False consciousness / alienation / Transparency 2.0 Forum

[everything_bagel]

snip

[fats provolone]

BL, thank you for your posts, I have enjoyed them. On a very basic level you seem to respond to the simple observations of false consciousness/alienation (or, more specifically, the feeling that lays a foundation for those concepts) with optimism (you seek to build larger frameworks, find a broader range of examples to confirm hypotheses, etc). Why do you think you respond that way and not more pessimistically(anomie and/or resignation and/or self-destruction)?

My guess is because it's contrary to the masses (on TLS), which allows BL to come off as edgy

optimism is edgy edgy? now ive heard everything.

[ratfukr]

[youtube]9P8gUNAVSt8[/youtube]

[OrangeBowl]

This thread needs more Alasdair MacIntyre.

[ratfukr]

Skimming After Virtue and the MacIntyre Wiki page. I'm actually way basic and never studied this, but Arendt's agon and ideas of "excellence" seem like a more appropriate synthesis of Aristotelian virtue and Marx for the purposes of this particular website. More broadly, MacIntyre seems on point in that harder social science methodology seems like it kicks the shit out of the way the law constructs doctrines about justice - court's adversarial form seems inefficient and piecemeal (see the Samuelson piece on Coase, and the Cournot duopoly myth vs Pareto efficiency in the aggregate) and ultimately exploitable. Maybe law students should read Kuhn and not just Dworkin, and I should read Lakatos. I fall back on analogizing to Althusser aspiring to scientism, wanting rigor but eschewing formalism, and think of Marx's descriptive tendencies and relative lack of moralizing as a positive. If Christians want Aquinas in there to make this whole thing work for them, though, I guess MacIntyre would probably be a good read? I know fuck all

[utahraptor]

I know fuck all

thanks

[los blancos]

There is no more brutally sisyphean task in the world than an endless and horrendously mismanaged doc review.

[J3987]

Somewhat interesting wrt admissions/"elite theory"

[ratfukr]

http://duncankennedy.net/documents/Phot ... uction.pdf

I want to read this book. I guess I will. Critical legal studies seems interesting even though the Socratic method seems like it at least wants to pretend to be contemptuous of shortcuts. I wonder if theory is still a lifehack for first year exams. I have to say that this thread feels a little redundant, considering:



Still, even if critique has to be synthesized from scratch, sucks to have to start from Derrida and Foucault instead of Althusser, Arendt, Pikkety, and a little bit of Deleuze. Maybe a big bit of Deleuze if you're starting here from Kennedy, whom I've never read. Anyway, now that everything's translated and Marxian economics is getting fun again, and plus with *waves hands* the internet existing, 2015 and taking the piss out of ossifying Coaseans and various MAF ideologues pretending to professionalism should be way more entertaining than whenever this came out, right?

e: I don't know if I care for Kennedy's identity politics prescription, personally, because something something Deleuze and becoming-minor and moving through walls, or else Judith Butler and *authentic self*, but it's a start
e2: Way too tired to do this right at the moment but will come back and pick at it if nobody wants to in the meantime:
http://duncankennedy.net/documents/Phot ... %20Ed..pdf

[ratfukr]

Posting this classic. Playing the hits. Emphasis added for Chicken Soup for the 0L Soul purposes

Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.

So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html

[ratfukr]

on the subject of student activism and the possibility of some collective bargaining power with law school administration, thoughts on the recent Ferguson/Garner trauma solicitations and identity and person of color politics? I appreciate the fundamental differences between these issues and the source of their political will/manifestation, but if properly engaged, the current energy could broaden to student mobilization against the system more generally // it wouldn't be the first time progressive movements operated in tandem, e.g. vietnam/indochina wars & civil rights mov't, proto-feminist & paris commune, ect.

see https://columbialawcoalition.wordpress. ... -of-color/
https://harvardlawcoalition.wordpress.com
https://georgetownlawcoalition.wordpres ... -students/

(if there's the student-driven political capital to effect "demands" re: postponing exams & promoting diverse spaces, which has been demonstrated, could there be for debt/tuition, increased transparency, ect. or just wishful thinking)

Well, OK. Maybe I'd like to see more faculty appointments of openly Angela Davis-style intersectional researchers, but also law professors who do papers with economists who explore inequitable wealth distribution and policy. Fund fellowships in social research and figure out how to keep "law and sociology" from getting pigeonholed under "critical legal studies" and marginalized this time. Also, ban >1800 hour firms from OCI and let people apply themselves if they want those jobs. Or figure out how pro bono works firm-to-firm and let people know when they bid or something, like calories on menus, don't you people have Cass Sunstein there? Ask him how to get lawyers back into the public sphere responsibly. I know fuck all about that whole thing and I'm making things up. Maybe HLS is already good at "public interest" and everyone else needs to step up their game. I have no idea.

But yes, I mean, the shit this last month is just insane and I don't see how the homogenization of the legal community on spreadsheets - in terms of both ethnic and life backgrounds, and by tying a training in the law with a debt load that compels indentured maintenance of pooled capital's interests - could possibly fail to exacerbate the underlying issues. False consciousness, alienation, crisis of democracy and capitalism, etc.

Oh. Right. I didn't really know about any of this:
http://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10589/Minow
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/bridge/

Insane RC fail so I think I'll hold off on addressing the irony of the failure of what identity politics have become in this instance until this comes in the mail. These are the pitfalls of tossing off these posts in real time without having read very much on the subjects in question.


http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/minow-myself.html

Credit to various parties for demanding a statement, and doing all of the things cited in the original letter. Still, it has to be just excruciating to read tone policing of form e-mails from a "Coalition" as in the appendices after spending a career writing this type of material:



Like, a crit is the dean of HLS, and all anyone wants to ask for is exam-related? You can't give people what they don't want. I think I will continue to speculate that students asking why MLK didn't get a permit to march in Birmingham is in no small part a function of the LSAT/GPA spreadsheet, cultural homogeneity of a more damning variety, the "jobs numbers" reification, and the absurdity of insane levels of indenture to study alongside maladapted striver dorks with no exposure to the real world (if that reputation has truth to it), all driving the best people away from the whole process.

This piece by Northwestern Law's dean makes more sense now, and probably still understates second-order effects of USNWR on the lifeworld:


http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... id=1069141

[Businesslady]

[Businesslady]

There are some issues that we’ll need to unpack. When we talk about “transparency”, a core question is transparent to whom? My thesis is that status quo finance must be opaque to beneficial investors, that is to the innumerable people who must be persuaded to bear some portion of the risk of aggregate investment when their informed preference would be to defensively hoard. That does not mean that finance must be opaque to, say, regulators, who themselves participate in the con by assuring people it is “safe to get in the water”. (Ultimately it cannot be made safe.) In theory, we could design a system that is opaque to the broad public, but transparent to regulators who police the intermediaries. That is the architecture that our present system strives for. But the many practical problems of this architecture are widely known: the capital allocators are more numerous than the regulators, and as a matter of practice, they tend to be much better remunerated (a fact which itself is a kind of regulatory failure). If bankers wish to invest recklessly (or simply to loot) and it boils down to a cat-and-mouse competition, the bankers are likely to win. The potential spoils from looting are very large, large enough that bankers can offer to share the spoils with regulators or the politicians who control them, leading to revolving doors and see-no-evil regulation. Regulators are supposed to stand in as agents of people who’ve ceded control of capital to opaque intermediaries, ultimately the broad public. But it is difficult to prevent them from being “captured” — socially, ideologically, and financially — by the groups that they are supposed to regulate. Regulators themselves often prefer opacity and complexity for reasons analogous to those that sucker end-investors. Regulators don’t like to fight with their friends and future benefactors, and they fear the operational and political headaches that would come with reorganizing large banks. But they don’t like to be put in a position where misbehavior is plainly before them, so inaction would be unmistakably corrupt. They find it a great relief to be persuaded that “sophisticated risk management” models, rating agencies, and “market discipline” mean they don’t have to look very hard or see very much. It seems better for everyone. Everyone gets along and feels fine. Until, oops.

All that said, to the degree that we can maintain high quality supervision, regulators who pierce the veil of opacity, prevent looting, and ensure high quality capital allocation are a clear positive. If we posit very good regulators, there is no tradeoff at all between supervision and effective capital mobilization. On the contrary, opaque finance is unlikely to deploy capital effectively without it, since, with actual capital providers blind, there is no one else to provide intermediaries with incentives to invest carefully rather than steal. An opaque financial system is an argument for vigilant regulation, not deregulation. If regulators allow themselves to be blinded by complexity and opacity, if financial intermediaries are permitted to arrange themselves so that legitimate practices and looting are difficult for regulators to distinguish, that becomes an argument for very punitive regulation whenever plain misbehavior is discovered, because as the probability of detection diminishes the cost must increase to maintain any hope of effective deterrence.

I am pretty pessimistic about this architecture. I think that high quality financial regulation is very, very difficult to provide and maintain. But for as long as we are stuck with opaque finance, we have to work at it. There are some pretty obvious things we should be doing. It is much easier for regulators to supervise and hold to account smaller, simpler banks than huge, interconnected behemoths. Banks should not be permitted to arrange themselves in ways that are opaque to regulators, and where the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate behavior is fuzzy, regulators should err on the side of conservatism. “Shadow banking” must either be made regulable, or else prohibited. Outright fraud should be aggressively sought, and when found aggressively pursued. Opaque finance is by its nature “criminogenic”, to use Bill Black’s appropriate term. We need some disinfectant to stand-in for the missing sunlight. But it’s hard to get right. If regulation will be very intensive, we need regulators who are themselves good capital allocators, who are capable of designing incentives that discriminate between high-quality investment and cost-shifting gambles. If all we get is “tough” regulation that makes it frightening for intermediaries to accept even productive risks, the whole purpose of opaque finance will be thwarted. Capital mobilized in bulk from the general public will be stalled one level up, and we won’t get the continuous investment-at-scale that opaque finance is supposed to engender. “Good” opaque finance is fragile and difficult to maintain, but we haven’t invented an alternative.

I think we need to pay a great deal more attention to culture and ideology. Part of what has made opaque finance particularly destructive is a culture, in banking and other elite professions, that conflates self-interest and virtue. “What the market will bear” is not a sufficient statistic for ones social contribution. Sometimes virtue and pay are inversely correlated. Really! People have always been greedy, but bankers have sometimes understood that they are entrusted with other people’s wealth, and that this fact imposes obligations as well as opportunities. That this wealth is coaxed deceptively into their care ought increase the standard to which they hold themselves. If stolen resources are placed into your hands, you have a duty to steward those resources carefully until they can be returned to their owners, even if there are other uses you would find more remunerative. Bankers’ adversarial view of regulation, their clear delight in treating legal constraint as an obstacle to overcome rather than a standard to aspire to, is perverse. Yes, bankers are in the business of mobilizing capital, but they are also in the business of regulating the allocation of capital. That’s right: bankers themselves are regulators, it is a core part of their job that should be central to their culture. Obviously, one cannot create culture by fiat. The big meanie in me can’t help but point out that what you can do by fiat is dismember organizations with clearly deficient cultures.

But don’t my paeans to the role of opacity in finance place arrows in the quiver of those seeking to preserve and justify financial predation? Perhaps. People who benefit from corrupt arrangements will make every possible argument to rationalize and preserve their positions. But the fact that ones views might be misused doesn’t mean we should self-censor. I was rude, in the previous post, to assert categorically that my argument “is true”, but I do think that it is. My tone was sardonic and bleak, and perhaps it ought not to have been, but these ideas have always been “out there”, and it’s best we acknowledge and deal with them. Nearly every proposed financial regulation is greeted with stern warnings that it will cause “credit to contract”. It is worth trying to understand the mechanics of real-world capital mobilization, and its role in underwriting prosperity (or perhaps militarism). I don’t think we have to fear talking about this stuff. The proposition that looting and misdeployment of capital serve the public good is easy to debunk. The proposition that there are arrangements which serve useful purposes but also create space for corruption is not controversial. We need to understand how institutions actually function and how they are abused if we are to have any hope of minimizing their pathologies while preserving their benefits. And we have to understand the purposes our institutions actually serve if we are to have any hope of replacing very problematic arrangements with something better.

[los blancos]

bump

[thesealocust]

I want to play in this thread, but it is going to take a very long time to read, much less process, all of this. Hopefully my seething contempt for the legal system and legal education will help propel me.

Also, what's the deal with posting blocks of text in images?

[smaug]

I want to play in this thread, but it is going to take a very long time to read, much less process, all of this. Hopefully my seething contempt for the legal system and legal education will help propel me.

Also, what's the deal with posting blocks of text in images?

If you read this thread the joke is on you.

[thesealocust]

I want to play in this thread, but it is going to take a very long time to read, much less process, all of this. Hopefully my seething contempt for the legal system and legal education will help propel me.

Also, what's the deal with posting blocks of text in images?

If you read this thread the joke is on you.

;-;

but I like ratfukr, and I saw this on the first page while skimming to try and figure out wtf was going on:

Dear trepidatious on-topic posters and 0Ls: there actually is a conversation to be had here. Do not be intimidated by citations to Theory. Try to actually read and understand what is being said, and ask questions if you don't.

Although maybe 'sympathy for manifestos and their writers' should be treated as a warning sign?