First Annual Workshop on Methods for Teaching Ethics in Data Science

Posted on April 19, 2023 by Peter

This is conference is open and free. It will take place on May 2nd, 2023 at Tufts University or on Zoom. Much of the time will be spent discussing short, fictional case studies about dilemmas relevant to data science. The in-person location: Joyce Cumming Center 177 College Ave, Medford, MA 02155

PROGRAM

Morning Session: Rooms 260 and 265 Joyce Cumming Center 8:30 am-9:00 am: Registration and Breakfast

8:30 am-9:00 am: Registration and Breakfast

9:00 am – 9:15 am: Welcome greetings

9:15 am – 9:45 am: Beyond case studies: Teaching data science critique and ethics through sociotechnical surveillance studies (Nicholas Rabb and Desen Ozkan)

9:45 am – 10:15 am: Discussion (Chair: Peter Levine)

Coffee Break: 10:15 am – 10:30 am

10:30 am – 11:00 am: Data Science Ethos: A tool for operationalizing ethics in Data Science (Micaela Parker)

11:00 am-11:30 am: Discussion (Chair: Benedetta Giovanola)

11:30 am – 12:00 pm: “What’s next for MTEDS24” (Chair: Sarah Hladikova)

Lunch break: 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Afternoon Session: Rooms 260 (Track 1/in person) and 265 (Track 2/hybrid) Joyce Cumming Center

Track 1 (in person):

1:30 pm – 2:00 pm: Case Study: The Lakeview Times (Lenore Cowen)

2:00 pm – 2:30 pm: Chatbots: A Case Study (Karin Knudson)

2:30 pm – 3:00 pm: Who owns our data? Indigenous data sovereignty (Kyle Monahan and Joseph Robertson)

Track 2 (zoom):
1:30 pm – 2:00 pm: Irena at HelpMe! (Robin Tharakan)
2:00 pm – 2:30 pm: Case Study: Artful Ventures (Sarah Hladikova)

2:30 pm – 3:00 pm: Towards Ethics of Materiality in Data Science (Madeline Tachibana )

Coffee and cookies: 3:00 pm – 3:30 pm

Please register (lunch count for in-person participants & zoom:

https://go.tufts.edu/mteds2023

Password: (provided upon registration)

Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain

Posted on April 17, 2023 by Peter

Living in Andalusia for three months, I read Pagan Spain, a book that the great Black American writer Richard Wright published in 1957. From 1947 until the end of his life, Wright lived mostly in Paris. Gertrude Stein encouraged him to cross the border to Spain. During three weeks of 1954, he drove about 4,000 km of Spanish roads, rode trains in the south, and talked with people of diverse backgrounds, demonstrating empathy for all but the most annoying of them. His book demonstrates particular compassion for women, whose structural oppression Wright analyzes at length and in a way that surely qualifies him as a feminist in an advanced 1950s mode.

Overall, he portrays Spain as deeply backward, profoundly poor, and utterly static. He sees no prospects for change. To be sure, Franco’s fascist dictatorship suppressed progress, and 1955 was just under halfway through that long and dark chapter. However, Wright analyzes Franco as more of a symptom than a cause. The problem, in his view, is spiritual: the Spanish people are deeply irrational, hierarchical, communalistic, and superstitious, in contrast to the rational individualism of what Wright calls “the Western world”–and with which he explicitly identifies.

He acknowledges a bias for Protestantism (despite not being religious any more), but he needs an explanation for Spain’s backwardness compared to other Catholic countries, including France. He suggests that Spain is actually immured in an older, deeper–and therefore more profoundly static–form of religion, which he labels paganism. The rituals of Spanish Catholicism are pre-Christian fertility rites in superficial disguise. For instance, he reads the Black Virgin of Monserrat as a pagan fertility figure that is meaningfully placed among phallic rock formations.

I admire Wright, appreciate his sensitive portraits of Spanish acquaintances, and share his abhorrence of Franco. But his book offers a testable hypothesis: Spain will never change (and certainly not soon). One character who emerges as basically a fool is an American businessman who predicts economic development.

In fact, Spanish GDP grew at an average rate of 6.5% from 1959 to 1974, the period known as “the Spanish miracle.” Per-capita GDP was five times higher in 1990 than it had been in 1950. That growth accompanied a vast migration of people to cities and the transformation of work and daily lives, for better and for worse. Other countries experienced similar trajectories. El milagro español resembled il miracolo economico italiano, les trente glorieuses in France and the German Wirtschaftswunder. This convergence diminishes Franco’s credit for the growth. But Wright explicitly denies any possibility of similar change.

Once fascism ended, Spain was poised for further, rapid convergence with the EU countries, not only economically but socially, culturally, and politically. The country that Wright perceived as permanently stifled by reactionary patriarchy was early to legalize same-sex marriage and now has a cabinet with a female majority. Wright believed that piety dominated the Spanish psyche, but today just 18.5% of Spanish citizens identify as practicing Catholics (and of those, more than one third never attend mass).

Wright ends the book with a portrait of Holy Week in Seville, complete with delirious penitents with “bruised and bleeding flesh,” soldiers whose faces are “hard and stern”–“their gleaming bayonets … a forest of steel”–workmen with “bleak and pinched” faces bearing floats, and other mass expressions of subjugation and piety. “A feeling of helplessness, of desperation, of wild sorrow, of a grief too deep to be appeased clogged the senses.” All of this is Catholic on the surface but follows “some ancient pattern of behavior” based on a male/female binary.

We recently observed Holy Week in Granada. The floats sound similar to the ones Wright watched, and the number of participants remains extraordinary. But the whole event is highly informal, with fun roles for children, guys coming out from under the floats to check their phones or buy drinks, light security, and bands that sound like homecoming day in a US college town. Although I am sure that piety persists in some quarters, overall, one has a sense of traditional forms being transformed for radically new purposes.

Demetrio E. Brisset (2019) describes scattered efforts to organize light and even satirical Easter festivals under Franco, which were increasingly successful. “The foundations for the modern-day festivals were thereby laid. The successful shift from festivities in honour of Catholic saints to a type of celebration related to non-religious carnivals simply required a change of attitude, that was encouraged by another social and political context, i.e. disintegration of the system of moral norms after the death of Franco. The social effervescence of the fascinating period between 1976 and 1978 liberated the festivities from the tight control to which they had previously been subjected.” Brisset traces several influences on 21st century festivals in Spain, including tourism, political critique and satire, scholarly efforts to revive folkloric traditions, demands for women’s leadership, and even self-conscious neopaganism, which seems to owe more to the global New Age movement than to anything indigenously Spanish.

Perhaps we can say Wright’s view was interesting enough to prove flatly wrong. Although his values were benign, he dramatically underestimated the agency of the people he observed, which might be a lesson for all of us.

I think of a young woman Wright meets in Barcelona, whose role in life is to be a virgin. She never leaves her family’s funereal apartment because premarital contact with the outside world would open her honor to question. Meanwhile, her fiance, who is too poor to afford a wedding, regularly purchases sex from women he holds in contempt. Today, this woman could be alive and in her 70s. If she has survived–and I hope she has–she has seen extraordinary change.

Source: Brisset, Demetrio E., Novas festas profanas em Espanha, Revista Lusófona de Estudos Culturais, December 2019

opinion is dynamic and relational

Posted on April 10, 2023 by Peter

“Sixty percent of Americans approve of the indictment of former President Donald Trump, according to a new CNN Poll.” This statistic results from randomly selecting more than 1,000 Americans and asking them to express their opinions in response to a multiple-choice survey question. Every respondent provided an answer. One might therefore presume that (almost) all Americans hold private opinions about the indictment, and they are able to disclose those views–truthfully or not–when the phone rings with a pollster on the line.

Is that what the survey results really mean? Here are 13 hypothetical scenarios in which someone opines in favor of the indictment:

A reads online about the indictment and forms a private opinion in favor of it. A pollster randomly calls A (out of the blue) to ask about the indictment. A recalls and shares his opinion, because he wants to be sincere in a conversation with a courteous stranger.
A pollster randomly selects B, who is a Democrat. Despite privately believing that the indictment is a stretch, B says that it is fair. She feels fine about this deception because Trump is a threat to democracy, and a poll is a means to influence public opinion.
A pollster randomly selects C, who thinks: “The 34 disclosed charges are only valid if they relate to an undisclosed additional felony, but I assume that this felony is serious or else Mr. Bragg would not have sought the indictment, so I will say it is justified.”
When randomly contacted for the same survey, D thinks, “Trump: bad. Indictment: bad for Trump. Therefore, Trump’s indictment: good.”
A family member asks E what she thinks about the indictment, so she forms an opinion in favor of it and casually states her view, without much emotion.
F’s friend says, “About time, Trump got arrested.” F generally admires this friend and takes her opinions seriously. F hasn’t thought about this news otherwise. She expresses agreement.
G’s colleague says, “I can’t believe those radicals are persecuting Trump.” G is generally annoyed by this colleague but has not otherwise thought about the indictment. G forms a private view in favor of it.
H serves on the New York grand jury and is required to vote whether to indict on each of 34 charges. Based on extensive evidence and deliberation, but with decidedly mixed and sober feelings, H votes to indict.
I paints a sign that says “Lock him up,” drives to New York City, and waves the sign in front of the national media while Trump is being arraigned. This person sincerely believes that Trump is guilty of the disclosed charges and thinks it is important to persuade the public of his guilt.
J joins I, also holding a similar sign, but isn’t especially interested in the hush money case and actually believes it is weak. J mainly wants to be on TV.
K is a Democratic senator and former prosecutor who feels that the New York State case is legally weak, politically detrimental to Democrats, and polarizing. However, K faces a potential primary challenger from the left. K issues a press release defending the indictment and calling for calm while the legal process plays out.
L is a liberal pundit who interviews six legal experts about the case, recognizes significant challenges to a successful prosecution, but carefully develops the strongest possible argument in favor of indictment in order to counter editorials that seem biased against Alvin Bragg.
M is a reporter who wants to write an objective and balanced news account of the indictment. A reads the quotes attributed to Alvin Bragg in M’s article and forms the opinion that the indictment is justified.

Each of these scenarios involves a person opining in favor of the indictment, yet their meanings are quite different. In several cases, the opinion is clearly dependent on context and could easily shift.

In all these scenarios, the opinion is relational–that is, formed during a purposive interaction with other people. Only a few of the scenarios involve thoughts that remain private. The rest are statements expressed to someone else for a reason, and sometimes at a cost.

Even the private thoughts are responses to others’ previous statements. For instance, A could not form an opinion about the indictment directly, as you might form an opinion of cold rain falling on your head. He must have heard or read one or more descriptions of the indictment that were written by people with intentions–even if, like the reporter labeled M, these writers would deny any bias. A may have chosen to read a description of Trump’s indictment for some specific reason, or the news might have assailed A’s consciousness without being sought, e.g., in the form of a headline.

A common implicit model of public opinion assumes that many people individually form authentic opinions of issues and store them in memory. On this model, well-known problems, such as the influence of the precise wording or ordering of questions or the refusal of many people to answer specific items, should have technical solutions. For instance, CNN should have offered a “not sure” option to reveal how many people lack opinions.

Some of the technical problems might result from a mismatch between the formulation of questions and the ways that people store their opinions. For example, I might have a strong, negative view of Donald Trump but no specific thoughts about the indictment. Then, when asked about the indictment, I could state a positive answer based on my hostility to Trump, a non-answer because I haven’t considered the indictment, or a negative response because (remembering a different stored opinion), I don’t trust the legal system. I would hold private opinions in my memory; the technical challenge is to describe them accurately using a standardized instrument.

Zaller & Feldman (1992, p. 586) argue that people generate potentially conflicting opinions on the same topic over time and store them all in their memory, retrieving a literally random one when asked about the topic. Then my real view is my whole set of relevant opinions, and the task is to depict that whole collection accurately. For instance, hard-core Democrats probably hold 95% anti-Trump opinions in their memories, but swing voters may be 50/50.

This model is fundamentally flawed if “opining” is an activity that people undertake in relationship with others for a purpose. In that case, an interview with a survey researcher is an odd kind of interaction that may not yield knowledge that generalizes to other contexts. Perrin and McFarland 2011 (p. 101) argue that “well-documented anomalies [in survey research,] such as question wording, question order, nonresponse, and even fictional questions on surveys … raise the possibility that responses are produced, not just evoked, by the artificial interaction between interviewer and respondent. Public opinion should be understood as collective, not just aggregated; dynamic, not static; and reactive, not unidirectional.”

Similarly, Paul Sniderman (2107, around p. 28) analyzes a survey respondent as a person in a conversation, and he applies the “maxims” that the philosopher H. P. (Paul) Grice found operative in ordinary conversations.

According to Grice (1967), when a regular conversation goes reasonably well, the speakers try to give relevant, sincere, and concise answers to questions and expect the same from one another. Thus, when a pollster suddenly calls you and asks what you think about the Trump indictment, you may try to give that person what they want: a concise and clear answer that is consistent with your real views. If you have no opinions, you may generate one to be helpful. You will also try to glean what you can from the interviewer, including any reasons that Trump may be guilty or innocent.

Rather than being manipulated by the question’s wording or holding soft and malleable opinions, you may instead be striving to agree–if possible–with your interlocutor, as you normally would with a friend. If the way a question is posed makes you think that Trump deserves to be indicted (even if that was not the pollster’s intention), you may agreeably opine in favor of the indictment. This behavior is not unreasonable; it reflects an effort to learn from the conversation. However, you might have reasons to distrust the pollster. You might believe that the media violates Grice’s maxims, in which case it may be attractive to give them an insincere response in return.

Again, an interaction with a pollster is a strange one, with no clear benefits for the respondent and minimal cues about the interviewer’s trustworthiness. Indeed, interviewers, who are paid phone-bank employees, are instructed not to disclose their own views, as normal people would. As Nina Eliasoph writes:

Research on inner beliefs, ideologies, and values is usually based on surveys, which ask people questions about which they may never have thought, and most likely have never discussed. … The researcher analyzing survey responses must then read political motives and understandings back into the responses, trying to reconstruct the private mental processes the interviewee ‘must have’ undergone to reach a response. That type of research would more aptly be called private opinion research, since it attempts to bypass the social nature of opinions, and tries to wrench the personally embodied, sociable display of opinions away from the opinions themselves. But in everyday life, opinions always come in a form: flippant, ironic, anxious, determined, abstractly distant, earnest, engaged, effortful. And they always come in a context–a bar, a charity group, a family, a picket–that implicitly invites or discourages debate (Eliasoph 1998 p. 18)

I agree with this line of argument, which suggests skepticism about survey research (even though I conduct and use such research).

I would add that each of our opinions also stands in relationships with some of our other opinions. As we opine during conversations with other human beings, we are more or less conscious that the various things we say (or privately believe) should fit together. Not only should each proposition that we endorse be logically consistent with the others, but they should tend to explain or entail each other.

Testing our own consistency is challenging because we do not have access to a database of all our stored opinions that we can audit for contradictions and gaps. On the contrary, a few of our own opinions are salient for us at a given time because of the situation we’re in, including what other people have recently said or asked. We lack the cognitive capacity to retrieve all the other things we have ever felt or said, some of which could easily be contradictory. Most of our own opinions lie beyond the illumination of the present.

It would be easier to achieve consistency if that were the only criterion for adopting a new view. We might then be able to retrieve our closely related existing opinions and reject any new idea if it conflicts with them. For example, I might hold a positive or negative view of Trump, and anytime anyone asks me anything relevant to him, I would decide whether it was good or bad for Trump and opine accordingly.

But that is the foolish consistency of a closed mind. Real people, confronted with the complexity and nuance of real issues, often endorse views that do not cohere so neatly, even in close succession. For instance, Jennifer Hochschild (1981, p. 252) describes a subject who is ambivalent about welfare policy because he believes in ideas of hard-work and independence but also that the rich are mostly un-deserving and that poor people need help. The various views that he shares with Hochschild may all be valid; it is only from the perspective of someone who wants this person to make a decision about welfare policy that they are even in tension. But this interviewee is not a legislator or referendum-voter who confronts a decision. The individual is describing many aspects of a complex situation.

Imagine that people can only recall and think about a few ideas at a time, and those ideas are completely relative to the context—for instance, dependent on how the interviewer has phrased the question. Then we are all blundering around in the dark. But that model does not fit familiar examples. Many people use a few closely related opinions as frequent reference points when they evaluate current events and issues. Some such opinions are invidious, such as racial bias against Alvin Bragg. But some are defensible and based in prior arguments and experiences. For instance, maybe the main flaw of current American politics is partisan polarization, and the Trump indictment will exacerbate the problem. Or perhaps Trump is a 21st-century populist authoritarian, and anything that checks his impunity is valuable.

General doctrines like these can operate as biases. Individuals who always return to a few premises make poor discussion-partners and may have trouble learning from others. Yet people with general views do not randomly select opinions from their stores of prior ideas. They hold organized bodies of thought that may have merit. And other cases reflect more responsiveness. For example:

A person is asked about the indictment of Trump, retrieves several previously formed opinions about the defendant, the US legal system, the relationship between prosecutions and elections, and the witness Michael Cohen and tries to construct a view that makes sense of these propositions.
A person (like G, above) reacts negatively to an annoying pro-Trump interlocutor and adopts a positive opinion of the indictment, but then she recalls that she generally opposes criminal prosecutions in comparable cases and decides to withdraw her view.
A person is not sure what to make of the indictment, reads several arguments on both sides, and remains uncertain but now holds a more complex view of the issues.

Speaking for myself … I recently encountered an argument that was new to me: the Sixth Amendment requires charges to be publicly disclosed at the time of arrest, which the New York prosecutors failed to do with Trump. That argument challenged my prior view of the case. I worked to incorporate it into my thinking. I struggled between: 1) “Good point; this case really is flawed,” and 2) “Since Trump can file a petition to get all charges disclosed, his constitutional rights are protected.” Whether my ultimate conclusion is wise or not, I was trying to reason based on inputs from other people.

I would not claim that any of these responses is typical. They involve the labor of forming and recalling one’s own views, absorbing others’ opinions, and trying to harmonize them, which requires some civic concern and some intellectual rigor and humility. We all often fail on those counts.

I would only claim that these forms of reasoning occur. Their very possibility implies that we may hold ideas that relate to each other, even as we interact with other people who have ideas of their own. This implies quite a different model of public opinion than the now-standard one, which envisions that individuals store lists of views in their private memories and reveal them–more or less honestly–when asked.

See also: individuals in cultures: the concept of an idiodictuon; Mapping Ideologies as Networks of Ideas; against the idea of viewpoint diversity. Sources: Perrin, Andrew J. and Katherine McFarland, “Social Theory and Public Opinion,” Annual Review of Sociology 2011. 37:87–107; Zaller, J. & Feldman, S. (1992), A simple theory of the survey response: answering questions versus revealing preferences, American Journal of Political Science, 36:3: 579-616; Sniderman, Paul M.. The Democratic Faith: Essays on Democratic Citizenship (Yale University Press, 2017); Grice, Paul, “Logic and Conversation” (1967), in Grice, Studies in the Ways of Words (Harvard, 1989), pp. 22-44; Eliasoph, Nina, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Hochschild, Jennifer. 1981. What’s Fair? American’s Attitudes Toward Distributive Justice. Harvard University Press

Machado: Glory is never what I’ve sought

Posted on April 6, 2023 by Peter

Antonio Machado begins the 53 short “Proverbs and Songs” from Fields of Castille (1912) with one that announces his intentions:

Nunca perseguí la gloria 
ni dejar en la memoria 
de los hombres mi canción; 
yo amo los mundos sutiles, 
ingrávidos y gentiles 
como pompas de jabón. 
Me gusta verlos pintarse 
de sol y grana, volar 
bajo el cielo azul, temblar 
súbitamente y quebrarse.

I’ve tried an English version that is a little loose to allow unforced near-rhymes that might honor Machado’s form:

Glory is never what I've sought,
not to print my song in others' thought.
I love delicate worlds, subtle
and weightless as a soap bubble.
I like to watch them decorate
themselves with sun and scarlet,
float below the sky's blue,
tremble, and--pop--they're through.

against the idea of viewpoint diversity

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Peter

In “People deserve safety on college campuses, ideas don’t,” Andrew J. Perrin and Christian Lundberg make an important argument against the idea of viewpoint diversity. They write:

Emphasizing viewpoint teaches students to not bother separating ideas from the people who hold them. Viewpoint is a visual metaphor that attaches what a person believes to where they sit: Viewpoints are properties people own and express, not ideas to be evaluated. It’s a classic ad hominem fallacy that renders argument fruitless.

We all draw on experience, and our experiences are influenced by our social positions. That is why demographic diversity is intellectually valuable. If, for example, men monopolize the conversation, then issues and solutions that are more obvious to other genders will probably be overlooked, or, at best, underplayed. The fact that some individuals demonstrate exceptional insight into others’ experiences does not negate this point. (See “Dear Mrs Amartya Sen, men will never understand us.”)

However, the metaphor of a viewpoint makes people’s ideas look like automatic functions of their social positions. It overlooks the diversity and freedom of individuals in any given social group; it makes reasoning and argument look fruitless; it implies that incorporating individuals with additional viewpoints will automatically improve a group and should be the main goal; and it suggests that a critical assessment of an idea is an attack on the person who holds it. As Perrin and Lundberg conclude:

Settling for exposure to viewpoints — as if they were infections to which one might develop antibodies — places them outside the realm of argument and reason. We fail those on the political left by ignoring conservative arguments instead of engaging them. Meanwhile, conservative students learn that their ideas are something others should be exposed to rather than meaningfully engaged.

I believe that the metaphor of a viewpoint is deeply rooted, and that challenging it could be quite fruitful. Put more generally, the image of a point in space is remarkably widely used to define people and ideas.

The most familiar example is the left-to-right political spectrum, which allows a person, an opinion or position, or a party or movement to be located at one point on a straight line. People or ideas can easily be visualized as points in two-dimensional space if they are located along two axes at once. For instance, Americans have often been described as liberal versus conservative on economics and on race, as two separate dimensions. Three dimensions are harder to depict on paper or a flat screen, although a three-dimensional model can be rotated and presented meaningfully on a plane. In any case, mathematics allows adding more than three dimensions, even though we can’t picture them visually, by simply tagging a given person, idea, or party or movement with many variables at once. Prevailing statistical methods, such as factor analysis, treat people, ideas, or groups as points in many-dimensional space and envision differences as the distance between positions. Many models try to explain why a person occupies a given point based on other known information about the same individual, such as party identification or race.

If a model employs many dimensions, it can incorporate any amount of quantitative data about the people and ideas being studied. Since each person or idea has a good chance of occupying a unique position in multidimensional space, there is relatively little danger that individuals will be casually lumped together in large groups.

However, some kinds of information must be lost in a model based on points in space. First, this metaphor conceals the way that ideas may connect to each other. If respondents are asked many questions on a survey, standard statistical methods capture correlations among their answers but cannot detect logical relationships among any individual’s ideas. Does a person believe one thing because of another belief, or despite it, or as two disconnected ideas? The structure of individuals’ thinking—if there is any—is lost. In contrast, when we read an impressive political argument or speech, we are primarily interested in its structure: in why (or whether) each point implies the next, or qualifies it, or contradicts it. A metaphor of points in space makes everyone look much more simple-minded than any careful speaker or writer.

To be sure, some of us probably fail to connect our separate ideas in reasonable ways, but we cannot know how many from standard survey research. The metaphor of points in space is biased against detecting complexity of thought, if there is any (Levine 2022).

Importantly, large bodies of research based on this model find that people are not responsive to arguments, that their beliefs are either incoherent or driven by indefensible biases, that they supply reasons after the fact to rationalize what they already desire—in short, that anything remotely resembling a deliberative democracy is psychologically naïve. Paul Sniderman—who dissents in interesting ways from what he calls “the textbook view of citizens’ capacity to reason about politics”—summarizes the consensus of his fellow political scientists as follows. “Average citizens’ knowledge about politics and public affairs is threadbare; their political beliefs minimally coherent, indeed, often self-contradictory; their support for core democratic values all too likely to crumble in the face of a threat, real or imaginary” (Sniderman 2017, pp. 42, 107).

Factor analysis is a statistical technique. It is often described as scientific, where “science” means a cumulative, empirical research project of testing hypotheses with data. Famous contributors to the statistical study of political opinions and behavior who have used a point-in-space model are English-speaking social and behavioral scientists like Charles Spearman, who invented factor analysis, and Philip Converse and his colleagues, who pioneered academic political survey research with the American National Election Studies.

A strangely similar metaphor is also influential in a very different tradition: Continental European political philosophy. Until the late 1800s, the words “culture” and “religion” had made sense only in the singular. People either had culture or not; they were either religious or not. But Romantic-Era thinkers began to see deep plurality. There were many cultures, religions, and nations (or peoples), understood as distinct in fundamental ways. These thinkers imagined that individuals saw the world from the perspective of their respective cultures or religions. Two people from different cultures would behold a different reality, although people who shared a culture would share a common worldview. A word for everything that can be seen from a given point is “horizon.” Perspective, viewpoint, and/or horizon were keywords in the thought of Herder, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and many other highly abstract European philosophers.

Again, a person with a perspective occupies a point in space. This metaphor generates insights—there may be a French, or a modern, or a bourgeois perspective on certain topics—but it also obscures and creates conundrums. If people hold all their beliefs because of their fundamental perspectives or viewpoints, then a critique of any of their beliefs can be taken as an objection to the person and their right to speak. In that case, arguments about ideas can seem uncivil and even threatening.

Furthermore, if human beings are assigned to cultures on a “one-to-a-customer basis,” (Wolcott 1991, p. 247), and if each culture fundamentally shapes how all its members understand the world, then how can anyone know anything objectively, including the nature of other people’s cultures? Surely everything we think is relative to our perspective. Deep cultural relativism leads to basic skepticism or even nihilism, as Nietzsche most famously argued.

One way out is to argue that a fair institution is one that treats all cultures and religions equally and neutrally. For instance, the great American political philosopher John Rawls assumes “that a modern democratic society is characterized … by a plurality of reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines” (Rawls 1993, pp. xvi, 59). Each of these doctrines determines each person’s values. Rawls concludes that a fair government must be neutral among these doctrines; indeed, he sees justice as fairness. Demands for “viewpoint diversity” on college campuses have a similar logic. However, critics have argued that neutrality is impossible (liberal institutions inevitably reflect specific values) and mere fairness among perspectives is an unsatisfactory account of justice.

Whether it is invoked in a statistical model or a work of political philosophy, a point in space from which one sees the world is a metaphor. It should not be taken too literally. We have other ways of describing the complexity of human interactions. We can model conversations as games with players and moves. We can envision ideas flowing through society on a hydraulic model, with pressure and viscosity (Allen 2015). Caroline Levine shows that literary writing often makes use of four forms—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—to represent social phenomena (C. Levine 2015).

Indeed, we live in a period of fascination with networks: electronic, neural, social, semantic, and many other kinds. This means that we have powerful new techniques for analyzing networks, and many recent studies apply these techniques to people and ideas in ways that offer insights about politics.

This is why I have been working with colleagues to replace the metaphor of points in space with one of networks. I have introduced the technical term idiodictuon for the network of ideas that each individual holds, where the connections among ideas are reasons.

In this model, when people discuss issues, they are sharing ideas and connections that others may choose to incorporate into their respective idiodictuons. Whether we encounter another person’s ideas depends on whether we are connected to that person in some kind of social network. Human beings who discuss within a network of relationships form a phylodictuon (a shared network of ideas, including ones that conflict).

It is generally good for a phylodictuon to encompass diverse ideas and ideas from diverse people (which are different matters), yet the job of a wise community is to improve its collection of ideas and how they are organized, not merely to ensure that all available ideas are included. As Perrin and Lundberg write, “Confronting serious ideas means that while every person deserves safety on campus, no idea does; all ideas deserve the respect that a real stress test brings.”

Sources: Perrin, Andrew J. and Christian Lundberg, “People deserve safety on college campuses. Ideas don’t,” The Boston Globe, March 29; Paul M. Sniderman, The Democratic Faith: Essays on Democratic Citizenship (Yale University Press); Peter Levine, “Mapping ideologies as networks of ideas,” Journal of Political Ideologies, 2022, DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2022.2138293; Harry F. Wolcott, “Propriospect and the acquisition of culture., Anthropology & Education Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1991): 251-273; John Rawls (Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Danielle Allen, “Reconceiving Public Spheres: The Flow Dynamics Model,” in Allen and Jennifer S. Light, From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age, University of Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 178-207; Caroline Levine, Caroline, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015).

the Synagogue of Water in Ubeda

Posted on April 3, 2023 by Peter

Ubeda is an astonishingly lovely Spanish town. Its harmonious renaissance buildings of honey-colored stone perch on a cliff over the Valley of the Guadalquivir. During the first half of the 16th century, local agriculture boomed and the gentry chose to build palacios in town and endow churches and public buildings. They had the benefit of a talented architect who was up-to-date in Italian Mannerism, one Andres de Vandelvira. Then the market fell and the town’s population shrank. In the 1910s, the great poet Antonio Machado found the area deeply depressed:

But what vitality for a dying people? With two thirds of our territory uncultivated, the greatest number of desperate emigrants from Europe, minimal population, are we still talking about confidence in our vitality, in our prolific strength and in our future? Isn’t it absurd to talk about trust? Our starting point must be a “desperate insubordination.”

Depopulation at least preserved the renaissance architecture, and now Ubeda and the neighboring town of Baeza appear prosperous.

In 2007, a local entrepreneur, Fernando Crespo, was planning to develop three connected properties when he discovered the remains of a medieval synagogue dispersed through these buildings. One of the facades still bears the insignia of the town’s inquisitor–a man whose job would have included persecuting people of Jewish descent. Crespo financed the recovery of the original synagogue, including a two-story prayer hall with a women’s gallery and a ritual bathing area that fills naturally with clean water. It makes a beautiful and moving sight.

In the local newspaper in 2011, Alberto Roman Vilchez reported that “several experts questioned whether, at this time, it can be said that the so-called Sinagoga del Agua de Ubeda is a synagogue or another type of monument.” Among the critics was Francisca Hornos, director of the Museo Provincial de Jaen, who acknowledged that the law permits anyone to say what they want about their own property, “but the typological and formal analysis of an archaeological, ethnological or artistic heritage should not be done after the fact. … Where is the archaeological excavation that was done there? Who did it? Where is the inventory of this excavation?” An archaeologist named Vicente Barba Colmenero took the view that archaeology must proceed according to “proper procedures, “with public disclosure.” Without a proper process, the building “cannot be called a synagogue.”

To this day, the amount of scholarly writing seems a bit sparse, and it’s perhaps unusual that the archaeology was conducted by the private owner, who now manages the site as a museum. However, in 2011, Pablo Jesus Lorite Cruz published a piece on the “Location and Authenticity of the Synagogue of Ubeda.” He emphasized that the upper balcony is consistent with a women’s gallery, the basement is consistent with a ritual bath, and the immediate district could well have been populated by Jews before 1492. He wrote that he had consulted documentation and a “technical architecture report defended at the Polytechnic University of Madrid on the primary building, currently in press.” He concluded, “In our humble opinion there is no doubt that what was truly discovered in Ubeda is a synagogue that in a short period of time time will reveal new ideas, hypotheses and even theses about the Jewish heritage and especially that of the city of Ubeda.”

I have not been able to find the technical report that Lorite mentioned, but Andres Domingo Lopez published a 2013 monograph on The Synagogue of the Hills: History of the Jews in Ubeda, which treats the building as a synagogue.

Apparently, a very long-standing Jewish community built a handsome temple near the city’s main square in Islamic times, and when the main Christian persecution began in 1492, this synagogue either gradually dissolved into secular buildings or was intentionally hidden in the hope that Jews might one day return. Although I wish the scholarly evidence were somewhat more transparent and robust, I was grateful to have been able to visit this place.

a Heideggerian meditation

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Peter

(This is the third in a series; see also a Hegelian meditation and a Husserlian meditation.)

This is a breath: in, out. Then another. It has a certain mood, first a bit anxious, then more relaxed.

What is going on here–really going on? People have disagreed, but they tend to use the same vocabulary even when they espouse incompatible theories. Their keywords include: subject, object, language, world, mind, nature, freedom, and necessity.

Just for example, perhaps some of the material called “air” is filling lungs while brain cells are generating a subjective impression of relaxation and suggesting the words “to breathe.”

This vocabulary seems to miss or obscure what it is happening here. The experience is not of oxygen; it is of breathing, which is intrinsically an activity with purpose and value. Being there (Dasein) always comes in a mood; affect is not merely added on. But the mood can shift, and the activity can change the mood. Unconscious, hurried respiration can become meditative breathing.

Dasein unfolds over time and is aware that it must end one day. It has not chosen to be but has been thrown into the world–obliged to breathe, to have a mood at each moment, to experience time, and to adopt a language with a history. Yet Dasein can choose to become aware of its temporality, its mortality, its concerns, and its attunements to the world.

Being-there with a breath affords these insights. Letting it be-there without the usual vocabulary of philosophy and science can show Dasein what it authentically has been and is.

So: what mood is there with this particular breath? If it is anxiety or boredom, that is real. Accept it, and then change it.

youth voting backlash

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Peter

The New York Times‘ Neil Vigdor cites two research findings from my Tisch College colleagues in his article entitled, “Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses.”

First:

Between the 2018 and 2022 elections in Idaho, registration jumped 66 percent among 18- and 19-year-old voters, the largest increase in the nation, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. The nonpartisan research organization, based at Tufts University, focuses on youth civic engagement.

And then:

Nearly 59 percent of students at traditional colleges in New Hampshire came from out of state in 2020, according to the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts.

The main thesis of the article is that Republican state legislators are introducing legislation to make voting harder for young people or for college students, particularly in states where the youth and/or college vote has been strong lately. However, only some of these bills have passed. For example, Idaho banned using student ID cards for voting, but a New Hampshire bill that would have required student voters to prove that they pay in-state tuition died in committee.

Since the 2002 election, we have consistently analyzed the youth vote and been able to show that it is especially consequential in some states and in some races. Our research has challenged the traditional view that youth never vote much, which discourages campaigns from contacting youth–a classic vicious cycle. Generating data about young voters seems essential for encouraging turnout, but when there’s good news, sharing it may sometimes trigger backlash. It’s encouraging to see some successful resistance.

Frontiers of Democracy Conference – Early Bird Special

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Peter

The Frontiers of Democracy conference is taking shape. We have received strong proposals for concurrent sessions on many diverse topics related to democracy in the United States and around the world. Our distinguished and exciting plenary panelists will specifically discuss religious pluralism and its relationship to democracy in multiracial societies.

We are offering early bird tickets for those who register by May 1. A regular General Admission ticket purchased by then will cost $170, and current students and Tufts University community qualify for a $70 ticket. After May 1, prices will go back to their standard levels of $240 or $120. Tickets include hors d’oeuvres on July 13, breakfast and lunch on July 14, and breakfast and lunch on July 15. (If you have already purchased tickets, you will automatically receive a partial discount to the early bird rate.)

We still have space for some additional session proposals and can accept proposals until May 1. The submission form for a session requires a title and description for the conference agenda, some thoughts about your format and audience, and the contact information of confirmed collaborators.

Time and location: July 13 (5 – 7 PM) to July 15 (noon) on Tufts University’s Medford, MA campus near the Medford/Tufts Station on the Boston Green Line.

perhaps it’s not that conservatives are happier but that people with depression cluster on the left

Posted on March 24, 2023 by Peter

Musa al-Gharbi has written a review essay on “How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives.” He summarizes studies that show that conservatives are more likely than liberals/progressives to describe themselves as happy, and this relationship holds when one controls for demographics. In other words, conservatives do not report being happier because they are more advantaged; instead, a conservative who has the same social circumstances as a progressive is likelier to be happy. Al-Garbi says that this finding is consistent across countries and extends back in time.

1. Replicating the basic pattern: conservatism is associated with happiness.

I can’t independently vouch for his overview of the research, but I can confirm the main finding with data from Tufts’ 2022 Equity in America survey. We drew a representative sample of 1,831 Americans, with large subsamples of African Americans and Latinos to allow more precise estimates of racial/ethnic differences. We also collected an extraordinary number of measures about each respondent.

We asked, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say you are… Very happy, Pretty happy, or Not too happy.”

In a model with age, education, race and gender, more education and older age predict greater happiness. (We know from extensive research that the age curve is not linear; happiness dips in middle age. That pattern is invisible in a linear regression.) If I add marital status and a self-report of physical health, only those variables are significantly related to reported happiness. In other words, it looks as if older and better educated people are more likely to be married and in good health. Those factors then relate to happiness.

If I add ideology, it is also significant (p <.001), with more conservative people more likely to report being happy. If I also add religious attendance, it too is significant, and ideology stays signifiant. That implies that the ideology “effect” is not explained away by religiosity, but both matter. Here is that model. The last four variables are significant.

2. Could the explanation be progessives’ social awareness?

I think some progressives might say that they–and others on their side–are unhappy because they are rightly conscious of social injustices and dangers. Thus their unhappiness reflects social concern.

We can test this hypothesis to a limited extent with our survey. It includes a few relevant attitudinal questions along with many variables about life circumstances. I added the following four items to the above model:

How bothered have you been witnessing someone in a public place being treated unfairly because of their race?
How has the pandemic impacted your mental health?
Thinking about climate change makes me feel anxious. [Agree/disagree]
Someone [I] know has been unfairly stopped, searched, questioned, physically threatened or abused by the police. [Agree/disagree]

Except the climate question, each of these is related to unhappiness to a statistically significant degree. However, being liberal is still also related to being unhappy. That means that these specific concerns seem to accompany unhappiness but do not explain away the ideological “effect.” Or, to put it another way, someone who was not worried about these four specific things, but who identified as a liberal, would still be more likely than a conservative to be unhappy.

3. Could liberals display a negative bias?

A conservative might be inclined to see progressives as negatively biased rather than socially conscious. And there may be some evidence of that in our data. We also asked: “Imagine a ladder with 10 rungs (or steps). At the top of the ladder (rung #10) are the people who are the best off, those who have the most money, most education, and best jobs. At the bottom are the people who are the worst off, those who have the least money, least education, worst jobs, or no job (rung #1). What rung from 10 through 1 best represents where you think you stand on the ladder.”

I used that item as the dependent variable in place of self-reported happiness. Liberals/progressives rated themselves lower on the ladder compared to other people when I controlled for demographics. In other words, if a liberal and a conservative have the same education, race, gender, and age, the conservative will feel more fortunate. A critic might say that liberals are people who–regardless of their actual social positions–rate their own circumstances relatively poorly, and that attitude drives their ideology and makes them unhappy or else reflects their unhappiness.

4. People with depression cluster on the left.

However, there may be a different explanation. In our sample, 281 people say they have been diagnosed with depression. If I remove them from the sample and run the first of the two regressions shown above (the one with happiness as the dependent variable), ideology is no longer statistically significant. Now, only marriage, physical health, and race are related to happiness (with whites being more likely to report being happy).

We also asked how often in the past week people had felt depressed. I subtracted the 683 people who answered more than “rarely.” Running the model without those people generated a result in which only physical health was related to happiness. Ideology again ceased to be significant.

Finally, we asked people to rate their own mental health from poor to excellent. 272 said fair or poor. When I excluded that smallish group from the sample, ideology was still significant.

In a model based on the whole population, each of the mental health measures predicts unhappiness, and liberalism does as well. Those coefficients are compatible with two theories: either most conservatives are a bit happier than most liberals, regardless of depression, or else the average happiness of liberals is lower because they include some depressed people. By excluding those who report depression or a diagnosis of depression from the analysis, I find evidence that the latter is the case. In short: people with depression are reducing the mean happiness of liberals.

Indeed, people with depression cluster on the left. In the sample as a whole, 5% of respondents identify as extremely liberal, but 14% of the people who have been diagnosed with depression are extremely liberal. Conservatives represent 18.5% of the sample but just 11% of those with diagnosed depression. This pattern is consistent with previous studies.

Saying that you are depressed or reporting a diagnosis of depression depends on many factors–not only one’s mental health and access to medical care but also one’s beliefs and attitudes about psychology, which may relate to ideology. From our survey, it is not clear whether depressed people are concentrated on the left or whether people who employ the label of depression tilt that way.

However, my own informal observations and what I hear from others suggests that a substantial subset of people who gravitate to the left have significant mental health challenges, often related to trauma. I suspect that they explain most of the association between conservative ideology and happiness.

Everyone has a right to choose and express their political views. Progressives must welcome all kinds of people onto their side. However, I think that attracting people who (regardless of their social circumstances) experience depression poses a challenge for any movement.* Also, I sometimes wonder whether progressive messages fall flat because their authors are less happy than their target audiences.

*I wanted to know whether committed activists on the left were likely to be depressed, but we only have data from 31 left-oriented people who protested in the past year, which is too small a sample to tell. See also: how predictable is the rest of your life?; the aspiration curve from youth to old age; are Americans ‘innocent of ideology’?; party identification and ideology over time.

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