Tim Burke Is Profoundly Annoyed by AHA President James Sweet, &

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-08-19 Fr

I greatly enjoy and am, in fact, driven to write Grasping Reality—but its long-term viability and quality do depend on voluntary subscriptions from paying supporters. I am incredibly grateful that the great bulk of it goes out for free to what is now well over ten-thousand subscribers around the world. If you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group receiving it regularly, please press the button below to sign up for a free subscription and get (the bulk of) it in your email inbox. And if you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group of supporters, please press the button below and sign up for a paid subscription:

FIRST: Tim Burke Is Profoundly Annoyed by AHA President James Sweet:

Here we are:

Timothy Burke: The Read: Past Presentism <https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-read-past-presentism>: ‘Friday's Child Is Still Thinking About James Sweet's AHA Address…. Sweet writes, “This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time…. This sameness is ahistorical, a proposition that might be acceptable if it produced positive political results. But it doesn’t…. [It] requires us to interpret elements of the past not through the optics of the present but within the worlds of our historical actors…. When we foreshorten or shape history to justify rather than inform contemporary political positions, we not only undermine the discipline but threaten its very integrity…”’

In my experience… [this position] most often arises as an objection to judging the slave-owning leaders of the early American republic by contemporary standards, but it is also a highly mobile objection applied to… Roman spectators watching gladiatorial combat, Aztec sacrificial rites, classical Greek pederasty, public executions in early modern Britain, colonial conquest and genocide.... It’s hard to say “well, the Founding Fathers were just different, it was a different time” and yet say, “Let’s go read the Federalist Papers and learn some valuable things about our government today.” It’s harder to invoke the presumptive alterity of Thomas Jefferson’s moral thought and yet read his own words and see that he himself was uncomfortably aware of his contradictions. Still more to see that some of his contemporaries were profoundly aware of his contradictions and called him out.... If you want to make the past out to be so foreign a country that we must approach it as alien and unknown (save for the labor of expert historians), you don’t get to say “well, except for this and that and that, which are in fact quite easily understood by contemporary people and very relatable”. That, dear friends, is a political move and I don’t particularly care for the politics in it...

Let me dig in a bit deeper here, right on the specific case that I think is troubling Sweet’s mind the most, in the strange middle of his address, where positions himself and proper-thinking historians... between two oddly drawn extremes: American conservative culture warriors on one hand and on the other Black people on heritage tours, Black intellectuals shaping the 1619 Project, and Black actors and creators making the upcoming film “The Woman King”, about the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa at the height of the slave trade...

Game and set to Tim Burke.

We want to understand our past. We want to utilize our past. And the past is another country: they do things differently there.

If people in the past are so completely alien to us that we cannot empathize with and ourselves, with our emotions and perspectives, try to enter in, understand, and judge their thoughts and actions—well, then the past is merely a set of curiosities. In that case, James, sweet should step down and go to the back of the line to join the videos of dogs walking on two legs on Tik-Tok.

But it is false to claim that people in the past are so completely alien to us. Rather, they were, like we are, greedy, nasty, selfish, brave, noble, and thoughtful. They dazzle us with their insights. They appall us with their blindnesses. Their different places from which they stand give us access to parallax with which we can see things in three dimensions.

If you say that Thomas Jefferson had different “values and mores”, and that to judge him is to do the bad thing of “interpret[ing] elements of the past not through the optics of the present”, you are then truly stupid. Thomas Jefferson knew what he was doing, and wrote:

indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever…. A revolution of the wheel of fortune… may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest…

Thomas Jefferson was also such a powerful voice that slaveholder confederates had to try to destroy his authority. And not just confederates. Northern Democratic-Party Senator John Pettit of free-state Indiana, for example, in 1854:

It is alleged that all men are created equal…. It is not true in fact… physically, mentally, or morally…. I hold it to be a self-evident lie…. The slave in the South… with but little over half the volume of brain that attaches to the northern European race…. You tell me that the native African, upon his burning sands, and in his native wilderness, is my equal, and I hesitate not to hoot…. It is not true that even all persons of the same race are created equal…. Are you the equal of the man who daily and nightly wallows in the gutter, and vomits upon all?…. If you are, you are not mine…

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One Poem:

Bertholt Brecht:

Who built seven-gated Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?

In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend 
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army? 
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears? 
Frederick the Greek triumphed in the Seven Years War. 
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball? 
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars. 
So many questions.

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One Video:

Ian Cuttress: What Apple Got Wrong with Right to Repair <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8_Z-i6mxS0>:

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Eric Berger: Europe Is Seriously Considering a Major Investment in Space-Based Solar Power <https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/european-space-chief-says-continent-will-lead-in-space-based-solar-power/>

• David Glasner: Robert Lucas and Real Business-Cycle Theory <https://uneasymoney.com/2022/08/17/robert-lucas-and-real-business-cycle-theory/>

• Panio Gianopoulos: The Next Big Idea Club’s September 2022 Nominees <https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/next-big-idea-clubs-september-2022-nominees/35222/>

• Paul Krugman: Why We Don’t Have a Carbon Tax <https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?CCPAOptOut=true&campaign_id=116&emc=edit_pk_20220816&instance_id=69451&nl=paul-krugman&productCode=PK&regi_id=64675225&segment_id=101527&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2Fdeabffca-eb9c-50f6-92f2-59dbef0da68d&user_id=8a3fce2ae25b5435f449ab64b4e3e880>: ‘There’s still a good case for giving people a direct financial incentive to limit emissions, and such a thing may become politically possible as the economy decarbonizes and green energy becomes a more powerful interest group. For now, however, we’re tackling climate change with carrots, not sticks, with subsidies, not taxes. And that’s OK…

• Emma Goldman: Anarchism and Other Essays <https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays#toc3>

• Elvia Limon: U.S. Imposes New Restrictions as Talks on Colorado River Water Grow Heated <https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/newsletter/2022-08-17/colorado-river-new-water-restriction-todays-headlines-newsletter-todays-headlines?utm_id=64652&sfmc_id=625826>

• Robert Kuttner: Free Markets, Besieged Citizens <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/07/21/free-markets-besieged-citizens-gerstle-kuttner/>

• Greg Payne: What It Means Now that the Inflation Reduction Act Has Been Signed into Law <https://www.kctv5.com/2022/08/17/what-it-means-now-that-inflation-reduction-act-has-been-signed-into-law/>

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Twitter & ‘Stack:

• Zvi Mowshowitz: CDC Admits Mistakes

Covid 8/18/22: CDC Admits Mistakes

• Sam Freedman: Getting the Most Out of Twitter

Covid 8/18/22: CDC Admits Mistakes

• Matthew Yglesias: What's Long-Term About “Longtermism"?

What's long-term about "longtermism"?

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¶s:

The field of discussion here is William MacAskill’s quite good new book, What We Owe the Future <https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/william-macaskill/what-we-owe-the-future/9781541618633/>, which was published on August 16. It consists 3/4 of very good and clever observations about how a benevolent human interested in making a difference should act—work on problems that are contingent, in that a small group of people can make a difference; significant, in that making a difference matters; and persistent, in that the difference made will attenuate only very slowly, or even compound. I am impressed by his command of history and politics, and by his ability to write a comprehensible précis of much of the work of Derek Parfit.

I find myself more skeptical of his belief that we ought to transfer wealth to and focus our energy on the future, as that is where we can do the most good. MacAskill thinks that the future will have little ability to revise itself according to its knowledge and powers, but will rather be set in stone by decisions we make in our generation. And he thinks that the most powerful dimension on which it will be set in stone is in its moral philosophy. Hence not only are we special people with unique powers and influence, but among us moral philosophers are very special people with immense powers and influence never to be matched in all of future history.

Right.

Worry about, and action to benefit, the future does not crowd out, much, action to benefit the present. But when I look at the people where our help now could do the most good, I see the bottom billion here and now and the other six billion of the non-top billion today as those on whom we should focus our altruism, not people in the constellation Cygnus in 50000 years.

And even though I live on the fringes of Silicon Valley, I never understand the chain of logic by which people make the hard turn into “rapture of the nerds” and “Roko’s basilisk” territory which the book makes a quarter of the way into its text. Here I think Matt has it right: there is certainly a book to be written about AI-threat. There is certainly a book to be written about Longtermism. They are not the same book—save for the fact that Longtermists, like all other people, think that the extinction of the human species within our own expected natural lifetimes is something we should take substantial care to avoid. Yet the Longtermist book, and the AI-threat book, and several other books are mashed together in a short book. And that means that each piece of it leaves me unsatisfied, and wanting more:

Matthew Yglesias: What's Long-Term About “Longtermism”?:

What's long-term about "longtermism"?

‘“Longtermist[s]”.... The claim they’re making is that there is a significant chance that current AI research programs will lead to human extinction within the next 20 to 40 years…. The salient thing about this claim—“malevolent AIs will probably take over the world before your new roof needs to be replaced”—is that if it’s true, it’s obviously very important regardless of your value system.... The outcome of growing E[ffective ]A[ltruist] interest in longtermism was... “they identified what they believe is a high probability short-term risk”...

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I confess that I was totally flummoxed in the 1980s when RBC “theorists” took a prediction error, called it a variable, but it on the right-hand side of equations, and claimed to have “fit” the “data” and to “understand” business cycles. I was even more flummoxed when they then stopped: rather than digging into the R&D- and the production-side determinants of shifts in technology, they declared any attempt to measure “technology” other than as some kind of aggregate Solow residual to be out-of-bounds. This seemed to me to be neither theory nor measurement but only ideology of a particularly bizarre and pointless kind.

The terrible thing was that it did have a material and damaging impact on the world’s response to the financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession.

Moral RBC theorists should long since have given all they have to the poor, and taken up lives of anonymous service to others:

David Glasner: Robert Lucas and Real Business-Cycle Theory <https://uneasymoney.com/2022/08/17/robert-lucas-and-real-business-cycle-theory/>: ‘Lucasian macroeconomics gained not only ascendance, but dominance, on the basis of  conceptual and methodological misunderstandings. The continued dominance of the offspring of the early Lucasian theories has been portrayed as a scientific advance by Lucas and his followers. In fact, the theories and the supposed methodological imperatives by which they have been justified are scientifically suspect because they rely on circular, question-begging arguments and reject alternative theories based on specious reductionist argument…

I greatly enjoy and am, in fact, driven to write Grasping Reality—but its long-term viability and quality do depend on voluntary subscriptions from paying supporters. I am incredibly grateful that the great bulk of it goes out for free to what is now well over ten-thousand subscribers around the world. If you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group receiving it regularly, please press the button below to sign up for a free subscription and get (the bulk of) it in your email inbox. And if you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group of supporters, please press the button below and sign up for a paid subscription: