by liberal japonicus
from this link
Yesterday we reached an agreement with the Pentagon for deploying advanced AI systems in classified environments, which we requested they also make available to all AI companies.
From Anthropology goes to war: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand by Eric Wakin
In late March 1970 the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SMC) sent selected anthropologists copies of a series of documents detailing extensive contacts between distinguished American academics and the U.S. Defense Department.’ Among the recipients were two members of the newly formed Committee o n Ethics of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)-its chair, Eric Wolf, and Joseph Jorgensen. The documents, which had been copied surreptitiously from the files of anthropologist Michael Moerman, suggested that a number of American social scientists had been doing contract and consultation work for the Defense Department. Most importantly, the documents also seemed to indicate that these social scientists were providing information that was being used in an ongoing U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Thailand.
Discuss
Thanks. I hope it’s ok if I use this as no open thread:
Juergen Habermas has died. I doubt many people made it through “The Theory of Communicative Action” but his (and Apel’s) discourse ethics were certainly influential when I studied philosophy. The idea that the better argument will eventually win out, together with Gadamer’s principle of charity, i.e. assuming that your interlocutor is rational and possibly correct, seems strangely antiquated in these times.
I only ever read “The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity“ and took away that Habermas tried to valiantly defend Kantian reason against various irrationalists and postmodernist upstarts – however, I wasn’t really buying it, especially since he seemed to contradict his own maxims by not really trying to understand where, say, Foucault and Derrida were coming from.
His concept of “Verfassungspatriotismus” (patriotism based on the constitution) was a useful corrective to the nationalist and xenophobic tendencies in Germany.
Finally, he recently made some contentious remarks about Ukraine (“compromise”) and Gaza (“Jewish lives are a priority”) which exposed the limits of his universalism, a generational shift in German intellectual discourse and left a bit of a sour aftertaste. But then this just showed that even the most rational thinkers are children of their time.
A comment that refers to “irrationalists” would have been better for Pi Day, but Pi+1 is still appropriate, I guess.
pi + 0.01
I’ve mentioned Giovanna Borradori’s Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003) a few times here over the years. Borradori’s book is her dialogues with Habermas and Derrida speaking with her separately, but responding to parallel questions about terrorism and philosophy in NYC not long after 9/11. It’s an extraordinary work, giving the reader a chance to see both philosophers thinking and responding in real time to an extraordinary circumstance. I found it very approachable reading, so it might make a good introduction to anyone wanting to get a taste of Habermas’s thinking, and an idea of the philosophical tensions between him and the post-structuralists.
I found Derrida’s responses in the book to be very insightful and clarifying, and a good corrective to the straw man portrayals of him as fast-talking charlatan.
The challenge, always, is to figure out whether the work you are doing will be used for unethical ends. Sometimes, that’s easy. But other times, it isn’t — especially with work which might, or might not, be used for unethical purposes. Social science has that issue, but so does medicine, engineering, etc.
It’s easy, especially after the fact and with 20/20 hindsight based on more complete information, to say “Obviously this work….” It takes actual effort to work out what information the actors had, and the context they were working in. Pundits rarely, in my observation, are quite that industrious.
thanks, nous