Richard Marshall interviews David Estlund in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’ve defended democracy from the attack that it is the rule of the know-nothings with what you call ‘epistemic proceduralism.’ Before we look at your defence could you say something about the attack. On the face of it it does seem mad that experts aren’t the people we go to to govern. After all, we wouldn’t want a non-expert dentist, so why not use the same approach to dealing with problems of government? What’s the problem with just ensuring that decisions being made are good decisions by handing power over to the experts?

DE: That’s exactly the question that motivated my work on democracy (as you know), and of course it’s the ancient challenge to democracy stemming from Plato. I didn’t find the modern idea very satisfying—that we could answer that challenge by pointing to a right of the people to rule themselves. That would have the advantage of explaining why the people get to rule even if they aren’t good at it. The right to rule oneself individually doesn’t seem (to us moderns) to depend on whether we’d be good at it, so this might seem like an extension. But the analogy with a (say, Millian) right to self-rule, interpreted as individual immunity from interference in self-regarding choices, is very weak. When you “rule” as a member of the democratic people you contribute to coercing others, not just yourself. That’s precisely the limit on the Millian idea of individual self-rule. So, I didn’t see that broad approach as an adequate answer to the ancient question: if your political decisions will affect (and even coerce) the prospects and choices of others, why should you get to do that even if you’re not good at it? Plato’s challenge is powerful.

So, we have to confront the possibility that ruling ought to be done by those who can actually do it well (though I reject it in the end). I find that students, at least, squirm at the very idea that some might be able to rule better than others, and yet they nod happily at the suggestion that some are much worse than others. So, since the stakes of political decision are so very high, why shouldn’t rule be by the much-less-bad? I came to think that an important key lies in the fact that, even if we agree that some would be better and some worse at ruling justly and well, we are very unlikely to agree on who is in which category. It would be one thing if all decent points of view did agree, but that’s just not plausible. The problem here is a moral one, not one about how to keep the dissidents in line. So, on one hand, it’s not plausible that the people simply have a right to collective self-rule even though their acts will momentously affect and interfere with others against their will. On the other hand, and here we push back against Plato, there is no strong reason to think that someone’s being correct about what should be done is enough to justify their having the power to impose it on others. What’s driving things, on this telling, is not a positive right of self-rule but some sort of right (hopefully defeasible!) not to be ruled, wisely or otherwise, by others. While the ancient puzzle is first raised by pointing to ignorance of the masses, it turns out that the moral problem might not mainly be about their ignorance. After all, there is still a problem for rule by the non-ignorant. So, at this point, an initial answer—err, question—to your question why we shouldn’t be ruled by the experts, is roughly: they might be correct, but what makes them boss?

More here.

Elena Holodny in Business Insider:

Elena Holodny: What's interesting in chaos theory right now?

Steven Strogatz: I'm often very interested in whatever my students get interested in. I primarily think of myself as a teacher and a guide. I try to help them – especially my Ph.D. students – become the mathematicians they're trying to become. The answer often depends on what they want to do.

In broad terms, the question of how order emerges out of chaos. Even though we talk about it as “chaos theory,” I'm really more interested in the orderly side of nature than the chaotic side. And I love the idea that things can organize themselves. Whether those things are our system of morality or our universe or our bodies as we grow from a single cell to the people we eventually become. All this kind of unfolding of structure and organization all around us and inside of us, to me, is inspiring and baffling. I live for that kind of thing, to try to understand where these patterns come from.

More here.

Anthony Gottlieb in the New York Times:

The physical world is “largely ­illusory,” an editorial in The New York Times announced on Nov. 25, 1944. Wishful thinking on a depressing day? No. Had The Times gone mad? Not quite. It was endorsing the ideas of Sir Arthur Eddington, an eminent British astronomer and popularizer of science, who had just died.

Eddington began his best-known book, “The Nature of the Physical World,” by explaining that he had written it at two tables, sitting on two chairs and with two pens. The first table was the familiar kind: It was colored, substantial and relatively long-lasting. The second was what he called a “scientific table,” a colorless cloud of evanescent electric charges that is “mostly emptiness.” Likewise the two chairs and two pens. Only the scientific objects were really there, according to ­Eddington. Hence the idea that our familiar world is a deception on a grand scale.

Coming to terms with science is not getting any easier. Today’s popularizers face two challenges, both of which are admirably met by Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, in his new book, “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.” First, there is more to explain than ever before, as the sci­ences extend their embrace to a widening range of phenomena. Fortunately, Carroll is something of a polymath. His accounts of the latest thinking about microbiology or information theory are as adroit as his exploration of the links between entropy and time or his elucidation of Bayesian statistics.

The second challenge for today’s explainers is that the theories are getting weirder. Einstein used to worry that, according to quantum mechanics, God seems to be playing dice with the universe. Now it appears that he has put a stage magician in charge of the casino.

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Lorraine Berry at The Guardian:

In 19th-century America, a number of utopian communities, oblivious to the defeatist etymology of the word utopia (Greek for “not” plus “place”, or “no-place”), were established, mostly throughout the north-east. Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), Robert Owen and a group of transcendentalists all tried their hands at creating separate communities of peace and understanding. All of these efforts failed fairly quickly.

The exception was the Oneida community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes, in the Leatherstocking region of central New York state. The region had already surrendered its secrets to the young Joseph Smith when he discovered the gold books of the angel Moroni buried in a drumlin near Palmyra, and founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Oneida, which is located 80 miles to the east, provided a home for Noyes’s nascent Society of Inquiry when its members fled from Putney, Vermont in the 1840s after Noyes’ doctrine of “complex marriage” offended the local townspeople.

more here.

Rayyan Al-Shawaf at The LA Times:

The way to the spring…is blocked. At least that’s the case for the Palestinians of Nabi Saleh, a small village northwest of Ramallah. The expansion-minded residents of a nearby Jewish settlement, with the aid of the Israeli army that occupies the West Bank, have taken over the town’s water source, which Palestinian farmers depended on to irrigate their fields.

Ben Ehrenreich, an award-winning writer based in Los Angeles, discovered as much when he moved to the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan in a war with its Arab neighbors in 1967. Ehrenreich, who lived in that troubled land intermittently between 2011 and 2014 (in part, reporting for Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine), demonstrates that Nabi Saleh is no anomaly. “The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine” emerges as a sobering, iconoclastic “collection of stories about resistance, and about people who resist,” marred slightly by the author’s unwillingness to subject Palestinian militant activity, which has often included terrorism, to moral scrutiny.

“The spring is the face of the occupation,” Bassem Tamimi of Nabi Saleh tells the author. Every Friday, the villagers, joined by international and Israeli solidarity activists, march toward it in a regularized act of protest. “And every Friday Israeli soldiers beat them back with tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber-coated bullets,” observes the author. Afterward, groups of male youths situated some distance away hurl stones at the soldiers, who are generally beyond their reach.

more here.

Andrew Martin at The Financial Times:

Travis Elborough is the affectionate chronicler of faded Englishness. He has been described as “the hipster Bill Bryson”, and it is a mystery to some of us why he is not as well-known as Bryson. His books have so far covered the Routemaster bus, the long-playing record, and the sale of London Bridge (“the world’s largest antique”, as he put it) to a Texan millionaire.

His writing combines subtle drollery with a fantastical, Monty Python-ish strain. Early in his narrative, he takes an excursion to Versailles, an important site in the aforementioned evolution. Louis XIV, the Sun King — a “control freak in modern parlance” — arranged the planting around a central axis whose focal point was his own bedroom, and the gardens were micromanaged according to his whim: “The fountains were magnificent features. But there was only enough water to keep the ones closest to the palace at a constant spurt. The others were switched off and on as the king approached and departed, his movements closely monitored and signalled to staff, with flags waved and whistles blown in a complex system of field telegraph.”

more here.

Peter Wehner in The New York Times:

Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.

Mr. Trump knows his target audience, which explains why, beginning the morning of the Indiana primary on May 3 (the day he became the de facto nominee), he has — among other in-the-gutter moments — implied that Senator Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy; insinuated that Vince Foster, a friend of the Clintons who was White House deputy counsel, was murdered (five official investigations determined that Mr. Foster committed suicide); engaged in a racially tinged attack on Gonzalo Curiel, a district court judge presiding over a fraud lawsuit against Trump University; and expressed doubt that a Muslim judge could remain neutral in the case. This is conspiratorial craziness and rank racism — and all of it has happened after we were told Mr. Trump would raise his game. The surprise is that so many Republicans are now expressing consternation at what Mr. Trump is doing. Has any recent presidential candidate ever advertised quite as openly as Mr. Trump the kind of vicious attacks he’d engage in? We were warned in neon lights what was coming. The idea that he will now engage in a “course correction” — that he will flip a switch and transform himself into a decent and dignified man — is laughable. Mr. Trump has repeatedly stated that he won’t change his approach. (“You win the pennant and now you’re in the World Series — you gonna change?”) In this one area, Republicans should take him at his word.

When a narcissist like Mr. Trump is victorious, as he was in the Republican primary, and when he has done it on his terms, he’s not going to listen to outside counsel from people who think they can change the patterns of a lifetime. Republicans have not changed Mr. Trump for the better; he has changed them for the worse. So here we are, with Republicans who lined up behind Mr. Trump now afraid of being led off a high cliff. If the prospect of a November shellacking isn’t enough to unnerve these Republicans, there’s also this to factor in: What we are talking about is potential generational damage to the Republican Party. Consider this historical comparison: In 1956 the Republican nominee, Dwight D. Eisenhower, won nearly 40 percent of the black vote. In 1960, Richard Nixon won nearly a third. Yet in 1964, in large part because of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater (who was no racist) won only 6 percent. More than a half-century later, that figure has remained low. Mr. Trump — through his attacks against Hispanics that began the day he announced his candidacy — is doing with Hispanics today what Senator Goldwater did with black voters in the early 1960s. The less resistance there is to Mr. Trump now, the more political damage there will be later. The stain of Trump will last long after his campaign. His insults, cruelty and bigotry will sear themselves into the memory of Americans for a long time to come, especially those who are the targets of his invective.

Mr. Trump is what he is — a malicious, malignant figure on the American political landscape. But Republican primary voters, in selecting him to represent their party, and Republican leaders now rallying to his side, have made his moral offenses their own.

More here.

John A. Schuster in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

This work extends and expands James A. Marcum's Thomas Kuhn's Revolution: An Historical Philosophy of Science (2005). Scholarship and debate about Kuhn have continued apace since then, chiefly conducted by philosophers and mainly concerned with Kuhn's later thought and its relation to Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970) [SSR]. Marcum takes up the theme that Kuhn's later work — scattered in occasional papers, talks and manuscript sources — constituted a second Kuhnian revolution in philosophy of science, this time being an 'evolutionary' [EPS] as opposed to his earlier 'historical' philosophy of science.

Marcum's 2005 volume was essentially a history of a book, SSR, its genesis, content and reception in HPS and other fields. The present work preserves virtually all of that material while expanding in two ways: an account of the genesis and content of Kuhn's second philosophy of science, and a much more detailed examination than previously of what we might term, in succinct but outdated history-of -ideas lingo, the 'influence' of Kuhn. Thus, in the opening two Parts of the new work, Marcum stays close to the corresponding Parts of the earlier work. Part III, which concluded the earlier work and was titled 'The path following Structure', is now titled 'Kuhn's paradigm shift' [that is toward EPS] and Chapter 5 within it is still concerned mainly with 'What was Kuhn up to after Structure', while Chapter 6 deals explicitly with Kuhn's EPS, replacing the old Chapter 6 dealing with 'Kuhn's legacy'. The latter issue now takes up its own Part IV, in two full chapters, the first dealing with Kuhn's 'impact' on HPS and the natural sciences, the latter with his 'impact' on behavioural, social and political sciences.

Returning to the Kuhn debates after a decade, Marcum now has a work at least 30% longer than the original, girded by a bibliography at least three times as voluminous and featuring not only works published since 2005, but also quite a few earlier works not treated in his original volume.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Just a few years ago, Crispr was a cipher — something that sounded to most ears like a device for keeping lettuce fresh. Today, Crispr-Cas9 is widely known as a powerful way to edit genes. Scientists are deploying it in promising experiments, and a number of companies are already using it to develop drugs to treat conditions ranging from cancer to sickle-cell anemia.

Yet there is still a lot of misunderstanding around it. Crispr describes a series of DNA sequences discovered in microbes, part of a system to defend against attacking viruses. Microbes make thousands of forms of Crispr, most of which are just starting to be investigated by scientists. If they can be harnessed, some may bring changes to medicine that we can barely imagine.

On Thursday, in the journal Science, researchers demonstrated just how much is left to discover. They found that an ordinary mouth bacterium makes a form of Crispr that breaks apart not DNA, but RNA — the molecular messenger used by cells to turn genes into proteins.

If scientists can get this process to work in human cells, they may open up a new front in gene engineering, gaining the ability to precisely adjust the proteins in cells, for instance, or to target cancer cells.

More here.

Richard Dawkins in Prospect:

“Are you an Inny or an Outy? A Keeper or a Brexiteer?”

“Well, at first I wanted to leave, to punish David Cameron. But then Boris came out as a leaver and I can’t stand his hair so I’ll be voting to stay in Europe.”

That is approximately the level of discourse which will momentously decide Britain’s future.

My own answer to the question is, “How should I know? I don’t have a degree in economics. Or history. How dare you entrust such an important decision to ignoramuses like me?”

I, and most other people, don’t have the time or the experience to do our due diligence on the highly complex economic and social issues facing our country in, or out of, Europe. That’s why we vote for our Member of Parliament, who is paid a good salary to debate such matters on our behalf, and vote on them. The European Union referendum, like the one on Scottish independence, should never have been called.

I really did hear the following remark yesterday on television: “Well, it isn’t called Great Britain for nothing, is it? I’m voting for our historic greatness.” Actually it was originally called Britannia major to distinguish it from Britannia minor, the French province of Brittany. Later, “Great Britain” signified the union with Scotland, and distinguished the geographically larger of the British Isles from the smaller, Ireland. It has never meant “great” in the bombastic sense you imagine will justify your “patriotic” vote.

More here.

A former Stanford swimmer who sexually assaulted an unconscious woman was sentenced to six months in jail because a longer sentence would have “a severe impact on him,” according to a judge. At his sentencing Thursday, his victim read him a letter describing the “severe impact” the assault had on her.

From Buzzfeed:

Your Honor, if it is all right, for the majority of this statement I would like to address the defendant directly.

You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today.

On January 17th, 2015, it was a quiet Saturday night at home. My dad made some dinner and I sat at the table with my younger sister who was visiting for the weekend. I was working full time and it was approaching my bed time. I planned to stay at home by myself, watch some TV and read, while she went to a party with her friends. Then, I decided it was my only night with her, I had nothing better to do, so why not, there’s a dumb party ten minutes from my house, I would go, dance like a fool, and embarrass my younger sister. On the way there, I joked that undergrad guys would have braces. My sister teased me for wearing a beige cardigan to a frat party like a librarian. I called myself “big mama”, because I knew I’d be the oldest one there. I made silly faces, let my guard down, and drank liquor too fast not factoring in that my tolerance had significantly lowered since college.

The next thing I remember I was in a gurney in a hallway. I had dried blood and bandages on the backs of my hands and elbow. I thought maybe I had fallen and was in an admin office on campus. I was very calm and wondering where my sister was. A deputy explained I had been assaulted.

More here. And here is an open letter by Vice President Joe Biden to the victim.

Masha Gessen at The New York Review of Books:

Once upon a time, not so long ago—after the Iron Curtain was lifted and before too many people absorbed a new set of propaganda cliches as their own speech—one could travel to the former Soviet Union, find a person of a certain age, ask a question, and hear the story of an entire life. The story was invariably painful and contradictory, and often a perfect encapsulation of the twentieth century. In the last quarter-century, the number of people of a certain age in the former Soviet Union has dwindled, and the number of those willing to tell their life stories to foreign strangers has decreased even faster. Soon, no one will be left to speak for the Soviet experience.

The Italian graphic novelist Igort went to Ukraine in 2008 and stayed for nearly two years. He met people at marketplaces and on country roads, and drew their lives. “Word by word I listen to the account of an existence that has become an undigested mass,” he writes, at the beginning of one section. “It pushes its way out from the gut. The following is a faithful transcription of that story…” These phrases sum up everything that is good and everything that is not so good about The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death Under Soviet Rule, the new single-volume English edition of Igort’s two graphic books, Quaderni Ucraini and Quaderni Russi. The translation, sadly, is often tone-deaf and downright sloppy—the peculiarly unappetizing language in this passage is just one example. But the stories he has collected are indeed an undigested mass, often a mess, and this is a good thing.

more here.

Robert Pippin at nonsite:

What happens to us when we watch visualized fictional narratives, otherwise known as movies? And what must we do in order to understand what we are shown? Is there a way of working to understand a film that goes beyond working to understand the details of its plot? When, at what point, have we understood a movie? Stanley Cavell has said that what serious thought about great film requires are “humane readings of whole films.” What are readings of films? Can either what happens to us in watching, or what we do in trying to understand, result in anything of any relevance to philosophy, to philosophical knowledge, if we allow ourselves to believe there might be such a thing?

These are difficult and very controversial issues. I propose only a small step in responding to such questions, or a narrow focus, let us say; a concentration on one two minute, forty-eight second short film called “Dans l”obscurité,” “In the Dark,” made in 2007 by the Belgian team of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, about whom I’ll say more in a minute.

Just what we see and hear when we see and hear movie events and movie dialogues is a trickier question than it might seem. When we see Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo, we would not be surprised in the slightest if someone were to point out that, “really,” there on the screen is the famous actor James Stewart pretending to be the fictional character Scottie Ferguson. Of course we know this. We might plausibly deny, however, that what we see when we watch this movie is James Stewart, and then we make-believe or pretend that he is Scottie Ferguson, or we see Stewart, and imagine Ferguson “in our heads,” as it were.

more here.

Frank Gehry at Artforum:

WHEN I LAST SAW my friend Zaha Hadid, it was a few weeks before her death, at the Yale School of Architecture. We liked being together when we taught, so over the years we managed to arrange our schedules to be at Yale at the same time so that we could meet and greet and talk and drink and complain and have fun.

I first met Zaha many years ago, when she had just been announced to the world as the winner of the competition for the Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong. The drawings and paintings that she produced for her project were mesmerizing and suggested a new idea, a new world, for architecture. Her style was clearly grounded in Constructivism, a movement that had inspired me for years, but Zaha’s personal touch gave it a new freedom, a new engagement, a new opportunity. And wow.

At that time, I was working for the Vitra furniture company on their campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. Rolf Fehlbaum, whose family owns the company, was enamored with the idea of creating a center of works by architects whom he found to be particularly interesting. Nicholas Grimshaw had done the first factory, and I was given the second factory and a small design museum. Tadao Ando and Álvaro Siza did buildings as well, and there was a small fire-station project that I, along with the others, thought would be perfect for Zaha.

more here.

Beth Ann Fennelly in Orion Magazine:

Here are some memories I can claim simply because I was in the right place at the wrong time: In Japan, lifting my head from my hammock to see three monks with surfboards run past, tear off their saffron robes, and plunge into the sea. Sleeping on an unfinished roof in a São Paulo favela beneath a sky bewitched and bollocksed — the Southern Cross replacing the Big Dipper, Orion turning a cartwheel — and being awakened by a crowing rooster. All my life, cartoon roosters have crowed at the dawn, and here — here! — for the first time, I hear it, this rooster, this dawn, this girl called me. In Morocco, abandoning my attempt at sleep and making my way to the hotel’s “nonstop gym” — bathroom-sized, just a lone treadmill, occupied by a small boy (the maid’s son?) curled in slumber, sheeted with a hotel towel. How, while I gazed at him, the Muslim call to prayer came from outside, how the boy’s long eyelashes flicked, how I backed out and padded to my room and crawled into my foreign bed, how I slept and slept and slept.

Of course in all these places I eventually adjusted, my body’s rhythms harmonizing again with Mother Nature’s, and I dined at the dinner hour, stayed awake through the concert’s encore. But looking back, those offpeak, offkilter visions are some of my most strongly etched souvenirs. If there were a remedy to dispense with jet lag, would I take it? Sure thing. In the same way that I’d take one that blocked fevers. In the same way I’d have been tempted to frog leap the hardest weeks of pregnancy. But until that elixir is elixired, what can we do but jet and then lag, wait for our demanding body to sync with the lobby clock, sync with the brain it lifts like a flower on its stem. We might as well marvel as we pass through the two-headed doorway, a door through which we must go, both because we have no way around it and because we must keep moving, because if we lean against the doorjamb, we’ll fall asleep.

More here.

Hans Clevers in Nature:

I have always felt uncomfortable about the concepts and definitions that we use in the stem-cell field. Some of the arguments seem circular; observation and assumption are not well separated. I once asked a colleague for their best definition of a stem cell. The answer: a cell that can self-renew. What, then, is self-renewal? The immediate reply: what stem cells do. Fuzziness in stem-cell concepts and definitions has significant consequences. It affects how we design, conduct and interpret experiments, how we communicate our discoveries and, ultimately, how we design therapies aimed at supporting the regenerative capacity of healthy stem cells or eradicating those that fuel the growth of tumours. Despite these concerns, as an experimentalist I could never put my finger on where exactly scientific common sense is failing.

Enter Lucie Laplane and her book Cancer Stem Cells. Trained as a science philosopher, Laplane also spent time at the bench in two stem-cell labs. Her book is the culmination of a six-year effort to describe and structure the philosophical underpinnings of stem-cell science. In addition to absorbing essentially all the relevant experimental literature — historical and scientific — she interviewed some of the leading international stem-cell researchers and clinicians. She discussed her emerging insights with fellow philosophers and science historians. Starting from an interest in cancer stem cells (CSCs), the book, despite its title, builds a much broader framework for understanding the biology of stem cells of all types. Central to CSC theory is the observation that not all tumour cells are equal. The bulk of a tumour consists of short-lived proliferative cells and differentiated cells. But some tumour cells seem to be the malignant equivalents of tissue stem cells. Much as normal stem cells maintain healthy organs by producing new tissue cells, CSCs drive the persistence of malignant tumours by producing new cancer cells.

More here.

Martin O’Neill in the Boston Review:

Some years ago, I had the privilege of studying in graduate school at Harvard under T. M. Scanlon—Tim, as everyone who knows him calls him. As of a few days ago, he has taught his last class as a full-time member of the Harvard philosophy department, where he arrived from Princeton in 1984. But, though he is freshly retired, he has, I hope and expect, not taught his last student. Because Scanlon’s intellectual contributions are important and enduring.

Scanlon is a modest man, so he might not appreciate my saying it, but he stands as one of the most powerful and insightful moral and political philosophers of recent decades. His largest book, What We Owe to Each Other (1998), develops and defends a distinctive approach to interpersonal morality, known as contractualism. Scanlon’s idea is that interpersonal morality—giving others their due—involves being able to justify your conduct to others. Doing right by other people means treating them in ways they cannot “reasonably reject.” More recent work includes a subtle account of the role and function of moral blame in Moral Dimensions (2008) and, in 2014’s Being Realistic About Reasons, a defense of a kind of moral realism, the claim that moral truths exist independently of humans’ beliefs and attitudes.

While Scanlon has been a system-builder in moral philosophy, his work in political philosophy, by contrast, focuses on particular values. His 2003 book The Difficulty of Tolerance includes an account of freedom of expression as well as insightful essays on toleration, human rights, and punishment, among other topics. Now Scanlon is at work on a book whose subject has concerned him for a long time, but which has in just the past five or so years emerged as a central axis of political debate: inequality.

More here.