Keep This in Mind When You Hear the Right Claim They’re Censored on Social Media

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It’s bullshit. From The Washington Post:

A new report calls conservative claims of social media censorship “a form of disinformation”.

[The] report concludes that social networks aren’t systematically biased against conservatives, directly contradicting Republican claims that social media companies are censoring them. 

Recent moves by Twitter and Facebook to suspend [the former president’s] accounts in the wake of the violence at the Capitol are inflaming conservatives’ attacks on Silicon Valley. But New York University researchers today released a report stating claims of anti-conservative bias are “a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.” 

The report found there is no trustworthy large-scale data to support these claims, and even anecdotal examples that tech companies are biased against conservatives “crumble under close examination.” The report’s authors said, for instance, the companies’ suspensions of [the ex-president’s] accounts were “reasonable” given his repeated violation of their terms of service — and if anything, the companies took a hands-off approach for a long time given [his] position.

The report also noted several data sets underscore the prominent place conservative influencers enjoy on social media. For instance, CrowdTangle data shows that right-leaning pages dominate the list of sources providing the most engaged-with posts containing links on Facebook. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino, for instance, far out-performed most major news organizations in the run-up to the 2020 election. 

The report also cites an October 2020 study in which Politico found “right-wing social media influencers, conservative media outlets, and other GOP supporters” dominated the online discussion of Black Lives Matter and election fraud, two of the biggest issues in 2020. Working with the nonpartisan think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue, researchers found users shared the most viral right-wing social media content about Black Lives Matter more than ten times as often as the most popular liberal posts on the topic. People also shared right-leaning claims on election fraud about twice as often as they shared liberals’ or traditional media outlets’ posts discussing the issue.

But even so, baseless claims of anti-conservative bias are driving Republicans’ approach to regulating tech. Republican lawmakers have concentrated their hearing exchanges with tech executives on the issue, and it’s been driving their legislative proposals. . . .

The New York University researchers called on Washington regulators to focus on what they called “the very real problems of social media.”

“Only by moving forward from these false claims can we begin to pursue that agenda in earnest,” Paul Barrett, the report’s primary author and deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights said in a statement. 

The researchers want the Biden administration to work with Congress to overhaul the tech industry. 

Their recommendations focus particularly on changing Section 230, a decades-old law shielding tech companies from lawsuits for the photos, videos and posts people share on their websites. . . . 

The researchers warn against completely repealing the law. Instead, they argue companies should only receive Section 230 immunity if they agree to accept more responsibilities in policing content such as disinformation and hate speech. The companies could be obligated to ensure their recommendation engines don’t favor sensationalist content or unreliable material just to drive better user engagement. 

“Social media companies that reject these responsibilities would forfeit Section 230’s protection and open themselves to costly litigation.” the report proposed.

The researchers also called for the creation of a new Digital Regulatory Agency, which would serve as an independent body and be tasked with enforcing a revised Section 230. 
The report also suggested Biden could empower a “special commission” to work with the industry on improving content moderation, which would be able to move much more quickly than legal battles over antitrust issues. It also called for the president to expand the task force announced by Biden on online harassment to focus on a broad range of harmful content. 

They also called for greater transparency in Silicon Valley. 

The researchers said the platforms typically don’t provide much justification for sanctioning an account or post, and when people are in the dark they assume the worst. 

“The platforms should give an easily understood explanation every time they sanction a post or account, as well as a readily available means to appeal enforcement actions,” the report said. “Greater transparency—such as that which Twitter and Facebook offered when they took action against [a certain terrible person] in January— would help to defuse claims of political bias, while clarifying the boundaries of acceptable user conduct.”

Truth About Truth

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Pontius Pilate supposedly asked “Quid est veritas?” What is truth? Daniel Detmer teaches philosophy in Indiana. He was asked about postmodernism and ended up talking about objective truth. Below is a fairly long selection from a longer interview conducted by Richard Marshall at 3:16:

DD: As you know, “postmodernism” is a very loose, imprecise term, which means different things in different contexts. The only aspect of it that I have written about at length concerns a certain stance with regard to truth—more specifically either the denial that there is such a thing as objective truth or else the slightly milder thesis that there might as well be no such thing since, in any case, we (allegedly) have no access to it. It is a stance that is reflected well in Richard Rorty’s complaint that we “can still find philosophy professors who will solemnly tell you that they are seeking  the truth , not just a story or a consensus but an accurate representation of the way the world is.” Rorty goes on to call such professors “lovably old-fashioned . . .”

. . . Some of those who thought postmodern truth denial was politically liberatory explained that they thought it enabled one to show that the claims that prop up oppressive political structures are not (simply) true, but rather are to be understood as merely comprising one narrative among others, with no special status. One problem with that, from a political point of view, is that it also entails that the critique of such structures as oppressive is itself also not (simply) true, but rather one narrative among others. . . .

3:16: What do you think postmoderns get wrong and what do they get right . . . ?

DD: Often what they have gotten right is the specifics as to how some specific claim is untrue, or misleading because it is only partially true, because some important thing has been left out. What do they get wrong? Well, consider [Richard] Rorty’s rejection of the notion of objective truth. One of his main arguments is that such a concept is of no help to us in practice, since we have no way to examine reality as it is in itself so as to determine whether or not our beliefs about it are accurate. To put it another way, we have no way of knowing whether or not our beliefs give us information about the way things really are, since “we cannot get outside the range of our lights” and “cannot stand on neutral ground illuminated only by the natural light of reason.” Thus, “there is no way to get outside our beliefs and language so as to find some test other than coherence,” and “there is no method for knowing  when one has reached the truth, or when one is closer to it than before.”

The first problem is that of figuring out what such statements mean. Rorty obviously cannot claim that they are  objectively true—revelatory of the way things really are, so that anyone who disagreed would be simply mistaken—since such a claim would obviously render him vulnerable to charges of self-refutation. But what, then,  does he mean? How, for example, could Rorty, consistent with his strictures regarding the impossibility of knowing the objective truth,  know that “we cannot get outside the range of our lights” and “cannot stand on neutral ground illuminated only by the natural light of reason”? Does he just mean that this is how things  look from  his lights? And how can he  know that there is no method for knowing when one has reached the truth, or when one is closer to it than before? Does he know that  this view is closer to the truth than is the one that holds that there  are methods for knowing when one is closer to the truth than one was before?

At a conference Rorty was once challenged to explain why he would deny that it is objectively true that there was not, at that time, a big green giraffe standing behind him. He replied as follows:

Now about giraffes: I want to urge that if you have the distinction between the idiosyncratic and the intersubjective, or the relatively idiosyncratic and the relatively intersubjective, that is the only distinction you need to take care of real versus imaginary giraffes. You do not need a further distinction between the made and the found or the subjective and the objective. You do not need a distinction between reality and appearance, or between inside and outside, but only one between what you can get a consensus about and what you cannot.

But if it is possible to find out that there really is a consensus about the presence, or lack thereof, of a real giraffe, then why isn’t it also possible, even without such knowledge of a consensus, to find out whether or not there really is a giraffe present? Or, to put it another way, if there is a problem in finding out directly that a giraffe really is or is not present, why does this problem not also carry over to the project of finding out whether or not there really is a consensus about the presence or non-presence of a giraffe? Why are consensuses easier to know about than giraffes? If they aren’t, then what is to be gained, from a practical standpoint, by defining “truth” or “reality” in terms of consensus?

It is as if Rorty were claiming that society’s norms and judgments are unproblematically available to us, when nothing else is. But why would anyone think that it is easier to see, for example, that society  judges giraffes to be taller than ants than it is to see that giraffes  are taller than ants? If anything, this gets things backwards. I would argue that the category “the way things are” is, over a wide range of cases, significantly  more obvious and accessible to us than is the category “what our culture thinks.” Is it a  more clear and obvious truth that we  think that giraffes are taller than ants than that giraffes  are taller than ants? I am quite certain of the latter truth from my own observation, but I have never heard anyone else address their own thoughts on the relative heights of giraffes and ants, let alone discuss their impressions of public opinion on the issue. Similar remarks apply to many elementary moral, mathematical, and logical truths.

Moreover, this problem remains no matter how one understands such phrases as “reality” or “the way things are.” For example, if we understand them in some jacked-up, metaphysical sense, to be expressed with upper-case lettering as Reality-as-it-Really-Is, beyond language or thought or anything human, then, while it is understandable that we might want to deny that we know whether or not a giraffe is “really” present, so should we deny that we know whether or not we “really” have achieved a consensus on the matter. (For notice that knowledge of consensus seems to require knowledge of other minds and their thoughts, and it is unclear why anyone would think that our knowledge of the existence of other minds is any less problematic than is our knowledge of the existence of an independent physical world.)

If, on the other hand, we understand them in a more humdrum sense, merely as meaning that things typically are the way they are no matter what we might think about them, and that some of our thoughts about them are made wrong by the way the things are, then, while it is easy to see how we might be able to gather evidence fully sufficient to entitle us to claim to “know” that we have achieved a consensus on giraffes, so is it clear that we might be able to claim to “know” some things about giraffes, even in the absence of any consensus about, or knowledge of consensus about, such matters. Of course, one could use the jacked-up sense of “reality” when saying that we don’t know what giraffes are “really” like, while simultaneously using the humdrum sense of “reality” when saying that we can nevertheless cope by knowing what our culture’s consensus view of giraffes is, but what would be the sense or purpose of this double standard?

Or again, consider Rorty’s statement that we should be “content to call ‘true’ whatever the upshot of free and open encounters turns out to be,”and that he “would like to substitute the idea of ‘unforced agreement’ for that of ‘objectivity.’” Notice that on this view, in order to know whether or not giraffes are taller than ants we must first know (a) whether or not there is a consensus that giraffes are taller than ants and (b) if there is, whether or not the communication that produced that consensus was free, open, and undistorted. But isn’t it obvious that it is easier to determine whether or not giraffes are taller than ants than it is to determine either (a) or (b)?

. . . At other times Rorty defines “truth” not in terms of consensus, but rather in terms of utility. For example, he characterizes his position as one which “repudiates the idea that reality has an intrinsic nature to which true statements correspond…in favor of the idea that the beliefs we call ‘true’ are the ones we find most useful,” declares that its “whole point is to stop distinguishing between the usefulness of a way of talking and its truth,” and says that it would be in our best interest to discard the notion of “objective truth.” This appears, at first glance, a clever way to avoid the problem of self-refutation. As Rorty obviously recognizes that it would be inconsistent for him to claim to have discovered the objective truth that there is no objective truth to discover, he here instead bases his rejection of “objective truth” solely on the claim that such a notion is not useful to us—we would benefit from abandoning it

But as soon as we ask ourselves whether or not it is indeed  true that the notion of objective truth is not useful to us and that we would therefore benefit from discarding it, all of the old problems return. For either we understand this as an objective truth claim, in which case we get a performative contradiction (because we make use of a notion in issuing the very utterance in which we urge that it be discarded), or else we understand it in terms of Rorty’s pragmatist understanding of “truth,” in which case we generate an infinite regress (because the claim that the notion of objective truth is not useful to us would then have to be understood as true only insofar as it  is useful to us, and  this , in turn, would be true only insofar as  it  is useful to us, and so on).

And insofar as Rorty’s move to pragmatism is motivated by doubts about our ability to know how things really are, the problem remains unsolved. For any grounds we might have for doubting that we can know whether or not giraffes “really” are taller than ants would easily carry over to our efforts to find out whether or not it “really” is useful to believe that giraffes are taller than ants. On the other hand, any standard of “knowledge” sufficiently relaxed as to allow us to “know” that it is useful to believe that giraffes are taller than ants would also be lax enough to enable us to “know,” irrespective of the issue of the utility of belief, that giraffes are taller than ants.

In short, I regard postmodern truth denial of the sort just described as confused, incoherent, and illogical, as well as, from a political standpoint, worse than useless. One might hope that Dxxxx Txxxx’s very different kind of assault on truth might help to reawaken our awareness of the political importance of truth, and of the value commitments (such as a prioritizing of evidence over opinion, and of realism over wishful thinking) necessary to attain it. 

So Where’s the Vaccine?

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Perhaps you’ve been wondering where the vaccine is and how much is on the way. We’d know more if the previous administration hadn’t displayed an extraordinary combination of malevolence and incompetence. The good news is that we’ll know more soon. From The Guardian: 

The Biden administration has spent its first week in office attempting to manually track down 20m vaccine doses in the pipeline between federal distribution and administration at clinic sites, when a dose finally reaches a patient’s arm.

The Trump administration’s strategy pushed the response to the coronavirus pandemic to individual states and omitted pipeline tracking information between distribution and when the shot is actually administered, Biden administration officials told Politico.

The lack of data has now forced federal health department officials to spend hours on the phone tracking down vaccine shipments, the news website reported.

“Nobody had a complete picture,” Dr Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team and executive vice-president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, told Politico. “The plans that were being made were being made with the assumption that more information would be available and be revealed once they got into the White House.”

As of Saturday, 49 million doses of vaccine have been distributed by the federal government, but only 27 million administered by states, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

About two million of those doses are believed to be accounted for by a 72-hour lag in reported administration, Politico reported. That still leaves millions in the pipeline between delivery and patient. At least 16 states have used less than half the vaccine doses distributed to them, USA Today reported this week.

“Much of our work over the next week is going to make sure that we can tighten up the timelines to understand where in the pipeline the vaccine actually is and when exactly it is administered,” Dr Rochelle Walensky, [the new] director of the CDC, told USA Today.

. . . The CDC’s first report on early vaccine rollout is expected in February.

This Is How Government Is Supposed To Work

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When giving poor families help buying food, should the government err on the side of caution (we don’t want money to be wasted) or generosity (we don’t want poor families to miss out)? The Biden administration knows the answer. From Politico:

Millions of low-income households with children are about to get more help buying groceries during the pandemic under a new policy released Friday by the Biden administration.

The backstory: Congress last spring launched Pandemic EBT, a program that aims to replace free and subsidized meals kids normally get at school. After schools broadly shut down last year, billions in aid was sent out to low-income families with school-aged children on debit-like EBT cards that can be used to buy food, but this school year the program has been bogged down in bureaucracy.

As POLITICO reported last month, the vast majority of households eligible for assistance haven’t seen any P-EBT payments several months into the school year, even though Congress re-upped the program in September — a failing that has kept roughly $2 billion in aid from going out to families each month.

The Agriculture Department, which oversees school meals and P-EBT, released guidance today that makes it easier for states to get aid to more families — and at a higher payment rate than under the [previous] administration.

“We want to put more money into the hands of people with kids,” said Stacy Dean, deputy under secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services.

What’s new: The changes unveiled Friday allow states to simplify how they figure out which children are eligible for benefits. The administration also outlined how to get P-EBT benefits to children who are younger than school age for the first time — an expansion of the program Congress asked for in last month’s aid package.

“We’re hoping that it will make it easier for states to implement the program,” Dean said in an interview.

The political context: Congress last month directed USDA to simplify the program, but Friday’s guidance and the increase in aid also marks a significant ideological shift at USDA.

During the Trump administration, the mandate was more to err on the side of caution, to put in place policies that focused more on individually verifying which households were eligible for P-EBT and for how many days — a task that was so administratively complicated with some schools open, some online-only, and some a hybrid, that it delayed the program from being implemented at all.

Under the Biden administration, the mandate is more to err on the side of getting more aid out quickly to as many low-income households as possible, even if it means inadvertently including some kids who are doing in-person learning.

What it means: The new policy means that soon many households that are already participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — still known to many as food stamps — will get additional benefits if they have children under the age of six.

It also means all families eligible for P-EBT will receive more aid. The reimbursement rate for replacing school meals is being bumped up by about $1 per day, bringing it up to $6.82 per child, per day of school missed — which adds up to just over $136 per child, per month. . . .

The USDA is encouraging states to retroactively apply the increase in benefits to the entire school year, which means that if a household already received P-EBT aid for August and September, for example, they could be owed nearly $20 more per child, per month.

Most states are not ready to roll: Just nine states and territories have been approved so far to restart paying out P-EBT benefits: Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Ohio, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont and Tennessee. [The Agriculture Department] said it has received plans from 22 states and territories, with more expected in the coming weeks.

Parmenides Was Unreal (in the Modern Sense)

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Parmenides of Elea doesn’t get much publicity these days. He lived 2,500 years ago on the edge of Greece and only one of his philosophical works survives. It’s a poem usually referred to as “On Nature”. The publicity he happens to get derives from the fact that he helped invent metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with the general nature of reality (as it’s been practiced by philosophers in the Western world ever since).

Parmenides is the subject of the latest entry in a series called “Footnotes to Plato”, a periodic consideration of famous philosophers from The Times Literary Supplement. Here’s a bit of the article:

If Parmenides’ presence in the collective consciousness is relatively dim, it is in part because he is eclipsed by the thinkers he influenced. And then there is the small detail that his opinions are, as Aristotle said, “near to madness”.  Let us cut to the chase: Parmenides’ central argument. It is so quick that if you blink, you will miss it. You may need to read the following paragraphs twice.

That which is not – “What-is-not” – he says, is not. Since anything that comes into being would have to come into being out of what-is-not, things cannot come into being. Likewise, nothing can pass away because, in order to do so, it would have to enter the non-existent realm of what-is-not. The notion of beings as generated or perishing is therefore literally unthinkable: it would require of us that we think at once of the same thing that it is and it is not. The no-longer and the not-yet are modes of what-is-not. Consequently, the past and future do not exist either.

All of this points to one conclusion: there can be no change. The empty space necessary to separate one object from another would be another mode of what-is-not, so a multiplicity of beings separated by non-being is ruled out. What-is must be continuous. Since beings cannot be to a greater or lesser degree – this would require what-is to be commingled with the (non-existent) diluent of what-is-not – the universe must be fundamentally homogeneous. And so we arrive at the conclusion that the sum total of things is a single, unchanging, timeless, undifferentiated unity.

All of this is set out in a mere 150 lines, many of which are devoted to the philosopher’s mythical encounter with a Goddess who showed him the Way of Truth as opposed to that of the Way of (mere) Opinion. Scholars have, of course, quarreled over what exactly is meant by this 2,500-year-old text that has reached us by a precarious route. The poem survives only in fragments quoted and/or transcribed by others. The main transmitter was Simplicius, who lived over a thousand years after Parmenides’ death. The earliest sources of Simplicius’ transcriptions are twelfth-century manuscripts copied a further 600 years after he wrote them down.

Unsurprisingly, commentators have argued over Parmenides’ meaning. Did he really claim that the universe was an unbroken unity or only that it was homogeneous? They have also wondered whether he was using “is” in a purely predicative sense, as in “The cat is black”, or in a genuine existential sense, as in “The cat is”. Some have suggested that his astonishing conclusions depend on a failure to distinguish these two uses, which were not clearly separated until Aristotle.

What I took away from my philosophy classes is that Parmenides was a “monist”, someone who thinks that, in some significant sense, Reality Is One. The variety and change we see around us is somehow illusory or unreal or unimportant. One textbook suggest Parmenides believed that “Being or Reality is an unmoving perfect sphere, unchanging, undivided”. A later monist, the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, argued that reality consists of a single infinite substance that we call “God” or “Nature”. There are various ways to be a monist.

Well, I’ve read the paragraphs above, the ones that try to lay out Parmenides’s central argument, more than twice. You may share my feeling that the argument doesn’t succeed.

Where I think it goes wrong is that Parmenides treats things that don’t exist too much like things that do.

Although it’s easy to talk about things that don’t exist (e.g. a four-sided triangle or a mountain of gold), that only takes us so far. If I imagine a certain configuration of reality (say, me getting a cold) and what I imagined then becomes real (I do get a cold), the imaginary, unreal state of affairs (getting a real cold in the future) hasn’t actually transformed into a real state of affairs (actually getting a cold). All that’s happened is the reality of me imagining getting a cold has been replaced in the world’s timeline (and my experience) by the reality of me getting a cold. One reality was followed by another. It’s not a literal change from something that didn’t exist into something that did.

Saying that the unreal has become real is a manner of speaking. It shouldn’t be understood as a kind of thing (an imaginary situation) somehow changing its properties or relations in such a way that it becomes another kind of thing (a real situation). Philosophers have a way of putting this: “existence is not a predicate”. They mean that existing isn’t the same kind of thing as being square or purple or between two ferns. Existence isn’t a property or relation that can be predicated of something in the way those properties or relations can be. 

When Parmenides says “what is not” cannot become “what is”, he’s putting “what is not” and “what is” in a single category that we might call “things that are or are not”. That leads him, rather reasonably, to point out that “are not” things can’t become “are” things. It’s reasonable to rule that out, because a transition from an “are not” thing to an “are” thing would be something like spontaneous generation. Putting aside what may happen in the realm of quantum physics, when sub-atomic stuff is sometimes said to instantly pop into existence, the idea that “Something can come from nothing” is implausible even today. Parmenides made use of that implausibility in the 5th century BCE when he argued that what isn’t real can’t change into what’s real, so changes never happen at all.

What Parmenides should have kept in mind is that things that “are not” aren’t really things at all — they’re literally nothing — so they can’t change into something. Change doesn’t involve nothing turning into something. Change occurs when one thing that exists (a fresh piece of bread or an arrangement of atoms) becomes something else that exists (a stale piece of bread or a different arrangement of atoms). Real stuff gets rearranged, and we perceive that as something coming into existence or going out of it, i.e. changing.

So I think Parmenides was guilty of a kind of reification or treating the unreal as real. He puts what doesn’t exist into a realm that’s different from the realm of things that do exist, but right next door to it. Those two realms aren’t next door to each other, however. They’re in totally different neighborhoods, one that’s real and one that’s imaginary. It’s impossible and unnecessary to travel from one realm to the other.

By the way, the gist of the Times Literary Supplement article is that Parmenides “insisted that we must follow the rigours of an argument, no matter how surprising the conclusion – setting in motion the entire scientific world view”. Maybe so. I was more interested in his strange idea that change never happens.