Year: 2016

As a piece of writing this is unrehearsed an unpollished, but I wanted to record some notes before Phil Walder’s second talk on meat-eating “Should Humanists Eat Animals” at Central London Humanists on Wednesday this week at Conway Hall. I didn’t see his previous talk either, but did hear some some specific points of feedback from others. (Also in recent weeks – Julian Baggini’s TLS piece and George Monbiot’s piece in the Grauniad – exchanged info with Phil. Both have of course written on meat-eating before.) So with apologies working blind as far as Phil’s actual talk is concerned herewith some thoughts:

The ethics of human power over the life and death of animals? I see this as the key issue, everything else being corollaries or practical detail.

The fact that we have evolved as omnivores as part of the animal kingdom is an attractive argument, but also being intelligent and enlightened, doesn’t mean we should eat animals if there is no reason to. The opposite holds too, the fact we are intelligent and enlightened doesn’t mean we should reject our evolutionary history either.

What counts as (killing and) eating animals is the first definitional problem. Domesticated or wild, hunted or husbanded (?) beasts or birds of any kind? Fish, caught or farmed? “Lower” forms of shellfish – where is the line drawn. What about symbotic life forms? What about animal products that don’t involve slaughter – dairy? Are eggs slaugher anyway? Funghi? But definitions can’t be the decisive the issue.

The real ethical issue is sustainability – phsyical & biological as well as psychological & morally. What are we doing to ourselves and the cosmos?

As far as the ethics of how the animals are treated in the supply chain – right up to slaughter and subsequent handling – and how we treat those we delegate to “process” the animals, from farmers to slaughter and butchery on our behalf, or ourselves if we are so inclined.

Sustainability is a matter of respect. Respect for the cosmos as well as for ourselves and our treatment of animals.

Intensive production (eg US beef or mass poultry, say) shows little respect for anything. The animals, ourselves or environmental resources. What about lower intensity production, sheep hill-farming on grouse moorland as part of wider environmental management? A lot of what we consider “natural” environment is in fact the result of thousands of years of husbandry.

Slaughtermen in intensive production may be “desensitised” even “dehumanised” in what they are doing. [A famous US documentary exposed extreme practices a couple of decades ago.] Little chance for the human to show the animals any respect. One reason why traditional cultures (eg religious ones) have taboos, mores and rituals when it comes to taking the life of animals – even if reality can still be trampled-on by supply chain economics in any culture.

I say all this as someone who eats meat and animal products, though more fish and shellfish than meat generally by choice, and generally less meat than most who do. As a result of travel and exposure to many different local cuisines we eat a wide range of non-meat and non-fish meals. And would generally target sustainable sources, though busy-life, bad-habits and blind-spots mean I/we do have specific processed food exceptions. In a sense I/we could easily be vegetarian but choose not to be.

And I say that as someone who used to be fascinated by the slaugherman at work, on both cattle and sheep, at the local butcher on my way home from school. And I recall a memorable meal of fresh fish on a mediterranean quayside, right alongside the blood-bath that was freshly landed tuna being butchered. Interesting conversation with our young school-age kids. Out of sight, out of mind, is not a healthy attitude to the real ethical issues.

In summary for me, meat-eating is OK (but not essential, obviously) provided it is sustainable at both the physical & biological environmental level and the level of psychological well-being and moral respect.

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[Post Note : My actual position is that we should not give up meat eating beyond sustainability condiderations. We might one-day regret long-term evolution away from omnivorousness – we shouldn’t lose the potential as a species.]

[Post Note : No sign of the recorded talk yet, but an interesting piece from Julie Burchill.]

Mentioned in my previous post that I was actively catching-up on reading Nicholas Nassim Taleb whose best-selling Black Swan I already felt I knew from secondary references, and whose later (Antifragile) arguments (and the person) I was coming to know through social media and blogging links.

As mentioned, I had received Antifragile first, but had only got started on the Prologue before Black Swan turned-up yesterday, so I switched to reading in published order. Just as well because the Prologue to Antifragile already inlcudes many references to Black Swans and the Black Swan Effect.

So, as per usual when reading and reviewing an anticipated book, I’m blogging an early review of initial impressions, so that any later conclusions and lessons learned (gutted and abstracted content) can be honestly judged as more than hindsight. I’m no more immune to cognitive biases than anyone else, so I prefer to be honest and state my prejudices up front.

Right from the first few pages – taking Black Swans (*) as a given already – I’m right with him in my own agenda:

“[This] philosophical-logical question into an empirical reality, […] that has obsessed me since childhood.”

“A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our [21st C] world […] Ever since we left the Pleistocene […] the effect of these Black Swans has been increasing. It started accelerating during the industrial revolution, as the world started getting more complicated, while ordinary events […] become increasingly inconsequential.”

That increasing complication is of course exaggerated by the degree and speed of information inter-connectivity too and, as he goes on to say later, increasingly recursive.

“Literally, just about everything of significance around [us] might qualify [as a Black Swan].”

“[Predictive, risk management business as intellectual frauds] exclude the possibility of the Black Swan.

“[Learning] with too much precision. […] Too practical and exceedingly focussed for [our] own safety.”

“We do not spontaneously learn that we don’t learn that we don’t learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don’t learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don’t seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with a passion,”

“Aggressive ignorance.”

And he is already telegraphing his anti-fragile thesis – ie not just being aware of and resilient to Black Swans in general, but being fore-armed with the antifragile capabilities to benefit from them – but I was already there in the previous post. Anyway enough for now, let’s finish with this one, and we’re only half-way through the 12 page Prologue:

“A new kind of ingratitude […]
a far more viscious kind of ingratitude:
the feeling of uselessness
on the part of the silent hero.”

Silent as in those that don’t fly planes into the WTC.

I can already see the ironies piling-up, as we aim for the meta-meta abstractions needed whilst inevitably arguing about specific technical detail. But I get it already. I’m driven by the same passion.

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[(*) Note: Black Swans are fundamentally what’s known as “The Induction Problem” – the failure of generalised knowledge of the past to predict the future specifically or generally (coupled with increasingly catastrophic and chaotic potential outcomes in an ever more complex and recursively connected world). Ever since Aristotle formalised what we mean by induction, people have been pointing out the problem. Most famously for us anglophones, Hume elaborated on Bishop Berkley on the chances of the sun rising (in the east) tomorrow, but Taleb (and wikipedia) remind us that Sextus Empiricus (alas the empirical according to Taleb) as well as Al-Ghazali’s debate with Averroes had already thoroughly warned anyone who’d read them. (I notice Taleb, like Simon Blackburn, is a fan of Hume, his lifestyle more than the more formal philosophy for which he is more generally known).]

Skimming my blog dashboard I find I have several, a handful, of draft pieces with reference to Nassim Nicholas Taleb and things he’s published or linked to, that I’ve not quite had the courage to post yet.

Like many, I find his argumentation style is so ruthless, he suffers no fools gladly, that even short supportive responses on twitter get the full application of vitriol – even blockage – if there is even the slightest hint of “not getting it”. With a lot of (other) people I might just pigeon-hole them down the wrong end of the autism disorder spectrum, or consider them plain arrogant and unhelpful. In Taleb’s case, it’s kinda the point.

His target is the overly simplistic, underinformed use of logic, scientific and/or statistical.

It’s ironic that right now I’m also in dialogue with Lee Beaumont on lessons in argumentation leading to better knowledge and its wiser application. The emphasis is very much on insight-seeking respectful dialogue (eg following Rappaport’s rule) whilst at the same time having access to the widest possible toolsets of logic and rhetoric from winning binary arguments and destroying fallacies to collaborative and creative synthesis of new knowledge. I suspect we and Taleb might not get off first base, or maybe we not even survive the experience.

Anyway the points is, however prickly Taleb’s style, he is onto something important about the limits to knowledge – even with the best information available some things remain essentially unpredictable or objectively unknowable in any practical sense. That much was the lesson of his Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. I hadn’t really joined-up the dots until I was reminded of his standing-up to challenge the naive scientific certainties of The Four Horseman of New Atheism (2009, and here 2012 in The New Statesman). And of course he is more generally supportive of promoting the value of philosophy to science as it bumps up against it’s unknown and unknowable edges.

My homework has some catching-up to do. Black Swan I only know by second hand references, so I now have a copy winging its way to me. Today however I received my copy of his 2012 Antifragile and just debating whether to plunge-in or wait and read him in the order published.

Antifragile goes beyond pointing out the chaotic unpredictability that undermines naive scientific rationale, to the constructive benefit of not just being resilient to the random, but being able to positively exploit it through evolution. I’m hooked; when I did my master’s thesis over 25 years ago, I quoted Malcom McLaren’s adage:

“Thriving on chaos”

Antifragile has some impressive hype in its cover blurbs too:

Changed my view of how the world works.
[Daniel Kahneman, no less] and

The most prophetic voice of all …
… a genuinely significant philosopher.

The hottest thinker in the world.
[Sunday Times]

Some exciting – and I guess challenging – reading ahead.

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[Post Note: Lee, mentioned above, has in fact already read and reviewed Antifragile, and interestingly his (negative) comments focus almost entirely on style, and the combative (boxing-match analogy) style of the set-piece god-wars debate above. The ironies pile up.]

Great piece from Peter Clive at “Mo’ Flo’ MoJo”

Grandma’s adages almost invariably contain an important element of non-obvious truth. Correlations between experience of things grouping together (platooning) in nature – two buses coming along at once – have evolutionary explanations. Yes even the behaviour of bus services evolve.

(Hat tip Gillian Mair @Ruglonian)

Been picking-up links and hits on the blog that had me confused until today. Firstly several Spiral Model hits – presumably from Ken Wilber’s “Intergal” AQAL metaphysical ontology (dervived from Graves, Beck & Cohen) – then several colours including TEAL which at first I suspected to be another acronym, but then realised Teal just another Wilber colour in the spiral layers. And now I realise there’s a whole management school spinning out of Frederick Laloux’s “Reinventing Organisations” which presumably takes Wilber’s evolutionary model of organisation. Something I’ve thought dismissively about myself in the past but focussed more on Maslow and Pirsig’s MoQ layered model with Hofstadter’s loopiness.

Just a few holding links for the moment.

Argumentum ad Wilberiam: How truthiness and
overgeneralization threaten to turn integral theory into a new
scholasticism.

So what’s this “Teal” organisations thing?

A critique of the ‘subtle hierarchism’ of the Teal Organizations concept in the book ‘Reinventing Organizations’ – originally hat-tip to Jaap van Till I believe, bringing @paulmasonnews into the conversation. A link to “Peer-to-Peer” organisation. Like so much management-speak there’s plenty of jargon and dubious bullshit, but as in all such cases there’s probably some meta-sense in there trying not to get reified by objective criticism?

The thing that really distracted me in reading these links was the Dupuy reference. The first comment in the critique above was by François Dupuy, sociologist picking up on missing “social systems” view aspects (of the book & review?) and my own extraction from a pure-science stance on systems engineering (cybernetics) came from Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s “Mechanisation of the Mind”. Checking if any relation.

Something to follow-up.

Intriguing collection  of essays – reviewed here by Jeffrey Barrett at NDPR. (Hat tip to @chrisoldfield again.)

Suspect the book may be a stretch too far, given the backlog I have right now, but an interesting review piece to save for later.

I blogged my own confusion about exactly what Sam Harris education was way back here, over a year ago. Reality is he’s an English major and a very clever writer. A bit like Pirsig “skating on thin ice” when writing about Zen having previously read only one book on the subject, later pursuing studies to cover his arse. A lot more parallels between Harris and Pirsig, and Hofstadter, and more.

[After his Stanford English batchelor] in 1986 — when he experimented with psychedelics, dropped-out after two years and travelled in India. (Sounds familiar?) He later gained a Batchelor’s in Philosophy in 2000 and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2009.

Interesting that recently there’s a bit of a twitter storm about how little he did to achieve his “bogus” cognitive neuroscience PhD:

Sam Harris didn’t freaking do his own experiments for that bogus PhD he uses to promote himself as a neuroscientist! pic.twitter.com/jeVld2lPDS

— Mohamed Ghilan (@MohamedGhilan) August 8, 2016

However thin his formal qualifications really are in philosophy and/or science he certainly hadn’t served his time before his elevation to the peerage as one of the four horsemen of science and rationality challenging the irrationality of religion. A young upstart spouting New Atheism from a very limited perspective.

But fair play to Sam, he’s doing his (real) education in public in front of us (a bit like I am, but I’ve been doing it since blogging was invented). Take for example his public conversation with Maajid Nawaz on the value of Islam – where I concluded he seemed “chastened” by the experience. Take for example his recent kiss and make-up conversation with time-served neurophilosopher Dan Dennett. Take for example (hat tip to Lee Beaumont) his recent podcast conversation with Eric Weinstein on Judaism and religion generally.

Sam is Waking Up to the fact that education is more than qualifications and wisdom is more than knowledge and knowledge is more than science. I say again, fair-play to him for showing us how to listen in public. His philosophy education may yet stand him in good stead. Would that Dawkins and Krauss (and Cox and …. ) followed his (and my) lead.

I mentioned and shared, a few posts ago, a brief presentation on Free-Will I gave to Teesside Sceptics in the Pub last week, but I also wanted to mention the other contributions:

Sue Whitcombe was probably the highlight of the night, partly because it was delivered with the passion of direct personal experience and partly because it was an unexpected topic for such a group. How child-psychology aspects get overlooked in cases of Parent-Alienation that accompany typical family break-ups. The key point for me and my agenda, was the binary nature of the child’s perception (particularly 7 to 11-ish?) of “one parent good, one parent bad”, and how easily and almost randomly that conclusion could be set by the (well- or bad-intentioned) communications of adults around the child, despite any previous normal (imperfect) shared loving relationships. A craving for the simplest explanation. Sue’s point, as a practicioner, was for more expert transparency in social organisations (and courts) that deal with family separations. (Also of interest, the extreme cases that result in entirely fictional abuse accusations against a previously loving parent. But that’s another story.)

More typical of expectations were the presentations by Chris Diboll and Adam Baker. Chris gave us a warning on being Sceptical About Economics and the harmful misinformation that typically accompanies economic claims and predictions. Hear, hear, I say. The problem I often characterise as “autistic economics” – we and economists often mistake economics for a science and expect meaningful objective facts and numbers on which to hang decisions. Politicians – evil conspiracy or incompetent cock-up and all grey areas between – exploit the misunderstanding we all share, and there was some good discussion. Talking of which, Adam presented examples of Conspiracy Theories with some of the psychological reasons why so many of us are tempted to believe them and how typically believing one tends to correlate with believing many to be part of wider over-arching establishment conspiracies. Again something of interest to my own agenda, the memetic effect of wanting to believe simple arguments that fit most easily with existing perceptions and the consequence that these become the easiest ideas to spread and take root. An effect reinforced in our times of mass social-media, but the mainstream press suffer from it too.

Thez Alan gave us a heartfelt rant on the local housing crisis. Apart from raising the profile of the issue, his main point seemed to be that building more houses wasn’t necessarily the solution. The problem at the social housing end of the market doesn’t benefit from building to expand the home-ownership market.

Reece Hanrahan had opened the evening with million-miles-an-hour wizz through Parallel Universes, Buddhism and Psychedelics mentioning a zillion topics and sources, but without any clear message other than these things are all somehow connected and that we should find it controversial. Wasn’t sure if he ran off immediately to a prior engagement because of the (presumed) sceptical question I’d asked about what, if any of the topics he’d listed, did he actually believe in? I wasn’t sure if he thought he was being deliberately controversial. If he’d stuck around he might have found out I am sympathetic and have taken an interest in practically everything he mentioned. I’m good with the multiverse, but not with parallel universes as a quantum kludge. I’m good with Buddhism as an alternative to the objective exclusion of the world from ourselves as subjects – Zen and the Art of …. you name it – is a recurring meme around here. I’m good with psychedelics as “doors of perception” breaking down the objective blockages to direct experience of the world. Many respectable philosophers and scientists have explored all of these, and still do, and I could list several hundred already referenced here. Pity.