The Dish

Reviewing David Edmonds’ Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us About Right and Wrong, Robert Herritt suggests that the body politic could use intellectual exercise:

There’s a healthy tendency to dismiss these kinds of line-drawing disputes as frivolous or, even worse, lawyerly. Trolley examples in particular, as Edmonds admits, have grown so complex as to “stretch the limits of our credulity and imagination – the limits beyond which intuitions become fuzzy and faint.”

And yet, we confront fine-grained moral distinctions all the time, like when the NSA tells us there’s an important difference between monitoring the metadata of our phone calls and monitoring their actual content; or when lawmakers seek to ban some mind-altering substances but not others. How are we to make sense of the judgment that, if you’re a Syrian dictator, killing your own people with conventional weapons is one thing, but using sarin gas is quite another? And then there’s the issue that Philippa Foot was trying to clarify when she created the trolley problem all those years ago: abortion.

Many of us have strong beliefs about these matters and, one would hope, reasons for those beliefs. Even if you see trolleyology as a waste of time, it at least lays bare how truly difficult it is to figure out what those reasons are, much less to determine whether they are any good.

A review of the “trolley problem” thought experiment:

Philippa Foot‘s original formulation of the problem ran as follows:

Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed. Beside this example is placed another in which a pilot whose aeroplane is about to crash is deciding whether to steer from a more to a less inhabited area. To make the parallel as close as possible it may rather be supposed that he is the driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed. In the case of the riots the mob have five hostages, so that in both the exchange is supposed to be one man’s life for the lives of five.

A utilitarian view asserts that it is obligatory to steer to the track with one man on it. According to simple utilitarianism, such a decision would be not only permissible, but, morally speaking, the better option (the other option being no action at all). An alternate viewpoint is that since moral wrongs are already in place in the situation, moving to another track constitutes a participation in the moral wrong, making one partially responsible for the death when otherwise no one would be responsible. An opponent of action may also point to the incommensurability of human lives. Under some interpretations of moral obligation, simply being present in this situation and being able to influence its outcome constitutes an obligation to participate. If this were the case, then deciding to do nothing would be considered an immoral act if one values five lives more than one.

The initial trolley problem becomes more interesting when it is compared to other moral dilemmas. One such is that offered by Judith Jarvis Thomson is called “the fat man”:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

The NSA has been secretly using online video games to spy and recruit informants, according to the latest Snowden leaks:

American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents. Fearing that terrorist or criminal networks could use the games to communicate secretly, move money or plot attacks, the documents show, intelligence operatives have entered terrain populated by digital avatars that include elves, gnomes and supermodels.

The agencies also have targeted the XBox Live network, which has nearly 50 million users. Peter Suderman collects some eye-opening details from the report, filed jointly by the NYT, the Guardian, and ProPublica:

US defense forces created mobile video games designed to spy on users. “The Pentagon’s Special Operations Command in 2006 and 2007 worked with several foreign companies – including an obscure digital media business based in Prague – to build games that could be downloaded to mobile phones, according to people involved in the effort. They said the games, which were not identified as creations of the Pentagon, were then used as vehicles for intelligence agencies to collect information about the users.”

In-game communications were subject to mass collection. “One document says that while GCHQ was testing its ability to spy on Second Life in real time, British intelligence officers vacuumed up three days’ worth of Second Life chat, instant message and financial transaction data, totaling 176,677 lines of data, which included the content of the communications.”

The government spent millions of dollars on video game behavior research to reach really, really obvious conclusions. “A group at the Palo Alto Research Center, for example, produced a government-funded study of World of Warcraft that found ‘younger players and male players preferring competitive, hack-and-slash activities, and older and female players preferring noncombat activities,’ such as exploring the virtual world. A group from the nonprofit SRI International, meanwhile, found that players under age 18 often used all capital letters both in chat messages and in their avatar names.”

One thing the agencies didn’t do – prevent any terrorist attacks:

[F]or all their enthusiasm – so many C.I.A., F.B.I. and Pentagon spies were hunting around in Second Life, the document noted, that a “deconfliction” group was needed to avoid collisions — the intelligence agencies may have inflated the threat. The documents, obtained by The Guardian and shared with The New York Times and ProPublica, do not cite any counterterrorism successes from the effort. Former American intelligence officials, current and former gaming company employees and outside experts said in interviews that they knew of little evidence that terrorist groups viewed the games as havens to communicate and plot operations.

Games “are built and operated by companies looking to make money, so the players’ identity and activity is tracked,” said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, an author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know. “For terror groups looking to keep their communications secret, there are far more effective and easier ways to do so than putting on a troll avatar.”

Some gamers even suspected the NSA was keeping an eye on them:

In one World of Warcraft discussion thread, begun just days after the first Snowden revelations appeared in the news media in June, a human death knight with the user name “Crrassus” asked whether the N.S.A. might be reading game chat logs. “If they ever read these forums,” wrote a goblin priest with the user name “Diaya,” “they would realize they were wasting” their time.

Will Oremus smirks:

Here’s my favorite part [of the NYT report]:

One problem the paper’s unnamed author and others in the agency faced in making their case – and  avoiding suspicion that their goal was merely to play computer games at work without getting fired – was the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate. A 2007 invitation to a secret internal briefing noted “terrorists use online games – but perhaps not for their amusement. They are suspected of using them to communicate secretly and to transfer funds.” But the agencies had no evidence to support their suspicions. 

Being an NSA agent sounds fun, no? Want to spend all day playing video games? Just convince your superiors that terrorists play video games too – perhaps not for their amusement! Want to take a trip to Hawaii? Terrorists take trips to Hawaii – perhaps not for their amusement!

But he adds ominously:

Fun fact: In 2007, a Second Life executive made a pitch to US intelligence agencies about the potential for government spies to use online games “to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviors of non-Americans through observation, without leaving US soil.” That Second Life executive was a former Navy officer named Cory Ondrejka who had previously worked at the NSA. Ondrejka no longer works at Second Life, the Times notes – he’s now director of mobile engineering at Facebook.

Tom Scocca defends the former against the latter:

If there is a defining document of contemporary literary smarm, it is an interview Eggers did via email with the Harvard Advocate in 2000, in which a college student had the poor manners to ask the literary celebrity about “selling out.” In reply to the question, Eggers told the Advocate that yes, he was what people call a sellout, that he had been paid $12,000 for a single magazine article, that he had taken the chance to hang out with Puffy, and that he had said yes to all these opportunities because “No is for pussies.” His response builds to a frenzied peroration:

Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.

Here we have the major themes or attitudes of smarm: the scolding, the gestures at inclusiveness, the appeal to virtue and maturity. Eggers used to be a critic, but he has grown out of childish things. Eggers has done the work – the book publishing, the Hollywood deal-making – that makes his opinions (unlike those of his audience) earned and valid opinions. … Do not dismiss – a movie? Unless you have made one? Any movie? The Internship? The Lone Ranger? Kirk Cameron’s Unstoppable?

Maria Bustillos quotes Scocca:

Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

The form of virtue, without the substance. There are whole worlds to unpack in that idea. Can we ever be sure that someone else’s assumption of virtue is fake? If so, how? If calls for civility, for integrity—for feeling and for sympathy—are to be considered suspect (“smarmy”), in and of themselves, what is to become of us? Specifically, what is to become of the poet, who approaches us with no critical armor, no theory, no formula—who demands this very absolution from us in advance?

Joe Nunweek remains skeptical of Scocca’s diatribe:

Leaving aside leading snark proponent Gawker’s backing by a modest community co-op media company worth $300 million – leaving aside the fact that I can’t stand glib clickbait positivity anymore than the next broke writer – I just don’t believe snark and smarm don’t have the particular couplings to prestige and privilege that Scocca says they do. You can heap venom on low-level offenders, beneficiaries and the undeserving poor with a bile that could corrode titanium, you can smarm at the top of the Twitter heap about a ‘highly problematic’ turn of phrase with the best of them. There’s a whole bunch of different power relations in which these tonal devices are interchangeable, but with both, it often comes back to serving the writer or speaker and his or her own, rather than the subject.

Snark or smarm – they’re both ultimately a failure to put ego aside, and they usually imply a disregard or lack of consideration for a work, an argument, whatever – because it’s more important to get in first and get in fatally. The framing device of ‘On Smarm’ is the Anakin Skywalker-like figure of Dave Eggers, who abdicated a life of ‘incredibly snotty, hostile articles attacking big name, non-fiction journalists’ to become an insufferable Zen-like figure of moderation who sagely counsels our youth not to discuss a book until they’ve written one. But really, he just proves a more basic reality – that a pathological egotist will eventually find the right tool to get himself success and attention, whether it’s more vinegar or more honey.

That’s what Richard Posner supports:

There is much talk about increasing the minimum wage to $10 or $13 an hour. It seems both imprudent and unnecessary to consider such steep, sudden jumps. I would favor increasing the federal minimum wage by 20 percent, to $8.70 an hour. That would yield a minimum-wage worker an annual income (assuming he or she worked 2000 hours per year) of $17,400—still very modest; but if he disemployment effect proves to be slight, as I would guess it would be, a further increase could be considered. At the very least, the 20 percent increase would yield valuable information on the elasticity of unemployment to changes in the minimum wage.

Becker also worries about raising the minimum wage too high:

Valuable perspective comes from the French experience, for the French minimum wage of almost $13 an hour has been one of the highest in the developed world. It is no coincidence that the unemployment rate of French youth is over 25%, and it is said to be over 40% for young Moslem males. A study by Abowd, et al, “Minimum Wages and Employment in France and the United States”, 2009 shows that even before the financial crisis hit, the high French minimum wage was appreciably impacting the employment of young French men and women. They did not find much affect of the much lower American minimum on employment, although others have shown that even the relatively low American minimum wage prices some teenagers out of the labor market since they do not add enough value to employers.

Recent Dish on the minimum wage here.

After Harvard revealed that the most commonly awarded grade there is an “A”, Conor defends the practice of grade inflation, at least at elite schools:

A rigorous system of inflation-free grading might benefit any graduate schools or employers interested in using the transcripts of applicants while evaluating them. But Harvard College shouldn’t tailor its grading system to fulfill their needs, and needn’t worry about its students being overlooked regardless of their grading approach. Being admitted to Harvard and graduating is itself a strong signal. There’s also the argument that grade inflation is unfair. Students who do exceptional work are given the very same “reward” as students who do mediocre work. But it’s wrong to conceive of grades as the reward for acquiring more knowledge than other people. The reward is coming away with a better education.

Eleanor Barkhorn pushes back:

Midway through my time at Princeton … the school adopted new grading standards. Starting my junior fall, professors could give out only a limited number of A-range grades. The change prompted lots of anxiety and indignation from the student body—and now, nine years later, it may be rolled back. But for me, “grade deflation” was a much-needed kick in the pants. I started reading more carefully, taking more diligent notes, developing relationships with my professors and their teaching assistants. I ended up learning a lot more and enjoying my classes in a much deeper way. Yes, hard-working students should be rewarded with good grades. But a very good way to inspire students to work hard in the first place is to make good grades worth something.

Yglesias thinks the problem is inflation of another kind:

Also on the subject of grades, Alice Robb informs us that robots can now accurately score essay tests. She proposes nixing multiple-choice exams, which research suggests measure students’ understanding poorly:

A group of researchers, led by Elizabeth Beggrow at the Ohio State University, assessed science students’ understanding of key ideas about evolution using four methods: multiple-choice tests, human-scored written explanations, computer-scored written explanations, and clinical oral interviews. Clinical interviews—which allow professors to ask follow-up questions and engage students in dialogue—are considered ideal, but would be an impractical drain on teachers’ time; in this study, the clinical interviews lasted 14 minutes on average, and some took nearly half an hour. Machines, on the other hand, could generate a score in less than five seconds, though they took a few minutes to set up. The researchers “taught” the software to mark essays by feeding it examples of human-scored essays until it learned to recognize patterns in what the human scorers were looking for …

When Beggrow and her team analyzed the data, they found that professors’ and computers’ scores of students’ short essays were almost identical—the correlation was 0.96 to 1.

(Chart from a 2012 study (pdf) on grade inflation)

Drezner calls the deal signed in Bali over the weekend a “game changer” for world trade:

Bali helps to demonstrate the surprising forward momentum on trade liberalization.  The deal in Bali comes on the same week that Congress nears approving trade promotion authority — or “fast-track’ for President Obama.  If that passes, then the United States will be able to negotiate the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe and the Trans-Pacific Partnership with a passel of Asia/Pacific economies (indeed, U.S. trade negotiators went from Bali to Singapore to continue talks on that deal).  Fast track will signal to U.S. negotiating partners that Washington is committed to finishing a deal.  Combine these negotiations with ongoing services negotiations, as well as a bilateral investment treaty with China, and you have the most ambitious trade agenda for the United States since the first year of the Clinton administration.

Robert Read is less excited:

Bali represents progress. It might not be particularly significant in the context of the original ambition for these talks, but it is still a major step forward for multilateralism. The package is likely to have very limited benefits for many countries but, more importantly, it signals a renewed commitment by WTO member countries to working together at a time of profound global recession.

Catherine Traywick unpacks the deal:

The deal is expected to increase global trade income by $1 trillion and add 20 million jobs, most of which would be in developing countries.

But critics were quick to highlight the deal’s shortcomings. Jeronim Capaldo, a senior researcher at Tufts’s Global Development and Environment Institute, argued in a policy paper this month that estimates of the deal’s potential benefits are overstated and “depend on too many unjustifiable assumptions.” While a trade facilitation agreement may create more jobs in exporting industries, he contends, it would also likely lead to higher unemployment in non-export industries. He also argues that income and savings projections do not take into account the high costs of implementing trade facilitation, which would naturally offset gains for poorer countries. The latter point is one that India brought up prior to last week’s trade talks, when its Confederation of Indian Industry called for the WTO to fund implementation costs for developing countries.

Simon Lester is lukewarm on the agreement:

It’s important to understand … that this agreement is not an agreement under which all countries will lower tariffs or barriers to trade in services, which is the traditional kind of trade agreement.  My colleague Dan Ikenson wrote about trade facilitation here. Reading through a draft of the agreement, it seems to cover two things.  First, it tries to achieve “good governance” in customs procedures, such as through requiring an appeals process for customs decisions.  And second, it requires governments to speed up the import process where possible, for example by letting frequent traders use expedited procedures. These are all good things, but it is not the same as using trade agreements to rein in protectionism.

The Economist weighs in:

[A]griculture proved the sorest subject, as ever. Disagreement spanned several issues, the most contentious of which concerned agriculture subsidies. India, its government facing a general election next year, spearheaded an effort to prevent emerging markets from facing challenges at the WTO over subsidies granted to farmers under the aegis of “food security” measures. In the months leading up to the Bali meeting India wrung substantial concessions from rich-world economies, including a four-year “peace clause” that would have granted developing countries protections from such challenges. Not satisfied with that, India later threatened to derail talks unless the issue was reopened. India ultimately won an indefinite waiver, good until a permanent solution can be reached.

Several other disputes received similar papering over. Indeed, while trade facilitation counts as a meaningful achievement, the deal is unlikely to convince sceptics that the multilateral process can produce ambitious reforms—not while those least committed to progress, like India in this case, can threaten to sink an entire agreement unless their demands are met.

A reader writes:

When I quit smoking, my weight balloons. It doesn’t matter how much I watch what I eat or how much exercise I get, I gain a lot of weight. When I got about 70 pounds above my normal weight, I started smoking again. Within a year, I’m down to my normal weight. I eat because I need to – not because I want to. My Type II diabetes disappeared. Pains in my feet and joints went away. Yet, I am classified as practically a leper from non-smokers even though I do not smoke around them. I asked my family doctor for help regarding my appetite and metabolism, but he said he couldn’t provide anything like that because it’s so bad for you. For me, smoking was my least bad option. I will quit again by the end of this year. Then the cycle will continue.

Another writes:

What Kelly Quirino is describing is detoxing from a drug; she is also trying to cope with the triggers inherent in withdrawal from any substance – in this case, it is cigarettes. Oh no, she’s eating more! So what? A temporary gain in weight is hardly as risky for one’s health than an addiction to nicotine, which will increase the user’s risk to heart disease, cancer, COPD, diabetes, and so on. Even worse, her smoking hurts her children’s health, who are vulnerable to second hand smoke, and are also more likely to become smokers.

Nicotine is more addictive than heroin; 32% of those who try smoking become addicted, as opposed to approximately 23% of people who use heroin. Smoking and tobacco use are insidious addictions, partly because smokers rarely see themselves as what they are: addicts. And as addicts, smokers need to detox from nicotine, utilize medications to stop smoking, and treat their smoking cessation as seriously as one would any other addiction.

But there is one big drawback to the rehab approach:

12-step groups are full of smokers who have traded in their more damaging addiction for the one that they see as benign – smoking. During my stint in rehab, I heard many justify their tobacco use as beneficial to their recovery, which it probably was. (Disclosure: I had my addictions, but was never a smoker.) However, trading one addiction for another is not a solution for the long term. The fact of the matter is smoking is not benign, nor is quitting it anything less than ending an addiction.

Update from a reader:

“Nicotine is more addictive than heroin; 32% of those who try smoking become addicted, as opposed to approximately 23% of people who use heroin.”. I think it is time to give these comparisons a break, or at least include some context. Tobacco is a legally purchased substance. Buying cigarettes is a simple as walking to the store. The availability of heroin is much more challenging. It seems to be that availability is a factor that should be considered when comparing the “addictiveness” of a drug.

Exactly one year ago my state, Washington, legalized marijuana possession and use. Though the actual “stores” don’t open until next spring, marijuana is now readily available, and the pro-active dispensaries mean that I can even get it delivered within the hour.

Prior to a year ago I’d probably smoked weed 10 times in my life. Since legalization? Ummm … Pretty much almost every single day. The difference is that I didn’t have a huge desire to violate the law previously, and did not honestly have a good idea where to find weed conveniently. For me, at least, marijuana was as “addictive” five years ago as it is today, but now it’s legal and very accessible.

An expert weighs in:

Kelly Quirino wrote, “I wander around, feeling like there’s something I’m supposed to be doing but coming up empty. I’m crabby, and sad, and my hands feel completely useless,” sounded so familiar to me. It’s what I heard over and over from the 60+ former smokers I interviewed in depth for a book that’s coming out in a week, Quit Smoking for Life. (It’s a legit, gimmick-free book, backed by the American Cancer Society and several academics, tobacco researchers, etc.)

I don’t know if you’d consider posting this, since it’s “promotional,” but if the hardcore smokers I interviewed can overcome tobacco addiction, and they did, then Quirino and your readers who smoke can as well. The reason most smokers fail their attempts to quit is that they don’t adequately prepare for how they’ll occupy their hands, mouths, and minds, or how they’ll cope with stress or with other people smoking around them.

Planning is the critical step between deciding to quit and quitting, yet most smokers just wing it – and fail. Most of the folks I interviewed had failed multiple times before finally succeeding with a mapped-out quit. They all said quitting sucked but that it was more bearable than they’d expected and that it changed them, as human beings, in ways that made them never want to return to smoking.

Writing this book gave me considerable compassion for smokers and made me loathe the tobacco industry even more than I already did.

Readers suffering from ulcerative colitis have testified to the cigarette’s ameliorative effects. Another suggests:

Those with colitis should give e-cigs a try if the effective ingredient for them happens to be nicotine, not the tobacco. Perhaps they can get the relief they need without exposing themselves to the dangers of regular cigarettes.

After analyzing the company’s data-driven business model, Tim Wu argues that “much more so than a network that reaches viewers through a third-party cable operator like Comcast or Time Warner, [Netflix] knows what its customers actually like and how they behave”:

Right now, American viewers are averaging only about 45 minutes of Internet-streaming video per week, a blip in comparison with total television intake. Given that audiences trained for decades to respond to event-driven television, how realistic is it to expect more viewers to shift from traditional TV? John Steinbeck offered one answer: “It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.” Any historian of consumer technology would add that machines change much faster than people.

Television in particular moves so slowly that the last time the concept of the network really came up for grabs was the late ’70s.

That’s when Ted Turner (the Turner Broadcasting System), Pat Robertson (the Christian Broadcast Network), and the founders of HBO successfully used satellites to begin to beam programming to cable subscribers. The ensuing frenzy resulted in the launch of a dozen networks, including ESPN, MTV, CNN, Discovery, and Bravo. Most of those channels are still around, not necessarily because of the strength of their programming, but because the reigning content hierarchy has been so entrenched.

Netflix believes it has a powerful factor in its favor as it tries to change viewers’ habits. “Human beings like control,” says [chief content officer Ted] Sarandos. “To make all of America do the same thing at the same time is enormously inefficient, ridiculously expensive, and most of the time, not a very satisfying experience.” There is a freedom achieved when your options extend beyond that night’s offerings and the limited selection of past episodes that networks make available on demand. Specifically, it’s the freedom to only watch television you really enjoy.

Previous Dish on Netflix here.