Month: April 2021

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 28, 2021 • 8:00 am

Joe Routon, who usually sends us street photography, has some wildlife photos today: birds. His captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are a few of my bird photos. Not being an expert on birds, I’ve probably misidentified some of these. I’m sure that your more erudite bird experts will correct me.

I photographed this Rufous Treepie (Dendrocitta vagabunda), a member of the crow family, in Rajasthan, India:

Photographed in my front yard is this Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis):

I photographed this Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus) on my daily social-distancing walk. I particularly enjoy its song.

Here’s an ostrich (Struthio camelus) who was kind enough to smile for my camera.

I photographed this Rufous-collared sparrow (Zonotrichia capensis) in Peru.

Another of my photos of the red-tailed hawk in my front yard.

Here is a Yucatan woodpecker (Melanerpes pygmaeus) I photographed in Yucatan, Mexico.

When in Peru, I photographed this boatload of Peruvian pelicans (Pelecanus thagus). Social birds, they enjoy fishing and boating together.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

April 28, 2021 • 6:30 am

It’s a hump day: Wednesday, April 28, 2021: National Blueberry Pie Day. It’s a great pie, with the best specimen to be had at Helen’s, in Machias, Maine (have a look at the photos here). It’s also Stop Food Waste Day, Denim Day, (not celebrating jeans, but denigrating rape excuses; read the link) Great Poetry Reading Day, International Guide Dog Day, and, in Canada, National Day of Mourning, commemorating “workers who have been killed, injured or suffered illness due to workplace related hazards and occupational exposures.”

I saw no rabbits on my way to work, which means that this day will not go well.

And reader Rick found a “Thought for Today” from someone who died exactly six years ago:

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

There is a rumor going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist. -Terry Pratchett, novelist (28 Apr 1948-2015)

News of the Day:

The CDC now says that any fully vaccinated American can go maskless outdoors, even in small groups of people that include the unvaccinated. Masks are recommended only in big outdoor groups, and always when indoors, even when you’re vaccinated.  Given that the chances that, if fully vaccinated, your chances of being an asymptomatic carrier are virtually zero, it seems to me that the vaccinated don’t need to wear masks at all except, perhaps, in large indoor crowds, the CDC seems hyper-cautious. Still, I do what they say.

The Washington Post has a pretty funny article about Richard Barnett, the guy who stormed the Capitol and put his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. He apparently left a note that said, ““Nancy, Bigo was here, you bitch.” Except the lawyers defending Barnett says that the note actually read, ““Hey Nancy Bigo was here biatd.” Biatd???? Either the guy can’t spell or “Biatd” is really “Biatch”, a kind of slang. This apparently makes a difference to his attorneys!

Reuters reports that a New York City man, Jarrod Powell, has been arrested and charged with attempted murder, and that as a “hate crime”, after the horrific beating of  Yao Pan Ma, a 61-year old Asian man. Isn’t it relevant, though, that the assailant was black, something that Reuters doesn’t mention? Doesn’t that bear on whether the act reflected white supremacy? ABC7 News reports this:

Ma’s wife was at the event but was too upset it speak. Instead, community activist Karlin Chan passed along her message.

“The Ma family understands this is the act of a single depraved individual and has nothing to do with the community of Harlem at large,” Chan said.

I’m horrified at what’s going on in India with the coronavirus: it’s the world’s largest dumpster fire. And although I predicted it, I take no joy in that. This New York Times article gives the view from Delhi (my favorite city in a country I love), where the positivity rate is an astonishing 36% (the paper reports that it was only 3% a month ago). Look at this horrifying photo:

(From the NYT). A mass cremation of those who died from Covid-19 at a crematorium in New Delhi on Monday. Photograph by Atul Loke

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 573,001, an increase of 696 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 3,150, 786, an increase of about 15,100 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on April 28 includes:

  • 1253 – Nichiren, a Japanese Buddhist monk, propounds Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō for the very first time and declares it to be the essence of Buddhism, in effect founding Nichiren Buddhism.
  • 1789 – Mutiny on the Bounty: Lieutenant William Bligh and 18 sailors are set adrift and the rebel crew returns to Tahiti briefly and then sets sail for Pitcairn Island.
  • 1869 – Chinese and Irish laborers for the Central Pacific Railroad working on the First Transcontinental Railroad lay ten miles of track in one day, a feat which has never been matched.

The railroad’s western section was built largely by Chinese laborers. Here’s a photo of some of them:

Here’s an original ferrotype of Billy the Kid (the only photo I could find of him save a questionable one I’ve presented before); he was shot dead at 21:

After he and Petacci were shot, their bodies were hung upside down in public: here’s a photo from Wikipedia with the caption, “The corpse of Mussolini (second from left) next to Petacci (middle) and other executed fascists in Piazzale Loreto, Milan, 1945″. Their bodies were further defiled and beaten, and there’s a photo of them in the morgue, which you can see here, but it’s very gruesome. 

  • 1947 – Thor Heyerdahl and five crew mates set out from Peru on the Kon-Tiki to demonstrate that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia.

But of course Heyerdahl was wrong: Polynesia was not settled by people from South America, but from Southeast Asia.

Here’s the original raft at the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo:

  • 1970 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon formally authorizes American combat troops to take part in the Cambodian campaign.
  • 1973 – The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, recorded in Abbey Road Studios goes to number one on the US Billboard chart, beginning a record-breaking 741-week chart run.
  • 1986 – High levels of radiation resulting from the Chernobyl disaster are detected at a nuclear power plant in Sweden, leading Soviet authorities to publicly announce the accident.
  • 1988 – Near Maui, Hawaii, flight attendant Clarabelle “C.B.” Lansing is blown out of Aloha Airlines Flight 243, a Boeing 737, and falls to her death when part of the plane’s fuselage rips open in mid-flight.

It”s amazing that nobody else was killed, though a few were injured. Here’s what the plane looked like when it landed:

  • 2004 – CBS News released evidence of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse. The photographs show rape and abuse from the American troops over Iraqi detainees.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1878 – Lionel Barrymore, American actor and director (d. 1954)
  • 1906 – Kurt Gödel, Czech-American mathematician, philosopher, and academic (d. 1978)

Here’s Gödel, who, like many philosophers, was an eccentric. In his later life he’d eat only food that was prepared by his wife. When she was hospitalized for 6 months, he refused to eat and died of starvation, weighing only 65 pounds when he died!

Schindler, who of course helped rescue Jews during WWII, died destitute, having spent his fortune saving people. He is the only member of the Nazi Party (he had to join to be credible) to be honored with the designation Righteous Among the Nations in Yad Vashem.  Here is the hero:

  • 1916 – Ferruccio Lamborghini, Italian businessman, created Lamborghini (d. 1993)
  • 1926 – Harper Lee, American novelist (d. 2016)

Lee wrote only one real book, To Kill a Mockingbird, but it as a classic, now in the process of being erased. A later manuscript was published, Go Set a Watchman, but is was poorly reviewed and it’s not clear that Lee was compos mentis when she agreed to its publication. Here’s her photo from the dust jacket of her famous first novel:

  • 1937 – Saddam Hussein, Iraqi general and politician, 5th President of Iraq (d. 2006)
  • 1948 – Terry Pratchett, English journalist, author, and screenwriter (d. 2015)
  • 1950 – Jay Leno, American comedian, talk show host, and producer
  • 1960 – Elena Kagan, American lawyer and jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
  • 1974 – Penélope Cruz, Spanish actress and producer

Those who “passed” on April 28 include:

  • 1903 – Josiah Willard Gibbs, American scientist (b. 1839)[14]
  • 1945 – Benito Mussolini, Italian journalist and politician, 27th Prime Minister of Italy (b. 1883)
  • 1992 – Francis Bacon, Irish painter (b. 1909)

This is probably Bacon’s most famous painting: Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953.

Here’s Velázquez’s original:

  • 2013 – Paulo Vanzolini, Brazilian singer-songwriter and zoologist (b. 1924)

As I said, Vanzolini was both a herepetologist and a famous writer of sambas; I met him when he’d come to Harvard to work with curator of herpetology Ernest Williams.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn: Hili must not be hunting very successfully:

Hili: Sparrows tell conspiracy theories to each other.
A: On what subject?
Hili: Some baloney about cats.
In Polish:
Hili: Wróble opowiadają sobie spiskowe teorie.
Ja: Na jaki temat?
Hili: Jakieś bzdury o kotach.

Hili and Szaron are getting along better these days. Here’s a photo with the caption “Rapprochement”:

In Polish: Zbliżenia

From Facebook:

From Nicole. I may have posted this before, but internalize the warning!

From Jesus of the Day. There’s no question about what I would do!

From Barry: a rooster who appears to pass out from crowing (hypoxia?)

Another from Barry. Checkmate, creationists! This site appears to be a spoof of creationist arguments, but it could have been a site that makes creationist arguments. The two purposes give very similar results!

From Luana. Rufo is a conservative, but the thread after this tweet thread gives a number of anecdotes involving woke education that you can check. The ones I recognize seem accurate:

Tweets from Matthew. I found this first one very soothing at 4 a.m. after three hours of tossing and turning:

From the 1860s! And the underwater painting is very lovely:

I’d be excited to see this, too. Be sure to enlarge the video in the first tweet:

This is the first observation of sponge trails suggesting that the animals (yes, they’re animals) are mobile. See the original paper here.

I like Matthew’s comment on this. The deep sea is about as unknown to us as is Mars.

How college admissions have become a mess, as well as moralistic and intrusive

April 27, 2021 • 1:15 pm

Things have changed a lot in college admissions in the past decade, and I can’t say that it’s for the better—at least as reported in the article below from The Chronicle of Higher Education (click on screenshot).

We’re all aware that indices of merit, including standardized-test scores, have become less important in college admissions, as they’re seen to be “anti-inclusive”. In addition, the number of applications to “elite” colleges have ballooned. The result, as Feeney notes, is that college admissions officers secretly admit that that two or three times as many students who are actually admitted are pretty much just as qualified as the top tier, so one could choose almost randomly from among the “admittable” students.

With the decline of standardized-test measures has come the fuzzy notion of “holistic” admissions. Previously this demanded lots of extracurricular activities, which of course meant that applicants began engaging in these activities merely to pad their application. This in fact was going on when I applied for college.

Now, however, this kind of padding has become so pervasive that colleges have once again changed what they’re looking for. The key word now is “authenticity”: the student should present “their most authentic selves” in their application.  What does that involve?

From Feeney:

But there is a problem with the new authenticity standard. The people who made applying to college an elaborate performance, a nervous and yearslong exercise in self-construction have now decided that the end result of this elaborate performance must be “the real you.” The tacit directive in all this — “Be authentic for us or we won’t admit you” — puts kids in a tough position. It’s bad that kids have to suffer this torment. It’s also bad that admissions departments actually think that the anxiously curated renderings that appear in applications can in any way be called “authentic.” It’s like watching Meryl Streep portray Margaret Thatcher and thinking: Now that is the real Meryl Streep.

Here’s are two bizarre examples of students striving for “authenticity”:

Of course, for the clumsier applicants whose self-presentations are derided by admissions deans, their failures often aren’t ones of authenticity. They are, rather, failures of discernment. In one of his many columns bemoaning the college admissions process, Frank Bruni of The New York Times shared an embarrassing story fed to him by a former Yale admissions officer named Michael Motto. Bruni writes of one application by which Motto “found himself more and more impressed.” “Then” — Bruni says — “he got to her essay.” The essay was about how, during an involved conversation with an admired teacher, the applicant, instead of killing the conversational moment by running to the bathroom, chose to piss herself. Now, if this doesn’t demonstrate commitment, I don’t know what does.

. . . . After all, nervous applicants are assured that, as Joie Jager-Hyman, who worked as an admissions officer at Dartmouth College, told Bruni, “Being a little vulnerable can give great insight into your character.” Remember the application advice of Haverford’s Lord: “Everybody’s imperfect.” Ed Boland, a veteran of Yale admissions, recalls a girl whose essay on how she was a “serial farter” improved her chances at Yale. The serial farter, in Boland’s words, was going for something about “gender and socialization.”

This of course, leads to striving for a faux authenticity, as for you must give the best presentation you can of yourself given what the college demands. There’s a new app for this that you can use to start flaunting your authenticity years before you apply for college:

The other major recent reform is the Coalition App, an online application originally designed by and for a group of 80 of the most selective colleges in America, including every member of the Ivy League, known together as the Coalition for College. It now comprises over 150 institutions. The Coalition App (now branded as MyCoalition) is intended to replace the Common Application, and the declared mission behind it is to apply technology to improve access.

The great innovation of the Coalition App is that it takes the form of an online account that students can open when they reach ninth grade. After they open their Coalition App account, students can start assembling a portfolio of their high-school efforts, uploading papers and image files and other documents both curricular and extracurricular, into their personal master file, called a “locker.”

Of course, “can” start in ninth means “must” start in ninth grade. Veronica Hauad, deputy director of admissions at the University of Chicago (one of the founding schools of the Coalition) explains some of the thinking behind encouraging students to start so early: “The application process shouldn’t be this frenzied process in the fall of your senior year, which is already busy.” To illustrate, she addresses a hypothetical high-school student. “Let’s think long term,” she says, “about my identity and what my application will look like.”

Given that this process is invidious, time-consuming, and intrusive, what solutions does Feeney suggest?  He floats the idea that a lottery might be a “good option”, but that leaves the question about “what information is the lottery based on”? Feeney also sees admissions departments as changing their function from a administration and selection to applying a certain kind of pressure to make students “morally agreeable.” Sound familiar? Here’s Feeney’s peroration:

Setting up a yearslong, quasi-therapeutic process in which admissions goads young people into laying bare their vulnerable selves — a process that conceals a high-value transaction in which colleges use their massive leverage to mold those selves to their liking — is reprehensible. It is terrible thing to do. It renders the discovery of true underlying selves absurd. Sometimes, as we’ve seen, admissions people will admit they have this formative leverage over young people. But they fail to show the humility that should attend this admission, the clinician’s awareness that to use this power is to abuse it. Instead, they want even more power. They want to intrude even more deeply into the souls of their applicants. The name they give these ambitions is “reform.”

I’m just glad I don’t have to apply to college now, nor have to adjudicate among the many applications that flood a school such as mine. And I don’t see things improving as admission becomes more and more “holistic.”

h/t: Luana

More on woke birding: changing the names of all birds named after people will at least create an inclusive birding community—and help conserve birds

April 27, 2021 • 11:15 am

In two previous posts (here and here), I described the movement to “cancel” the names of those birds  named after people who held views we find reprehensible today. Names given after people are called “eponymous” names.  Two of the eponyms that are being removed are any bird named after Audubon himself (he decapitated Mexican battlefield corpses for scientific study, though that was common practice at the time), and McKown’s Longspur, named after a Confederate general. No matter that McKown’s longspur was named for his contributions to ornithology, and named before the Civil War, not in honor of his fighting for the Confederacy, nor that McKown repudiated the Confederate cause later in life. No, his fighting for the wrong side was enough to get his name removed (the bird is now known as the “thickbilled longspur”).

Now there’s a move afoot to rename every eponymous bird, as recounted in the article below (click on screenshot), which appears on the Cornell University bird site, All About Birds.  (The bird shown, Bachman’s sparrow, is likely to be renamed because Bachman said some white supremacst things.) The renaming is because bird names are considered white and colonialist, and said to cause “harm.”

Note that renaming all these birds is going to be a big job, for the names they bear now are well ensconced in the literature, and there’s no way to go back and change them. It’s not like removing a monument or renaming a building. There are more than 100 eponymous bird species in North America alone.

Why are they trying to change all eponymous bird names? To me it seems like the paradigmatic case of performative wokeness. Although the avowed aims are to make birding more inclusive, not only getting people of color (I assume) to become birders, but to get more people interested in birds as a way to conserve them. Both aims are admirable; my beef is that renaming birds will do virtually nothing to accomplish those goals.  Here’s what the article said, mentioning a virtual panel discussion by The Community Congress on English Bird names.

The unanimous sentiment among the 15-person panel—which featured birders, scientists, field guide authors, and other experts from the U.S. and Canada—was that changes need to be made among more than 100 eponymous bird names for North American species to make birding more welcoming and inclusive to all.

. . .“Eponymous names don’t reflect the welcoming and inclusive community we know birding can be,” Rutter said [Jordan Rutter, a founder of the group Bird Names for Birds]. She said that she believes the current system for determining common bird names reflects colonialism in ornithological history. Nearly every North American bird name tied to a person can be traced back to a white American or European naturalist.

“Every eponymous common name needs to go,” Rutter said. “We know that won’t happen quickly. And to be done right, it shouldn’t happen quickly … but it needs to happen.”

Note that every eponymous name needs to go. Not just names of Confederal generals or white supremacists, but every name. Why? Because most of those names “can be traced back to a white American or European naturalist”.  But most naturalists then were white. What’s the damage, then? It’s apparently that there is palpable harm caused to people by having to use or read those names. Referring to McKown’s Longspur, the article notes:

The change [to Thick-billed Longspur] was made after birders campaigned to remove McCown’s name from the bird, and after the classification committee revised its guidelines for bird names—adding considerations for “present-day ethical principles” when considering changing English common bird names that create “ongoing harm.”

And this is done to “improve the big landscape of racial and social injustice.”

Ongoing harm? Who claimed they were harmed beyond the idea of the woke birders that McCown’s name might create harm? Were there any Potential Birders of Color who said, “You know, I could get a lot more interested in birds, and engage in strenuous conservation efforts, if only I didn’t have to deal with that bloody name “McCown’s Longspur.”

This is both rhetorical and emotional inflation: a way for woke birders to feel that they’re accomplishing something when I have a strong feeling that they’re just doing something for show. If they want more birders of color, they should go to schools and excite the kids, they should help organize racially mixed birding groups, and (reflecting recent events), they should make clear that a black person with field glasses is more likely to be a birder than a murderer.

There is no evidence that I know of—and the articles present none—that eponymous bird names have created harm and social injustice. The very idea of that is almost laughable. But this is what scientists do when they want to show that they’re on the right side of history and don’t know how to really promote social change.

A Guardian “long read” on free will

April 27, 2021 • 9:15 am

Several readers sent me a link to a new Guardian piece on free will by journalist Oliver Burkeman (some added that I’m quoted a couple of times, which is true). It’s a “long read” for those with a short attention span, but I have to say that it’s a very good piece, covering all the bases: the definitions, the consequences of contracausal free will, the “solution” of compatibilism, the implications for moral responsibility and for judicial punishment; yes, it’s all there.  And although Burkeman’s personal take, given at the end, is a bit puzzling, it’s a very good and fair introduction to the controversies about free will.

Click on the screenshot to read:

 

As I said, I have mostly praise for Burkeman’s piece, as he’s clearly done his homework and manages to condense a messy controversy into a readable piece.  So take my few quibbles in light of this general approbation.

First, though, I must note Burkeman’s opening, which, surprisingly, shows the hate mail philosophers have received for promulgating determinism. (Burkeman notes, correctly, that even compatilists who broach a new kind of free will are still determinists.) Although I was once verbally attacked by a jazz musician who said I’d taken away from him the idea that he had complete freedom to extemporize his solos, I’ve never received the kind of mail that Galen Strawson has:

. . . . the philosopher Galen Strawson paused, then asked me: “Have you spoken to anyone else yet who’s received weird email?” He navigated to a file on his computer and began reading from the alarming messages he and several other scholars had received over the past few years. Some were plaintive, others abusive, but all were fiercely accusatory. “Last year you all played a part in destroying my life,” one person wrote. “I lost everything because of you – my son, my partner, my job, my home, my mental health. All because of you, you told me I had no control, how I was not responsible for anything I do, how my beautiful six-year-old son was not responsible for what he did … Goodbye, and good luck with the rest of your cancerous, evil, pathetic existence.” “Rot in your own shit Galen,” read another note, sent in early 2015. “Your wife, your kids your friends, you have smeared all there [sic] achievements you utter fucking prick,” wrote the same person, who subsequently warned: “I’m going to fuck you up.” And then, days later, under the subject line “Hello”: “I’m coming for you.” “This was one where we had to involve the police,” Strawson said. Thereafter, the violent threats ceased.

Good lord! Such is the resistance that people have to hearing that they don’t have “contracausal” (you-could-have-chosen-otherwise) free will. Regardless of what compatibilists say, belief in contracausal free will is the majority view in many places (see below).

There are only a few places where Burkeman says things I disagree with. One is how he treats the issue of “responsibility”. My own view, as someone Burkeman calls “one of the most strident of the free will skeptics,” is that while we’re not morally responsible for our misdeeds, which implies we could have chosen a different path, we are what Gregg Caruso calls “answerably responsible”. That is, as the agent of good or bad deeds, whatever actions society deems appropriate in response to our acts must devolve upon our own bodies. Therefore, if we break the law, we can receive punishment—punishment to keep us out of society where we might transgress again, sequestering us until we are deemed “cured” and unlikely to transgress again, and punishment to deter others. (Caruso, also a free-will skeptic, disagrees that deterrence should be an aim of punishment, since it uses a person as an instrument to affect the behavior of others.) Caruso holds a “quarantine” model of punishment, in which a transgressor is quarantined just as Typhoid Mary should be quarantined: to effect possible cures and protect society from infection. Burkeman describes Caruso’s model very well.

What is not justified under punishment (and most compatibilists, including Dan Dennett, agree) is retributive punishment: punishment meted out by assuming that you could have chosen to behave other than how you did. That assumption is simply wrong, and so is retributivism, which is largely the basis of how courts in the West view punishment.

As for praise or blame, or responsibility itself, Burkeman somehow thinks they would disappear even under a hard-core deterministic view of society:

Were free will to be shown to be nonexistent – and were we truly to absorb the fact – it would “precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution”, Harris has written. Arguably, we would be forced to conclude that it was unreasonable ever to praise or blame anyone for their actions, since they weren’t truly responsible for deciding to do them; or to feel guilt for one’s misdeeds, pride in one’s accomplishments, or gratitude for others’ kindness. And we might come to feel that it was morally unjustifiable to mete out retributive punishment to criminals, since they had no ultimate choice about their wrongdoing. Some worry that it might fatally corrode all human relations, since romantic love, friendship and neighbourly civility alike all depend on the assumption of choice: any loving or respectful gesture has to be voluntary for it to count.

But no, praise and blame are still warranted, for they are environmental influences that can affect someone’s behavior.  It is okay to praise someone for doing good and to censure them for doing bad, because this might change their brains in a way to make them liable to do less bad and more good in the future. (Granted, we have no free choice about whether to praise or blame someone.) The only thing that’s not warranted in Burkeman’s list is retributive punishment. Gratitude, pride, guilt, and so on are useful emotions, for even if we had no choice in what we did, these emotions drive society in positive directions, reinforcing good acts and discouraging bad ones.

Burkeman goes on, emphasizing the danger to society of promulgating determinism—a determinism that happens to be true. As the wife of the Bishop of Worcester supposedly said about Darwin’s view that we’re descended from apes,

“My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.”

This appears to be the view of not only Burkeman, it seems, but also of Dan Dennett. As Burkeman notes “Dennett, although he thinks we do have [compatibilist] free will, takes a similar position, arguing that it’s morally irresponsible to promote free-will denial.”

Morally irresponsible to promulgate denial of contracausal free will? Morally irresponsible to promulgate the truth? Or does he mean morally irresponsible to deny compatibilist notions of free will like Dennett’s? Either way, I reject the idea that we must hide the truth, or quash philosophical discussion, because it could hurt society.

Burkeman goes on about morality:

By far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces (plus maybe a little quantum randomness). “For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts, a collection of dialogues with his fellow philosopher Daniel Dennett, “it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.”

The operant word here is “deserves”—the idea of “desert” that’s the topic of a debate between Caruso and Dennett that I recently reviewed.  If you mean by “deserve” the fact that you’re deemed “answerably responsible,” and thus can undergo punishment for something bad you did, or can justifiably be praised, then yes, there is good justification for holding people answerably responsible for their good and bad deeds, and taking action accordingly.

There is much to argue with in the piece, not with Burkeman, but with some of the compatibilists he quotes. One of them is Eddy Nahmias:

“Harris, Pinker, Coyne – all these scientists, they all make the same two-step move,” said Eddy Nahmias, a compatibilist philosopher at Georgia State University in the US. “Their first move is always to say, ‘well, here’s what free will means’” – and it’s always something nobody could ever actually have, in the reality in which we live. “And then, sure enough, they deflate it. But once you have that sort of balloon in front of you, it’s very easy to deflate it, because any naturalistic account of the world will show that it’s false.”

Here Nahmias admits that determinism reigns, and implicitly that contracausal free will is nonexistent. But what I don’t think he grasps is that the naturalistic view of will, determinism, while accepted by him and his fellow compatibilists, is flatly rejected by a large majority of people—and in several countries (see the study of Sarkissian et al., though I note that when presented with concrete moral dilemmas, people tend to become more compatibilistic). Contracausal free will is the bedrock of Abrahamic religions, which of course have many adherents. Those who proclaim that everybody accepts pure naturalism and the deterministic behavior it entails—that denying that is “an easily deflatable balloon”—probably don’t get out often enough.

Likewise, though who say a society grounded on determinism will be a dreadful society full of criminals, rapists, and murderers are wrong, I think. This is for two reasons. First of all, know quite a few free-will skeptics, including Caruso, Alex Rosenberg, Sam Harris, myself, and others, and if free-will skepticism had a palpable effect on someone’s behavior, I can’t see it. It’s an unfounded fear.

The other reason is that there’s an upside in being a determinist. We still have our illusions of free will, so we can act as if our choices are contracausal even if, intellectually, we know they’re not. Hard determinists like myself are not fatalists who go around moaning, “What’s the use to tell the waiter what I want? It’s all determined, anyway.”

And there’s the improvement in the penal system that comes with accepting deteriminism: there’s a lot to be said for Caruso’s “quarantine” model, which is more or less in effect in places like Norway, though I still adhere to the value of deterrence. And, as Burkeman says eloquently, a rejection of free will paradoxially makes us “free” in the sense that we can be persuaded to give up unproductive retributive attitudes and overly judgmental behavior:

In any case, were free will really to be shown to be nonexistent, the implications might not be entirely negative. It’s true that there’s something repellent about an idea that seems to require us to treat a cold-blooded murderer as not responsible for his actions, while at the same time characterising the love of a parent for a child as nothing more than what Smilansky calls “the unfolding of the given” – mere blind causation, devoid of any human spark. But there’s something liberating about it, too. It’s a reason to be gentler with yourself, and with others. For those of us prone to being hard on ourselves, it’s therapeutic to keep in the back of your mind the thought that you might be doing precisely as well as you were always going to be doing – that in the profoundest sense, you couldn’t have done any more. And for those of us prone to raging at others for their minor misdeeds, it’s calming to consider how easily their faults might have been yours. (Sure enough, some research has linked disbelief in free will to increased kindness.)

. . . . Yet even if only entertained as a hypothetical possibility, free will scepticism is an antidote to that bleak individualist philosophy which holds that a person’s accomplishments truly belong to them alone – and that you’ve therefore only yourself to blame if you fail. It’s a reminder that accidents of birth might affect the trajectories of our lives far more comprehensively than we realise, dictating not only the socioeconomic position into which we’re born, but also our personalities and experiences as a whole: our talents and our weaknesses, our capacity for joy, and our ability to overcome tendencies toward violence, laziness or despair, and the paths we end up travelling. There is a deep sense of human fellowship in this picture of reality – in the idea that, in our utter exposure to forces beyond our control, we might all be in the same boat, clinging on for our lives, adrift on the storm-tossed ocean of luck.

I agree with this. And there’s one more benefit: if you are a free-will skeptic, you won’t always be blaming yourself for choices you made in the past on the grounds that you made the “wrong choice.” You didn’t have an alternative! This should mitigate a lot of people’s guilt and recrimination, and you can always learn from your past mistakes, which might alter your behavior in a permanent way. (This is an environmental influence on your neural program: seeing what worked and what didn’t.)

In light of Burkeman’s paean to free-will skepticism, then, it’s very odd that he says the following at the end:

Those early-morning moments aside, I personally can’t claim to find the case against free will ultimately persuasive; it’s just at odds with too much else that seems obviously true about life.

The deterministic case against contracausal free will is completely persuasive, and I think Burkeman agrees with that. So exactly what “case against free will” is he talking about? Is he adhering to compatibilism here? He doesn’t tell us. What, exactly, is at odds with what seems “obviously true about life”? But so much that “seems obviously true” is wrong as well, like the view that there’s an “agent”, a little person, sitting in our head that directs our actions. I would have appreciated a bit more about what, after doing a lot of research on the free-will controversy, Burkeman has really come to believe.

h/t: Pyers, David

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 27, 2021 • 8:00 am

Today’s photos come from reader James Blilie, whose notes and captions are indented. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

These are my photos from 1981 and 2006.

I keeping with the theme theme, I call this set “close encounters”. All are taken in the Rocky Mountains of North America and all are close encounters with wildlife found there.  I’m not really a wildlife photographer.  These were just lucky encounters while hiking and backpacking in the parks.

None of these photos are taken with a telephoto lens.  Every one in the first batch from the Canadian Rockies was taken with a 50mm lens (“normal lens”) on 35mm Kodachrome 64 film. Of the second batch, one is even taken with a wide-angle lens.

First, from Jasper and Banff National Parks and Mount Robson Provincial Park, in September 1981, a series of scanned Kodachrome images.  September seems like a spectacular time to view wildlife in these vast and beautiful parks.  (Equipment:  Pentax K-1000 or ME-Super and Pentax M 50 mm f/2.0 lens)

A bull elk (Cervus canadensis):

Next, a large group of stone sheep (Ovis dalli stonei), you can see the proximity to the road.

Next, a series of my friend and I photographing a group of Mountain Goats (Oreamnos americanus) (These are neither goats nor sheep of course.)  We saw this group of goats and sat down in the direction they were traveling and they walked right past us.  My friend was lucky to encounter a curious youth.

Next a bull moose (Alces alces).  I can’t recommend getting close to these; and in northern Minnesota I’ve been aggressively threatened by them  Luckily in those cases, I was in a canoe and they were unable to approach us!

Finally from the Canadian Rockies, a couple of views of what the local scenery looks like.

Bow Lake with moonrise.

And spectacular Mount Robson from the shore of Berg Lake.

Next are a few from our (USA) northern Rocky park:  Glacier National Park, in 2006, when my son Jamie was 2 years old.  He could hike with us even then!  (Equipment: Pentax *ist DSLR and some entry-level lenses.  I hadn’t really converted to digital at this point.  I’m a late-adopter.)

The first two are another close encounter with a Mountain Goat (Oreamnos americanus). We were sitting eating our lunch and a group walked past, including this large male:

Finally, another scenic view from Glacier National Park.  This is on the Sunrift Gorge Hike.

My scanner is an Epson V-500 perfection photo scanner (current version is the V-600), which I can highly recommend.  A good film dust brush is a key accessory.  And good software to adjust the images and spot out dust that the brush didn’t get.