Gelernter

The best scientists are often the ones who are plainest about their non-scientific interests. Feynman's intro physics books are the best of all physics intros in part because he talks freely about beauty: Here's a beautiful theorem. Here's a beautiful fact. My own small contributions to software were guided at every step by my search for beautiful design. More important, as I argue in my recent book on the spectrum of consciousness: who knows most about the human mind? Today it's John Coetzee, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick. That’s why the book turns to novelists and poets at least as often as to neurobiologists and psychologists. I've had far more sustained, intense reaction to my one novel (1939) than to anything else I've published.
 

The short stories I've published over the years in Commentary have been read by maybe six people each; but the reaction from readers of those stories, in seriousness, intelligence, and depth, swamps the reaction to any science, tech, or political piece I've published.
 

From 20 ideas from David Gelernter.

Beauty is objective.  
 

Take any civilization, ask for its artistic masterpieces; today, they are almost guaranteed to be valuable all over the world. There’s almost nothing less subjective than the sense of beauty.
 

What replaces religion for teaching ethics?

It used to be that nearly all American children were reared as Christians or Jews. In the process they were given comprehensive ethical views, centering on the Ten Commandments and the “golden rule,” and God’s requirements as spelled out by the prophet Micah: “Only to do justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.”
 

As a result American were not paragons; but they had a place to start.  Today many or most children in the intellectual or left-wing part of the nation are no longer reared as Christians or Jews. What ethical laws are they taught? Many on the left say “none, and it doesn’t matter”—a recipe for one of the riskiest experiments in history.  
 

The left, and my colleagues in the intelligentsia, need to come to terms with this issue. Rear your children to be atheists or agnostics—fine. But turning them loose on the world with no concept of right and wrong is unacceptable. You might well say that Jewish and Christian ethical teaching managed to accomplish remarkably little; but if you believe that, and propose to teach your children even less than the bare bones that proved (you say) so inadequate, then your irresponsibility is obvious. Choose the ethical code you like, but choose something and make sure they know it.
 

I did a year of policy debate in high school. The topic we debated that year nationally was whether the United States should increase space travel. The entire format is too specifically niche, and winning relied too much on speaking at unreasonably high speeds, past the point of comprehension, flooding your opponent with too many points to counter. It was interesting to learn, throughout the season, of what cases the top teams in the state were building and to try to find vulnerabilities in those cases through research and logic, but in hindsight, teaching kids to defend a broader set of topics across philosophy, logic, and ethics would've been a more useful exercise.

I'd enjoy a site that posted one such debate each week, with two leading thinkers trading blows in written form, with judges, or perhaps the public, voting on a winner at the end. More interesting might be to let a coin flip determine who'd argue the pro or con side.

The case for opening borders

The overwhelming majority of would-be immigrants want little more than to make a better life for themselves and their families by moving to economic opportunity and participating in peaceful, voluntary trade. But lawmakers and heads of state quash these dreams with state-sanctioned violence—forced repatriation, involuntary detention, or worse—often while paying lip service to “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
 

Wage differences are a revealing metric of border discrimination. When a worker from a poorer country moves to a richer one, her wages might double, triple, or rise even tenfold. These extreme wage differences reflect restrictions as stifling as the laws that separated white and black South Africans at the height of Apartheid. Geographical differences in wages also signal opportunity—for financially empowering the migrants, of course, but also for increasing total world output. On the other side of discrimination lies untapped potential. Economists have estimated that a world of open borders would double world GDP.
 

Even relatively small increases in immigration flows can have enormous benefits. If the developed world were to take in enough immigrants to enlarge its labor force by a mere one percent, it is estimated that the additional economic value created would be worth more to the migrants than all of the world’s official foreign aid combined. Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised.
 

Alex Tabarrok makes the case for opening borders, and it's a strong one. The ultimate NIMBY-ism isn't at the city level, it's at a national level. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but just a few of them, the rest, the masses, they're on their own.

I would not be where I am today had my parents not come to the United States from Taiwan when my dad entered graduate school. Go back further, and my parents were lucky to be able to migrate to Taiwan during the turmoil in the 50's in China. I'm entirely the product of a long line of good fortune.

As noted in Good Luck Being Born Tomorrow, which I've linked to before:

97% of people born tomorrow will be in a country that is authoritarian, communist, doesn’t support same sex marriage, does not allow abortion, supports capital punishment or has seen over ten thousand deaths in recent armed conflicts. Good luck!
 

If you were reborn tomorrow, assigned randomly to be one of the babies born somewhere in the world, your odds of being as fortunate as you are now (I assume you are one of the lucky ones given you're reading this post) are worse than the odds of flipping a coin and drawing heads. A lot worse.

To believe that those not as fortunate deserve no chance to improve their lot, that takes a deep sense of privilege. As Tabarrok notes:

What moral theory justifies using wire, wall, and weapon to prevent people from moving to opportunity? What moral theory justifies using tools of exclusion to prevent people from exercising their right to vote with their feet?
 

No standard moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-developed perspective, regards people from foreign lands as less entitled to exercise their rights—or as inherently possessing less moral worth—than people lucky to have been born in the right place at the right time. Nationalism, of course, discounts the rights, interests, and moral value of “the Other, but this disposition is inconsistent with our fundamental moral teachings and beliefs.
 

Freedom of movement is a basic human right. Thus the Universal Declaration of Human Rights belies its name when it proclaims this right only “within the borders of each state.” Human rights do not stop at the border.Today, we treat as pariahs those governments that refuse to let their people exit. I look forward to the day when we treat as pariahs those governments that refuse to let people enter.

Lesser-known trolley problem variations

Putting a stake in the popular philosophy thought exercise.

The Time Traveler
 

There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards a worker. You have the ability to pull a lever and change the trolley’s path so it hits a different worker. The different worker is actually the first worker ten minutes from now.
 

The Cancer Caper
 

There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards four workers. Three of them are cannibalistic serial killers. One of them is a brilliant cancer researcher. You have the ability to pull a lever and change the trolley’s path so it hits just one person. She is a brilliant cannibalistic serial killing cancer researcher who only kills lesser cancer researchers. 14% of these researchers are Nazi-sympathizers, and 25% don’t use turning signals when they drive. Speaking of which, in this world, Hitler is still alive, but he’s dying of cancer.
 

The Suicide Note
 

There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards a worker. You have the ability to pull a lever and change the trolley’s path so it hits a different worker. The first worker has an intended suicide note in his back pocket but it’s in the handwriting of the second worker. The second worker wears a T-shirt that says PLEASE HITME WITH A TROLLEY, but the shirt is borrowed from the first worker.
 

And so on. I'm not really sure what I can learn from the trolley problem, but I'm uncomfortable that the most common version always involves an fat guy. In fact, it's just referred to as The fat man problem!

Ethics of fighting Ebola

I can't think of too many people better qualified to break down the ethics of fighting Ebola than Peter Singer.

In this respect, Ebola is – or, rather, was – an example of what is sometimes referred to as the 90/10 rule: 90% of medical research is directed toward illnesses that comprise only 10% of the global burden of disease. The world has known about the deadly nature of the Ebola virus since 1976; but, because its victims were poor, pharmaceutical companies had no incentive to develop a vaccine. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies could expect to earn more from a cure for male baldness.

Government research funds in affluent countries are also disproportionately targeted toward the diseases that kill these countries’ citizens, rather than toward diseases like malaria and diarrhea that are responsible for much greater loss of life.

The most accurate way to judge the efficacy of a vaccine is through a double blind trial. One group of patients suffering from the malady are given the potential vaccine, the other set a placebo, and neither the doctors nor patients know who received what. When dealing with a shortage of vaccines and a disease as deadly as Ebola, the usual rules may not apply. That may be okay.

But, when facing a disease that kills up to 70% of those who are infected, and no accepted treatment yet exists, patients could reasonably refuse consent to a trial in which they might receive a placebo, rather than an experimental treatment that offers some hope of recovery. In such cases, it might be more ethical to monitor carefully the outcomes of different treatment centers now, before experimental treatments become available, and then compare these outcomes with those achieved by the same centers after experimental treatments are introduced. Unlike in a randomized trial, no one would receive a placebo, and it should still be possible to detect which treatments are effective.

The trolley problem and self-driving cars

The trolley problem is a famous thought experiment in philosophy.

You are walking near a trolley-car track when you notice five people tied to it in a row. The next instant, you see a trolley hurtling toward them, out of control. A signal lever is within your reach; if you pull it, you can divert the runaway trolley down a side track, saving the five — but killing another person, who is tied to that spur. What do you do? Most people say they would pull the lever: Better that one person should die instead of five.
 
Now, a different scenario. You are on a footbridge overlooking the track, where five people are tied down and the trolley is rushing toward them. There is no spur this time, but near you on the bridge is a chubby man. If you heave him over the side, he will fall on the track and his bulk will stop the trolley. He will die in the process. What do you do? (We presume your own body is too svelte to stop the trolley, should you be considering noble self-sacrifice.)

In numerical terms, the two situations are identical. A strict utilitarian, concerned only with the greatest happiness of the greatest number, would see no difference: In each case, one person dies to save five. Yet people seem to feel differently about the “Fat Man” case. The thought of seizing a random bystander, ignoring his screams, wrestling him to the railing and tumbling him over is too much. Surveys suggest that up to 90 percent of us would throw the lever in “Spur,” while a similar percentage think the Fat Man should not be thrown off the bridge. Yet, if asked, people find it hard to give logical reasons for this choice. Assaulting the Fat Man just feels wrong; our instincts cry out against it.

Nothing intrigues philosophers more than a phenomenon that seems simultaneously self-evident and inexplicable. Thus, ever since the moral philosopher Philippa Foot set out Spur as a thought experiment in 1967, a whole enterprise of “trolley­ology” has unfolded, with trolleyologists generating ever more fiendish variants.
 

There are entire books devoted entirely to the subject, including the humorously titled The Trolley Problem, or Would You Throw the Fat Guy Off the Bridge: A Philosophical Conundrum or the similarly named Would You Kill the Fat Man?: The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong. If the obese don't have enough problems, they also stumble into philosophical quandaries merely by walking across bridges at inopportune moments.

In the abstract, the trolley problem can seem frivolous. In the real world, however, such dilemmas can prove very real and complex. Just around the corner lurks a technological breakthrough which will force us to confront the trolley problem once again: the self-driving car.

Say you're sitting by yourself in your self-driving car, just playing aimlessly on your phone while your car handles the driving duties, when suddenly a mother and child step out in front of the car from between two parked cars on the side of the road. The self-driving car doesn't have enough time to brake, and if it swerves to avoid the mother and child, the car will fly off a bridge and throw you to certain death. What should the car's driving software be programmed to do in that situation?

That problem is the subject of an article in Aeon on automated ethics.

A similar computer program to the one driving our first tram would have no problem resolving this. Indeed, it would see no distinction between the cases. Where there are no alternatives, one life should be sacrificed to save five; two lives to save three; and so on. The fat man should always die – a form of ethical reasoning called consequentialism, meaning conduct should be judged in terms of its consequences.

When presented with Thomson’s trolley problem, however, many people feel that it would be wrong to push the fat man to his death. Premeditated murder is inherently wrong, they argue, no matter what its results – a form of ethical reasoning called deontology, meaning conduct should be judged by the nature of an action rather than by its consequences.

The friction between deontology and consequentialism is at the heart of every version of the trolley problem. Yet perhaps the problem’s most unsettling implication is not the existence of this friction, but the fact that – depending on how the story is told – people tend to hold wildly different opinions about what is right and wrong.

Pushing someone to their death with your bare hands is deeply problematic psychologically, even if you accept that it’s theoretically no better or worse than killing them from 10 miles away. Meanwhile, allowing someone at a distance – a starving child in another country for example – to die through one’s inaction seems barely to register a qualm. As philosophers such as Peter Singer have persuasively argued, it’s hard to see why we should accept this.
 

If a robot programmed with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were confronted with the trolley problem, what would the robot do? There are long threads dedicated to just this question.

Lots of people have already foreseen this core ethical problem with self-driving cars. I haven't seen any consensus on a solution, though. Not an easy problem, but one that we now have to wrestle with as a society.

Or, at least, some people will have to wrestle with the problem. Frankly, I'm happy today when my Roomba doesn't get itself stuck during one of its cleaning sessions.