Author: Tom Slee

A frustrated philosophy student of my acquaintance asks: "Are Philosophers Giving Up On Reason?" and reviews What Philosophers Know by Gary Gutting. (Short version: not much). 

Frustrated's conclusion:

Gutting sets out to show “what philosophers know.” But all that he ends up “showing” is that philosophers have become too afraid of radical skepticism to exercise any skepticism at all, too afraid of having their own false beliefs exposed to expose the false beliefs of others, and too distrustful of their own reason to accept it when it leads them counter to their intuition. 

I don't know the book, but I do think philosophy must do a better job if it wants to hold on to students who care about the state of the world.

Here's a tasty dollop of web-friendly populism from south of the border. Those Republicans want less government, and they're crowdsourcing it, mass-collaboration style. Here's Scott Aaronson:

the incoming Republican majority in Congress has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets ordinary Americans like me propose government programs for termination.  So imagine how excited I was to learn that YouCut’s first target—yes, its first target—was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation.  Admittedly, I’ve already tried to save NSF from some wasteful expenditures, in my occasional role as an NSF panel member.  But this is my first chance to join in as a plain US citizen.

Tom McCarthy being interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on Writers and Company about his new novel C :

When I did my research into emergent radio I was astonished to find, almost word for word, anticipations of the type of debates that were going on around the Internet from the '90s to now. You get wireless activists going "we don't want to be regulated, we don't want a central broadacster, it should remain many-to-many".

Surprising to me. Anyway, I'm off to buy Remainder or C, both of which sound entertaining.

The hacker ethic, open source, open government, radical transparency and mass collaboration: all these ideas are linked by a belief that the Internet will promote non-hierarchical organization, decentralization, “democratization”, openness and sharing. A  side effect of the WikiLeaks cables is to show that, for all the talk of movements and revolutions, these beliefs are empty of real political content. The cables prompt some tough questions, but the fault lines those questions reveal run perpendicular to digital attitudes, not parallel. When push comes to political shove, open source proponents and so on are found on both sides of the debate. The Internet is a new terrain, but the battles being fought on it are old ones.

For example, Open Government advocates are one group having a tough time reacting to the leaks, and their struggles show that the real issues are not the open source/hacker technological questions of openness, access to data, and transparency, but the old political question of “US foreign policy, for or against?”

“Is WikiLeaks open government?” asks O’Reilly’s Alex Howard, but he doesn’t answer his own question. Tech President’s Nancy Scola writes about “What WikiLeaks Means for ‘Open Government’” and also avoids coming down on for or against WikiLeaks. In typically gnomic fashion, Tim O’Reilly stays firmly on the fence, tweeting that WikiLeaks neither champions nor defies open government, instead it “*challenges* [open government government 2.0] philosophy. Challenges are good if we rise to them.” Whatever that means.

Of those who do take a position, some believe that WIkiLeaks is bad for open government (here, here for just two) and others (fewer, from what I can see) that it is good.

The internal struggle highlights an emptiness at the heart of the Open Government idea. It is based on the idea that more data available to more people will make government work better, either by improving efficiency and access (Open 311 etc) or by highlighting particular problems (maplight.org and so on), or perhaps both. But while WikiLeaks is making more data available to more people it has no interest in making the US government work better: quite the opposite. As Assange’s writings and this widely linked essay by Aaron Bady make clear, WikiLeaks is using information exposure to put sand in the gears of the US State Department.

There is one agreement among Internet/Open Government supporters, which is that the cables highlight excessive government secrecy, and that it shows us that government should be more open to start with. From Australia, Stephen Collins admits that “there’s an uncomfortable feeling in the open government world at the moment,” but goes on to argue that “phe­nom­ena such as Wik­ileaks are a symp­tom, rather than the dis­ease itself. Wik­ileaks exists because of the fail­ure of governments around the world to operate openly enough through­out their his­tory.” Jeff Jarvis makes the same argument, suggesting that nothing in the documents is that bad anyway: “the revelation of these secrets has not been devastating. America’s and Germany’s relationship has not collapsed because one undiplomatic diplomat called Angela Merkel uncreative.”

But while there are many cables in the pile that are of no interest to anyone and which seem to be marked as secret for no good reason, to focus on those is to ignore the real revelations that are coming out, day after day. The purpose of the leaks is to derail the American global agenda – if they haven’t succeeded, they will try again.

The openness question is always contingent, and to phrase political questions in terms of data is sidestepping the big issue. Your answer to “what data should the government make public?” depends not so much on what you think about data, but what you think about the government. Everyone is in favour of other people’s openness.

The same fault lines are appearing around issues such as Amazon and PayPal’s refusal to deal with WikiLeaks. Despite all the talk from the commanding heights of Silicon Valley about the Internet as an enabling technology for dissidents in other countries, especially Iran and China, the enthusiasm for dissent at home is muted. I am a dissident, you are a criminal?

(If anyone cares, my view is that the leaking of these WikiLeaks cables was a brave act and if it damages US foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere, which I think it will, I’m all for it.)

I know, I'm all sceptical about this web stuff. But Unionbook looks like an interesting initiative. Developed using Ning (a commercial platform) it provides a useful set of social networking tools for union members. You can find it at http://www.unionbook.org.

via cyberunions.org and Max Lombardi

Match the caption to the video (thanks to Chris Weagel for the middle one).  For the full effect play the videos simultaneously.

Captions

"PM, Toronto mayor say 'thugs' to blame for attacks"

"a bright day for retailers"

"shameful, dangerous and counterproductive"

"The violence prompted police to place Canada's largest city in a virtual state of lockdown"

"the American consumer has adapted to the economic climate over the last couple of years and is possibly spending more wisely as the holiday season begins"

"completely unacceptable"

"When it comes to Black Friday shopping, Hudgens said she most likes “the shopping (and) the savings but mostly the tradition."

"[Black Friday] really serves as a bright reminder that in a capitalist society competition and incentives are key to making the most of a voluntary transaction"

Videos

Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu wrote a bit for the Wall Street Journal called In the Grip of the New Monopolists. It's about Facebook, Google, eBay, Apple, and Amazon — and a bunch of people say he doesn't know what he's talking about.

George Mason University's Adam Thierer claims that Tim Wu Redefines Monopoly, and accuses Wu of being "hell-bent on redefining the English language". TechDirt's Mike Masnick states confidently that "domination of a market, by itself, does not create a monopoly", and goes on "if we look at the basic definition of a monopoly, you see that it's about having an exclusive situation – being the only seller in the market, or having exclusive control". In BusinessWeek and GigaOm Mathew Ingram picks up the story and declares "none of these examples – with the possible exception of Google and search – meets any kind of serious test of the term monopoly" and that "It's not clear what Wu even means by saying that Apple has a monopoly on "online content delivery."

But Wu is right and they are wrong. Monopoly is an economic term and he is writing in the Wall Street Journal, so it's not far-fetched to use the economic definition. And no less a source than Google's own economist Hal Varian defines a monopoly as "a situation where a market is dominated by a single seller". Not "where there is only one seller". The graduate text "The Theory of Industrial Organization" by Jean Tirole says that "most of the [monopoly] phenomena here could be derived even in the presence of competitors as long as the firm retained some market power. So it's pretty clear that economists use the term the way Wu does.

I did point this out in the comments to Adam Thierer's piece, and Cato Institute's Jim Harper (or maybe some other Jim Harper?) replied that "The stylized version of the word "monopoly" adopted by some economists is fine for them to use in talking among themselves. In the Wall Street Journal, readers will take it to mean "one seller," just like they take "monorail" to mean "one rail" and "monotheism" as the belief in one god, etc."

But is that how people use the word in everyday life? Let's turn to a couple of tech columnists to see how they use "monopoly". Here is one Mike Masnick: "In the past, Microsoft used to be willing to admit that unauthorized copies helped the company, as it helped establish its software as a near-monopoly in certain areas, and kept competitors out." Or how about one Mathew Ingram – the one who says "It's not clear what Wu even means by saying that Apple has a monopoly…"-arguing against a suggestion that micropayments can work for newspapers:

Reifman defends his approach by pointing to several successful models of payment for services, including iTunes, text messaging, TiVo, and broadband Internet. The first thing that leaped out at me is that three of those four things — iTunes, text messaging and broadband Internet — are a result of something approaching a monopoly (or an oligopoly or cartel, in the case of text messaging and broadband Internet). Apple can charge for music because it controls access to the songs from all the major record labels. Phone companies and cable companies can charge usurious rates for text messaging and Internet because they have little or no real competition.

Yes, I guess people really do use "monopoly" the way Tim Wu does.