[FRIAM] tolerance of intolerance

Mon Sep 30 13:02:05 EDT 2024

People are prone to corruption and failure.  That's as true for SCOTUS as it is for middle managers at the EPA.   Given this situation, we should want the best grounding for knowledge and as many eyes on it as possible.   That's not what one gets with "Expert witnesses".  What one gets with that are corruptible weak links.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2024 6:30 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tolerance of intolerance

Yeah, but the composition of physical laws up into the composites that make up social laws isn't straightforward. Maybe I could stomach the assumption of transitivity from, say, "biological laws" to "social laws", but not physical laws to social laws. The transitivity fails.

I can't tell where I actually land in the spectrum between Eric and Dave's positions. I really like the idea that those who have their hands inside the goo, inside the machine, close to the metal, are the ones who decide how best to interact with the machine. As Dave once accused, it's a bit Vico-ist. On the other hand, our collective respect for (delusional belief in?) the Truth fades faster each day. The elites are exhibiting faster rates of churn. (E.g. Elno and SpaceX overturning tried and true, "modernist", methods for engineering space machines. E.g. a top-notch Data Science postdoc might cost a university ~$1M/yr, which means they all abandon the academy and go to work for Google or somesuch. Etc.)

And with such a turbulent churn of the elite production system, it's completely reasonable to be confused about which elites to trust - or which side of their mouth to trust. Luckily, I hold Diogenes in high esteem, which allows me to doubt everything ... regardless of EricC and Nick's claim that's impossible. So it's no crisis for this almost-dead privied white man. But the kids? What will they see on the other side of this Rawlsian Veil? I'm so thankful I have no children.

On 9/28/24 20:40, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Violating social laws may or may not have consequences.  That depends on the enforcement mechanisms of a society.  Violating physical laws is not possible.  Thus, social laws should follow physical laws, as it was before Chevron was overturned.  Not the other way around.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
> Sent: Saturday, September 28, 2024 5:09 PM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tolerance of intolerance
> 
> I resist—unsuccessfully, obviously—commenting on these issues because my opinions/ideas are pretty much antithetical to everyone else. But two points:
> 
> There seems to be certainty regarding the criminality/venality/egomania of one person/group coupled with an inability to recognize (or a very generous willingness to overlook)  the same things in other people/groups. The crimes might be different in detail (insider trading instead of inflating of assets) and the venality and egomania hidden behind polite facades; but the substance is the same, and, in my observations/opinions, pretty much equal in degree.
> 
> Judges should decide law, not facts. With one exception, I see no instances of SCOTUS doing otherwise. The exception is the very recent assumption that judges can determine the 'facts' of history and the feeble attempt to ground decisions of law in those 'facts'.
> 
> Within the legal system, juries, most prominently, and special masters, referees, and expert witnesses are charged with arguing (expert witnesses) or determining (the others cited) facts. Chevron gave bureaucrats (not necessarily scientists) the right of determining fact by fiat. Overturning Chevron was a matter of law and simply restored fact finding to those, according to law, responsible.
> 
> Even if you believed that scientific positions taken by bureaucratic entities were arrived at via free, open, honest, and rigorous application of science, by the best, and best informed, scientists; those bureaucrats have no standing, in law, to assert the final truth of the matter.
> 
> davew
> 
> 
> On Sat, Sep 28, 2024, at 4:50 PM, Santafe wrote:
>> Didn’t mean to drop  this Glen.  Busy patch.
>>
>> I don’t know.  Have been ruminating for a week (or whatever it is) 
>> wondering whether I have any substance to contribute.
>>
>> I understand how an argument like the one you make below might hang 
>> together (first para and part of the second).  Do I think it does, 
>> for this case?  Not really.  Gorsuch looks like the kind of patrician 
>> who could have come strainght out of the worst ranks of the Roman Senate.
>> More than any of the others.  So he is probably unreachable for any 
>> aim at this point.  We have to wait for him to die of old age, 
>> because his character growth ended decades ago.  ACB probably has 
>> more decency, but is captured by her particular (not the most 
>> dramatic) cult, and that is limiting.  If she were to show signs of 
>> growth, I wouldn’t find it incomprehensible, but I don’t expect it to be much or to be soon.
>>
>> Roberts doesn’t look like the cynical or bitter power-abuser that 
>> Thomas and Alito purposely present themselves as.  And I can’t get 
>> inside anybody’s head; the more time goes by I don’t think I even 
>> have a good scope of what human heads can be like.  I think I am 
>> becoming mind-blind; they are not more comprehensible to me than 
>> bears.  But the evidence of his actions is that he repeatedly, and in 
>> a very activist/interventionist manner, protects a manifest criminal 
>> and a clear inside power-takover faction, from people who are not 
>> acting criminally and are far more democratic — and very much not 
>> populist — in their aims and their methods than the ones he protects.  
>> I think that is indicting, whether one forms a personal impression or not.
>>
>> I will go out on a limb and suggest that there is some projection.
>> The language of Robers’s statements (and things I have seen quoted 
>> from the rulings, which I have not read through) sounds as if he 
>> believes lower courts don’t actually go by any standard of anything, 
>> and that’s why he wants to make the whole judicial system into a 
>> giant funnel for all authority for anything consequential to flow 
>> back to him.  If I look at bits of lower-court rulings that I see, or 
>> more often hear commentary by people who seem sound to me, it looks 
>> to me like a noisy system with good and bad choices, but one in which 
>> reasoning much better than that issued by SCOTUS is not uncommon at 
>> all.  So it seems to me like a kind of admission by Roberts that _he_ 
>> and his cabal don’t actually have any standards, but just start from 
>> the desired outcome and make up a story, so he figures all the other 
>> courts must be doing the same thing, and therefore he wants to accumulate final say.
>>
>> I will admit that I often find the rhetorical language that all the 
>> justices use annoying.  Not that I want things in obscure Law French.
>> Just that they talk as if everything has to be appealed mainly to 
>> emotions for a Sesame Street audience.  Often it seems that more 
>> sensible reasons are available, than appeals to the emotional 
>> movement of whatever day of the week it is.  They are all smart 
>> enough to do that, so the fact that they don’t feels to me like an 
>> admission of their view of the audience from which they want buy-in.  
>> Not a respectful view; unfortunately probably deserved in large part too.
>>
>> On Courts versus Institutions of experts, though:  Here I don’t go 
>> with the argument you make.  Neither of them has a guarantee of good 
>> or of bad faith.  I think what we have seen in every important test 
>> throughout history says that good or bad faith is one of these highly 
>> unstable and dynamically maintained things, which ultimately needs 
>> some level of coordinated maintenance across the society if it is to 
>> survive.  So no matter what anyone chooses institutionally, given the 
>> complexity and sheer bandwidth of the problems that need choices 
>> made, you are going to heavily distribute the load.  In that case, a 
>> lot of whether you can or can’t make good choices will come down to 
>> the simple technical thing of professional training.  Lawyers aren’t 
>> trained as empirical derivers; they are some other social thing.  For 
>> questions of social consequence, sure; a good-faith lawyer might see 
>> something other professionals would pass over.  But most of this 
>> agency stuff is about figuring out what happens in the thing we refer 
>> to as the actual or real world.  And they are trained in a small 
>> sub-culture of relatively recent methods that can handle parts of 
>> that reliably in ways that nothing else we ever did before can do.  
>> When those are the structures of the problems, those professionals 
>> should be used, as they are the best tools we have to solve those problems.
>> Making the whole society into a monoculture of law, which then 
>> degrades to a monoculture of politics, is not the right choice, and I 
>> think eventually not a stable choice.
>>
>> I see things (or bits of things, because I don’t spend lots of time 
>> on
>> this) like the presidential debates, and it makes me think of what 
>> wags what.  There is a sensibility of trashiness that has grown up 
>> through the generations of reality TV.  There are those of us 
>> (probably many) who find this so tedious and grating that we will do 
>> a lot not to be trapped in a room with it.  But it has metamorphosed 
>> so that levels of public exchange that can be consequential and 
>> should be treated that way, have been completely gobbled up by the 
>> reality TV aesthetic.  It seems important that a society can do that to itself.
>> I think not good that it can and has.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>> On Sep 24, 2024, at 11:16 PM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, I'm still thinking about this. [sigh] But in my long covid induced fugue on the interminable flight across the atlantic, I landed on the idea that while, yes, the Roberts court is aggregating power back to themselves (particularly - not the judicial system as a institution), perhaps there's an -urgic demon at work. The power aggregation to the particular humans on the SC is a merely symptom of the work of that demon. And the demon is, in general, moving to protect us from populism. Bear with me a bit.
>>>
>>> Regardless of what we think if, say, Cannon or Thomas, it seems ACB and Gorsuch are in the tradition of rationalists we might want the study of the Law to produce. (Kavanaugh is different, I think. And I'm leaving out the liberal Justices because I keep my enemies closer than my allies.) In considering the Chevron overturning, on the surface, it seems stupid ... a rejection of expertise. But combining Chevron with "Schedule F", I would trust the dialectic pursued by Good Faith members of the judiciary more than I would trust some rando appointed to "govern" in one of those executive agencies. This is especially true in a scientific environment where so many publications come out each day/week/year (many of which are on preprint servers but cited as if peer-reviewed), no collection of Good Faith scientists can keep track of them, much less curate them for non-experts. Barring abdication of truth-curation to LLMs (i.e. transnational corporations like Google, MicroSoft, Apple, etc.), the judiciary may be a decent buttress.
>>>
>>> And the somewhat hierarchical composition of the judiciary (from schools/tests to experience dealing with batshit rhetoric) provides a kind of institutional inertia that the blast of "scientific" research doesn't provide. The judiciary might be the last bastion of the Deep State, capable of resisting demagogues like Trump.
>>>
>>> What say ye? Is my optimism showing? 8^D
>>>
>>> On 7/17/24 17:17, Santafe wrote:
>>>> Back to the Roberts court, the things I have seen written that seem most cogent to me argue that their one consistent tack is to aggregate power to their specific selves.  There are these nonsense rulings, which are vague or inconsistent, and honest lower courts often cannot figure out whether or how to comply with them.  (There was just one of these, I think the Domestic Abuser with a Gun case, along exactly this line, a month or two ago.  Rahimi?)  And once it is a mess of appeals in the lower courts, it can get back to SC, who can then make up whatever outcome they want for that case.  It gets very close to trolling for Roberts to write condescendingly that the lower courts were “confused” by the SC’s ruling; in fact they had it dead to rights, and Roberts surely isn’t so dumb he doesn’t know that.  So to act as if they have made the mistake is to put out loud what the game is.  It’s like Gaetz’s text about “Cannon for Supreme Court” or whatever it was.  Trolls gonna troll.  @The cruelty is the point.  It’s about the assertion of domination, once you think you have enough of a lock that your advantage is to get out of the “hiding” phase and go into the “demoralizing” phase.
>>>> So I don’t know that there really is new “law” power in the Monarchical Executive.  There may or may not be, but the SC would like to make itself indispensible in operating that machinery.
>>>
>>> --

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