When someone asserts that each person has the same human rights as every other person, this move goes from a macro-design principle directly to micro operations of personal behavior. Those making this leap of faith are then upset when macro principles—such as those in the United Nations’ International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights—are qualified by all manner of country-specific protocols and reservations.

But such reservations are not hypocritical. Rather, they must be expected if human rights are to be treated reliably. It has been left up to nation-states to enforce universalized values, and the only way we really know that human rights as macro principles are taken seriously is to see how they are applied through context-specific scenarios, contingent to each country when not to each case.

‘‘Thou shall not kill’’ is all well and good, but we do not know how seriously that principle is treated until we get to grappling with qualifications such as ‘‘except in cases of self-defense.’’ ‘‘Granted that I should love my neighbour,’’ wrote R. H. Tawney, the British economic historian, but ‘‘the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale organization, remain for solution are, ‘Who precisely is my neighbour?’ and, ‘How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice?’’’.

If human rights exist only at the macro level, you counter, are we not all at risk as individuals at the micro level? Yes, but not in the way you may mean. Just because we doubt that human rights actually exist as overarching principles everywhere equally for everyone does not stop us from recognizing that we are at risk in terms of personal and system reliability when systems behave as if those rights did not exist, and that there may be better practices to deal with such situations that are modifiable to the context in which we find ourselves, here and now rather than then and there.

Therefore, we argue that any attempt at reforming AI from within the same interlocking oppressive systems that created it is doomed to failure and, moreover, risks exacerbating existing harm. Instead, to advance justice, we must radically transform not just the technology itself, but our ideas about it, and develop it from the bottom up, from the perspectives of those who stand the most risk of being harmed.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231219241

About those “risks”. . . Are you quite sure you want to define radical transformation in conventional terms of “risk reduction”?

I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.

I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the United States was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.

Angus Deaton, March 12, 2024 (accessed online at https://www.chronicle.com/article/in-economics-do-we-know-what-were-doing?sra=true)

–“Also in cases where the outcome to be predicted is a numerical value (e.g., a risk score), a prediction can be easily translated into a discrete scale (e.g., low – medium – high risk).”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE WHO RESPECTS COMPLEXITY WOULD MAKE A DECISION BASED ON ONE NUMBER ONLY.

–“The fundamental problem with making climate change a security issue is that it responds to a crisis caused by systemic injustice with ‘security’ solutions, hardwired in an ideology and institutions designed to seek control and continuity. At a time when limiting climate change and ensuring a just transition requires a radical redistribution of power and wealth, a security approach seeks to perpetuate the status quo.”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE SHOULD BELIEVE RADICAL REDISTRIBUTION WOULD “CONTROL” CLIMATE CHANGE BY OTHER MEANS.

–“Suspend and cancel debt payments when a climate extreme event takes place, so countries have the resources they need for emergency response and reconstruction without going into more debt.”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE CAN DEFINITIVELY SAY JUST WHAT SUCH AN EVENT IS TODAY.

–“The combined effect of these interventions is a precarious economic edifice built upon stagnant growth, sapped productivity and monopsony power, with consumption driven by high levels of household debt.”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE ARGUES AGAINST THE LATTER’S DECREASE IN CONSUMPTION INEQUALITY–OR DO THEY?

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Sources.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-024-01886-3

https://www.tni.org/en/publication/primer-on-climate-security#4

https://climatenetwork.org/resource/debt-and-climate-crises/

https://www.cunylawreview.org/the-pitfalls-of-liberalism-at-large-democracy-the-administrative-state-liberalisms-undying-support-of-the-united-states-political-economy/

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii147/articles/cedric-durand-landscapes-of-capital

The article starts with:

Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with post-structuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the cultural turn, and the establishment of what scholars have recently called the postcultural historiography without the help of such paramount concepts of post-structuralist analysis as contingency, variability, instability, open-endedness, and so on. Having defined the last forty years of theoretical and methodological developments in history, these nowadays conventional tools of critique and interpretation have grown to become synonymous with the post-structuralist conceptual promise and outcome. This article questions this standard and exceptionally generous account. What if, the article asks, we start our account not with the resolute assertion of the radical contingency and variability of the post-structuralist view of history, but with something more fundamental to it—its own fixed and totalizing presuppositions? To show how an intellectual agenda opposed to fixed and totalizing reasoning can end up operating with fixed and totalizing logics of its own, the essay turns to Michel Foucault and his momentous career, to be traced from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The article ends:

For those of us who have never doubted that humans are socially constituted and that they use their socially and, thus, ideologically constituted habits of thought and praxis to enact and unwittingly constrain their lives, the post-structuralist proposition to turn this fundamental dilemma into a fixed and totalizing foundation of social life hardly constitutes a welcome breakthrough in the conversation about human agency, resistance, and struggle. What it does instead is to cut off the critical conversation about radical—that is, ideologically and structurally consequential—forms of social being. It does it by turning the question whether and under what historical circumstances humans can disengage from unwitting and ideological constraints that their societies impose on their social and cognitive life into a conceptual nonstarter. I end this article with this question in order to put it back on the historians’ agenda.

In between these two paragraphs, historian Anna Krylova provides the most forensically incisive critique I’ve read about this kind of historiographical analysis.

Anna Krylova (2024). ‘Foucault, Post-structuralism, and the Fixed “Openness of History”’. Modern Intellectual History: 1–23 (accessed online on October 2 2024 at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/foucault-poststructuralism-and-the-fixed-openness-of-history/EC9D3735BB7929416001A670E8C8601D)

(For other views on the more nuanced forms of contingency and human agency, see https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/06/19/what-if-the-root-cause-is-more-contingency/ and https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/05/08/human-agency-as-the-worlds-global-counternarrative-with-examples/)

When it comes to the crisis management literature, leadership is largely top down (officials direct) or bottom up (self-organizing crisis response), where networks are said to be vertical (hierarchical and chain of command) or horizontal (laterally interacting, official and unofficial).

We add a third category: control rooms. And not just in terms of Incident Command Centers during the emergency but already-existing infrastructure control rooms whose staff continue to operate during the emergency.

Paul Schulman and I argue infrastructure control rooms are a unique organizational formation meriting society protection, even during (especially during) continued turbulence. They have evolved to take hard systemwide decisions under difficult conditions that require a decision, now. Adding this third is to insist on real-time large-system management as the prevention of major failures and thus crises that would have happened had not control room managers, operators and support staff prevented them.

More, a major reason for this high reliability management in a large socio-technical system is to ensure that when errors do happen, they are less likely to be because of this management than to have been forced by other factors, particularly exogenous shocks. High reliability management seeks to isolate the field of blame and root causes, not least of which relate to “bad leadership.”

I

Simon Pierre Boulanger Martel et al. (2024) “Peace with Adjectives: Conceptual Fragmentation or Conceptual Innovation?” International Studies Review (https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viae014) identifies the following varieties of peace in their review of the literature, 1969 – 2022:

adversarial peace, autonomous peace, bellicose peace, cold peace, conditional peace, contested peace, cooperative peace, dictatorial peach, elusive peace, fearful peace, hybrid peace, illiberal peace, illegal peach, insecure peace, militarized peace, normal peace, partial peace, precarious peace, polarized peace, regional peace, restored peace, restricted peace, territorial peace, tyrannical peace, unjust peace, unresolved peace, unstable peace, victor’s peace, violent peace, warm peace. . .

AND THERE IS ALSO

agonistic peace, civil peace, consolidated peace, constitutional peace, everyday peace, inclusive peace, institutional peace, just peace, legitimate peace, liberal peace, local peace, maximal peace, negative peace, participatory peace, quality peace, relational peace, republican peace, sovereign peace, stable peace, strong peace, sustainable peace, a different territorial peace, world peace. . .

AND THEN

climate resilient peace/intersectional positive peace, decolonial peace, emancipatory peace, feminist peace, gender-just peace, positive peace, post-liberal peace, transrational peace. . .

The authors understandably ask–

For example, how does a case of insecure peace (Höglund and Söderberg Kovacs 2010) differ from a case of precarious peace (Maher and Thomson 2018)? And is feminist peace (Paarlberg-Kvam 2019) the same as gender-just peace (Björkdahl 2012), or do these concepts denote different understandings of the meaning of peace?

–noting, anyway, “the lack of minimal agreement on the core features of peace. . .”

II

The more differentiation of what is and is not peace, the better in my view. The world is that complex. And yet it is difficult to gainsay one of the authors’ conclusions:

There are structural incentives for scholars to coin new terms to improve their publication and citation rates, and less incentives to allocate time for thorough reading and engagement with existing scholarly work. . .While it is not easy, especially for early-career scholars, to challenge the dominant structures of academic career-making, we would nevertheless like to end with a small call for resistance to the logic of individualized output optimization in favor of more collective, dialogical, and cumulative knowledge production.

In its current state of the art, AI seems not compatible with human creativity, as Felin and Holweg (2024: 28) exemplify with the invention of aviation: given all empirical evidence available at the end of the nineteenth century, AI will not have been able to “predict” the development of the aerospace industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. . .

Félix‐Fernando Muñoz (2024). “The coevolution of technology, markets, and culture: the challenging case of AI.” Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (acccessed on line at https://doi.org/10.1007/s43253-024-00126-0)

I quote at some length from the Felin and Holweg (2024) just referenced:

So, what was the evidence for the plausibility of human powered flight at the time [in the late 1800s and the early 1900s]? The most obvious datapoint at the time was that human powered flight was not a reality. This alone, of course, would not negate the possibility. So, one might want to look at all the data related to human flight attempts to assess its plausibility. Here we would find that humans have tried to build flying machines for centuries, and flight-related trials had in fact radically accelerated during the 19th century. All of these trials of flight could be seen as the data and evidence we should use to update our beliefs about the implausibility of flight. All of the evidence clearly suggested that a belief in human powered flight was delusional. A delusion can readily be defined as having a belief contrary to evidence and reality (Pinker, 2021; Scheffer, 2022): a belief that does not align with accepted facts. In fact, the DSM-4/5—the authoritative manual for mental disorders—defines delusions as “false beliefs due to incorrect inference about external reality” or “fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence.”

Notice that many people at the time—naïvely, it was thought—pointed to birds as evidence for the belief that humans might also fly. This was a common argument. But the idea that bird flight somehow provided hope and evidence for the plausibility of human flight was seen as delusional by scientists and put to bed by the prominent scientist Joseph LeConte. He argued that flight was “impossible, in spite of the testimony of birds” (1888: 69). Like a good scientist and Bayesian, LeConte appealed to the data to support his claim. He looked at bird species—those that fly and those that do not—and concluded “there is a limit of size and weight of a flying animal.” According to LeConte, weight was the critical determinant of flight. With his data, he clearly pointed out that no bird above the weight of 50 pounds is able to fly, and thus concluded that therefore humans cannot fly. After all, large birds like ostriches and emus are flightless. And even the largest flying birds, he argued—like turkeys and bustards—“rise with difficulty” and “are evidently near the limit” (LeConte, 1888; 69-76). . . .

The emphasis that LeConte placed on the weight of birds to disprove the possibility of human powered flight highlights one of the problems with data and belief updating based on evidence. It is hard to know what data and evidence might be relevant for a given belief or hypothesis. The problem is—as succinctly put by [Karl] Polanyi—that “things are not labeled evidence in nature” (1957: 31). Is the fact that small birds can fly and large birds cannot fly relevant to the question of whether humans can fly? What is the relevant data and evidence in this context? Did flight have something to do with weight, size, or with other features like wings? Did it have something to do with the “flapping” of wings (as Jacob Degen hypothesized)? Or did it have something to do with wing shape, wing size, or wing weight?19 Perhaps feathers are critical to flight. In short, it is hard to know what data might be relevant and useful. . . .

So, what might happen if we weight our beliefs about the plausibility of human flight by focusing on reliable, scientific sources and consensus? In most instances, this is a rational strategy. However, updating our belief on this basis when it comes to heavier-than- air flight during this time period would further reinforce the conclusion that human powered flight was delusional and impossible. . . .

In the case of human flight, the data, evidence, and scientific consensus were firmly against the possibility. No rational Bayesian should have believed in heavier- than-air flight. . . .

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4737265 (my bold)

Why would we belleve today’s AI would have done any better then with that information?

I

Many people would probably think that writing down what they already think is an important part of any policy analysis. It’s a commonplace among many different types of authors, however, that they don’t know what they think until they actually write it down.

“My writings, in prose and verse, may or may not have surprised other people; but I know that they always, on first sight, surprise myself,” writes T.S. Eliot. Chimes in political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, “I do not know what I think until I have tried to write it”. “Therefore, till my work is finished, I never know exactly what result I shall reach, or if I shall arrive at any”, penned Alex de Tocqueville, historian, to philosopher John Stuart Mill. “You never know what you’re filming until later”, remarks a narrator in Chris Marker’s 1977 film Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge. A well-known curator admits, “But then, often when I sit down to write the catalogue text, I discover that it’s actually about something else”. J.M. Coetzee, Nobel novelist, manages to make all this sound quite known: “Truth is something that comes in the process of writing, or comes from the process of writing”.

So too I argue for policy analysts writing up their analyses. But a caveat is needed: Analyses come via many different genres, and not all are conducive to surprising oneself with respect to what one really thinks given the evidence now in front of him or her.

II

Such is the point made by contemporary art critic, Sean Tatol, in a recent edited panel exchange: “When I’m writing, I’m in the process of writing down my thoughts either to formulate something that I haven’t thought of before or to come to a conclusion that’s a surprise to me. That sense of development in thought is, I think, to me the most gratifying. But I think in terms of my short-form reviews that happens very seldom.”

Policy analysts as well have their short-form modes. But one cannot generalize here. The email may well be more surprising for analytical purposes than that article. Two policy briefs, one by a policy advocate who already knows the answer before touching fingers to keyboard, and the other by the policy analyst who holds off rewriting until seeing what they’ve first typed, are quite different matters.

The moral of this story is unexceptionable but worth repeating: The more genres that the policy analyst has access to and is adept in, the more likely that catalyst of analytic surprise is to be found.

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Sources

https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQPLML9A6bY