similar to having monuments on the site of a lynching—they are artifacts of something awful. There is also the rather important point that keeping them in place means that they continue to function as intended: as statements of racism and instruments of intimidation.

In terms of erasing history, removing a monument that honors the Confederacy does not erase history: the artifacts will, in general, be preserved and the historical record remains. While there have been attempts to revise the history to make it about things other than slavery, the history of the South remains recorded. As such, removing the statues does not erase history. Rather, it expresses a rejection of the values of racism and slavery.

 

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Live Water

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Like water, stupid health fads flow forth constantly. One of the most recent is “live water.” This has apparently become big in Silicon Valley, once again proving the old Dungeons & Dragons adage that intelligence is not the same as wisdom. Or perhaps showing, once more, that the folks in Silicon Valley are not as smart as they think they are. Or perhaps they are just pranking the rest of the world.

If you are not familiar with it, live water is supposed to be untreated water—you know, the sort of water one finds literally falling from the sky. While it is easy enough to get your own live water, it can also be bought at a rather high price.

As is usual with such things, part of the problem is live water is being actively pitched by (somewhat) charismatic people who are either skilled in deceit or engaged in willful self-deception. One reason this is worrisome is that people are wasting money on water that is just, well, water. The other obvious problem is that if live water is really “live”, then it stands a good chance of being contaminated with bacteria, viruses, various microorganisms, toxins and other things that sensible people do not want in their water. This is, after all, why modern civilizations work hard to have clean water and people with wilderness experience are careful to decontaminate the water they drink. In addition to concerns about scams and health issues, there is also the philosophical concern of the ethics of belief.

In popular culture, epistemology (the study of knowledge) is best known from the problem of the external world and the problem of other minds. The problem of the external world, as exemplified by movies like the Matrix and shows like Legion, is about the question of how we know that there is a really real world for real. The problem of other minds, as exemplified by the movie Ex Machina, is about the question of how I know other entities have minds. The ethics of belief is a less flashy, but important, problem that raises questions about what we should believe and under what conditions.

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John Locke, in his discussion of enthusiasm, argued that “the one unerring mark by which a man may know whether he is a lover of truth for truth’s sake is the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.” Locke lays out a convincing case for this which focuses mainly on the consequences of not following his principle. In addition to the more mundane harms of entertaining unsupported beliefs, Locke also notes that a person runs the risk of coming under the influence of the Prince of Darkness—something obviously best avoided. This view is expanded upon by a later Brit.

In his “The Ethics of Belief”, British philosopher W.K. Clifford uses an example of a shipowner who sends an unsafe emigrant ship to sea by convincing himself that the ship will be fine. Of course, the ship sinks and he collects the insurance money without any guilt. Clifford contends that the sincerity of a belief does not exculpate such a person because they have no right to have that belief. Clifford goes on to argue that people are obligated to get into a position in which they only believe based on adequate evidence.

In the case of live or raw water, the scientific evidence is overwhelming that it, at best, has no benefits and, at worst, can cause severe health problems. As such, the people selling it based on unsupported beliefs are violating their epistemic duties—they are believing without evidence and, in fact, believing in the face of extremely strong evidence to the contrary. So, if they are engaged in the sort of sincere rationalization that Clifford describes, they are also acting unethically—after all, the evidence is readily available and well established.  If the sellers know that they are engaged in potentially dangerous scam, they are also engaged in a different sort of unethical behavior. But what about the consumer?

In Clifford’s example, the harm is being inflicted by the believer on others. In the case of a consumer who has false beliefs about live water, they are only harming themselves. On the one hand, it does make sense to argue that a person should not harm themselves, that they have a duty to themselves in this matter.

At the very least, they owe it to themselves to act based on beliefs that are well supported, so that they can make informed choices. In the case of the live water, the consumers claim to be drinking it for the health benefits. As such, false beliefs about the water will cause them to act contrary to their intent: they want to be healthy, but their false beliefs can lead to health problems.

On the other hand, it can be argued that people have the right to believe as they wish when doing so only harms themselves. So, if someone wants to ignore evidence and believe that live water is healthy, they have the liberty do so. This could be seen as going along with a right I have argued for in the past, the right to self-abuse. This right is based on Mill’s principle of liberty—that people have the freedom to do as they wish, provided they do not harm others, even if they do harm themselves. However, it can be argued that even the right of self-abuse does not allow people a right to hold beliefs without adequate evidence.

In the case of self-abuse, a person has the right to self-harm. However, this does not give others the right to harm them through deceit. So, for example, a person who knows smoking is harmful and smokes is acting within this liberty. A person who lies to others who would not smoke if they knew it was harmful does not have a right to lie. As such, it can be contended that the right to self-abuse requires that a person know they are abusing themselves—that they are not harming themselves via self-deception So, a person who thinks that the water is healthy and would not drink it if they knew it was unhealthy is not exercising a right to self-abuse, but is acting in foolish ignorance.

This could be countered by pushing the point that people have the right to hurt themselves even if they are doing so out of a form of willful ignorance—that the right of self-abuse extends to information assessment and decision making, even if the person would not engage in this self-harm if they knew the facts. That is, people have a right to self-harm through willful ignorance even if they do not actually want to harm themselves. To me, this seems fundamentally incoherent—but other people no doubt have other intuitions. In any case, do not drink live water unless you are interested in some real-life Oregon trail experiences.

 

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Liberal Sauce

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The visit of Mark Zuckerberg’s to congress provided an interesting juxtaposition between the criticism of Facebook as a rapacious corporation and Ted Cruz’s criticism that Facebook is a bastion of anti-conservative liberalism.  Zuckerberg did allow that Silicon Valley leans hard left but denied the charge of bias. While the matter of bias is interesting, I will set it aside to consider Zuckerberg’s claim that Silicon Valley is left leaning.

On the face of it, the valley does seem to tilt to the left. Zuckerberg and his brethren do tend to embrace the leftist positions on various social issues. For example, Apple’s Tim Cook is routinely praised for his advocacy of LGBT rights. In general, one might say, the Silicon Left has embraced the narrative of identity politics. Interestingly, some have argued that this focus on identity politics has cost the Democrats dearly in terms of votes lost to Trump and his fellows. While this claim can be contested, it is not without merit. However, a proper analysis does require a bit more nuance. While it seems likely that the Democrat focus on identity politics made the forgotten Americans feel forgotten, this would not have been a major problem if it had not been for another major factor: the correct belief on part of the forgotten that the elites, including the elites on the left, did not care about them. In fact, it would be reasonable to say that the elites actively harmed the forgotten Americans. Before getting back to the Silicon Left, I need to tell a seemingly unrelated story from my college days. But, I assure you, it will be quite relevant.

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When I was in college, the cafeteria served a mystery meat—a breaded patty of some sort of meat and probably soy as filler. This meat was quite magical—by pouring different sauces on it, the cooks could transmute it into beef (brown sauce), chicken (yellowish sauce) or pork (light brown sauce). Under the sauce, as far as any of us could tell, it was the same meat adjacent mass.

The point of this is to set up an obvious metaphor: the elites are like the meat mass: they are almost all essentially the same under the thin layer of sauce: they do not care about the lower/middle classes and are simply out for power, money or fame.

While the idea that the conservative elites do not care about the forgotten Americans and actively harm them with the implementation of their environmental and economic ideologies is well known, the fact is that the left elites are also guilty of at least cruel indifference if not active harm. While this might seem odd, given that the leftist elites are harshly accused by their conservative elite brethren of wanting to coddle the poor, it is quite real. The Clintons, for example, were instrumental to the rise of globalism and shaping it in ways that have been catastrophic to American workers and the middle class. In this regard, Trump’s criticism of globalism does have merit: while it has been amazing for the corporations, it has been harmful to many American workers.

In the case of the Silicon Left, they are also the same sort of meat masses under that liberal sauce. For example, consider Apple’s Cook. While Cook, as noted above, is considered a champion of LGBT rights, Apple is infamous for the human rights violations in its supply chains. While Cook also professes liberal values, his company dodges paying the taxes that could be used to fund all those social programs that are supposed to be beloved of liberals. Zuckerberg, who also follows speaks within the narrative of the left, heads up a company best known for an economic strategy based on privacy violations and monetizing racism, ageism, sexism, and xenophobia. It could be countered that folks in the Silicon Left and other left elites do donate to charities, praise going green, do speak on social issues, and have enlightened policies for their top employees. While this is all true and does make some difference, this is the liberal sauce and not the meat. Under that sauce are the values that allow the above-mentioned human rights violation, tax evasion and so on.

While it might be pointed out that the Silicon Left is no worse than the right, this is not exactly the case. The Silicon Left purports to be liberal, caring and dedicated to “doing no evil.” While this might hold true regarding certain social issues and identity politics, it does not apply to core economic concerns and even basic human rights. This compounds their misdeeds with hypocrisy. As such, the liberalism of the Silicon Left is just sauce deep.

 

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Crisis Pregnancy Centers III: Free Speech

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As J.S. Mill and many others have argued, the freedom of expression is a fundamental liberty. As such, it would be reasonable for proponents of crisis pregnancy centers to make use of it. As noted in my previous essays, crisis pregnancy centers purport to offer an alternative to abortion—though they seem to routinely engage in deception rather than honest persuasion. This leads to some interesting moral questions about the freedom of expression.

To get the obvious out of the way, those who work for crisis pregnancy centers have the moral right to express their views on abortion. They also have the moral right to try to persuade others to accept their views and to talk women out of having abortions. After all, a key part of the freedom of expression is the freedom to engage with others who are willing to listen to argue for one’s views or persuade others to accept them. As such, the freedom of expression of these centers (which is just shorthand for the freedom of expression of the people who work for them) is not in dispute. However, there are some matters that are not quite as obvious.

One concern, which was addressed in my previous essay, is the ethics of deceit. While people do have the right to express their views, there is not a moral right to engage in willful deception—the freedom of expression is not a ticket to lie. As I have argued elsewhere, a person can be in error and yet not be lying: lying requires that the person knows they are engaging in an untruth and that they have the right (or, rather, wrong) sort of intention. So, if the folks at the centers really believe the factual untruths they tell women, then they are not lying. However, this does not get them off the moral hook completely—there is also an ethics of epistemology (the theory of knowledge). Just as there is a moral obligation, as per Aquinas, to consider one’s actions before acting, there is also an obligation to confirm one’s beliefs before trying to get others to accept them. The seriousness of this obligation, as with actions, is in proportion to the seriousness of the effects of the belief. So, not being careful about unimportant claims is not a big deal but being careless about claims about birth control’s efficacy or the medical effects of abortion would be morally unacceptable. As with any liberty, there are also associate responsibilities and due diligence and honesty about the claims one makes are part of these responsibilities. That is, freedom of expression is not freedom from truth and research.

A second concern is the matter of values. While people do not have a right to their own facts, they do have the right to their own values (and the responsibility of the consequences of those values). While some folks embrace the self-defeating notion that relativity of values requires tolerance (it self-defeats because claiming tolerance as an objective value contradicts relativism), it would beg the question to assume that values are objective (or subjective). Even if values are objective (that is, some get things right and some get things wrong), there is still the obvious problem of sorting out which values are right. Because of this, it is rather more difficult to show that someone has made an error of values—that they have the wrong values. This, obviously enough, allows of some clear exceptions: those who advocate things like rape and genocide have indisputably gotten things objectively wrong. However, there is a vast territory in dispute and this legitimate dispute helps warrant the freedom of expression: since we do not know what is right in many cases, it would be both foolish and wrong to silence people with differing views.

While the various sides in abortion tend to believe they have the objective truth of the matter; the broad topic of abortion is morally complicated and an area of reasonable moral dispute. Those who think they have the right answer still have an excellent reason to accept this, if only on pragmatic grounds: if they are winning now, they might be on the outs tomorrow and hence need the freedom to make their case. If they are on the outs now, they obviously want the freedom to make their case now. As such, the center folks have the right to present their values as do those who disagree with them.

The final concern I will address is the matter of compelled listening. While there have been some interesting legal cases involving compelled speech, there is also the interesting moral matter of compelled consumption of expression. The easy and obvious view on this matter is that people have no right to expect others to listen to them and they do not, with some notable exceptions, have the right to harass people under the guise of free expression. To use the obvious analogy, you have the right to swing a knife around as much as you wish—as long as you are not slashing away at other people. Likewise, you can express yourself however you wish, provided that the expression is not aimed at harassing, coercing or harming others. I will admit the obvious problem of sorting out what counts as harassment, coercion and harm and note that this is a problem that can be solved by considering specific types of cases and also by developing general guidelines. For example, college students have no legitimate grounds to claim that a speaker who holds a view they dislike is automatically harming them. As another example, a student who is shouting vitriol and drowning out a speaker they disagree with is both violating the speaker’s right to free expression and endeavoring to compel others to listen to them over the speaker, thus they are in the process of trying to violate two distinct rights.

Returning to the centers, they do have every right to try to persuade, but the tactics that are coercive, deceptive or harassing are not protected by the freedom of expression. While they do have the right to express their views, they do not have the right to trick, harass or coerce others into listening or accepting their views. Naturally, the general principles at work here apply generally, especially to the freedoms of people I disagree with.

 

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