prior probability

Did you know that today is the 136th anniversary of the historic gun battle between a group of outlaws led by Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers and a group of lawmen led by Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona Territory? Our friend and colleague Steven Lubet, who brought this fact to our attention, wrote an entire book about this episode and the legal repercussions and miscarriage of justice that occurred after the dust settled. He has also blogged about this historic event here: “Although the shootout is legendary, it is less well known that Wyatt Earp and his brothers, and Doc Holliday, were prosecuted afterward for the murder of Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury. The Earps were represented by Tom Fitch, one of the most accomplished trial lawyers of the late nineteenth century, who fortuitously happened to be living in Tombstone at the time. The evidence against the Earps and Holliday included eyewitness testimony from the county sheriff, who said that the dead men had been trying to surrender when they were shot down, but Fitch’s brilliant lawyering managed to get the case dismissed at the preliminary hearing.” 

In honor of all-around great guy and French basketball power forward Boris Diaw:

1. Mon frère Boris, via Jonathan Abrams at Grantland
2. Boris Diaw, the most interesting man on Earth, via Tim Carmody at kottke.org
3. Interview with Diaw, who is down to go to Mars, via Alex Wong at GQ
4. Presenting the most Boris Diaw anecdote imaginable, via Seth Rosenthal at SBNation.com
5. NBA – YouTube:

Are there any moral truths? On this day in history, the Moral Science Club–a formal discussion group for Cambridge University’s philosophers–held a meeting to explore this very question. British authors John Eidinow and David Edmonds wrote an entire book (their book is one of my favorite non-fiction books of all time) about this particular meeting, because it was the only time in history that Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Popper were in the same room. These three great philosophers, along with several philosophy students and their professors, assembled in King’s College at 8.30pm, in a set of rooms in the Gibbs Building, number three on staircase H. In the words of Eidinow and Edmonds: “H3 was just as neglected as the other rooms in the building, squalid, dusty and dirty. Heating was dependent on open fires and the inhabitants protected their clothes with their gowns when humping sacks of coal. That evening, the guest speaker was Dr Karl Popper, up from London to deliver an innocuous-sounding paper, ‘Are There Philosophical Problems?’ *** Yet, to this day, no one can agree precisely what took place. What is clear is that there were vehement exchanges between Popper and Wittgenstein over the fundamental nature of philosophy. These instantly became the stuff of legend.” Bonus materials: Here is Adam Gopnik’s beautiful essay in honor of Popper. Also, philosopher John Wilkins recounts the H3 poker incident, starting at 5’36” in the video below:

Source: Jim Zimmerlin (hat tip: digg)

We’ve been reading Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen’s fascinating book “Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong,” a book we discovered last month at a conference on Artificial Intelligence and the Law held at Savannah Law School. (Dr Wallach was the keynote speaker.) Although their book was published in 2010, the recent spat between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg over the future of AI makes “Moral Machines” a timely read, since Wallach and Allen offer a comprehensive overview of many issues relevant to “machine morality.”

Nevertheless, the premise of their book is off base. Why? Because even if we could teach or program machines to be ethical, so what? Ethics does not provide a sufficient safeguard against evil. In fact, I would go as far as to argue that it is a complete waste of time to program ethics into machines. Which theory of ethics would we choose from? There are so many competing theories of right and wrong, that any ingenious person or machine could justify just about any decision on moral grounds. By the same token, I am not sanguine about the prospects of “crowdsourcing” morality, since the crowd could be wrong on moral matters. Instead of machine morality, perhaps we should focus on machine mortality: we could require all advanced machines or strong AI to self-destruct after some period of time.

In the alternative, we would spend less time thinking about ethics and more time inventing new systems of effective checks and balances: machines that monitor and counter other machines! That is, instead of trying to teach ethics to future machines (as Wallach & Colin propose), or instead of “crowdsourcing” morality (as others have proposed), why not look at this problem in game theory or strategic terms? Consider the domains of markets or politics. Without competition (i.e. open markets with free exit and entry) or some formal system of checks and balances (such as the constitutional one depicted in the image below), no amount of ethics or morality will save us from ourselves. Why doesn’t this same logic apply to AI?

In a recent blog post dated 20 October on his blog Marginal Revolution, our friend and colleague Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason, shared with his readers his typology of economic approaches to the world: (1) the rational actor approach or “Econ 1.0,” a world full of stable preferences and populated by cold and calculating utility maximizers, i.e. fictional creatures who are maximizing hypothetical utility functions; (2) the behavioral approach or “Econ 2.0,” a world full of biased, imperfect, and cognitively-challenged individuals who are “satisficing” as best they can their unstable preferences; and (3) the cultural or social approach or “Econ 3.0,” a world full of flesh-and-blood people with complex and overlapping mixtures of cultural self-identifities and social loyalties. (For the record, we include Prof Cowen’s typology in full below the fold.) For our part, we find this typological triad to be very useful, and we agree with Cowen that Cultural Econ (Econ 3.0) is the way to go. Classical Econ (Econ 1.0), corresponding to what our intellectual hero Ronald Coase used to derisively describe as “Blackboard Economics,” generates true but mathematically trivial (for the most part) results. Likewise, Behavioral Econ (Econ 2.0) doesn’t get us very far, since our biases tend to run in opposing directions. In short, as much as we love building formal theoretical models, history and culture are just as important as mathematics and psychology. Continue reading →

This is our final post regarding the new Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism, a remarkable collection of erudite essays which was published earlier this year. (During the previous three weeks, we have reviewed 11 select essays from the Libertarian Handbook.) In this concluding post, we shall go back to first principles to point out two foundational problems with libertarian theory, a predicament that is not solved in the Libertarian Handbook. Simply put, the problem is this: What is the moral basis of libertarianism? Do we have a natural, God-given, or pre-political right to liberty, or is freedom simply a pragmatic or instrumental means to an end? (Or in the words of John Thrasher, who contributed an excellent essay to the handbook: should we “base libertarian conclusions on some deontological basis (e.g., natural rights) or [should we] adopt a consequentialist justification”? 

Furthermore, whether we prefer a deontological or consequentialist approach to liberty, how are we able to justify any reasonable limits on our liberties? Simply saying that “my freedom ends where your freedom begins” (or “my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins”) is by itself totally unhelpful without a general theory of consent or a general theory of harm. After all, what if two men are participating in a consensual boxing match, or what if I have to defend myself or my family from an unprovoked aggressor? In these cases, consent or the threat of imminent harm, as the case may be, can then serve as a powerful moral justification (or moral trump, pun intended) in favor of the use of force. (Or consider the meme pictured below. Why should freedom end at one’s nose, so to speak? Why not take into account the slippery slope of so-called psychic harms?) Is there any way out of this normative swamp? Instead of committing ourselves to either a rights-based justification of liberty or an instrumentalist one, we would create a general rebuttable presumption in favor of liberty. That is, in the absence of a good justification for restricting freedom (and regardless of the moral source of such justification), people should be free to do whatever they want. This libertarian formulation is by no means perfect. What is? But at least it avoids moral slippery slopes by shifting the burden of proof onto the enemies of liberty.

Really?