anotherpanacea

Tag: Epistemic Institutional Design

  • Bullshit and Journalism

    This weekend’s revelation that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple and Foxconn was partly fabricated has led some bloggers and journalists to return to the question of how we should interpret the relationship between something called “facts” and something Daisey is calling “higher truth.” This distinction seems spurious to me, though we often hear it described in…

  • This is What Epistocracy Looks Like

    Most academics know some version of the critique of elite rule, administrative power, and centralized regulation by experts. Hannah Arendt called bureaucracy the “rule of No Man;” Michel Foucault described the overlap of legislative power, knowledge-production, and the apparatus of discipline and control; Iris Marion Young defended simple street activism against the demand that political…

  • Fear of Democracy

    While there is much more to be said about the risks associated with advocating “experimental disenfranchisement,” I stand by the claim that we cannot ignore the widespread temptation towards disenfranchising ignorant citizens. We must at least acknowledge that the challenge is not simply coming from nowhere: Jason Brennan reflects a widespread, even common-sensical, fear of…

  • Must we destroy the profession in order to save it?

    Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting, 2011, page 5: “The right to vote and the rightness of voting are different things. I do not argue that we should disenfranchise anyone. Though I think many voters are wrong to vote, I will not argue that anyone should prevent them from voting.” (Emphasis mine) Eric Schliesser, New APPS,…

  • Deciding Whether or Not to Tell a Story

    When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “Truth and Beauty” with the poet Ann Lauterbach. It was basically a class on reading and writing essays, but I took it because I was a philosophy major and I thought it would be about aesthetics, i.e. about whether judgments about beauty can be true…

  • Democracy Means Asking the Right Questions

    Whenever I talk to students about democracy, I like to emphasize that the original term for democratic rule was isonomy. Consider the account Otanes gives in Herodotus’ History: “[T]he rule of the multitude [plêthos de archon] has… the loveliest name of all, equality [isonomiên]…. It determines offices by lot, and holds power accountable, and conducts all deliberating…

  • The Commons: Restore or Build New?

    Most discussions of the Commons assume that common-pool resources are supplied by nature, like the English fields that were available to locals for grazing, cultivation, and hay-cutting until the Inclosure Acts. However, it is equally possible to create new common pool resources for local control. Kojo Nnamdi spent an hour on his radio show yesterday…

  • 23 Things about Capitalism

    In his new book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang offers a progressive explanation for what Tyler Cowen calls “The Great Stagnation,” the slowing growth in public goods available for consumption or redistribution. Between his various jibes at a strawman version of the standard economic model, Chang offers a persuasive analysis…

  • What can small groups do?

    I’ve just returned from two weeks at the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies, which culminated in a conference attended by 117 researchers, practitioners, philanthropists, and public officials interested in expanding the role of citizens in our democracy. Peter Levine summed up the conference here: The Frontiers conference was modeled on No Better Time, a…

  • John Jay College Report on Catholic Sex Abuse

    Following up their earlier study, John Jay College has produced an analysis of the sex abuse scandal in the US. I think it is mostly quite a good analysis, though there are a few weakness and one or two unnecessarily controversial claims tied to those weaknesses. To my mind, the most crucial section is this passage, which…