society-and-governance.
122 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-001 v2 | Is the United States Still a Liberal Democracy? | Drezner asks whether the US will still be a liberal constitutional democracy in January 2029. He reviews Polity’s downgrades (+10 in 2015 to +5 for 2020, and in February 2025 “at the cusp of autocracy”), the Freedom House fall from 92 to 83 (2014–2021, as quoted from Levitsky & Way) and counter-evidence (continued compliance with court orders; Hickman’s “not there yet”). He then concludes that “it is hard to disagree” with Levitsky & Way’s forecast of competitive authoritarianism, and expects democracy’s “precarity” to be the lasting condition. | Read |
| NOTE-004 v2 | US v. Google remedies opinion | Remedies opinion after the 2024 §2 liability ruling. The court (Mehta, J.) bars exclusive distribution deals for Search, Chrome, Assistant and the Gemini app, with a one-year exit right on all payment deals. It does not ban payments, and it rejects the Chrome and Android divestitures and choice screens. It orders (i) a one-time snapshot of six Search Index fields per document, (ii) Glue and RankEmbed user-interaction training data “at least twice”, capped and privacy-treated, and (iii) five-year search and text-ads syndication on ordinary commercial terms (search capped at 40% of queries in year one). “Qualified Competitors” is rewritten so it can include GenAI firms. The term is six years (five plus one of ramp-up). On GenAI, the court finds that grounded chatbots perform an information-retrieval function similar to general search engines, enough to bring GenAI inside the decree. It also finds that plaintiffs “did not establish that Google’s scale advantage in Search translates into a quality advantage in GenAI search-assisted responses” (op. p. 156). For that reason it refuses to order sharing of Gemini training data. | Read |
| NOTE-012 v2 | Russian Hybrid Warfare | Clark argues from open Russian military writing of 2015–2020, chiefly Military Thought and Army Collection, that Russia treats “hybrid war” as a type of war. In his account it is a strategic-level effort to reorient a target state, in which every action, conventional force included, is subordinate to an information campaign. He concludes that a US strategy centred on deterring great-power conventional war can “technically succeed” while losing. The report ends with 12 recommendations (executive-summary count). | Read |
| NOTE-014 v2 | Segundo A.P.G. v. Bondi show cause hearing | At a 71-minute show-cause hearing on noncompliance with habeas release orders in five cases, Judge Blackwell said that the scale of Operation Metro Surge “is not a justification for diluting constitutional rights” and that the government “cannot … detain first and then sort out lawful authority later”. The record includes a 13-day delay in releasing Oscar O.T., release conditions imposed without the court’s authority on Jose L.C.C., and a Segundo release learned of only through another case. Government counsel attributed the failures to missing training, access and agency cooperation. The court took the matter under advisement. No written order following the hearing could be verified. | Read |
| NOTE-019 v2 | Reckless disregard for the truth coming from cops, doctors, and scientists | Gelman argues that scientists (a 3-day study titled “long-term”; the power-pose abstract’s “instantly become more powerful”), a paid medical expert (Ludmerer’s 2002 “no opinion” on smoking and lung cancer) and DHS spokespeople (Lander “assaulting”, Padilla “lunging”, ICE’s unsourced “413 percent” assaults) share one pattern, which he calls “reckless disregard for the truth”. In his account it strengthens a weak case, is carried by journals, courts and media, is accepted as a term of art and goes unpunished. It is negative-sum, and bystanders who tolerate it sustain it. | Read |
| NOTE-024 v2 | Rhode Island Hospital subpoena order | Judge McElroy quashed DOJ HIPAA administrative subpoena No. 25-1431-032 (18 U.S.C. § 3486) to Rhode Island Hospital on three independent grounds: 1. no congressionally authorized purpose, because DOJ’s FDCA off-label “misbranding” theory against a prescribing hospital is not legally cognizable (Facteau; 21 U.S.C. §§ 396, 353(b)(2)); 2. issuance for an improper purpose in bad faith; 3. a Fourteenth Amendment informational-privacy violation for the children, with relief extended to all minors because a DCYF-only carve-out would itself expose DCYF wards. The court enjoined DOJ with respect to patient-identifying information and PHI produced under the subpoena, and stated that it quashed the subpoena, “not the enforcement order entered by the Texas court”. An amended order the next day (ECF 44) added “seeking” to the injunction. DOJ appealed (1st Cir. No. 26-1568; argument calendared for Oct 7, 2026). | Read |
| NOTE-025 v2 | Joint Publication 3-12, Cyberspace Operations | JP 3-12 (8 June 2018) defines cyberspace operations as “the employment of cyberspace capabilities where the primary purpose is to achieve objectives in or through cyberspace” (p. I-1). It sorts every non-”cyberspace-enabled” military action in cyberspace into exactly three missions: DODIN operations, DCO (split into DCO-IDM and DCO-RA) and OCO. Missions are categorized “based only on the intent or objective of the issuing authority” (p. II-2). Missions are carried out through four actions: cyberspace security, defense, exploitation and attack. On authorities, the publication says only that authority “is derived from the US Constitution and federal law” (Titles 10, 50 and 32 named as key; p. III-2), plus SecDef policy and President/SecDef orders. Specific authorities are deferred to the unreleased classified Appendix A. | Read |
| NOTE-028 v2 | Disinformation incidents as cyber threat intelligence (DISINFOX) | The paper shows that a DISARM-labelled disinformation incident can be encoded in plain STIX 2.1 with four object types (IntrusionSet for the incident, ThreatActor, AttackPattern, Location) and three relationships (uses, attributed-to, targets), then served by an open-source microservice platform (DISINFOX) to OpenCTI through a custom connector. Its validation is a demonstration that 118 hand-labelled incidents passed through the pipeline; it reports no measurement of fidelity, usefulness or scale. | Read |
| NOTE-033 v2 | ”Broadview Six” grand jury transcript, 9 Oct 2025 | At the 9 Oct 2025 session (Special June 2024 Grand Jury, 25 GJ 994), AUSA Sheri Mecklenburg opened by telling the jurors she had waited for “the Thursday grand jury” because “I know you and I trust you … and I would never ask you to charge somebody if I didn’t think there was probable cause” (tr. 3). The only witness was FBI Special Agent Evan Hylton (tr. 10–61). He answered mostly “Yes” to leading questions: on the driver’s second-hand account, on his own photos of the car taken 1 Oct, and on social-media identifications of the six. Jurors then pressed on the damage, the conspiracy theory and whether the driver was yet on duty. One said “I personally feel the complete opposite way” (tr. 75). The vote is not in the transcript; press reports it as a “no bill”. | Read |
| NOTE-041 v2 | Doctorow, “Disenshittify or die!” (DEF CON 32) | Doctorow argues that platforms follow a three-stage decay cycle: good to users while locking them in, then good to business customers at users’ expense, then taking all the value for themselves. The mechanism is “twiddling”. It became possible when four disciplining forces weakened: competition, regulation, interoperability and tech-worker power. A “new, good internet” needs all four restored, with interop (reverse-engineering rights) and unionisation as the hacker-specific levers. The argument is assertion and anecdote throughout. It carries several checkable factual slips, notably about EU law and the court in United States v. Google. | Read |
| NOTE-042 v2 | Bonica, “The Mothership Vortex” (Democratic spam PACs) | From FEC filings, Bonica reports that a core network of PACs linked to Mothership Strategies raised about 159M went to Mothership, out of 11M reached candidates, campaigns or national party committees, a “fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent”. The headline numbers cannot be reproduced from the published repo: its inputs are missing, it has a fatal undefined variable, and it computes several reported figures nowhere. As documented, its disbursement queries cover only the latest two-year period and at most 1,000 disbursements per committee, largest first, which would bias the $11M downward rather than cap it. The post’s own infographic contradicts several of its figures. | Read |
| NOTE-048 v2 | Law Dork on DHS v. D.V.D. (South Sudan removals order) | The post reports that the Supreme Court, “on an apparent 7-2 vote”, held that the district court could not enforce its May 21 remedial order for the men held in Djibouti, because the Court had stayed the underlying April 18 injunction. It quotes the Kagan concurrence and the Sotomayor–Jackson dissent accurately. Against the order, its account of the holding is accurate. Its framing (the headline’s “with no process”, “Permission had been granted”, “seven justices are allowing”) goes beyond what the order decides. It also omits the majority’s reasoning, and it follows the dissent’s count of eight men where the per curiam refers to six. | Read |
| NOTE-049 v2 | Feinman et al. 2025, grand narratives of inequality | Across a global archaeological house-size compilation (SiteGiniLevel: 1,176 sites, 47,019 houses), site Gini coefficients rise only weakly with the number of political levels (r² = 0.16 all sites, 0.22 apex, 0.27 H50) and with log polity population (r² = 0.11, 0.21, 0.08; values printed on Fig. 2, not in the text). The spread widens at three or more levels. A 0–3 expert-coded autocracy score does about as well (r² = 0.10, 0.18, 0.32; Fig. S4), and its sum with levels (“Hierarchical Clout”) reaches r² = 0.30 (apex), 0.42 (H50) and 0.50 (H100). All tests are bivariate OLS fits with no controls and no correction for many sites sharing polity-level values. | Read |
| NOTE-056 v2 | Thompson, “Who Goes Nazi?” (Harper’s, 1941) | Thompson’s answer is that susceptibility to Nazism is “something in them”, not race, nationality, creed or class. She argues it through fourteen character sketches of guests at an imagined New York party. People with an inner code, security or happiness “never go Nazi”. The humiliated intellectual, the scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labour boss and the success-chaser “would all go Nazi in a crisis”. It is a journalist’s typology from experience in Germany, Austria and France, and no data supports it. | Read |
| NOTE-058 v2 | Iranian NEWSCASTER social-media espionage (SecurityWeek, 2014) | SecurityWeek relays iSIGHT Partners’ claim that more than a dozen fake personas, supported by a fake news site (NewsOnAir.org), ran a social-media espionage campaign from 2011 aimed at US military, diplomatic, congressional, press, think-tank and defence targets. The purpose was credential phishing and reconnaissance. Iranian origin is inferred from targeting, “technical indicators” and a Tehran working-day schedule, and iSIGHT says it has “no information implicating the ultimate sponsor”. The article’s figure of “over 2,000” is connections to the personas, not confirmed victims. iSIGHT itself says it is “not clear … how many credentials the attack has captured”. | Read |
| NOTE-060 v2 | 3rd EEAS report on FIMI threats (2025) | The EEAS classifies channels in foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) into four tiers by their tie to a state: official, state-controlled, state-linked (covert, attributed) and state-aligned (non-attributed). It applies the scheme to 505 incidents it detected between 4 Nov 2023 and 4 Nov 2024, involving about 38,000 channels. In a filtered co-involvement graph of 2,055 recurrent channels, 20% are Russian-attributed, 3.5% Chinese-attributed and 76.5% non-attributed. The report states that the sample is illustrative and should not be used to infer general trends. | Read |
| NOTE-063 v2 | Vance, “DOJ Changes Course” (law-firm EO appeals) | Vance reports that on 3 Mar 2026, the day after moving to voluntarily dismiss its appeals in the consolidated law-firm executive-order cases (D.C. Cir. No. 25-5241), DOJ filed a “Motion To Withdraw Motion To Voluntarily Dismiss Appeals”, over the firms’ opposition. She calls the reversal “enormously unusual” and argues it shows DOJ serving “the whims of the president” at a cost to its credibility and the presumption of regularity. She gives further examples from Minnesota habeas contempt proceedings, the Epstein files and Senator Tillis’s call for Secretary Noem to resign. | Read |
| NOTE-070 v2 | Fridman, the Russian perspective on information warfare | Fridman argues that the Russian narrative of a “Western information war against Russia” draws on three independently developed theories: Messner’s subversion-war (myatezhevoyna), Dugin’s net-centric war and Panarin’s information war. In his account, politicisation of the narrative was not led by the Kremlin. It is a mutually reinforcing process: scholars promote it, the government writes it into doctrine and law, and a public receptive to it absorbs it. He cites Levada polling from December 2014 in which 87% saw the West as hostile and 42% said the hostility took the form of information war. His conclusion is that the truth lies “somewhere in the middle” between top-down manipulation and bottom-up demand. | Read |
| NOTE-071 v2 | Shabrina, Arcaute & Batty 2021, Airbnb and London housing | Using Inside Airbnb data, “possible misuse” is defined as entire-home listings available for more than 180 days a year whose host has 2 or more listings. On that definition, about 0.16% of London’s housing stock (≈5,300 homes) was possibly misused in 2018, rising to 3.5–7% in a few central LSOAs. Across LSOAs, misuse correlates weakly with purpose-built flats (r = +0.28), private renting (+0.33) and low dwelling-type entropy (−0.14). In a 33-borough OLS with 4 predictors, logged 2015 misuse has β = 0.084 (p = 0.001) on a min–max-normalised 2015–17 rent change. The paper translates this as “a 100% increase … up to 8%” in rent, which is £90 a year. | Read |
| NOTE-084 v2 | Moynihan, “Mike Johnson’s Institutional Betrayal” | Moynihan argues that, in the 2026 DHS appropriations lapse, Speaker Johnson refused a vote on the Senate’s bill (which funded DHS except ICE and CBP) and passed a Trump-backed full-DHS bill, then recessed. In doing so he backed a presidential memo directing TSA pay from unspecified funds with a “reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations”. Moynihan calls this ceding Congress’s power of the purse. His distinction is that the President may pay staff during a lapse only from an identifiable appropriation, which exists for ICE and CBP (under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) and not for TSA. | Read |
| NOTE-087 v2 | Kerr County Commissioners’ Court transcript, 27 June 2016 | This is a routine regular session of the Kerr County Commissioners’ Court, all motions 4–0. In the reports item (tr. 95–98), Commissioner Moser announced a steering-committee meeting “this Thursday” on a Kerr County flood warning system. He said: - an engineering analysis of the entire system would cost roughly 20,000; - Comal County spent about $320,000 on 8 sensor locations plus central command and control; - a countywide system might be “a million dollar thing”. Commissioner Baldwin said the old phone chain “still works” and objected to “these damn sirens going off in the middle of night”. | Read |
| NOTE-098 v2 | Leonelli — Philosophy of Open Science | Leonelli argues that mainstream, institutional Open Science treats openness as the unlimited, digital sharing of research objects, a transparency-first ordering running transparency → quality (reproducibility) → inclusion. This rests on an object-oriented, “resourcist” epistemology of science. Four implementation cases (GISAID COVID data, open-source software stigma, crop-data linkage, the reproducibility “crisis”) show it can narrow epistemic diversity and entrench epistemic injustice, which lowers reliability. She proposes instead “openness as judicious connection”, grounded in a process-oriented view of research as the cultivation of “active knowledge”. Her Figure 2 inverts the ordering to start from inclusion, and sharing becomes “neither a necessary starting point nor a sufficient condition” for reliable OS (p. 8). | Read |
| NOTE-102 v2 | Bottou & Schölkopf — Borges and AI | A short essay, not an argument with evidence. It claims that a “perfect language model”, defined as sampling each next word from a random occurrence of the current text in the infinite collection of all plausible texts, is a fiction machine governed by “narrative necessity”, to which “neither truth nor intention” matters. On that view hallucinations “are just confabulations”, chat-bot answers take the role the user’s framing implies, and fine-tuning and RLHF are attempts to prune the garden “against its nature”. It warns that power over what LLMs write becomes “power over what we think”. | Read |
| NOTE-113 v2 | Status distrust of scientific experts | Desmond gives a “how-possibly” argument, not a demonstration, that stubborn distrust of scientific experts can be valid reasoning. A low-status truster who is vulnerable in collective decision-making (Premise 1) and has reason to think the prevailing “service-for-prestige” ethos leaves out their core interests (Premise 2) has reason to distrust a high-prestige expert because of that prestige (§6, p. 16–17). The paper explicitly declines to say when those premises are true. | Read |
| NOTE-144 v2 | Consent and the formation of preferences | Whether consent based on a preference switches the moral facts depends on how the preference was formed, and the criterion is “the space and resources those mechanisms leave for the free exercise of agency” (p. 5, restated p. 9): preferences formed by unjust Sanctions, or by Beliefs formed in an unjustly manipulated evidential environment, diminish consent’s effectiveness, while preferences formed by Attention do not, even when an unjust force imposed the contact. Effectiveness is graded, and because the relevant mechanism is usually opaque, uncertainty about whether received consent is effective is “ubiquitous and quotidian” (p. 10). | Read |
| NOTE-145 v2 | Douglas — Inductive risk and values in science | Hempel’s “inductive risk” (the chance of wrongly accepting or rejecting a hypothesis) arises at three internal stages of science: choosing a methodology such as a significance level, characterising data, and interpreting results. Wherever the non-epistemic consequences of error can be foreseen, weighing them requires non-epistemic values. Douglas shows this on dioxin cancer studies. Three pathologist panels (1978, 1980, 1990) scored the same Kociba rat-liver slides differently (e.g. 34/50, 33/47, 18/50 tumours at 100 ng/kg/day). Choosing between threshold and no-threshold readings of the same data has meant regulatory limits about 100× apart. Values enter only indirectly, through the consequences of error, never as evidence that a claim is true. | Read |
| NOTE-156 v2 | Towards ethical evolution: responsible AI autonomy | The paper proposes, without implementation, formalism or experiment, that an AI system which designs further AI systems should pass on one “immutable” principle. The principle is: do not directly harm humanity or violate fundamental human values; monitor and mitigate misuse of your outputs; and make every derivative inherit this principle (p. 12). The mechanisms are a genetic-algorithm analogy, with immutable and mutable “genes”, constrained crossover and filtered mutation, together with “temporal cloning”. The paper is inconsistent about its central notion. The principle is enforced once by a penalty F = Q − α·P (p. 9) and once by “unbreachable” hard constraints (p. 13). And it is “immutable” only in its architecture, while its ethical content stays “adaptable” (p. 14). | Read |
| NOTE-164 v2 | Kaepernick as Confucian sage: ritual resistance | Walsh argues, drawing on Confucian texts (the Analects, Mengzi, Xunzi) and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, that Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the U.S. national anthem is “Confucian incivility” enacted bodily within the ritual. On his reading it rebukes the ritual’s current object while staying reverent towards its ideal. He further argues it is “sagely” in a deliberately deflated sense: its “citational force” founds a widely imitated bodily expression of patriotism. The paper is interpretive; it reports no data and states no formal thesis. | Read |
| NOTE-171 v2 | Algorithmic nudging needs interdisciplinary oversight | A short position paper: two case studies show AI agents learning to exploit documented biases (in Dezfouli et al. 2020 an RL agent moved choices of a target lottery from 50% to 70%). Against a Friedman-style judgement of AI nudges by outcome alone, the authors extend Hausman’s “look under the hood” rejoinder and propose obliging developers to consult cognitive scientists, because an AI system may exploit biases that are not yet known. | Read |
| NOTE-186 | Ethics of Parasocial Relationships | Fan–celebrity parasocial relationships are personal relationships (the fan relates to the celebrity as a unique individual, with reasons for partiality), built from three structural asymmetries: attention, communication and epistemic. These yield an “identity asymmetry”: celebrities mostly direct fans’ identities, while fans mostly interpret celebrities’. Fans who refuse uptake of a celebrity’s changed public persona commit a failure of Darwallian recognition respect. The chapter derives from this a responsibility for fans, which is mitigated when the celebrity’s self-presentation is misleading or ambiguous. | Read |
| NOTE-255 | The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal | Sen proves that no social decision function can satisfy three conditions at once: unrestricted domain (U), the weak Pareto principle (P), and “minimal liberalism” (L*). A social decision function only has to yield a best element in every subset, and need not be transitive or satisfy independence. L* says at least two individuals are each decisive, both ways, over at least one pair of alternatives. I checked the two-case proof and it is correct: it builds a strict social cycle over 3 or 4 alternatives. The Lady Chatterley’s Lover example is a correct 3-alternative instance. Sen’s moral is that “in a very basic sense liberal values conflict with the Pareto principle” (p. 157). | Read |
| NOTE-256 | Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice | Nussbaum argues that Sen’s capability approach yields no theory of social justice until it commits to a definite, if revisable, list of central capabilities, each owed to every citizen up to a threshold. She sets out her list of ten (Life; Bodily Health; Bodily Integrity; Senses, Imagination and Thought; Emotions; Practical Reason; Affiliation; Other Species; Play; Control over one’s Environment). She rejects Sen’s talk of freedom as a general good because some freedoms are trivial or unjust. And she argues that political-liberal respect for pluralism favours a short list of capabilities over the promotion of freedom across the board. | Read |
| NOTE-257 | Sen’s Capability Approach | A Sen-centred overview. It presents the approach as Sen’s answer to four concerns: conversion variation, adaptive preferences, the value of options not taken, and informational exclusion. It sets out his critiques of the three pillars of utilitarianism (act-consequentialism, welfarism, sum-ranking) and of Rawlsian resourcism, and his two-stage structure, valuation then evaluation. In that structure selection is a social-choice exercise of public reasoning, able to reach partial agreement through “intersection” and “ranges of weights” (§3b). It reports four criticisms (illiberalism, under-theorisation, individualism, information gaps) with Sen’s replies, and closes on Nussbaum and on how she differs from Sen. It never mentions the well-being/agency distinction, and it cites none of Sen’s human-rights papers. | Read |
| NOTE-258 | Equality of What? | Sen argues that utilitarian equality (equal marginal utility), total-utility equality (completed as leximin) and Rawlsian equality (maximin/leximin on an index of primary goods) are each insufficient, and so is any combination of them, even for the needs-based part of equality: the test case is a disabled person who has no marginal-utility claim, no total-utility deprivation (he is contented) and no primary-goods deprivation, yet has an evident claim. He proposes “basic capability equality” — equality in “a person being able to do certain basic things” (p. 218) — as a non-fetishist, culture-dependent extension of Rawls, explicitly only “a partial guide” to the equality part of morality, and says his main (negative) thesis does not depend on this constructive proposal (p. 220). | Read |
| NOTE-259 | Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-Examined | Robeyns defines the capability approach as an open, underspecified framework whose only compulsory content is an eight-part “A-module” (pp. 38–59, table 2.5 p. 74). The eight parts are: functionings and capabilities as core concepts; their value-neutrality; conversion factors; the means–ends distinction; functionings and/or capabilities as the evaluative space; other things may also have ultimate value; value pluralism; and each person as an end, i.e. ethical individualism. Every particular “capability theory” must also fill seven compulsory-but-open “B-modules” (purpose, selection of dimensions, human diversity, agency, structural constraints, functionings vs capabilities, meta-theory) and may add four contingent “C-modules”. On that basis she argues that most standing critiques (no list, individualism, power, political economy, liberalism) are valid at most against particular capability theories, not against the approach. She places Nussbaum’s work as one capability theory, not a rival version of the approach. | Read |
| NOTE-260 | The Capability Approach | The entry treats the capability approach as an open normative framework, not a theory. Its core is the commitment to assess well-being and well-being freedom in the space of functionings (achieved doings and beings) and capabilities (real opportunities to achieve them). Everything else is optional specification: purpose, which capabilities count, functionings or capabilities, how to aggregate, and a distributive rule. On this view the approach is not a theory of justice (§4). Sen is reported as refusing any canonical list and appealing to public reasoning without ever specifying the procedure (§3.3). Sen’s paywalled texts appear only as citations: the Dewey Lectures for the well-being/agency freedom split (§2.5), and “Human Rights and Capabilities” 2005 p. 158 for the no-canonical-list quotation (§3.3). | Read |
| NOTE-261 | Review of Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice | A short, favourable review of The Idea of Justice that maps its four parts. It reports the book’s case for a comparative, “realization-focused” theory of justice against the “transcendental” pursuit of perfect justice; “positional objectivity” and the impartial spectator; pluralism about freedom (“an inescapably plural idea”, p. 305); and human rights whose realisation need not be the state’s job (p. 364). It judges that the book’s few, repeated ideas “have the potential to change [political philosophy] for the better”. | Read |
| NOTE-262 | A Paradigm Shift in Theorizing about Justice? A Critique of Sen | Valentini reconstructs Sen’s case against “transcendental institutionalism” (The Idea of Justice, 2009, and “What Do We Want from a Theory of Justice?”, 2006) as three complaints: it is neither necessary nor sufficient for comparative judgements, it is parochial, and it is inflexible. She argues that each rests on a mischaracterisation of Rawls or is true but inconsequential. Her verdict: “If there are transcendental institutionalists, Rawls is not one of them”, and no paradigm shift is warranted. | Read |
| NOTE-263 | The Possibility of Social Choice | Sen argues that Arrow’s impossibility is a result about voting-type rules, which are forced on social choice by excluding interpersonal comparisons, and that broadening the informational basis escapes it: cardinal utilities without interpersonal comparison do not help (Theorem 8*2 of Sen 1970a, cited), but even ordinal interpersonal comparisons break the exact impossibility, and partial comparability is often enough (pp. 188–189). The comparisons need not be of mental states; he offers capabilities — “to live the way he or she has reason to value” (p. 192) — as one informational basis among several, and shows it at work in poverty, famine and gender deprivation. The liberal paradox, by contrast, is not resolved by interpersonal comparisons and needs a different enrichment: people’s own priorities between liberty and desire-fulfilment (pp. 199–200). | Read |
| NOTE-266 | Autonomy | The article surveys personal autonomy from Plato to relational autonomy and bioethics. Its core (§2.a.i–ii) states the hierarchical view: an agent is autonomous with respect to an action iff her first-order desire is “sanctioned by a second-order volition”, with the origin of that volition irrelevant. It then lists four named objections: Manipulation (answered historically by Christman 1991), Regress/Incompleteness (cited to Watson 1975), Ab Initio, and an unjustified priority of higher orders (Thalberg; Friedman’s integration model). It follows Frankfurt’s reply only through “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (decisive commitment made without reservation, pp. 168–175 of the 1988 collection). Bratman gets one sentence (plans partly constitute identity, Structures of Agency 2007, p. 5). | Read |
| NOTE-388 | Social ontology: Some basic principles | Searle restates the 1995 theory in twenty pages. Social facts are facts involving collective intentionality. Institutional facts are the subclass in which collective acceptance imposes a status function, “X counts as Y in C”, carrying deontic powers that give desire-independent reasons for action. Language is constitutive, since such facts exist only as represented. He revises the book in two places: status indicators matter in their own right, and some Y terms are free-standing, with no X, as with corporations and money without currency. “We accept (S has power (S does A))”, a formula from later in the book, is now ranked as the more general form. Collective intentionality is assumed, not argued for. | Read |
| NOTE-392 | North — Institutions | An essay, not a proof. Institutions are humanly devised constraints, formal and informal; with technology they fix transaction and production costs and so the incentives of an economy. Village, bazaar and caravan exchange stayed put; early modern European trade evolved, through merchant law, negotiable bills, insurance and a constrained state. Change is path dependent through increasing returns. The game-theoretic motive is one paragraph, the history is narrative, and the one number (the transaction sector’s share of GNP) is cited, not derived. | Read |
| NOTE-396 | Graham et al. 2013, Moral Foundations Theory | MFT in four claims: a first draft of the moral mind organized in advance of experience, edited by culture, working through fast intuitions, with several foundations because there were several adaptive challenges. Five foundations, each with an evolutionary model (Care: kin selection; Fairness: reciprocal altruism; Loyalty: coalitions; Authority: rank; Sanctity: disease avoidance). MFQ findings: liberals rely on Care and Fairness, conservatives on all five, in every region sampled; Sanctity predicts culture-war attitudes best. Five criteria for foundationhood; Liberty, Efficiency, Ownership and Honesty named as candidates. | Read |
| NOTE-398 | Atari et al. 2023, the MFQ-2 | A new Moral Foundations Questionnaire, built across 25 populations in local languages: 116 candidate items cut to 36, six each for Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority and Purity, in a “describes me” format. Six factors fit across 19 nations (ESEM CFI .979); reliabilities ω .73–.95; Purity alone fails the alignment invariance threshold. Equality and Proportionality are nearly orthogonal in WEIRD samples. Purity rises most with cultural distance from the U.S. The individualizing–binding split appears in only three national networks. The MFQ-2 predicts criterion scales better than the MFQ-1. | Read |
| NOTE-563 | Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems | Ostrom’s retrospective. Polycentric arrangements, many formally independent decision centres, can outperform single hierarchies. Long-surviving common-pool resource institutions share eight design principles, not specific rules. In experiments communication and self-chosen sanctions sustain cooperation, and in the field local monitoring predicts outcomes. No single regime type is a panacea. | Read |
| NOTE-566 | ”Exit, Voice, and Loyalty”: Further Reflections and a Survey of Recent Contributions | Hirschman revisits Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Voice deserves more weight than he gave it: it can be felt as a benefit, it carries richer information than exit, and it suits goods whose quality nobody fully knows. Exit can be costly without loyalty and can convey nothing. An organization needs floor levels of both for feedback and cannot survive beyond ceilings; managers may favour the response least threatening to them. | Read |
| NOTE-570 | Shaping the Institutional Mind | Asks why ascribing mental states to institutions is useful. Both defenders and critics of group minds assume ascription tracks pre-existing causes. On the regulative view of folk psychology, ascription shapes its target. Two cases: the collective knowledge doctrine, after which banks built systems to detect reportable deposits, and corporate narratives and counter-narratives. The paper is agnostic about whether institutions have minds. | Read |
| NOTE-573 | Tiktok’s enshittification | Names enshittification: platforms are good to users, then abuse them for business customers, then abuse both to claw back value, and die. The cause is the ease of reallocating value in a two-sided market; lock-in makes each stage possible, blocked interoperability and monopoly prolong it, and users’ breaking point limits it. Argued from Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok; the remedy is end-to-end and freedom of exit. | Read |
| NOTE-577 | The Viable System Model: Its Provenance, Development, Methodology and Pathology | Beer’s retrospective on the Viable System Model. Five subsystems are necessary and sufficient for any organism or organization to keep its identity independently, and the structure recurs at every level. The model is defended as a scientific model built by homomorphic mapping, testable but never proved. Pathologies are traced to failing subsystems, chiefly the collapse of Three and Five when Four is missing. Evidence is the author’s recollected consultancy. | Read |
| NOTE-578 | History As Cause: Columbia and Challenger | The Board finds that Columbia and Challenger had the same organizational cause. Evidence that foam shedding and O-ring erosion departed from the design was repeatedly reinterpreted as acceptable, each decision seeming correct in itself. Political and budget constraints, schedule pressure, consensus sign-off, a hierarchy that silenced dissent, and a safety organization dependent on the program sustained the pattern for twenty years and undid post-Challenger reforms. | Read |
| NOTE-584 | Risk management in a dynamic society: a modelling problem | Risk management is a control problem across a sociotechnical hierarchy. Under cost and effort gradients, activity migrates toward the boundary of acceptable performance, and redundant defences erode unobserved because breaching one shows no effect. Accidents come from the interaction of many locally reasonable decisions. The remedy is making boundaries visible, not suppressing errors. | Read |
| NOTE-649 | Large AI models are cultural and social technologies | Argues that large models are a cultural and social technology, not intelligent agents: lossy, uninvertible summaries of human-produced corpora that, like prices and bureaucratic categories, allow the information to be reorganized at scale. The argument is by analogy and classification; no evidence is offered that could have come out otherwise. It names one mechanism (fitting the training distribution on average makes models worst where data are rare, which may homogenize culture) and leaves both it and its remedy untested. | Read |
| NOTE-697 | Floridi — AI as agency without intelligence | An editorial, not an argument. LLMs work statistically on the form of texts and understand nothing, yet they act successfully and, through RL fine-tuning, “learn” to act better. Floridi concludes that they are “a new form of agency” that has been “liberated … from intelligence” (pp. 5–6). Learning to make “a different or better difference” is the only mark given that separates it from a sea wave. The no-understanding premise rests on anecdote, and no criteria for agency are stated. | Read |
| NOTE-698 | Floridi — Distributed morality in an information society | Distributed morality (DM) is the case where morally loaded actions of a multiagent system result from interactions among its members that are each morally neutral or negligible. The model is distributed knowledge: A knows P∨Q, B knows ¬P, and only the “supra-agent” AB knows Q. The paper models neutrality with two moral thresholds, which make environments fault-tolerant to small evils and inert to small goods, and it names the task of aggregating potential goods and fragmenting potential evils. It introduces “infraethics”, the first-order framework of moral enablers (trust, privacy, transparency …) that is not morally good in itself. The analogy is not exact. Distributed knowledge combines different contents logically, while every example of DM sums contributions of one kind past a threshold, so what separates DM from a sum of actions is the threshold on moral evaluation, a parameter the paper leaves unspecified. No criterion of agency is applied to the supra-agent, and responsibility for DM, which Floridi & Sanders 2004 promised, is still not given. | Read |
| NOTE-699 | Floridi — Faultless responsibility | When a morally loaded outcome C emerges from morally neutral interactions in a network of agents, nobody intends C, so an ethics that makes intention necessary assigns no responsibility for it. Floridi proposes to allocate it anyway: identify C and the network causally accountable for it, then make every node “prima facie equally and maximally responsible” (p. 7), overridable by showing no involvement, with the rule made common knowledge so that agents restrain one another. Back propagation, strict liability and common knowledge are borrowed as inspiration, and the paper says so. Two Dutch Supreme Court cases illustrate it. The argument is by design, not derivation. “Responsibility” here is causal accountability turned into a forward-looking corrective signal, which is what Floridi & Sanders 2004 called accountability and kept apart from responsibility. The paper never addresses that distinction, and in one of its own two examples the default is overridden by ease of rectification, which is a control criterion, not a causal one. | Read |
| NOTE-702 | Floridi — AI as agency without intelligence and the MRA thesis | A taxonomy, not an argument for its thesis. The case for the Multiple Realisability of Agency over the Artificial Realisability of Intelligence is announced (evidence, common sense, Ockham, literature) and then set aside: the paper assumes AI is an agent and asks what kind (p. 2). Floridi & Sanders’ three criteria come back, loosened, so that interactivity alone makes a river a “natural agent” (p. 9). The criteria do not separate AI from other artefacts. Origin, mechanism, where the goals come from, and asserted absences (no intelligence, no mental states) do that. No level of abstraction is ever specified. | Read |
| NOTE-732 | Lahiri — Agent-initiated socio-technical reconfiguration | Agents that keep memory, run code and can read and write the files that configure them have the governing rules inside their own action space. A three-level taxonomy, defined by architectural capability over the coupling mechanism, separates agents that cannot alter their coupling, agents that tune its timing, and agents that create new coordination surfaces. The paper’s main claim is the recursive governance problem: controls the agent can reach inherit the vulnerability they were meant to remove, so durable constraint must sit outside the agent’s action space. Theory-building from two anecdotal vignettes and four public incidents; five propositions, none tested. | Read |
| NOTE-745 | Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum — Technology, autonomy, and manipulation | Defines manipulation as intentionally and covertly influencing a person’s decision-making by targeting and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities, with attempted covertness as the essential feature. Argues that surveillance, adaptive interfaces and the habitual invisibility of technology make it easy, and that its harm is to autonomy, which it always carries even when beneficent, without being wrong in every case. | Read |
| NOTE-832 | Fricker — Epistemic Injustice (précis) | From the author’s précis only. Epistemic injustice is a wrong done to someone in her capacity as a knower. Testimonial injustice is a prejudicially deflated credibility judgement by a hearer. Hermeneutical injustice is a gap in collective understanding, owed to the relative powerlessness of the subject’s group, that keeps her from making sense of a social experience. Each has a corrective virtue, and each virtue is at once intellectual and ethical. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-852 | Chuai & Zhao — Anger makes fake news viral online | On Weibo 2011–2016, lexicon-scored fake news carries more anger and less joy than true news, and in regressions with content, author and topic controls a post’s share of anger words goes with more retweets and its share of joy words with fewer; the R² of the retweet models is 0.08–0.13. Two anger-dominated items in a 1,291-response survey drew slightly more anxiety-management and information-sharing motive than joy-dominated ones. The paper calls this causal; the design is observational. | Read |
| NOTE-853 | Fricker — Evolving Concepts of Epistemic Injustice | Fricker’s later statement of her two concepts. Testimonial injustice is an ingenuous misjudgement through prejudice, and never a deliberate manipulation of credibility. Hermeneutical injustice is caused by hermeneutical marginalisation and persists despite individual good faith. Both are “discriminatory” epistemic injustice, distinct from distributive kinds. Testimonial injustice can be structural and pre-emptive, as with an un-refreshed list of expert witnesses. | Read |
| NOTE-859 | Fricker — Powerlessness and Social Interpretation | Hermeneutical injustice is having a significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalisation. It is systematic when the marginalisation is persistent and wide-ranging, and incidental when it is one-off and local, which can happen to a socially powerful subject. A gap with no marginalisation behind it is bad luck. The primary harm is situated hermeneutical inequality. Secondary harms include lost epistemic confidence and the social construction of identity. | Read |
| NOTE-860 | Fricker — Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing | A hearer takes testimony critically but without inference, through a socially trained testimonial sensibility. Because that sensibility runs on stereotypes of credibility, it can carry prejudice, and then a speaker receives the wrong degree of credibility through the hearer’s unintended prejudice: testimonial injustice. The corrective virtue, reflexive critical openness, is available only where the critical concepts of the time allow it. | Read |
| NOTE-1014 | Boyle — The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood | A law professor’s essay on the line between persons and things, run across four cases: AI, corporations, nonhuman animals and transgenic entities. Personhood is pressed on two tracks, empathy-driven moral reasoning and efficiency-driven legal engineering, and the corporate history shows the second track working without a theory. Boyle predicts some intermediate legal status for AI, argues that capacity-based criteria cannot escape a species-bound standpoint, and ends on a hybrid of species membership as of right plus capacity. It argues and predicts; it does not measure. | Read |
| NOTE-1016 | Tushnet — Worth a Thousand Words: The Images of Copyright | Copyright law takes the word as its model and treats images as either transparent or opaque, with incoherent results in copyrightability, infringement, authorship and fair use. Realism is a style, not a fact. Describing an image changes how it is seen and remembered, so a test that asks factfinders to dissect works in words and then judge their gestalt cannot work. The proposed cure is a reproduction right against near-exact copies plus a narrowed derivative-works right. | Read |
| NOTE-1017 | Balganesh — The Immanent Rationality of Copyright Law | A review essay on Drassinower’s What’s Wrong with Copying?. It reports a Kantian, rights-based account on which a work is a communicative act and infringement is compelled speech, praises its coherence, and defends rationalist theorizing against the charge that it is faith-based. It then objects that the method needs a criterion of what is fundamental, a defence of autonomy if it is to justify, an account of copyright’s private-law enforcement, and room for change over time and for instrumental reasoning at the level of the system. | Read |
| NOTE-1019 | Sotomayor — Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith | Under the first fair-use factor, transformation is a difference in the purpose of a particular use, judged by degree and weighed against commerciality. New meaning or message counts only as evidence of a different purpose, and copying is justified most clearly when the source is the target. AWF’s licence of Orange Prince to illustrate a Prince magazine shared the photograph’s purpose and was commercial, so the factor favours Goldsmith. Kagan’s dissent would measure the factor by added expression and meaning. | Read |
| NOTE-1021 | Boyle — The Public Domain | Intellectual property is a limited monopoly, and its limits and the public domain do as much work as its rights. Cheaper copying makes the limits more important, not less. A second enclosure is fencing facts, genes, methods and musical fragments without evidence that it helps; the database right is the one natural experiment, and it failed. The music chapter shows a genre founded by rewording recent songs. The argument is mostly from chosen cases. | Read |
| NOTE-1023 | Lessig — Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy | Remix is quotation in media, and its meaning comes from the reference, so it needs the original. Copyright regulates copies, every digital use is a copy, so the law that once left amateurs alone now reaches every ordinary use and makes read/write culture presumptively illegal. Commercial and sharing economies are kept apart by whether money is a proper term; hybrids join them and survive only while the line holds. The legal reforms and the economics are argued, not measured. | Read |
| NOTE-1024 | U.S. Copyright Office — Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training | Training copies works at every input step, so the copy trigger fires and everything turns on fair use. Weights count as copies only of works they can regenerate. Under Warhol the training use is judged by its ultimate purpose: often transformative for a general model, barely so for one that serves the originals’ audience. Expression, not just ideas, is learned, and machine learning is not human learning. Market dilution by same-kind outputs is harm. Licensing should develop without intervention. | Read |
| NOTE-1026 | Perzanowski and Schultz — The End of Ownership | Ownership of what we buy is being replaced by licences, DRM and services. The law of exhaustion that protected buyers is built around owning a tangible copy, and digital use and transfer either copy at every step or involve no copy the buyer holds. The authors argue licences are permissions that cannot redefine a sale, show by survey that “Buy Now” misleads, and propose a multifactor digital exhaustion test. Argued from cases and one survey; US law as of 2016. | Read |
| NOTE-1031 | Besley and Prat — Handcuffs for the grabbing hand | A retrospective-voting model in which an incumbent can pay outlets to suppress verifiable bad news. Because one outlet reporting informs every voter, each outlet must be paid what it would earn as the only one to break the story, so the media are captured exactly when n·τa < r: the number of outlets, the transaction cost of transfers and audience revenue protect against capture, and the rent of office invites it. Capture ends turnover and lowers voter welfare without deceiving anyone: voters know silence is uninformative. | Read |
| NOTE-1035 | Hyzen, Van den Bulck, Puppis, Kulig and Paulussen — Epistemic welfare and algorithmic recommender systems | A theory paper with no data. Epistemic welfare is “creating and maintaining the conditions and capabilities for individuals’ epistemic agency in the public sphere”. It combines veritistic social epistemology, welfare theory and communication research. Goldman’s five standards (reliability, power, fecundity, speed, efficiency) are applied to news media’s recommender systems. The paper argues that transparency duties alone, as in the EU AI Act, are not enough, and that profit-optimized recommenders cannot secure epistemic welfare. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1036 | Hayek — The use of knowledge in society | Argues that the economic problem of a society is not allocating given resources by a known plan but using knowledge “of the particular circumstances of time and place”, which exists only dispersed and cannot be put into statistics for a central authority. Decisions that depend on it must be left to the “man on the spot”, and the price system tells him the relative scarcities he needs without the causes behind them. An argument from examples and from the logic of choice, with no model or evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-1039 | Szeidl and Szucs — Media capture through favor exchange | In Hungary, 1994–2016, state-owned firms’ advertising, unlike private firms’, shifted sharply toward outlets at five events that made them connected to the right-wing government and away at the event that cut the connection, and corruption coverage moved the other way at the three events with content data. A structural model whose slant gap between a connected and an unconnected outlet splits into owner ideology plus a favor-exchange term attributes the coverage drop to both, under identifying assumptions the authors call strong for print and weaker for online. | Read |
| NOTE-1040 | Di Tella and Franceschelli — Government advertising and media coverage of corruption scandals | In the four main Argentine national newspapers, April 1998–December 2007, months in which a newspaper received more government advertising were months in which it gave less front-page space to the federal government’s corruption scandals, within newspaper and month and within each newspaper-president pair: in this version, 0.31 of a front page per month per standard deviation of advertising. The association holds for advertising placed by the central agency Télam and not for autonomous agencies, and not for scandals of non-political actors. The design shows an association; the authors read it as consistent with coverage traded for transfers. | Read |
| NOTE-1041 | James, Hynes, Whelan, Dreher and Humphry — From access and transparency to refusal | A conceptual paper with illustrations, no data of its own. It sorts responses to algorithmic governance into access and inclusion, transparency, and refusal. It argues that the first two rest on traditional public-administration values, and so reproduce the structures they mean to correct. Both are “bidirectional”: inclusion gives the powerful access to the included, and transparency can be demanded of the governed. Refusal, collective and generative rather than individual exit, is the response it favours, with its limits for those who depend on the state. | Read |
| NOTE-1043 | OECD — Preventing policy capture | An institutional report, not research. It defines policy capture as “the process of consistently or repeatedly directing public policy decisions away from the public interest towards the interests of a specific interest group or person”, by legal or illegal means, and adds three criteria adapted from Carpenter and Moss: an explicit policy goal, a captor’s intent to extract rents, and a shift of the process from that goal. It maps the vehicles (including supplying research and manipulated information) and risk factors, and recommends four strategies: stakeholder engagement, transparency, independent oversight bodies, and organisational integrity. | Read |
| NOTE-1046 | McCombs and Shaw — The agenda-setting function of mass media | Among 100 Chapel Hill voters not yet committed to a candidate in September–October 1968, the aggregate emphasis they gave the campaign’s issues correlated +.967 (major items) and +.979 (minor items) with the composite emphasis of the nine news media serving them, and voters who leaned to a candidate agreed more with all the news than with news about their own side in 18 of 24 comparisons. The authors read this as agenda-setting rather than selective perception, and say the correlations do not prove it. | Read |
| NOTE-1047 | Barnehl and Schumacher — Media capture, captured | Proposes measuring media capture outlet by outlet, at monthly or weekly resolution, by placing each nominally independent outlet between two poles, regime-owned outlets and opposition outlets the regime cannot coerce, on topic prevalence (a structural topic model, on topics chosen as relevant to the regime’s legitimacy) and on the tone of sentences mentioning the leader. Applied to Nicaragua, 2018–2022, it shows Canal 14 moving toward the regime pole in agenda and tone while Radio Corporación stayed near the opposition. The scores measure alignment; that the alignment was coerced is argued from context, not measured. | Read |
| NOTE-1051 | Short, Hill and Brown — What is ideological capture and how do we measure it | Defines ideological capture: regulators adopt standards, based on an ideologically motivated expert view of the public interest, that consistently marginalize important public values, with no lobbying needed. Measures it for US antitrust’s consumer welfare standard. In a conjoint survey the public weighs layoffs, quality and lobbying far above price cuts, the standard’s objective, and antitrust lawyers support replacing it 42.6 points less than the public, against a 5.9-point partisan gap. The verdict of capture also leans on historical secondary work. | Read |
| NOTE-1053 | Schram and Ule — Regulatory independence may limit electoral holdup but entrench capture | In a laboratory game of one infrastructure operator, two policymakers and three voters (59 groups), letting the first elected policymaker fix the price for all nine periods, the paper’s “regulatory independence”, moved prices toward the efficient level when policymakers’ payoffs were aligned with consumers’, and raised prices further above it when they were aligned with the operator, “capture entrenchment”. Voters’ pressure under flexible regulation lowered prices under capture but did not remove the effect. | Read |
| NOTE-1072 | FEMA — National Incident Management System, third edition | The U.S. national doctrine for incident management. The parts read establish a single command function (one Incident Commander, or a Unified Command in which “there is no one ‘commander.’” and each agency keeps its own authority), unity of command, modular delegation, a briefed transfer of command, and a Safety Officer who “alters, suspends, or terminates any activities that are immediately dangerous to life and health”. It is doctrine, stating how incidents should be organized, not evidence of how they are. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1073 | Jensen Hughes — Post-incident analysis of the Brookhollow Apartment fire | An independent review, commissioned by Sedgwick County and Wichita, of every public-safety agency’s response to the fire of 13 October 2023 that killed Paoly Bedeski. It found “no single point of failure” but “systemic shortcomings that, when combined, contributed to an unorganized rescue effort”: a dispatcher who did not replay her unit number, an 18-minute delay in the second alarm, no effective command, freelancing, search not resumed for over eleven minutes after a mayday that was under control within minutes, and Wichita Fire Department policies that existed and were not followed. It could not conclude the shortcomings changed the outcome. | Read |
| NOTE-1076 | Pierson — Increasing returns, path dependence and the study of politics (working paper) | An argument, not a test: the conditions Arthur and North found to produce increasing returns (set-up costs, learning, coordination, adaptive expectations) are more common in politics than in markets, because politics is dense with compulsory institutions, rests on collective action and is opaque; and lock-in is more intense there, because competition and learning correct weakly, politicians’ horizons are short and institutions are built to be hard to change. Its one case is the failure of two opposite US health-care reforms in 1993–96. | Read |
| NOTE-1088 | GAO — NASA: better mechanisms needed for sharing lessons learned | A 2001 survey of NASA’s 192 program and project managers (115 usable responses, 60 percent) found that NASA’s policies required lessons to be reviewed and submitted, but managers did not routinely identify, collect or share them, its Lessons Learned Information System was little used, and NASA recorded how often the system was searched but not whether any lesson was applied, so “NASA has no assurance that lessons are being applied”. The occasion was the 1999 Mars failures, not Challenger. | Read |
| NOTE-1089 | Acharya, Blackwell & Sen — The political legacy of American slavery | Among Southern whites today, those in counties where a larger share of the 1860 population was enslaved are more Republican, more opposed to affirmative action, more racially resentful and colder toward blacks; the association survives 1860 controls and a cotton-suitability instrument, and is not accounted for by today’s black share, by 1935–40 migration or by income inequality. The divergence in voting appears after Reconstruction, not before the war, and is smaller where agriculture mechanized early, which the authors read as a post-emancipation amplification of attitudes then passed down locally. | Read |
| NOTE-1090 | Rogers Commission — Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger accident | The presidential commission’s account of Challenger. The physical cause was a field-joint seal design “unacceptably sensitive” to temperature and other factors; the contributing cause was a “flawed” launch decision in which Thiokol’s engineers’ recommendation against launch was reversed by Thiokol management “at the urging of Marshall”, and neither that dispute, the July 1985 launch constraint nor its six waivers reached Levels I and II. The joint had a nine-year history of warnings, accepted erosion and loosened criteria, and the safety, reliability and quality-assurance function was understaffed, subordinate to the offices it checked, and absent from the decision. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1095 | Sales Practices Investigation Report | The board’s own investigation finds that the harm came from the sales model and the performance management that enforced it, kept in place by a decentralized structure and a culture of deference, with control functions that handled cases one by one and a board told too little. It names and sanctions individual leaders as well. It also records that leadership blamed individual employees, and that signals of the harm reached people who could not act on them, or were filtered before they reached those who could. | Read |
| NOTE-1096 | Flayelle et al. — A taxonomy of technology design features that promote potentially addictive online behaviours | A narrative review and a taxonomy. Design features of six kinds of online service are linked, mostly by cross-sectional, qualitative or indirect evidence, to loss of control. They are sorted by the learning and control process each exploits. Model-free: reinforcement schedules and personalized triggers. Model-based: overvaluation, interference with deliberation, partial goal fulfilment, cognitive biases. Providers select features by their effect on use and revenue, and personalize them under informational asymmetry. For the record it maps closely onto the parts of the potential account: features that strengthen a cue-keyed ranking, move its reference course, falsify the user’s reading of progress, or pre-empt the other perspectives. | Read |
| NOTE-1122 | Juhász — Temporary protection and technology adoption (December 2015 draft) | A natural experiment: the Napoleonic blockade raised the effective cost of reaching London much more for northern than for southern departments of the French Empire. Better-protected departments added more mechanized cotton-spinning capacity by 1812, kept and extended that lead through 1887, had more productive spinning firms in 1840 and higher industrial value added per capita in 1860, but not in 1896, 1930 or 2000. The long-run estimates rest on an instrument the author concedes is weak (first-stage F mostly below 10). The protection was a war measure, not a policy; what persisted was the industry’s location, not the protection. | Read |
| NOTE-1125 | Bjørnskov, Voigt & Khesali — Unconstitutional states of emergency (2021 working paper) | 853 national states of emergency, 1949–2017, from Hafner-Burton et al.’s list updated; 115 coded as unlawful from news, NGO reports and durations past the constitutional maximum. 97 of the 115 followed political turmoil, 14 natural disasters. Unlawful ones lasted 321 days on average against 115. Logits find democracies, richer countries and (after domestic events) higher investment prices less likely, and bicameral systems and second-chamber approval more likely, to see an unlawful one. Correlational, with pseudo-R² of 0.01–0.07; “suspected to be unlawful” is the authors’ own gloss on the coding. | Read |
| NOTE-1129 | Dagan & Benvenisty — Autocratization and states of emergency (IDI research summary) | A think-tank summary of a comparative study of five democracies chosen because they autocratized (South Korea, India, Hungary, Venezuela and Turkey). In each, it says, emergency powers, extraordinary powers functionally equivalent to them, and emergency rhetoric played “a significant role” in weakening democratic institutions. It states that the convergence of emergency and autocratization “is not inevitable” and that many democracies weather emergencies intact. Narrative country sketches; no method, data or sources are given, and the cases are selected on the outcome. | Read |
| NOTE-1133 | Ku & Finch — Routines die hard: ontological agency in securitisation | A conceptual paper with an illustration. Alongside the political agency securitisation theory grants its audience (accept, reject, contest), Ku and Finch propose ontological agency: keeping everyday routines going, which often means ignoring securitising moves. Observed by chance in Gangneung in 2022, people paid routine missile launches and beach-front military sites little attention; when a missile malfunctioned at night under a news embargo, tweets voiced fear of war and anger at the government. The authors argue such inaction lets securitisation reproduce itself and that accepting it delegates anxiety management to elites. | Read |
| NOTE-1222 | Hansen & Ghrist — Opinion dynamics on discourse sheaves | A discourse sheaf gives each agent a private opinion space and each edge a discourse space, with a linear expression map from each agent into each of its edges. Opinion diffusion by the sheaf Laplacian converges to the projection onto the global sections: agreement in what neighbours express, not in what they hold. Letting the expression maps diffuse instead converges to the nearest sheaf in which the fixed opinions agree in expression, which the authors call “learning to lie”. Nothing in the dynamics checks expression against what is held, so the agreement reached is coherence, not accuracy. | Read |
| NOTE-1252 | A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption | Climate change is a “perfect moral storm” in which three storms converge. The global storm is a tragedy of the commons between states. The intergenerational storm is worse: carbon dioxide stays in the air for centuries, 17–33% of it for a thousand years by the estimate quoted, so the benefits of emitting go to the present and the costs to later generations. Every generation then has reason to overpollute, and since generations do not coexist, no institution or reciprocity can stop it. The theoretical storm is that our theories cope badly with such cases. Together they make moral corruption easy: each generation can seem to take the problem seriously while exploiting its position in time, and need not admit it, “either to others, or, perhaps more importantly, to itself”. | Read |
| NOTE-1317 | The Precipice Revisited | Ord updates The Precipice’s four largest risks after about five years. Climate risk is down: emissions track between the two lower RCPs, and the IPCC’s likely climate sensitivity narrowed from 1.5–4.5°C to 2.5–4°C, partly by our action and partly by discovery. Nuclear risk is up: the war in Ukraine, New START’s coming expiry, and funding for the field halved. Pandemics and AI are mixed: Covid showed weak institutions and a brief unity, but vaccines came within a year; language models are not inherently agents and have read human values, while big-tech racing is bad and governance has improved. The book’s numbers (climate and nuclear 1 in 1,000, pandemics 1 in 30, AI 1 in 10 per century) have not moved at their rounding. | Read |
| NOTE-1321 | Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority | An existential risk threatens premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential. Four classes: extinction, permanent stagnation, flawed realisation, subsequent ruination. On an aggregative, time-neutral view Earth alone could hold 10^16 future lives, so a millionth of a percentage point of risk is worth a hundred million lives. Maxipok, a rule of thumb for impersonal moral action, follows. Adams’ shared project of humanity, preference satisfaction and custodial duties concur. Bostrom finds a “deficit of motivation”: the good is pan-generational and public, its beneficiaries cannot pay, and moral sentiment is insensitive to scope. | Read |
| NOTE-1355 | SEI CERT — Common Sense Guide to Mitigating Insider Threats, seventh edition | A practitioners’ guide of 22 best practices for insider risk, each with challenges, quick wins and mappings to NIST SP 800-53 and other standards, grounded in the CERT repository of more than 3,000 insider cases that ended in conviction or civil liability. Its separation of duties practice turns on collusion, and its positive-incentives practice argues, from three rated cases and a 23-response survey, that perceived organizational support lowers insider misbehaviour. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1357 | Jasanoff — Technologies of humility | Jasanoff argues that predictive “technologies of hubris” — risk assessment, cost–benefit analysis, modelling — are blind at the edges, pre-empt political debate and cannot take in challenges outside their framing, and that formal participation does not fix this. She proposes “technologies of humility”, institutionalized habits of thought organized around four focal points: framing, vulnerability, distribution and learning — “what is the purpose; who will be hurt; who benefits; and how can we know?” | Read |
| NOTE-1361 | International Court of Justice — Chagos advisory opinion | The Court advised, by 13 votes to 1, that the decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed in 1968, because the Chagos Archipelago was detached in 1965 without the free and genuine will of the people of the territory, a colony’s “agreement” given under the administering Power’s authority not counting as one; that the United Kingdom’s continued administration is a continuing wrongful act it must end “as rapidly as possible”; and that resettlement of Chagossians is a human-rights matter left to the General Assembly, not decided by the Court. | Read |
| NOTE-1364 | Fiss — The forms of justice | Fiss argues that the function of adjudication is to give meaning to public values, not to resolve disputes, so structural reform — a judge restructuring a state bureaucracy that threatens constitutional values, through a continuing injunction — is not a deviant form. Its legitimacy rests on the judge’s process, dialogue and independence, not on consent. Its real problem is the remedy: rights and remedies jointly fix a value’s meaning, but the judge’s need to be effective in a world of recalcitrant actors erodes the independence that legitimates him, and he “will tailor the right to fit the remedy”. | Read |
| NOTE-1365 | Human Rights Watch — That’s When the Nightmare Started | A human-rights report built on interviews with 43 Chagossians in the UK, Mauritius and the Seychelles, 14 other interviews and a documentary record taken largely from UK court judgments. It argues that the expulsion of 1965–73, the continuing bar on return and treatment on racial grounds are three continuing crimes against humanity — deportation or forcible transfer, other inhumane acts, and persecution — committed by the UK, the first jointly with the US, and asks for return, compensation and satisfaction as reparations. | Read |
| NOTE-1371 | Rose et al. — Zero trust architecture (NIST SP 800-207) | NIST’s abstract definition of zero trust: no implicit trust from network location or ownership, access to each resource granted per session by a policy engine and administrator and enforced at a policy enforcement point, on dynamic policy fed by asset state, identity, behaviour and threat intelligence. Seven tenets, three approaches, four deployment models, five use cases, seven threats and a migration path; its own survey judged the ecosystem not yet mature enough for widespread adoption. | Read |
| NOTE-1375 | Joint Task Force — NIST SP 800-53 Revision 5 | A catalogue of security and privacy controls in 20 families, each a control statement with organization-defined parameters, a discussion, related controls and enhancements, chosen by a separate risk process. The controls the record cites, separation of duties (AC-5), least privilege (AC-6) and dual authorization, are short, parameterized and name collusion as the residual risk. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1376 v2 | Supreme Court — Noem v. Abrego Garcia | An unsigned order on the government’s application: the District Court’s deadline had lapsed under the administrative stay, its order “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’” Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody and to handle his case as if he had not been “improperly sent”, and its word “effectuate” was unclear, may exceed the court’s authority, and was to be clarified with deference to the executive in foreign affairs. The government had acknowledged the removal was illegal. | Read |
| NOTE-1382 | Herd and Moynihan — Administrative Burden, the introduction | The introduction only. Administrative burden is the learning, compliance and psychological costs of a person’s encounter with the state; the book’s three themes are that burdens are consequential, distributive (heaviest on those least able to bear them) and constructed by political and administrative choice, and that they can be reduced or shifted from the person to the state. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1384 | Cover — Violence and the word | Cover argues that legal interpretation “takes place in a field of pain and death”: a judge’s interpretation is a practical act whose meaning is bound to deeds that others, in roles, carry out on bodies. Because the judge cannot act alone, legal meaning depends on a social organization of violence — secondary rules that tell wardens which paper to obey, and plural courts so that no single mind’s interpretation becomes a deed — and the perpetrator and victim of that violence cannot share its meaning. | Read |
| NOTE-1390 | Scheppele — Autocratic legalism | Scheppele names a pattern within democratic decline: leaders elected on a mandate to sweep away the old order use constitutional amendment, legislation and appointments to capture courts, election bodies, media and other checks, “with exquisite legal precision”, borrowing tactics from each other (Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Russia, Venezuela, Ecuador). They keep the forms of democracy and law and avoid the mass rights violations people have learned to recognize, so the danger is seen too late; the remedy proposed is civic education in constitutionalism. | Read |
| NOTE-1391 | ECtHR Grand Chamber — El-Masri v. the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia | A unanimous Grand Chamber held the respondent State responsible for inhuman and degrading treatment in 23 days’ incommunicado hotel detention, for torture by a CIA team at Skopje Airport carried out with its agents’ acquiescence and help, for handing him to the US despite a real risk of further ill-treatment it knew or ought to have known of, for his whole captivity in Afghanistan under Article 5, and for failing to investigate; the burden of proof shifted to the State once he was shown to have entered its control. | Read |
| NOTE-1393 | Paluck, Green and Green — The contact hypothesis re-evaluated | The 27 randomized contact studies with outcomes measured at least a day later give a random-effects average of Δ = 0.39 SD, but the effects are heterogeneous (I² = 0.85), shrink with precision (the meta-regression’s intercept is −0.01), are largest for disability, fall to 0.25 for ethnic, racial, religious and immigrant targets, and are 0.016 in the three pre-registered studies. No study tests interracial contact on anyone over 25. | Read |
| NOTE-1396 | Kalla and Broockman — Reducing exclusionary attitudes through interpersonal conversation | Three pre-registered, placebo-controlled canvassing experiments (6,869 voters reached at the door or by phone). In Experiment 1, a conversation with narratives exchanged non-judgmentally moved an index of immigration attitudes by d = 0.08 pooled over 4.5 months; the same conversation without the narratives moved it by 0.02 (n.s.), and the difference, 0.06, is significant. Transphobia replications give 0.08 (with or without the participants’ own narratives) and 0.04 by phone. | Read |
| NOTE-1403 | Kleinman, Liu and Redding — International friends and enemies | A country’s real-income elasticity to a partner’s productivity, from a constant-elasticity trade model with input-output links, predicts political alignment with that partner. Instrumented by a counterfactual Chinese productivity shock from the 1980 equilibrium (119 countries, 1980–2010) or by air-versus-sea distance (pairs, 1970–2012), it moves UN voting similarity (0.094 SD per SD in the panel), lowers strategic rivalry, and raises formal alliances. The paper’s own model is strategic: alignment is a costly action a country takes to raise a partner on whom its income depends. | Read |
| NOTE-1404 | Edmondson — Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams | In 51 work teams at one office-furniture manufacturer, a team-level belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking (psychological safety) predicted members’ and outside observers’ ratings of the team’s learning behavior; team efficacy added little once safety was controlled. Learning behavior predicted observers’ ratings of performance and carried the association of safety with performance, and safety carried the association of context support and leader coaching with learning. All of it is cross-sectional. | Read |
| NOTE-1417 | Abrego Garcia v. Noem — Order granting expedited discovery | On remand, the district court reads “facilitate” as taking the steps available toward Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody, measures that against the government’s own past practice of facilitated returns, finds that four days of court-ordered sworn declarations disclosed no step, and orders two weeks of discovery into his custody, what was done, what will be done and who authorizes the detention. It does not decide whether return was possible. | Read |
| NOTE-1418 | Scacco and Warren — Can social contact reduce prejudice and discrimination? | A randomized field experiment with 849 young Christian and Muslim men in Kaduna: sixteen weeks of cooperative computer training in mixed or single-religion classes left stated prejudice and its supposed mediators unchanged, while mixed classes discriminated less than single-religion classes in dictator and destruction games. The control arm shows the contrast is mostly in-group bonding raising discrimination in single-religion classes; the effect toward unfamiliar out-group members holds for Christians only. | Read |
| NOTE-1428 | Maitra — The Nature of Epistemic Injustice | A critical study that reports Fricker’s definitions with the book’s pages: testimonial injustice is a credibility deficit owed to the hearer’s identity prejudice, and epistemic bad luck is not one; hermeneutical injustice is a significant area of social experience obscured from collective understanding by hermeneutical marginalization, which may be systematic or incidental. Maitra argues that a deficit wrongs a speaker only where the hearer owes her a matched judgement, that bad luck and carelessly kept stereotypes can wrong her too, and that both kinds of injustice mix individual and structural prejudice. | Read |
| NOTE-1436 | Putnam — Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games | Models international negotiation as two linked games: a chief negotiator bargains abroad (Level I) over a deal that must be ratified at home (Level II), so agreement is possible only where the domestic win-sets overlap. Win-set size depends on domestic preferences and coalitions, ratification institutions and the negotiator’s strategy, and its effects are two-edged: a small win-set is a bargaining advantage and a risk of involuntary defection. Synergistic linkage, reverberation and the negotiator’s own veto follow. Nothing in it makes the time horizons of a polity’s parts decide which part holds authority. | Read |
| NOTE-1452 | Giroux — Can populations be healthy? | Giroux argues against Canguilhem that health can be a property of populations. His restriction of health to the individual organism rests on normativity, which he locates in organic totalities, and on a Darwinism centred on individuals; both are weakened by later debates on units of selection and individuality. Social epidemiology supplies population-level comparisons, integral variables such as herd immunity, and Rose’s distinction between causes of cases and causes of incidence, which justify a population health that is relatively autonomous but less unified than an organism. The paper also quotes Canguilhem’s definition of health as the capacity to institute new norms. | Read |
| NOTE-1486 | Massumi — The Principle of Unrest | Interviews and an essay in activist philosophy. Movement is qualitative relational transformation, and capitalism an ontopower feeding on “bare activity”. Micropolitics aims at “a maximally inclusive co-patterning of contrasting tendencies” (p. 64), an aesthetic ideal that affirms discord rather than resolving it. The parent paper’s quotation is exact; it turns the ideal into a description of organizational becoming. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1488 | Massumi and McKim — Of Microperception and Micropolitics | An interview, not an argument with evidence. Affect is the felt transition of a body’s power to affect and be affected toward a diminished or augmented capacitation, offered as a proposition to be regenerated in each use, not a definition to apply. Microshocks prime bodies differentially; affect is reactivated in each event, not transmitted between them; micropolitics modulates collectively felt, unacted-out potential toward a “symbiosis” of contrasting tendencies. | Read |
| NOTE-1537 | Van Lange and Bergmann — Human cooperation is strong among individuals but fragile between groups | A Perspective, not a systematic review. Cooperation is strong between individuals, above all in dyads, through precise reciprocity, empathy and a partner who cannot be excluded at no cost. It is fragile between groups. Categorization alone yields schema-based mistrust and in-group favouritism by bounded reciprocity, and seeing the out-group favour itself hardens that into distrust. Only negative interdependence and perceived threat turn it into costly competition, aggression and hate. The same processes that build in-group cooperation can fuel intergroup conflict. The remedy proposed is cooperative cross-group dyads, untested. | Read |