Journal of No. 118

Deep context: my conviction that Sam Harris is an idiot, and his idea of finding an objective measure of wellbeing is misguided from the outset. Making morality objective is like trying to make aesthetics objective -- it's just a fake way of baking in your own subjective opinions and declaring them objective.

Pull-quote:

The simplest explanation for biased algorithms is that the humans who create them have their own deeply entrenched biases. That means that despite perceptions that algorithms are somehow neutral and uniquely objective, they can often reproduce and amplify existing prejudices.

Headline: A beauty contest was judged by AI and the robots didn't like dark skin

Article also has a relevant link to a related story:

"To take just one example, judges, police forces and parole officers across the US are now using a computer program to decide whether a criminal defendant is likely to reoffend or not. ... If you’re black, the chances of being judged a potential reoffender are significantly higher than if you’re white. And yet those algorithmic predictions are not borne out by evidence.
...
The big puzzle is how the bias creeps into the algorithm. We might be able to understand how if we could examine it. But most of these algorithms are proprietary and secret, so they are effectively “black boxes” – virtual machines whose workings are opaque. Yet the software inside them was written by human beings, most of whom were probably unaware that their work now has an important moral dimension."

SciAm mentions an interesting study on breast milk. Economically stable mothers produce richer (fattier) milk for sons than daughters. Poor mothers produce richer milk for daughters.

Apparently, this jibes with evolutionary predictions on parental investment: "The Trivers-Willard hypothesis states that natural selection favors parental investment in daughters when times are hard and in sons when times are easy. ... Well-off parents who can afford to invest in sons should do so because their gamble could give them many grandchildren. Conversely, poor parents should not heavily invest in sons because it is unlikely to pay off -- their offspring start at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. For those families, daughers are a safer bet becase as long as they survive to adulthood, they are likely to produce young."

I really am working, but my current task is eerily similar to a pigeon pecking at a food bar at occasional intervals. So you are all hostage to the blathering that emerges from my brain, mediated through fingers and the intertubes. So I was reading Pharyngula, and a couple items caught my attention.
( pull up a chair and set a spell )

Because Massimo Pigliucci took the bullet for me, reviewing Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape

"What Sam Harris wishes to do in his new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, is to mount a science-based challenge to [the is/ought problem]. For Harris, values are facts, and as such they are amenable to scientific inquiry. I think he is spectacularly wrong.
...
But he is a self-professed consequentialist — a philosophical stance close to utilitarianism — who simply ducks any discussion of the implicatons of that a priori choice, which informs his entire view of what counts for morality, happiness, well-being and so forth."

As I suspected, Harris fails before he even starts.

Sam Harris gave a TED talk on "Science can answer moral questions". Following the initial feedback, in which he was called an idiot, he blogged at length about the matter. The TED talk is too long, the blog post is too long, so let me tackle the NPR summary of his main argument:

1. Science can, in principle, answer moral questions even if it cannot do so in practice now.

2. The science that will answer these questions will be the rapidly advancing fields of brain, cognitive and, ultimately, consciousness studies.

3. The criterion on which these questions will be answered is "human wellbeing."

Now, I have nothing against wellbeing. Wellbeing is pretty nice. But somehow I don't think this criterion was determined scientifically. So yes, if we have a pre-determined criterion, science can certainly help us experiment to determine how to maximize it.

That said, I really don't see how this program is going to be very helpful. Indeed, I think you can see how this scheme has affected American politics for the worse. Let's raise taxes. Wellbeing of constituents goes down. Ok... let's cut services. Wellbeing of constituents goes down. What about the wellbeing of future generations? Fuck em. Similarly, we can look at the 'morality' of climate change. Maybe we can ask Sam Harris to measure the wellbeing of the people of 2050 and decide how to weigh that against the wellbeing of the people of today.

Something as simple as stealing becomes a problem. What if poor guy's wellbeing is increased more than yours decreases by being robbed by him? Sure, to deal with these situations, you can maybe jigger your definition of total wellbeing to make this work out the way you want it to, but to then say that science determined the answer is a complete sham. We're firing science arrows and then drawing targets around the one we want to be the right answer. There's nothing wrong with using some sort of rational process to come up with definitions of wellbeing (or right and wrong), but to somehow imply that the result of that process was just 'out there' waiting to be discovered is silly.

Seriously, if Harris came up with a wellbeing-o-meter and discovered that women who wear the burqa have higher self-esteem, less anxiety about their appearance, less frustration with choosing what to wear, experienced fewer catcalling incidents, and had more disposable income to spend on rearing their offspring, while experiencing signficantly reduced pleasure in the shaking what her mama gave her department. If he found that -- on balance -- their overall wellbeing was higher than that of non burqa wearing women...

would Harris say:

A) Often science contradicts our common sense ideas. I thought it was obvious that forcing women to wear the burqa reduced their wellbeing. However, I have discovered that such a strategy would maximize wellbeing. Thus, as an act in the interest of the public good, the scientific overlords have therefore passed such a law.

B) Clearly, the wellbeing formula needs to place higher numerical weight on the shaking what her mama gave her factor.(*) This is merely a simple recalibration of the universal objective wellbeingometer. It's technical.