Yeah, but the composition of physical laws up into the composites that make up social laws isn't
straightforward. Maybe I could stomach the assumption of transitivity from, say, "biological
laws" to "social laws", but not physical laws to social laws. The transitivity fails.
I can't tell where I actually land in the spectrum between Eric and Dave's positions. I
really like the idea that those who have their hands inside the goo, inside the machine,
close to the metal, are the ones who decide how best to interact with the machine. As
Dave once accused, it's a bit Vico-ist. On the other hand, our collective respect for
(delusional belief in?) the Truth fades faster each day. The elites are exhibiting faster
rates of churn. (E.g. Elno and SpaceX overturning tried and true, "modernist",
methods for engineering space machines. E.g. a top-notch Data Science postdoc might cost
a university ~$1M/yr, which means they all abandon the academy and go to work for Google
or somesuch. Etc.)
And with such a turbulent churn of the elite production system, it's completely
reasonable to be confused about which elites to trust - or which side of their
mouth to trust. Luckily, I hold Diogenes in high esteem, which allows me to
doubt everything ... regardless of EricC and Nick's claim that's impossible. So
it's no crisis for this almost-dead privied white man. But the kids? What will
they see on the other side of this Rawlsian Veil? I'm so thankful I have no
children.
On 9/28/24 20:40, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Violating social laws may or may not have consequences. That depends on the
enforcement mechanisms of a society. Violating physical laws is not possible.
Thus, social laws should follow physical laws, as it was before Chevron was
overturned. Not the other way around.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, September 28, 2024 5:09 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tolerance of intolerance
I resist—unsuccessfully, obviously—commenting on these issues because my
opinions/ideas are pretty much antithetical to everyone else. But two points:
There seems to be certainty regarding the criminality/venality/egomania of one
person/group coupled with an inability to recognize (or a very generous
willingness to overlook) the same things in other people/groups. The crimes
might be different in detail (insider trading instead of inflating of assets)
and the venality and egomania hidden behind polite facades; but the substance
is the same, and, in my observations/opinions, pretty much equal in degree.
Judges should decide law, not facts. With one exception, I see no instances of
SCOTUS doing otherwise. The exception is the very recent assumption that judges
can determine the 'facts' of history and the feeble attempt to ground decisions
of law in those 'facts'.
Within the legal system, juries, most prominently, and special masters,
referees, and expert witnesses are charged with arguing (expert witnesses) or
determining (the others cited) facts. Chevron gave bureaucrats (not necessarily
scientists) the right of determining fact by fiat. Overturning Chevron was a
matter of law and simply restored fact finding to those, according to law,
responsible.
Even if you believed that scientific positions taken by bureaucratic entities
were arrived at via free, open, honest, and rigorous application of science, by
the best, and best informed, scientists; those bureaucrats have no standing, in
law, to assert the final truth of the matter.
davew
On Sat, Sep 28, 2024, at 4:50 PM, Santafe wrote:
Didn’t mean to drop this Glen. Busy patch.
I don’t know. Have been ruminating for a week (or whatever it is)
wondering whether I have any substance to contribute.
I understand how an argument like the one you make below might hang
together (first para and part of the second). Do I think it does, for
this case? Not really. Gorsuch looks like the kind of patrician who
could have come strainght out of the worst ranks of the Roman Senate.
More than any of the others. So he is probably unreachable for any
aim at this point. We have to wait for him to die of old age, because
his character growth ended decades ago. ACB probably has more
decency, but is captured by her particular (not the most dramatic)
cult, and that is limiting. If she were to show signs of growth, I
wouldn’t find it incomprehensible, but I don’t expect it to be much or to be
soon.
Roberts doesn’t look like the cynical or bitter power-abuser that
Thomas and Alito purposely present themselves as. And I can’t get
inside anybody’s head; the more time goes by I don’t think I even have
a good scope of what human heads can be like. I think I am becoming
mind-blind; they are not more comprehensible to me than bears. But
the evidence of his actions is that he repeatedly, and in a very
activist/interventionist manner, protects a manifest criminal and a
clear inside power-takover faction, from people who are not acting
criminally and are far more democratic — and very much not populist —
in their aims and their methods than the ones he protects. I think
that is indicting, whether one forms a personal impression or not.
I will go out on a limb and suggest that there is some projection.
The language of Robers’s statements (and things I have seen quoted
from the rulings, which I have not read through) sounds as if he
believes lower courts don’t actually go by any standard of anything,
and that’s why he wants to make the whole judicial system into a giant
funnel for all authority for anything consequential to flow back to
him. If I look at bits of lower-court rulings that I see, or more
often hear commentary by people who seem sound to me, it looks to me
like a noisy system with good and bad choices, but one in which
reasoning much better than that issued by SCOTUS is not uncommon at
all. So it seems to me like a kind of admission by Roberts that _he_
and his cabal don’t actually have any standards, but just start from
the desired outcome and make up a story, so he figures all the other
courts must be doing the same thing, and therefore he wants to accumulate final
say.
I will admit that I often find the rhetorical language that all the
justices use annoying. Not that I want things in obscure Law French.
Just that they talk as if everything has to be appealed mainly to
emotions for a Sesame Street audience. Often it seems that more
sensible reasons are available, than appeals to the emotional movement
of whatever day of the week it is. They are all smart enough to do
that, so the fact that they don’t feels to me like an admission of
their view of the audience from which they want buy-in. Not a
respectful view; unfortunately probably deserved in large part too.
On Courts versus Institutions of experts, though: Here I don’t go
with the argument you make. Neither of them has a guarantee of good
or of bad faith. I think what we have seen in every important test
throughout history says that good or bad faith is one of these highly
unstable and dynamically maintained things, which ultimately needs
some level of coordinated maintenance across the society if it is to
survive. So no matter what anyone chooses institutionally, given the
complexity and sheer bandwidth of the problems that need choices made,
you are going to heavily distribute the load. In that case, a lot of
whether you can or can’t make good choices will come down to the
simple technical thing of professional training. Lawyers aren’t
trained as empirical derivers; they are some other social thing. For
questions of social consequence, sure; a good-faith lawyer might see
something other professionals would pass over. But most of this
agency stuff is about figuring out what happens in the thing we refer
to as the actual or real world. And they are trained in a small
sub-culture of relatively recent methods that can handle parts of that
reliably in ways that nothing else we ever did before can do. When
those are the structures of the problems, those professionals should
be used, as they are the best tools we have to solve those problems.
Making the whole society into a monoculture of law, which then
degrades to a monoculture of politics, is not the right choice, and I
think eventually not a stable choice.
I see things (or bits of things, because I don’t spend lots of time on
this) like the presidential debates, and it makes me think of what
wags what. There is a sensibility of trashiness that has grown up
through the generations of reality TV. There are those of us
(probably many) who find this so tedious and grating that we will do a
lot not to be trapped in a room with it. But it has metamorphosed so
that levels of public exchange that can be consequential and should be
treated that way, have been completely gobbled up by the reality TV
aesthetic. It seems important that a society can do that to itself.
I think not good that it can and has.
Eric
On Sep 24, 2024, at 11:16 PM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
Unfortunately, I'm still thinking about this. [sigh] But in my long covid
induced fugue on the interminable flight across the atlantic, I landed on the
idea that while, yes, the Roberts court is aggregating power back to themselves
(particularly - not the judicial system as a institution), perhaps there's an
-urgic demon at work. The power aggregation to the particular humans on the SC
is a merely symptom of the work of that demon. And the demon is, in general,
moving to protect us from populism. Bear with me a bit.
Regardless of what we think if, say, Cannon or Thomas, it seems ACB and Gorsuch are in the
tradition of rationalists we might want the study of the Law to produce. (Kavanaugh is different, I
think. And I'm leaving out the liberal Justices because I keep my enemies closer than my allies.)
In considering the Chevron overturning, on the surface, it seems stupid ... a rejection of
expertise. But combining Chevron with "Schedule F", I would trust the dialectic pursued
by Good Faith members of the judiciary more than I would trust some rando appointed to
"govern" in one of those executive agencies. This is especially true in a scientific
environment where so many publications come out each day/week/year (many of which are on preprint
servers but cited as if peer-reviewed), no collection of Good Faith scientists can keep track of
them, much less curate them for non-experts. Barring abdication of truth-curation to LLMs (i.e.
transnational corporations like Google, MicroSoft, Apple, etc.), the judiciary may be a decent
buttress.
And the somewhat hierarchical composition of the judiciary (from schools/tests to
experience dealing with batshit rhetoric) provides a kind of institutional inertia that
the blast of "scientific" research doesn't provide. The judiciary might be the
last bastion of the Deep State, capable of resisting demagogues like Trump.
What say ye? Is my optimism showing? 8^D
On 7/17/24 17:17, Santafe wrote:
Back to the Roberts court, the things I have seen written that seem most cogent
to me argue that their one consistent tack is to aggregate power to their
specific selves. There are these nonsense rulings, which are vague or
inconsistent, and honest lower courts often cannot figure out whether or how to
comply with them. (There was just one of these, I think the Domestic Abuser
with a Gun case, along exactly this line, a month or two ago. Rahimi?) And
once it is a mess of appeals in the lower courts, it can get back to SC, who
can then make up whatever outcome they want for that case. It gets very close
to trolling for Roberts to write condescendingly that the lower courts were
“confused” by the SC’s ruling; in fact they had it dead to rights, and Roberts
surely isn’t so dumb he doesn’t know that. So to act as if they have made the
mistake is to put out loud what the game is. It’s like Gaetz’s text about
“Cannon for Supreme Court” or whatever it was. Trolls gonna troll. @The
cruelty is the point. It’s about the assertion of domination, once you think
you have enough of a lock that your advantage is to get out of the “hiding”
phase and go into the “demoralizing” phase.
So I don’t know that there really is new “law” power in the Monarchical
Executive. There may or may not be, but the SC would like to make itself
indispensible in operating that machinery.
--
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