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joanne ye

Democracy Project to Fill Gap in Online Politics - 3 views

Reference: Democracy Project to Fill Gap in Online Politics (2000, June 8). PR Newswire. Retrieved 23 September, 2009, from Factiva. (Article can be found at bottom of the post) Summary: The D...

human rights digital freedom democracy

started by joanne ye on 24 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

'There Is No Values-Free Form Of Education,' Says U.S. Philosopher - Radio Fr... - 0 views

www.rferl.org/...2315794.html

Education Value Democracy Humanities

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • from the earliest years, education should be based primarily on exploration, understanding in depth, and the development of logical, critical thinking. Such an emphasis, she says, not only produces a citizenry capable of recognizing and rooting out political jingoism and intolerance. It also produces people capable of questioning authority and perceived wisdom in ways that enhance innovation and economic competitiveness. Nussbaum warns against a narrow educational focus on technical competence.
  • a successful, long-term democracy depends on a citizenry with certain qualities that can be fostered by education.
  • The first is the capacity we associate in the Western tradition with Socrates, but it certainly appears in all traditions -- that is, the ability to think critically about proposals that are brought your way, to analyze an argument, to distinguish a good argument from a bad argument. And just in general, to lead what Socrates called “the examined life.” Now that’s, of course, important because we know that people are very prone to go along with authority, with fashion, with peer pressure. And this kind of critical enlivened citizenry is the only thing that can keep democracy vital.
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  • it can be trained from very early in a child’s education. There’re ways that you can get quite young children to recognize what’s a good argument and what’s a bad argument. And as children grow older, it can be done in a more and more sophisticated form until by the time they’re undergraduates in universities they would be studying Plato’s dialogues for example and really looking at those tricky arguments and trying to figure out how to think. And this is important not just for the individual thinking about society, but it’s important for the way people talk to each other. In all too many public discussions people just throw out slogans and they throw out insults. And what democracy needs is listening. And respect. And so when people learn how to analyze an argument, then they look at what the other person’s saying differently. And they try to take it apart, and they think: “Well, do I share some of those views and where do I differ here?” and so on. And this really does produce a much more deliberative, respectful style of public interaction.
  • The second [quality] is what I call “the ability to think as a citizen of the whole world.” We’re all narrow and this is again something that we get from our animal heritage. Most non-human animals just think about the group. But, of course, in this world we need to think, first of all, our whole nation -- its many different groups, minority and majority. And then we need to think outside the nation, about how problems involving, let’s say, the environment or global economy and so on need cooperative resolution that brings together people from many different nations.
  • That’s complicated and it requires learning a lot of history, and it means learning not just to parrot some facts about history but to think critically about how to assess historical evidence. It means learning how to think about the global economy. And then I think particularly important in this era, it means learning something about the major world religions. Learning complicated, nonstereotypical accounts of those religions because there’s so much fear that’s circulating around in every country that’s based usually on just inadequate stereotypes of what Muslims are or whatever. So knowledge can at least begin to address that.
  • the third thing, which I think goes very closely with the other two, is what I call “the narrative imagination,” which is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of another person to have some understanding of how the world looks from that point of view. And to really have that kind of educated sympathy with the lives of others. Now again this is something we come into the world with. Psychologists have now found that babies less than a year old are able to take up the perspective of another person and do things, see things from that perspective. But it’s very narrow and usually people learn how to think about what their parents are thinking and maybe other family members but we need to extend that and develop it, and learn how the world looks from the point of view of minorities in our own culture, people outside our culture, and so on.
  • since we can’t go to all the places that we need to understand -- it’s accomplished by reading narratives, reading literature, drama, participating through the arts in the thought processes of another culture. So literature and the arts are the major ways we would develop and extend that capacity.
  • For many years, the leading model of development ... used by economists and international agencies measuring welfare was simply that for a country to develop means to increase [its] gross domestic product per capita. Now, in recent years, there has been a backlash to that because people feel that it just doesn’t ask enough about what goods are really doing for people, what can people really do and be.
  • so since 1990s the United Nations’ development program has produced annually what’s called a “Human Development Report” that looks at things like access to education, access to health care. In other words, a much richer menu of human chances and opportunities that people have. And at the theoretical end I’ve worked for about 20 years now with economist Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for economics. And we’ve developed this as account of -- so for us what it is for a country to do better is to enhance the set of capabilities meaning substantial opportunities that people have to lead meaningful, fruitful lives. And then I go on to focus on a certain core group of those capabilities that I think ought to be protected by constitutional law in every country.
  • Life; health; bodily integrity; the development of senses, imagination, and thought; the development of practical reason; opportunities to have meaningful affiliations both friendly and political with other people; the ability to have emotional health -- not to be in other words dominated by overwhelming fear and so on; the ability to have a productive relationship with the environment and the world of nature; the ability to play and have leisure time, which is something that I think people don’t think enough about; and then, finally, control over one’s material and social environment, some measure of control. Now of course, each of these is very abstract, and I specify them further. Although I also think that each country needs to finally specify them with its own particular circumstances in view.
  • when kids learn in a classroom that just makes them sit in a chair, well, they can take in something in their heads, but it doesn’t make them competent at negotiating in the world. And so starting, at least, with Jean Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century, people thought: “Well, if we really want people to be independent citizens in a democracy that means that we can’t have whole classes of people who don’t know how to do anything, who are just simply sitting there waiting to be waited on in practical matters.” And so the idea that children should participate in their practical environment came out of the initial democratizing tendencies that went running through the 18th century.
  • even countries who absolutely do not want that kind of engaged citizenry see that for the success of business these abilities are pretty important. Both Singapore and China have conducted mass education reforms over the last five years because they realized that their business cultures don’t have enough imagination and they also don’t have enough critical thinking, because you can have awfully corrupt business culture if no one is willing to say the unpleasant word or make a criticism.
  • So they have striven to introduce more critical thinking and more imagination into their curricula. But, of course, for them, they want to cordon it off -- they want to do it in the science classroom, in the business classroom, but not in the politics classroom. Well, we’ll see -- can they do that? Can they segment it that way? I think democratic thinking is awfully hard to segment as current events in the Middle East are showing us. It does have the tendency to spread.
  • so maybe the people in Singapore and China will not like the end result of what they tried to do or maybe the reform will just fail, which is equally likely -- I mean the educational reform.
  • if you really don’t want democracy, this is not the education for you. It had its origins in the ancient Athenian democracy which was a very, very strong participatory democracy and it is most at home in really true democracy, where our whole goal is to get each and every person involved and to get them thinking about things. So, of course, if politicians have ambivalence about that goal they may well not want this kind of education.
  • when we bring up children in the family or in the school, we are always engineering. I mean, there is no values-free form of education in the world. Even an education that just teaches you a list of facts has values built into it. Namely, it gives a negative value to imagination and to the critical faculties and a very high value to a kind of rote, technical competence. So, you can't avoid shaping children.
  • ncreasingly the child should be in control and should become free. And that's what the critical thinking is all about -- it's about promoting freedom as the child goes on. So, the end product should be an adult who is really thinking for him- or herself about the direction of society. But you don't get freedom just by saying, "Oh, you are free." Progressive educators that simply stopped teaching found out very quickly that that didn't produce freedom. Even some of the very extreme forms of progressive school where children were just allowed to say every day what it was they wanted to learn, they found that didn't give the child the kind of mastery of self and of the world that you really need to be a free person.
Weiye Loh

Wikileaks and the Long Haul « Clay Shirky - 0 views

www.shirky.com/...wikileaks-and-the-long-haul

Wikileaks Democracy Transparency

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy”*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state. Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities.
  • On the other hand, human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities. (If Aaron Bady’s analysis is correct, it is the damage and not the oversight that Wikileaks is designed to create.*)
  • we have a tension between two requirements for democratic statecraft, one that can’t be resolved, but can be brought to an acceptable equilibrium. Indeed, like the virtues of equality vs. liberty, or popular will vs. fundamental rights, it has to be brought into such an equilibrium for democratic statecraft not to be wrecked either by too much secrecy or too much transparency.
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  • As Tom Slee puts it, “Your answer to ‘what data should the government make public?’ depends not so much on what you think about data, but what you think about the government.”* My personal view is that there is too much secrecy in the current system, and that a corrective towards transparency is a good idea. I don’t, however, believe in total transparency, and even more importantly, I don’t think that independent actors who are subject to no checks or balances is a good idea in the long haul.
  • The practical history of politics, however, suggests that the periodic appearance of such unconstrained actors in the short haul is essential to increased democratization, not just of politics but of thought. We celebrate the printers of 16th century Amsterdam for making it impossible for the Catholic Church to constrain the output of the printing press to Church-approved books*, a challenge that helped usher in, among other things, the decentralization of scientific inquiry and the spread of politically seditious writings advocating democracy. This intellectual and political victory didn’t, however, mean that the printing press was then free of all constraints. Over time, a set of legal limitations around printing rose up, including restrictions on libel, the publication of trade secrets, and sedition. I don’t agree with all of these laws, but they were at least produced by some legal process.
  • I am conflicted about the right balance between the visibility required for counter-democracy and the need for private speech among international actors. Here’s what I’m not conflicted about: When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can’t get what they want.
  • The Unites States is — or should be — subject to the rule of law, which makes the extra-judicial pursuit of Wikileaks especially nauseating. (Calls for Julian’s assassination are even more nauseating.) It may be that what Julian has done is a crime. (I know him casually, but not well enough to vouch for his motivations, nor am I a lawyer.) In that case, the right answer is to bring the case to a trial.
  • Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: A Democracy Paradox in Studies of Science and Technology - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...dox-in-studies-of-science.html

Deliberation Democracy STS Science Technology

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • I am a co-author along with Eva Lövbrand and Silke Beck on a paper published in the current issue of Science, Technology and Human Values (which I also mentioned on this site last fall).  The paper is titled "A Democracy Paradox in Studies of Science and Technology," (it can also be found here in PDF) and it takes a close look at claims made by scholars who study science and technology that the governance of science and technology ought to be grounded in deliberation among experts and the general public. Political legitimacy, it is argued, derives from such deliberation. However, such claims are themselves almost universally grounded not in deliberation, but authority.  Hence the "democracy paradox."
  • Only when specifying and adhering to internally consistent criteria of legitimacy, will students of science and technology be able to make a convincing case for more deliberative governance of science and technology.For my part (not speaking for my co-authors), appeals to deliberative democracy by science studies scholars can not evade the paradox.  Instead, we must look to other conceptions of democracy to understand the legitimate roles of science and expertise in governance.
Jun Jie Tan

The Facebook Democracy: How Will it Affect You? - 2 views

http://mashable.com/2009/04/05/facebook-democracy/ Facebook adopted new governance documents based on users' input and votes in Apr 09. The company has seemingly let its users decide the direc...

Democracy

started by Jun Jie Tan on 16 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

In Europe, sharp criticism of US reaction to WikiLeaks - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.boston.com/...sm_of_us_reaction_to_wikileaks

Wikileaks Democracy Double Standard

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Washington’s fierce reaction to the flood of secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks displays imperial arrogance and hypocrisy, indicating a post-9/11 obsession with secrecy that contradicts American principles.
  • John Naughton, writing in the same British paper, deplored the attack on the openness of the Internet and the pressure on companies such as Amazon and eBay to evict the WikiLeaks site. “The response has been vicious, coordinated and potentially comprehensive,’’ he said, and presents a “delicious irony’’ that “it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamoring to shut WikiLeaks down.’’
  • A year ago, he noted, Clinton made a major speech about Internet freedom, interpreted as a rebuke to China’s cyberattack on Google. “Even in authoritarian countries,’’ she said, “information networks are helping people to discover new facts and making governments more accountable.’’ To Naughton now, “that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.’’
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  • The Russians seemed to take a special delight in tweaking Washington over its reaction to the leaks, suggesting the Americans are being hypocritical. “If it is a full-fledged democracy, then why have they put Assange away in jail? You call that democracy?’’ Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin said during a news briefing with the French prime minister, Francois Fillon.
  • Even The Financial Times Deutschland (independent of the English-language Financial Times), said that “the already damaged reputation of the United States will only be further tattered with Assange’s new martyr status.’’ It added that “the openly embraced hope of the US government that along with Assange, WikiLeaks will disappear from the scene, is questionable.’’
  • Assange is being hounded, the paper said, “even though no one can explain what crimes Assange allegedly committed with the publication of the secret documents, or why publication by WikiLeaks was an offense, and in The New York Times, it was not.’’
  • But Renaud Girard, a respected reporter for the center-right Le Figaro, said he was impressed by the generally high quality of the American diplomatic corps. “What is most fascinating is that we see no cynicism in US diplomacy,’’ he said. “They really believe in human rights in Africa and China and Russia and Asia. They really believe in democracy and human rights. People accuse the Americans of double standards all the time. But it’s not true here. If anything, the diplomats are almost naive.’
Ang Yao Zong

Remember "Negarakuku"? - 3 views

http://www.mrbrown.com/blog/2007/04/muar_rapper_on_.html http://mt.m2day.org/2008/content/view/13039/84/ The two links above talk about Wee Meng Chee, a Malaysian rapper who is currently pursuing...

democracy speech freedom sedition

started by Ang Yao Zong on 15 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Low Yunying

Pro-democracy activist placed on trial or political blogging - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

politics blogging

shared by Low Yunying on 30 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Low Yunying on 30 Sep 09
     
    This case study is dated back at 2001, when a pro-democracy activist in China was put on trial in western China for publishing political materials on the Web. Huang Qi was arrested after publishing articles commemorating the 1989 protests in Tiananmen square on his Web site, 6-4tianwang.com. He also uploaded information on his site about the democracy movement, Falun Gong and the independence movement in the northwestern Muslim region of Xinjiang. In fact, Huang Qi remains in detention (as reported by a news article in Feb2009). This brings us to the question of whether it is ethical for the State to curtail an individual's rights to freedom of expression. After all, he was merely publishing articles about an event that has already happened, and he should have the right to upload whatever he feels on his blog. There is also an issue of the violation of human rights as he has been detained for almost ten years and some have reported that he was beaten while in custody. Does the state have the right to intervene and lock the man up for close to a decade over a political blog post? Does the state have the right to stifle any opposing viewpoints or dissent on the internet? Should political views be allowed to aired or should they be moderated for the well-being of the society? After all, dissenting views could lead to bloody events in conflicts between opposing groups and the state. How much should the government intervene in the regulation of the internet? Where is the line to be drawn in terms of freedom of expression?
juliet huang

Government 2.0 - it's the community, stupid - 8 views

This article comments on the government use of the internet to comment and collabrate with the public. According to the author, efficient use of tools to interact with the public will create a "c...

started by juliet huang on 16 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

"Athens" on the Net - 2 views

The idea that the internet serves as a public space in Habermasian speak is too simplistic. The very fact that not everyone has access or know how to access/ fully utilize the internet in itself is...

democracy

started by jaime yeo on 16 Sep 09 1 follow-up, last by Weiye Loh on 16 Sep 09
YongTeck Lee

State 2.0: a new front end? - 3 views

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/state-2-0-a-new-front-end A paragraph in the article sums up what the article is about quite well: "Indeed, new problematics are emerging around online democr...

digital democracy

started by YongTeck Lee on 15 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Jude John

Democracy 2.0 Awaits an Upgrade - 3 views

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/world/americas/12iht-currents.html 1. "President Obama declared during the campaign that "we are the ones we've been waiting for." That messianic phrase held the ...

democrcacy technology

started by Jude John on 14 Sep 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

How facts backfire - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.boston.com/...how_facts_backfire

Democracy Facts Brain

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Jul 10 - Cached
  • a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Jul 10
     
    How facts backfire Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains By Joe Keohane July 11, 2010
Weiye Loh

Democracy's Laboratory: Are Science and Politics Interrelated?: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

Science Politics Democracy

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The myth of the scientific method as a series of neat and tidy steps from hypothesis and prediction to experiment and conclusion is busted once you go into a lab and observe the more haphazard and messy realities of how researchers feel their way toward discovery. So it is with liberal democracies, which almost never work out as planned but somehow progress ever closer to finding the right balance between individual liberty and social order. The constitutions of nations are grounded in the constitution of humanity, which science is best equipped to understand.
  • Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 10
     
    Democracy's Laboratory: Are Science and Politics Interrelated? Mixing science and politics is tricky but necessary for a functioning polity
Weiye Loh

What is the role of the state? | Martin Wolf's Exchange | FT.com - 0 views

blogs.ft.com/...what-is-the-role-of-the-state

Political Economy Politics State

shared by Weiye Loh on 11 Sep 10 - Cached
  • This question has concerned western thinkers at least since Plato (5th-4th century BCE). It has also concerned thinkers in other cultural traditions: Confucius (6th-5th century BCE); China’s legalist tradition; and India’s Kautilya (4th-3rd century BCE). The perspective here is that of the contemporary democratic west.
  • The core purpose of the state is protection. This view would be shared by everybody, except anarchists, who believe that the protective role of the state is unnecessary or, more precisely, that people can rely on purely voluntary arrangements.
  • Contemporary Somalia shows the horrors that can befall a stateless society. Yet horrors can also befall a society with an over-mighty state. It is evident, because it is the story of post-tribal humanity that the powers of the state can be abused for the benefit of those who control it.
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  • In his final book, Power and Prosperity, the late Mancur Olson argued that the state was a “stationary bandit”. A stationary bandit is better than a “roving bandit”, because the latter has no interest in developing the economy, while the former does. But it may not be much better, because those who control the state will seek to extract the surplus over subsistence generated by those under their control.
  • In the contemporary west, there are three protections against undue exploitation by the stationary bandit: exit, voice (on the first two of these, see this on Albert Hirschman) and restraint. By “exit”, I mean the possibility of escaping from the control of a given jurisdiction, by emigration, capital flight or some form of market exchange. By “voice”, I mean a degree of control over, the state, most obviously by voting. By “restraint”, I mean independent courts, division of powers, federalism and entrenched rights.
  • defining what a democratic state, viewed precisely as such a constrained protective arrangement, is entitled to do.
  • There exists a strand in classical liberal or, in contemporary US parlance, libertarian thought which believes the answer is to define the role of the state so narrowly and the rights of individuals so broadly that many political choices (the income tax or universal health care, for example) would be ruled out a priori. In other words, it seeks to abolish much of politics through constitutional restraints. I view this as a hopeless strategy, both intellectually and politically. It is hopeless intellectually, because the values people hold are many and divergent and some of these values do not merely allow, but demand, government protection of weak, vulnerable or unfortunate people. Moreover, such values are not “wrong”. The reality is that people hold many, often incompatible, core values. Libertarians argue that the only relevant wrong is coercion by the state. Others disagree and are entitled to do so. It is hopeless politically, because democracy necessitates debate among widely divergent opinions. Trying to rule out a vast range of values from the political sphere by constitutional means will fail. Under enough pressure, the constitution itself will be changed, via amendment or reinterpretation.
  • So what ought the protective role of the state to include? Again, in such a discussion, classical liberals would argue for the “night-watchman” role. The government’s responsibilities are limited to protecting individuals from coercion, fraud and theft and to defending the country from foreign aggression. Yet once one has accepted the legitimacy of using coercion (taxation) to provide the goods listed above, there is no reason in principle why one should not accept it for the provision of other goods that cannot be provided as well, or at all, by non-political means.
  • Those other measures would include addressing a range of externalities (e.g. pollution), providing information and supplying insurance against otherwise uninsurable risks, such as unemployment, spousal abandonment and so forth. The subsidisation or public provision of childcare and education is a way to promote equality of opportunity. The subsidisation or public provision of health insurance is a way to preserve life, unquestionably one of the purposes of the state. Safety standards are a way to protect people against the carelessness or malevolence of others or (more controversially) themselves. All these, then, are legitimate protective measures. The more complex the society and economy, the greater the range of the protections that will be sought.
  • What, then, are the objections to such actions? The answers might be: the proposed measures are ineffective, compared with what would happen in the absence of state intervention; the measures are unaffordable and might lead to state bankruptcy; the measures encourage irresponsible behaviour; and, at the limit, the measures restrict individual autonomy to an unacceptable degree. These are all, we should note, questions of consequences.
  • The vote is more evenly distributed than wealth and income. Thus, one would expect the tenor of democratic policymaking to be redistributive and so, indeed, it is. Those with wealth and income to protect will then make political power expensive to acquire and encourage potential supporters to focus on common enemies (inside and outside the country) and on cultural values. The more unequal are incomes and wealth and the more determined are the “haves” to avoid being compelled to support the “have-nots”, the more politics will take on such characteristics.
  • In the 1970s, the view that democracy would collapse under the weight of its excessive promises seemed to me disturbingly true. I am no longer convinced of this: as Adam Smith said, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. Moreover, the capacity for learning by democracies is greater than I had realised. The conservative movements of the 1980s were part of that learning. But they went too far in their confidence in market arrangements and their indifference to the social and political consequences of inequality. I would support state pensions, state-funded health insurance and state regulation of environmental and other externalities. I am happy to debate details. The ancient Athenians called someone who had a purely private life “idiotes”. This is, of course, the origin of our word “idiot”. Individual liberty does indeed matter. But it is not the only thing that matters. The market is a remarkable social institution. But it is far from perfect. Democratic politics can be destructive. But it is much better than the alternatives. Each of us has an obligation, as a citizen, to make politics work as well as he (or she) can and to embrace the debate over a wide range of difficult choices that this entails.
  • Weiye Loh on 11 Sep 10
     
    What is the role of the state?
Weiye Loh

Democracy's Laboratory: Are Science and Politics Interrelated?: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

Science Politics Democracy

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 10 - Cached
  • That science and politics are nonoverlapping magisteria (vide Stephen Jay Gould’s model separating science and religion) was long my position until I read Timothy Ferris’s new book The Science of Liberty (HarperCollins, 2010). Ferris, the best-selling author of such science classics as Coming of Age in the Milky Way and The Whole Shebang, has bravely ventured across the magisterial divide to argue that the scientific values of reason, empiricism and antiauthoritarianism are not the product of liberal democracy but the producers of it.
  • “The new government, like a scientific laboratory, was designed to accommodate an ongoing series of experiments, extending indefinitely into the future,” Ferris explains. “Nobody could anticipate what the results might be, so the government was structured, not to guide society toward a specified goal, but to sustain the experimental process itself.”
  • “Liberalism and science are methods, not ideologies. Both incorporate feedback loops through which actions (e.g., laws) can be evaluated to see whether they continue to meet with general approval. Neither science nor liberalism makes any doctrinaire claims beyond the efficacy of its respective methods—that is, that science obtains knowledge and that liberalism produces social orders generally acceptable to free peoples.”
  • Weiye Loh on 07 Sep 10
     
    Democracy's Laboratory: Are Science and Politics Interrelated? Mixing science and politics is tricky but necessary for a functioning polity By Michael Shermer   
Weiye Loh

Office of Science & Technology - Democracy's Open Secret - 0 views

www.ostina.org/...1471

Politics Science Expertise Democracy

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • there is a deeper issue here that spans political parties across nations:  a lack of recognition among policy makers of their dependence on experts in making wise decisions.  Experts do not, of course, determine how policy decisions ought to be made but they do add considerable value to wise decision making.
  • The deeper issue at work here is an open secret in the practice of democracy, and that is the fact that our elected leaders are chosen from among us, the people.  As such, politicians tend to reflect the views of the general public on many subjects - not just those subjects governed solely by political passions, but also those that are traditionally the province of experts.  Elected officials are not just a lot like us, they are us.
  • For example, perhaps foreshadowing contemporary US politics, in 1996 a freshman member of the US Congress proposed eliminating the US government's National Weather Service , declaring that the agency was not needed because "I get my weather from The Weather Channel."  Of course the weather informaton found on The Weather Channel comes from a sophisticated scientific and technological infrastructure built by the federal government over many decades which supports a wide range of economic activity, from agriculture to airlines, as well as from the private sector weather services.
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  • European politicians have their own blind spots at the interface of science and policy.  For instance, several years ago former German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel claimed rather implausibly that: "You can build 100 coal-fired power plants and don't have to have higher CO2 emissions."  His explanation was that Germany participates in emissions trading and this would necessarily limit carbon dioxide no matter how much was produced. Obviously, emissions trading cannot make the impossible possible.
  • We should expect policy makers to face difficulties when it comes to governance when it involves considerations of science, technology, and innovation for the simple reason that they are just like everyone else -- mostly ignorant about mostly everything.
  • in 2010, the US NSF reported that 28% of Americans and 34% of Europeans believed that the sun goes around the earth.  Similarly, 30% of Americans and 41% of Europeans believe that radioactivity results only from human activities.  It should not be so surprising when we learn that policy makers may share such perspectives.
  • A popular view is that more education about science and technology will lead to better decisions.  While education is, of course, important to a healthy democracy, it will never result in a populace (or their representatives) with expertise in everything.  
  • Achieving such heroic levels of expertise is not realistic for anyone.  Instead, we must rely on specialized experts to inform decision making. Just as you and I often need to consult with experts when dealing with our health, home repairs, finances, and other tasks, so too do policy makers need to tap into expertise in order to make good decisions.
  • it should be far less worrisome that the public or policy makers do not understand this or that information that experts may know well.  What should be of more concern is that policy makers appear to lack an understanding of how they can tap into expertise to inform decision making.  This situation is akin to flying blind. Specialized expertise typically does not compel particular decisions, but it does help to make decisions more informed.  This distinction lies behind Winston Churchill's oft-cited advice that science should be "on tap, but not on top." Effective governance does not depend upon philosopher kings in governments or in the populace, but rather on the use of effective mechanisms for bringing expertise into the political process.
  • It is the responsibility - even the special expertise - of policy makers to know how to use the instruments of government to bring experts into the process of governance. The troubling aspect of the statements and actions by the Gummers, Gabriels, and Bachmanns of the political world lies not in their lack of knowledge about science, but in their lack of knowledge about government.
Weiye Loh

Chinese City Builds Censorship-Free Internet Zone … For Foreigners | The Utop... - 0 views

utopianist.com/...e-internet-zone-for-foreigners

Censorship Internet China Capitalism Democracy

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The state-of-the-art data centers, meant to make Chongqing a big player in the cloud computing game, might attract business, but the locals certainly aren’t too happy about it [via IT World]: That has sparked an uproar among some Chinese Internet users, because the unfiltered Web access will be available only to foreign companies, according to the reports. People commenting on social-networking sites have slammed the zone as a throwback to the days of “No dogs and no Chinese allowed,”a reference to how local Chinese were prohibited in the early 20th century from entering certain foreigner communities
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Jun 11
     
    people keep assuming that the forces of globalization and capitalism will somehow politically transform China into a democracy. Surely the need for foreign businesses to work in China would force the Chinese government to do away with things like internet censorship? Hmm, not so much. The city of Chongqing has gotten around this problem by building a development zone with unrestricted internet access-for foreign businesses, that is.
Weiye Loh

Is Assange the "world-spirit embodied"? A Hegel scholar reports fro... - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...5%BEi%C5%BEekassange-troxy-gig

wikileaks Philosophy Open Data Open Government

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Although the atmosphere at the Troxy was very genial, and Žižek generally enthusiastic about WikiLeaks (as he was in the London Review of Books article he published about it), there was a distinct tension between the rather standard Enlightenment rhetoric employed by Assange (more facts, a more complete historical record, better educated journalists)  and the significantly more radical conclusions the philosopher was drawing. This is why - whilst it should no doubt be read in a similar light as Žižek’s own remarks on his position during the conversation (I feel now like that Stalinist commentator: the leader has spoken, I provide the deeper meaning) - the ventured analogy nevertheless contains a kernel of truth beyond its bombast: defining the emancipatory significance of phenomena should not be left to the actors alone.
  • in response to Goodman's initial question on the significance of the Iraq war logs, Assange primarily emphasized the concrete revelations WikiLeaks had provided. He mentioned the 400.000 cables leaked, 15.000 previously unreported deaths revealed, a video of an American helicopter mowing down civilians, and so on. In contrast, Žižek went far enough to say that even if WikiLeaks had not revealed a single new thing, it should be considered game-changing. Why? Because of the very way it functions. For the philosopher, our democracies not only have rules regarding what can be revealed, but also rules which regulate the transgression of those first rules (the independent press, NGOs, etc). The contention then is that WikiLeaks operates outside both these sets of rules, and that there is the source of its power.
  • the reply was firmly anchored in the key trope Žižek has championed since his first major work in English: that ideology in today's "post-ideological" world is not dead, but rather more powerful than ever - alive not so much on the level of knowledge but in the ways it structures social reality itself.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Žižek points out, the innocence of the accusers is anything but innocent; they decry the violence of WikiLeaks revelations, themselves oblivious to the military, economic, political and social framework of everyday violence that goes unmentioned in public discourse. The violence of leaks is on a formal level, and precisely this is at the root of the Slovene’s exclamation to Assange: “Yes, you are a terrorist, but by God, then what are they?”
  • WikiLeaks should not be seen as merely another chapter in investigative journalism and free flow of information, but a positive, subversive emancipatory force by virtue of the way it operates outside the system of secrets and allowed revelations. What then remains ahead is the hard task of keeping this subversive strength alive.
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11
     
     in response to Goodman's initial question on the significance of the Iraq war logs, Assange primarily emphasized the concrete revelations WikiLeaks had provided. He mentioned the 400.000 cables leaked, 15.000 previously unreported deaths revealed, a video of an American helicopter mowing down civilians, and so on. In contrast, Žižek went far enough to say that even if WikiLeaks had not revealed a single new thing, it should be considered game-changing. Why? Because of the very way it functions. For the philosopher, our democracies not only have rules regarding what can be revealed, but also rules which regulate the transgression of those first rules (the independent press, NGOs, etc). The contention then is that WikiLeaks operates outside both these sets of rules, and that there is the source of its power.
Weiye Loh

Open data, democracy and public sector reform - 0 views

practicalparticipation.co.uk/...report

Open Government Open Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 05 Jul 11 - Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 05 Jul 11
     
    Governments are increasingly making their data available online in standard formats and under licenses that permit the free re-use of data. The justifications advanced for this include claims regarding the economic potential of open government data (OGD), the potential for OGD to promote transparency and accountability of government and the role of OGD in supporting the reform and reshaping of public services. This paper takes a pragmatic mixed-methods approach to exploring uses of data from the UK national open government data portal, data.gov.uk, and identifies how the emerging practices of OGD use are developing. It sets out five 'processes' of data use, and describes a series of embedded cases of education OGD use, and use of public-spending OGD. Drawing upon quantitative and qualitative data it presents an outline account of the motivations driving different individuals to engage with open government data, and it identifies a range of connections between open government data use of processes of civic change. It argues that a "data for developers" narrative that assumes OGD use will primarily be mediated by technology developers is misplaced, and that whilst innovation-based routes to OGD-driven public sector reform are evident, the relationship between OGD and democracy is less clear. As strategic research it highlights a number of emerging policy issues for developing OGD provision and use, and makes a contribution towards theoretical understandings of OGD use in practice.
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