Oct.22 | Challenging the government, a cautionary tale, the euthanasia conveyor belt, and paying attention
Lawyers who test the government do us a favour | Jonathan Haidt won't compromise on truth-seeking | The depressing inevitability of euthanasia regimes | Notes on "Stand Out of Our Light"
Challenges to government maintain our confidence in it
Lawyers who test the lawfulness of official action and advocate for their clients are doing us a favour, not a disservice
“Compliance” is derived from Old French and Latin roots meaning “to fulfil” or “to carry out.” Sometimes it’s right to carry out a command, and sometimes it’s not. Distinguishing between the two is often a matter of trust, as when the Government told us we should stay in our homes in response to the COVID pandemic. We trusted that this was a lawful order, and so we complied. That trust turned out to be misplaced for the first nine days of the March 2020 lockdown, when the Government had no legal authority for its command. We found this out because a public-spirited former public servant, Dr Andrew Borrowdale, took the Government to the High Court and then to the Court of Appeal, winning a declaration that New Zealanders’ rights had been unlawfully limited. So it was alarming to read that senior lawyers have been enjoining their colleagues to be “careful” about challenging Government power during an emergency. Keep reading
A cautionary tale from US academia
The distinguished professor Jonathan Haidt won’t compromise his commitment to truth-seeking
Jonathan Haidt is the latest public figure to run up against the demands of diversity, equity and inclusion in American academic life. The social psychology professor is internationally regarded for his seminal book, The Righteous Mind, which seeks to explain why sincere liberals and conservatives can see the world so differently. More recently, he’s known for his contributions to The Coddling of the American Mind, which he co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, for his work exposing the risks posed by social media to private and public life, and for founding Heterdox Academy, a initiative to promote “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement” in universities. So when the Society for Personality and Social Psychology said that research presented at its conferences must advance the Society’s “equity, inclusion, and anti-racism” goals, it was a red flag for Haidt. Keep reading
The depressing inevitability of euthanasia regimes
Welcome to the conveyor belt
A recent Unherd podcast on Canada’s euthanasia regime has an air of depressing inevitability about it. The episode’s guest, Gary Nichols, tells the story of his brother Alan’s 2019 death—a story of mental health issues which should have called Alan’s capacity to consent into question, a request to die based solely on “hearing loss,” and a paternalistic medical regime that didn’t want Alan’s family to have an opportunity to persuade him that living might be better than dying. Listening to Gary’s testimony, you get the impression of a conveyor belt—once Alan took the first step onto it, the outcome was almost a foregone conclusion. Keep reading
Paying attention with our lives
Notes on "Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy" by James Williams
“If you wanted to train all of society to be as impulsive and weak-willed as possible, how would you do it? One way would be to invent an impulsivity training device – let’s call it an iTrainer – that delivers an endless supply of informational rewards on demand. You’d want to make it small enough to fit in a pocket or purse so people could carry it anywhere they went. The informational rewards it would pipe into their attentional world could be anything, from cute cat photos to tidbits of news that outrage you (because outrage can, after all, be a reward too). To boost its effectiveness, you could endow the iTrainer with rich systems of intelligence and automation so it could adapt to users’ behaviors, contexts, and individual quirks in order to get them to spend as much time and attention with it as possible. … Of course, the iTrainer project would never come anywhere close to passing a research ethics review. Launching such a project of societal reshaping, and letting it run unchecked, would clearly be utterly outrageous. So it’s a good thing this is all just a thought experiment.”
Perceptive readers may notice that the iTrainer bears a certain resemblance to technologies that have rapidly become part of our everyday lives. They may also infer that the impact of the iTrainer has not been entirely positive. In Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy, James Williams offers a distinctive diagnosis of the damage done by these technologies—their effect on our ability to pay attention. Keep reading