Christian Madsbjerg ~ Filosofie in een tijd van big data

• door: Linda Bouws

Christian Madsbjerg  – Tekening Joseph Sassoon Semah

Zijn big data en algoritmes de ultieme bron voor succes, zoals Gijs van Oenen betoogt in ‘Overspannen democratie. Hoge verwachtingen, paradoxale gevolgen’ (zie: http://rozenbergquarterly.com/gijs-van-oenen-overspannen-democratie-hoge-verwachtingen-paradoxale-gevolgen/) ? Is het zo dat big data leidt tot meer inzicht en succes? Heeft menselijke interpretatie nog wel nut in het tijdperk van het algoritme? De filosoof, politiek wetenschapper en veelgevraagd adviseur van Fortune 500-bedrijven Christian Madsbjerg laat aan hand van voorbeelden zien dat de wereld uit veel meer bestaat dan een serie algoritmes. Veel van de grootste succesverhalen komen niet voort uit wiskundige analyses, maar zijn het resultaat van menselijke betekenisgeving en betrokkenheid met cultuur. Elk inzicht blijft krachteloos als we niet het menselijk gedrag, het denken erbij betrekken. Een kritische benadering is nooit ‘zo revolutionair en actueel geweest als nu’. Als we onze culturele kennis afdanken, dan gaat dan ten koste van de toekomst van de mens.

Christian Madsbjerg houdt in zijn boek ‘Filosofie in een tijd van big data’ een vlammend betoog voor cultureel engagement, diepgang, ervaring en de geesteswetenschappen en ontmaskert de tirannie van het getal en de wetenschappelijke focus op direct nut. “Nooit eerder is onze cultuur zo sterk verleid door de belofte van kunstmatige intelligentie, machinaal leren en cognitieve computing. Nooit eerder is onze wereld van overlappende politieke, financiële, sociale, technische en ecologische systemen zo sterk met elkaar verbonden geweest.” Madsbjerg houdt een warm pleidooi voor de studie geesteswetenschappen, die ons tot nieuwe ideeën kan brengen, cultureel engagement dat de basis vormt van de methode die hij ‘betekenisgeving’ noemt, en een leidraad kan zijn in een steeds veranderende omgeving. Het kan niet alleen inzicht geven, maar op langer termijn veel profijtelijker zijn, ‘zowel voor je bankrekening als voor je leven – dan een beperking tot de benauwde werkelijkheid van de big data’, de ‘dunne data’, die ons willen begrijpen op basis van wat we doen, abstracte data, terwijl ‘dikke data’ de hele context meenemen, data van de betekenisgeving, de context van de feiten.

Madsbjerg haalt Silicon Valley aan als een bedrijf waar alleen dunne data gelden, met een ‘obsessie voor kwantificering’ en veel wordt gesproken over ‘disruptie’ (een breuk tussen een ‘voor’ en een ‘na’, een natuurwetenschappelijke manier van denken, waarbij iets waar is tot het tegendeel wordt bewezen). Big data zijn gericht op correlatie en niet op causaliteit en zijn niet geïnteresseerd in het ‘waarom’. Men gaat op zoek naar info en ervaringen die ons een gevoel van bevestiging en erkenning geen. Alhoewel de innovaties van Silicon Valley ook grote voordelen bieden, is het gevaar groot om zonder betekenisgeving te werken. Dit staat in groot contrast met de intellectuele traditie.  Read more

Goodbye Regulations, Hello Impending Global Financial Crisis

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Prof.dr. Gerald Epstein

Ten years after the last financial crisis, Republicans — with backing from many Democrats — have made sure that Wall Street can return to its old ways of doing business by repealing the Dodd-Frank Act, which acted up to now as a very mild regulatory regime to rein in the predatory nature of financial capital. The decision to repeal Dodd-Frank was justified on the grounds that it put a break on economic growth. Gerald Epstein, professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, argues that this is not true at all. In this exclusive Truthout interview, Epstein notes that it is now very likely that the “toxic, speculative activities” of the Wall Street crowd will return with a menace, thereby preparing the groundwork for the next global financial crisis.

C.J. Polychroniou: Following the financial crisis of 2008, a bill was passed in 2010 under the Obama administration that sought to contain risks in the US financial system. The bill, which was sponsored by US Sen. Christopher Dodd and US Rep. Barney Frank, was rather weak as a regulatory regime. Nonetheless, it was severely criticized by conservatives. Donald Trump delivered a mixed message in running for president, railing against the big banks and Hillary Clinton’s connections to Wall Street, while at the same time promising more deregulation. Now, Congress has passed and President Trump has signed into law a comprehensive financial deregulation law, “The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act.” In addition, Trump-appointed financial regulatory agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have implemented policies to loosen regulations further on a variety of financial institutions and activities. The backers of rolling back Dodd-Frank have claimed that financial deregulation will increase economic growth and provide more credit to households and business. First, what were the weaknesses of the Dodd-Frank Act, and did it actually contribute to anemic economic growth, as its Republican critics like Paul Ryan and others are arguing?

Gerald Epstein: The main weakness of the Dodd-Frank Act is that it did not break up the “too big to fail” financial institutions. As a result, these large financial institutions retained the power to blackmail the public to bail them out the next time there is a financial meltdown and, as we have seen since Trump was elected, to buy off enough politicians to roll back the weak financial regulations that were passed. More generally, Dodd-Frank had way too many loopholes that resulted from financial sector lobbying so that it could never be implemented in its strongest form.

No, Dodd-Frank did not contribute to anemic growth. There is no evidence of this. Anemic growth was largely due to the legacy of the financial crisis itself, in which a great deal of household wealth was decimated, and to the continuing austerity policies that the Republicans were able to force on a weak-kneed and Wall Street-bedazzled Obama administration. On top of these factors are the long-term structural problems of the US economy related to the high level of inequality — itself largely due to the oversized power of Wall Street — and to the widespread disinvestment of US multinational corporations from the US economy, among other factors. If anything, Dodd-Frank worked against some of these tendencies, and thereby helped to sustain the long economic recovery that the Trump administration is now benefiting politically from. Read more

EU’s Debt Deal Is “Kiss of Death” For Greece

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

After eight long and extremely painful years of austerity due to gigantic rescue packages that were accompanied by brutal neoliberal measures, in Athens, the “leftist” government of Alexis Tsipras has announced that the era of austerity is now over thanks to the conclusion of a debt agreement with European creditors.

In the early hours of June 22, a so-called “historic” deal on debt relief was reached at a meeting of Eurozone finance ministers after it was assessed that Greece had successfully completed its European Stability Mechanism program, and that there was no need for a follow-up program.

The idea that Greece’s bailout programs can be considered a success adds a new twist to the government’s Orwellian doublespeak, given the fact that the country has experienced the biggest economic crisis in postwar Europe, with its gross domestic product (GDP) having shrunk by about a quarter, and reporting the highest unemployment rate (currently standing at 20.1 percent) of all European Union (EU) states.

On top of that, the ratio of the country’s public debt to gross GDP has risen from 127 percent in 2009 to about 180 percent, a development which has essentially turned Greece into a debt colony, leading to pressing demands that all valuable public assets be sold — including airports, railways, ports, sewerage systems, and gas and energy resources. Indeed, since the start of the bailout programs, Greek governments have been trying hard to outdo one another on the privatization front in order to satisfy the demands of the official creditors, the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Still, the current pseudo-leftist Syriza government has proven to be the most servile of Greek governments to creditors.

Arguments for privatization aside, the deadly combination of higher debt and declining GDP had most economists convinced quite early on that austerity was killing Greece’s economy, and that a debt write-off would be at some point absolutely necessary for medium- and long-term recovery. However, Germany and its northern European allies had diametrically opposed this idea, insisting on even stronger doses of austerity, while balking at the prospect of a debt write-off. Read more

The Anatomy Of Trumpocracy: An Interview With Noam Chomsky

• by: C.J. Polychroniou

Noam Chomsky

With its spate of right-wing rulings this week, the Supreme Court has paved the way for Donald Trump and the Republican-dominated Congress to intensify their attacks on human rights, workers and the country’s democratic institutions, dragging the US deeper into the abyss.

US political culture has long been dominated by oligarchical corporate and financial interests, militarism and jingoism, but the current Trumpocracy represents a new level of neoliberal cruelty. Indeed, the United States is turning into a pariah nation, a unique position among Western states in the second decade of the 21st century.

What factors and the forces produced this radical and dangerous shift? How did Trump manage to bring the Republican Party under his total control? Is Trumpocracy a temporary phenomenon, or the future of American politics? Is the Bernie Sanders phenomenon over? In the exclusive Truthout interview below, world-renowned scholar and public intellectual Noam Chomsky, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at MIT and currently Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, tackles these questions and offers his unique insights.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, while many in the country and the world at large watch aghast as Donald Trump’s nightmare of white supremacy continues to unravel the United States, it still remains something of a puzzle as to what propelled Trumpism to political prominence. For starters, why did voters turn to Trump? Who are the people that make up his hard-core base, and how do we explain the fact that he has essentially taken over the Republican Party without any serious opposition?

Noam Chomsky: Part of the solution to the puzzle is Obama’s performance in office. Many were seduced by the rhetoric of “hope” and “change,” and deeply disillusioned by the very early discovery that the words had little substance. I don’t usually agree with Sarah Palin, but she had a point when she ridiculed this hopey-changey stuff. A fair number of Obama voters, mostly working people, switched to Trump. These developments were already clear by the time of the 2010 special election in Massachusetts to fill the seat of Senator Kennedy – the liberal lion. Virtually unknown Scott Brown won the election, the first Republican elected to the Senate in [more than] 40 years in this liberal state. Analysis of the vote showed that even union members hardly supported his liberal opponent because of anger at Obama: the way he handled the housing-financial crisis (bailing out the rich, including the perpetrators, while letting their victims hang out to dry) and much else, including provisions of his health care proposal that working people saw, with justice, as an attack on health programs that they had won in contract negotiations. Read more

Simon(e) van Saarloos ~ ENZ. Het Wildersproces

• door: Linda Bouws

Simon(e) van Saarloos Tekening: Joseph Sassoon Semah

“Wie mij wil stoppen, moet mij vermoorden”, zei Geert Wilders toen hij in november 2016 voor de rechtbank stond vanwege zijn ‘minder-minder’ uitspraak op de verkiezingsavond in het Haags café De Tijd. De-islamisering is niet zijn doel, concludeert filosoof en schrijver Simon(e) van Saarloos: doorgaan is zijn doel.
Ze stelt de vraag of Wilders iets verlangt. “Hij wil bepaalde dingen niet (islamisering), maar verlangt hij iets? Ervaart hij het verlangen naar een harmonieuze samenleving, een utopie, een Nobelprijs, de aandacht van één specifiek iemand? Of is hij eigenlijk een blij ei – zou de mogelijkheid om elk maatschappelijk probleem voor het karretje van je eigen agenda te spannen, plus de voortdurende vraag om een respons via twitter of te voor de camera, een bevredigend prikkelparadijs zijn voor Wilders?”

ENZ. uit de titel refereert aan het veelvuldig gebruik van dit woord in het verkiezingsprogramma van de PVV: “Geen geld meer naar ontwikkelingshulp, windmolens, kunst, innovatie, omroep, enz.” Wilders herhaalt zijn standpunten, waardoor de herhaling de waarde van de zinnen bestendigt. “Niet de inhoud van Wilders’ uitspraken veroorzaakt dat hij zichzelf blijft herhalen, maar het feit dat ze niet mogen worden uitgesproken zet hem aan tot herhaling.”
Van Saarloos wil Wilders begrijpen en volgt alle procesdagen vanuit de rechtszaal. Een proces over discriminatie maar dat vooral over vrijheid van meningsuiting gaat.
Simon(e) van Saarloos is geïnspireerd door de filosoof Hannah Arendt en haar boek Eichmann in Jerusalem – A Report on the Banilty of Evil over het proces tegen voormalig SS’er Adolf Eichmann in 1961.

Van de eerste procesdag op 4 maart tot de formele afsluiting op 9 december 2016 geeft Van Saarloos in haar boek ‘ENZ. Het Wildersproces’ een minutieus verslag van dat wat ze ziet en hoort. Op het door Wilders uitgesproken weerwoord (23 november) dat in het geheel is opgenomen, levert ze per alinea stevig commentaar. Tussendoor reist ze op zoek naar Wilders naar de mosjav in Israël waar hij begin jaren tachtig een tijdje heeft gewoond, gaat het toneelstuk Holy F. in première, horen we over haar liefdes en etentjes met de ‘Rechtse Eetclub’, en over de lezingen die ze bezoekt. In het laatste hoofdstuk kruipt ze zelfs in Wilders, als ze verkleed als Wilders naar het carnaval in Limburg gaat. Read more

Robert B. Reich ~ Our national identity has been our shared ideals

Robert B. Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers “Aftershock”, “The Work of Nations,” and”Beyond Outrage,” and, his most recent, “The Common Good,” which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, “Inequality For All.” He’s co-creator of the Netflix original documentary “Saving Capitalism,” which is streaming now.

Follow: http://robertreich.org/