Pun Salad

Matthew Hennessey bids us Welcome to the Age of Excusability. (WSJ gifted link)

But, as Matthew goes on to note: "The excusability crisis is bipartisan." Use the gifted link, if necessary, to Peruse the Thing in its Entirety.

Also of note:

• 

  I think I agree with Anthony Comegna and (maybe) David Graeber. Writing in the July issue of Reason, Anthony's headline says: The Best Democracy Is Anarchy. He is reviewing David Graeber's The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . and the Amazon link is at your right.

  Long before European governments or their colonies began to embrace "democracy," something far more democratic was widely practiced in the world's vast ungovernable spaces.

  Black Sam Bellamy's 1717 pirate crew was "a collection of people in which there was likely to be at least some firsthand knowledge of a very wide range of directly democratic institutions," wrote David Graeber, the late anarchist and anthropologist, in one of his essays collected posthumously in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…. Those institutions ranged "from Swedish things to African village assemblies to Native American councils": a rich assortment of influences as the sailors found themselves "forced to improvise some mode of self-government in the complete absence of any state." The very ungovernability of the Atlantic itself, the vast inland frontiers, the dense forests and swamplands, made it "the perfect intercultural space" of experiment and improvisation.

  For Graeber, it was the occupants of those democratic spaces, and not any politician or political theorist, from whom we should be taking our historical cues. Democracy, he argued, is not representative government, where the people select appointees to make decisions for them. That's Roman nonsense. Democracy is a daily exercise. It is (or can be) practiced in your workplace or family or place of learning, because those units are the most basic and consequential to daily life. It lives in cultural practice and not in states, and states cannot be democratized.

  Could be. I'll see if I can wangle a copy from some library.

• Junior fires the experts. In fact, he announced it in the WSJ yesterday with an anodyne headline: HHS Moves to Restore Public Trust in Vaccines.

  Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics, but there is one thing all parties can agree on: The U.S. faces a crisis of public trust. Whether toward health agencies, pharmaceutical companies or vaccines themselves, public confidence is waning.

  Some would try to explain this away by blaming misinformation or antiscience attitudes. To do so, however, ignores a history of conflicts of interest, persecution of dissidents, a lack of curiosity, and skewed science that has plagued the vaccine regulatory apparatus for decades.

  That is why, under my direction, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is putting the restoration of public trust above any pro- or antivaccine agenda. The public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies. This will ensure the American people receive the safest vaccines possible.

  Today, we are taking a bold step in restoring public trust by totally reconstituting the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP). We are retiring the 17 current members of the committee, some of whom were last-minute appointees of the Biden administration. Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028.

  Well, I'm sure those 17 folks have day jobs they can fall back on.

  Roger Pielke Jr. has a simple question: Whose Experts? He has a chart showing where ACIP sits in Uncle Stupid's vaccine approval process. And another chart that shows that public trust in the "people running medicine" has been on the decline for more than 50 years.

  It is certainly problematic that the Biden administration appointed all former members of the ACIP. At the same time, it is also problematic that the Trump administration believes that they should expect to appoint a majority of the committee.

  To the extent that partisan considerations play a central role in ACIP empanelment, we defeat the entire purpose of soliciting expert advice. Cherry picking experts is just as bad as cherry picking scientific studies. It allows the creation of a politically expedient portrayal of reality, but there is no guarantee that reality is real.

  The WSJ editorialists waited until today to comment on the move: RFK Jr. Conducts His Vaccine Purge. (WSJ gifted link)

  The HHS Secretary has broad discretion over the panel’s remit and composition. There might be a constitutional argument for eliminating the committee and other outside advisory panels because they can weaken executive accountability. Agency leaders have sometimes shifted political responsibility for controversial decisions to advisory panels.

  But Mr. Kennedy’s beef seems to be that the committee’s members know something about vaccines and may have been involved in their research and development. “Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines,” he writes. How does he define “substantial”?

  Some members have been paid by vaccine makers—typically sums less than their salaries—to assist with clinical trials in which they help evaluate the vaccines for safety and efficacy. These trials are double-blinded, meaning doctors don’t know which volunteers receive the vaccine or placebo so there’s no financial incentive to tilt the data in favor of manufacturers.

  Fortunately, I'm all caught up on my shots. I hope Junior's new panel of "experts" don't prevent me from getting my next ones.

Recently on the book blog:

The author, Julian Baggini, is (I think it's fair to say) a pop philosopher. A serious thinker combined with a considerable amount of self-promotion. ("Not that there's anything wrong with that," said the blogger.) I became aware of this book when I looked back at his WSJ review of Science and the Good, which dealt tangentially with the issue of "free will." I've been a longtime fan of that topic.

I was very impressed with Baggini's approach to "free will": he's not so much arguing for a position for or against, but outlining his earnest search for the truth behind the topic. Perhaps unique for a book of this type, Baggini goes out and interviews other philosophers and researchers. Also artists and addicts. He fairly presents their views and insights. For a relatively short book, it's a real tour de force. His writing style is clear and mostly accessible to even a philosophical dilettante like me.

Baggini urges the reader to avoid the trap of thinking of "free will" as a binary, all-or-nothing deal, where we are either (a) completely deterministic bags of molecules, perhaps with some quantum coin-flipping going on; or (b) completely in control of our actions with the ability to choose any future path at any moment.

The truth, argues Baggini, is somewhere in between, depends on our situations, values, and past histories. Which makes things a little messy, but manageable. For this (very bad) Lutheran, his deployment of Martin Luther's famous quote "Here I stand, I can do no other" was very on-target.

Baggini's exploration takes him to various free will-related topics, some surprising: artistic expression, legal responsibility, addiction, mental illness, and more.

Not that I'm in total agreement. Almost as an aside, Baggini claims "Freedom merely as absence of constraint and presence of consumer choice is a very thin value indeed". Whereas I think, given its relative rarity and fragility, it's actually a pretty good deal, and not a "very thin value" at all.

Baggini's also read Free Will, by anti-free willer Sam Harris. Interestingly, he quotes the same bit of the text that I did back in 2015, where Harris is musing about Joshua Komisarjevsky, participant in a 2007 Connecticut rape-murder. Harris makes the (to me) sloppy, albeit astounding, claim:

If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky's shoes on July 23, 2007—that is, if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state—I would have acted exactly as he did.

Baggini lets this go largely unremarked, but I thought back then (and still do) that there's a real problem with "I" in Harris's sentence. Given Komisarjevsky's brain, genes, experience, etc.: there's no room for Harris's "I" to squeeze in.

At the end, Baggini comes close to making a fully-libertarian argument. But then backs off considerably with (to me) weak hand-waving about the justified role of the state in providing health care, education, transportation infrastructure. Ah well.

I realize that I'm coming close to complaining that Baggini didn't write the book the way I would have. So don't get me wrong: if you're interested in "free will", this is a very good book to check out.