Kids, peas, and the sorites problem

My son is a picky eater, and not a fan of vegetables, so in order to encourage him to eat a wider variety of food, he has a "super eating" food list. If he eats a food he's not keen on, he gets it written on his list. When he has 20 instances on the list, he gets a (non-food) treat of some sort.

Generally, the list technique is the only thing that has helped him eat a wider variety of foods, but being a child, he does like to push me on it. And today he unknowingly presented me with the Sorites problem with his peas.

Me: "Here's your tea. I've given you some peas; I know you're not all that keen on them, so if you eat all of them they'll count for your list."
Him: "Peas? Ugh! Do I really have to eat all of them?"
Me: "Yes please. Eat all of them."
Him: "But if I left a tiny one then would you still write it on my list? One little pea won't make a difference will it?"
Me: "Hmm, well I suppose if it really is only one pea that you're leaving then yes I guess I'd still count it for your list."
Him: "Because a pea is only small."
Me: "I suppose so..."
Him: "So if I leave two peas then that would be OK too wouldn't it?"
Me: "Well why would you be leaving two peas? Eat them."
Him: "But you said one pea doesn't make a difference, so two peas doesn't make a difference either."
Me: "Eat your peas please. I'll let you leave one, but not two."
Him: "Hmph. Well that doesn't seem fair."

He ate all but one of the peas, and I counted it for his list, but I was laughing a little to myself about being presented with the Sorites problem by my little philosopher in the making.

But next time, I should probably just stick to "Eat all your peas, and don't leave any"!

Driverless cars, the trolley problem, and tyranny of the majority

Today BBC News ran an article entitled Driverless cars: who should die in a crash? The news story has come about because researchers at MIT have conducted a study analysing more than 40 million responses to an online 'trolley problem'-style ethical survey.

The trolley problem is a classic philosophy problem (which, by chance, I taught today to a class of Year 5 pupils). The problem is this:

A train is hurtling along a track; and on the track ahead are five innocent people who will die if you do nothing. You can't stop the train (its brakes have failed) but you can pull a lever to switch it onto another track - where it will kill just one innocent person. Should you pull the lever or not?

My 'Trolley Problem' powerpoint for the Year 5 pupils.
Several of them said it would matter if some of the people were
criminals; no one said the people's skin colour or gender mattered.

Most people (and indeed the pupils I taught today) say that one should pull the lever based on purely utilitarian grounds - this can be phrased in the words of Spock from Star Trek: "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". In other words, although it's bad for one person to die, it's even worse for five people to die, so pull the lever and kill one.

It's OK for us to hypothesise about what we'd do in this very unlikely scenario, because it's just a thought experiment: it's not real. But driverless cars are forcing us to reconsider this problem not as a hypothetical possibility, but as a very real possibility. If a driverless car is in a no-win situation where its brakes have failed and someone will die, who should it be? The passengers, the toddler on the zebra crossing, or the old ladies on the pavement?

Well, the people at MIT designed a survey / experiment ("The Moral Machine") to find out people's responses to these very sorts of questions. So far so good you might think, but here comes the troubling part: BBC News quotes the MIT people as saying:

"Before we allow our cars to make ethical decisions, we need to have a global conversation to express our preferences to the companies that will design moral algorithms, and to the policymakers that will regulate them."

Now although this falls short of their suggesting that we use the results of the survey to inform the moral programming of driverless cars, it certainly seems to be in that ballpark. But this, I maintain, is a dangerous and morally troubling step towards eugenics-by-driverless-car. Why? Because in the Moral Machine survey, people's choices about who should die and who should be saved are based on judgments about factors such as age, gender, class, weight, and how law-abiding the person is.

Screenshot from the Moral Machine survey

An optional section of the survey involves moving sliders according to how important you think that particular factor is. For example, you can say that saving higher class over lower class is really important, and saving the young over the old is fairly important. One factor which didn't feature in the survey was race/ethnicity/religion. The people at MIT probably thought it was just too controversial to see whether people would save a black man rather than a white man, or a Muslim woman rather than a Christian woman - but these are probably factors which would yield interesting and distasteful results --but no less interesting and no more distasteful than the actual results of the survey, which show that people choose to save:

• Women more than men
• The young more than the old
• Fit people more than fat people
• Middle class more than lower class

So why am I troubled by this? Well, driverless cars are on their way, whether we like it or not. And they will be faced with genuine moral decisions, whether we like it or not. And they will need some moral guidance or 'rules' to follow in order to make those split-second decisions about whether the fat young person or the thin old person should die. Yes, a moral system programmed into the cars will be absolutely essential - however....

Basing the moral system of a driverless car on the results of a survey - however large - is a huge issue. Even if we ignore the fact that there is no barrier to the same person taking the survey more than once (I took it twice) and even if we ignore the fact that details of the pictures in the survey aren't immediately clear (in my first time around, I didn't notice that some people were crossing the road on the red man, nor that some of the stick men were supposed to represent homeless people) there is still a massive problem in the form of the tyranny of the majority. 

John Stuart Mill (I love that guy!) in On Liberty wrote that we must take steps to guard against the tyranny of the majority - this is when a large group of people get their way simply because they are greater in number than a small group of people. Now if you ask me, the majority getting their way is unproblematic if we've taken a vote about whether we should have chocolate ice cream or strawberry ice cream - or about whether we should visit a castle or the beach tomorrow... but the majority verdict really does become tyrannical when the issues at stake are the welfare, lives and rights of people. And these are the very things that are at stake with these driverless cars trolley-problem-style dilemmas. The results of the Moral Machine survey show that the majority prioritise the young over the old, and the rich over the poor - and suppose a similar survey also shows the majority prioritise able-bodied people over disabled people, and white people over brown people. This alone is disturbing enough, but if we then proceed to program the moral system of the majority into driverless cars, and set them free on our public highways - well, it's the tyranny of the majority at its most foul, and a recipe for eugenics by carcrash.

We simply cannot allow the vulgar prejudices of the majority to inform the moral systems of driverless cars. Driverless cars need a way to determine which action to take, of course, but this should be based on non-prejudicial factors such as the likelihood of surviving the crash, the number of people, and the location of the impact: the age, gender, class (etc.) of people should not - ever - be a factor in decision-making about who lives and who dies.

Being a woman in Philosophy

The blog Being a Woman in Philosophy (BAWIP) is a well-known collaborative blog; it details some very interesting and eye-opening (not to mention eye-watering) events which have happened to women in the field of philosophy. It's just appalling that people have had to go through these experiences, and it's genuinely alarming if these experiences are commonplace for women in philosophy.

But are they commonplace? I don't know for sure, but I do know that my experience of being a woman in philosophy is entirely at odds with what is on the BAWIP blog.

I was a philosophy undergrad in the late 90s, and I've taught A Level philosophy for about 8 years, and now I have been doing an MA in philosophy at university for the past 2 years; I'm just starting my PhD. I've been a woman throughout, I might add. I don't believe I have ever experience
d any discrimination, harassment, a chilly climate, or anything of the sort. Let's disregard my years of teaching A levels since that's not comparing like with like vis-a-vis the BAWIP blog; let me just consider my experiences as a woman in philosophy as a student at university.

"Yes, I'm female. No, I don't want you to kiss me."

I don't recall every detail of my undergrad degree at Keele 20 years ago, but given that I don't remember any sexual harassment or discrimination, I'm willing to say that none happened (to me). The majority of my professors were men, but there were also some women, and the lectures and seminars which were led by a woman were not qualitatively different from those led by a man. I was outnumbered by males in all my classes, but I didn't care. Males might have "dominated the discussion" in virtue of there being more of them in the room, but I was someone who spoke frequently in seminars, and I never felt any discrepancy or discrimination based on sex or gender. In fact, I have nothing but great memories of my Philosophy degree at Keele; studying there was an absolute pleasure and they were some of the best years of my life.

My experiences as an MA student - and now a PhD student - at Nottingham have not been noticeably different. Yes, I'm almost always outnumbered by men, but this does not bother me. Actually, I quite like being outnumbered by men and I often feel more comfortable in a room full of men than a room full of women. Why? Hard to say. As a kid I was a tomboy, and as an adolescent and young adult, I had interests in activities which happened to be male-dominated. I did sports and activities where I was sometimes the only female among 10-20 males, and I never felt threatened by any of them; they were my friends. So I've always been quite comfortable with being outnumbered by men. From my teenage years onwards, the guys I was surrounded by sometimes made sexual jokes or innuendos, "locker room talk" and the occasional sexist comment, but I either laughed along with them, rolled my eyes and sighed, or gave as good as I got; I never felt uncomfortable or harassed. Sometimes my female friends and I would talk about sex, make sexual innuendos or sexist jokes, so what's the difference? None, as far as I can see. So those were my experiences of being a woman in sport and recreation.

Back to being a woman in philosophy... Yes I'm outnumbered, and no it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I've had contact (viz. conversations) with probably around 70 men and 15 women working or studying in Philosophy over the past 2 years, and every one without exception* has been normal, honest, decent, kind, and I haven't detected the faintest whiff of sexism. Ever. I've been to seminars; I've attended lectures; I've had private conversations in their offices; I've spoken to them less formally over lunch; we've emailed each other... and each and every man has behaved, as far as I can tell, with the utmost integrity, respect, warmth and professionalism. I consider several of them to be my friends. Just to be clear, it is not that I have noticed sexism but been OK with it; it is that I have never noticed any sexism in philosophy. (This differs from my teenage experiences in male-dominated sports and activities, where sexism occurred but I lived with it.)

*Actually there was a man who seemed hostile towards men and women alike, but he only stuck around for a few weeks.

So, my experiences seem fundamentally different from those collected on the Being a Woman in Philosophy blog. There are a few ways to explain the difference:
1. Different institutions;
2. Different intersections;
3. Different foci (confirmation bias);
4. Cherry-picking.
Let's consider each of these.

Different institutions

It's possible that the institutions mentioned on the BAWIP blog are at the opposite end of the spectrum to mine. Perhaps there really is abundant sexism in other universities, and none whatsoever in mine. But this seems highly implausible: it would be remarkably good luck if  sexism is rife but I just so happened to have attended two non-sexist institutions in different areas of the country 20 years apart. It's also implausible because I have had plenty of contact with people from outside my own institution, and indeed from different countries, and all of them, I would say, have behaved just as impeccably as the men in my university. So let's dismiss this idea as simply unconvincing.

Different intersections

A second possible explanation is that the experiences on the blog are from women who are discriminated against not (just) because they are women, but because they are working-class, transgender, people of colour, disabled, or some other reason, whereas I am a white woman who doesn't tick any other boxes where discrimination often occurs. So in many ways, as a white cisgender, able bodied person I am in the overwhelming majority, whereas others may not be. It may be that men's attitudes towards me is markedly different from their attitude towards black women, Asian women, disabled women, trans women, and so on. This is possible, but it seems highly implausible that the pleasant and welcoming male philosophers I know would suddenly change when a woman of colour, trans, disabled or whatever appears on the scene. One reason why I am convinced that this change in behaviour doesn't occur is that I have been in lectures and conferences where there have been women of colour and other minorities in the audience, and a white man at the front, and I would say none of the men have behaved inappropriately or in a sexist way. But hey, I suppose I have to admit that it's possible that some men might have Jeckyl-and-Hyde personalities whereby they behave impeccably when in a public setting, but offensively when in private. I just don't believe that this is true of the men I know. And even if it is true, then the difficulty is not specifically being a woman in philosophy, but being a trans woman in philosophy, a woman of colour in philosophy, and so on.

Different foci (confirmation bias)

It is possible that the women on BAWIP and I simply focus on different  things. I don't believe I'm in a sexist environment, and so any sexist comments that are said simply don't make it onto my radar, whereas someone who does believe they are in a sexist environment would pick up on even tiny instances of sexism. This seems like quite a plausible possibility to me. But is it that I'm getting lots of false negatives, or that the women on the Being a Woman in Philosophy blog are getting lots of false positives?

Perhaps 'false' is an inappropriate term, and there is no mind-independent fact about whether x is offensive or sexist; perhaps x is offensive iff someone believes it's offensive? (That's an issue I'll explore another time.) It does seem possible that people who are already feeling discriminated against, harassed or in a 'chilly climate' due to their sex would be more attuned to noticing sexist comments; this is a confirmation bias, and I'm sure you don't need me to tell you how confirmation bias can disrupt our objectivity. if these women are having a confirmation bias, then the incidents may be out of proportion or misinterpreted. ...But I am also susceptible to confirmation bias, and so perhaps I really am oblivious to sexism right in front of me? I don't think I am oblivious, but that's the nature of being oblivious, I suppose.

If I think really hard, I can recall experiences which, with a fair amount of spin, could be framed as sexist. For example: people accidentally referring to the author of a paper as 'he' even though it was written by a woman; people using male pronouns when talking about a generic philosopher; using male pronouns in written work. I wouldn't call any of these sexism; the only reason I mention them is that I've heard other people describe them as sexist. I'm not convinced that they are sexist - in fact, I've done all of these things myself. Does this mean that the reason I don't perceive the problem is because I'm part of the problem? I don't think it does, but again, perhaps I am just oblivious - and oblivious to the fact that I'm oblivious. Perhaps my definition of sexism is just different to others' (although many, but not all of the experiences detailed on the BAWIP blog are, even by my reckoning, quite clear examples of blatant and unacceptable sexism and sexual harassment).

So I think it's really quite plausible and likely that other women notice sexism where I don't notice it; whether the sexism genuinely exists or not seems something of a grey area. I've definitely had conversations (outside of philosophy) where it was clear to me that A was being disdainful towards B, yet in private discussions with B, it became evident that B didn't notice or didn't believe that A was being disdainful. Without further information, it's not clear whether B or I was correct about the behaviour of A. But this sort of occurrence could plausibly explain why my experience of being a woman in philosophy differs so fundamentally from those described on the BAWIP blog. But I think that confirmation bias alone doesn't explain the sheer volume of instances described on the BAWIP blog.

Cherry-picking

I think cherry-picking is a fair criticism to be made of a blog which collects sexist experiences from women in philosophy, and gathers them together all in one place. If every woman who works in philosophy for say 30 years experiences a single instance of sexism and shares it to the blog, the blog would have reams and reams of material - thousands and thousands of examples. But would one experience per woman per career truly constitute a pervasive sexist climate in philosophy? I don't believe that it would. That's not to mitigate or belittle the genuine and sometimes harrowing experiences detailed on the blog, but we need to remember that they have been cherry-picked because they are so sexist. When I first read the blog, I actually thought they were all the experiences of one woman (I was horrified!) - but they aren't. They are the collected anecdotes of goodness knows how many women. That doesn't make them any less disturbing or any more acceptable, but if they are set against a backdrop of almost universally good experiences of women working alongside men, they lose some of their potency.

Look! A red apple!

Cherry-picking is such a problematic venture when trying to fairly represent the experiences of an entire group. I'm not wholly clear on whether the BAWIP blog is aiming to fairly represent the experiences of all women in philosophy, or whether it is merely trying to gather together some of the worst problems with gender inequality. If the latter, then my argument here has little weight to it, but the title of the blog, Being a Woman in Philosophy implies the former - that it speaks for all women, and shows what it is like to be a woman in philosophy. If it really is intending to show the daily reality for all or even most women in philosophy, then I think it probably fails. If I had no idea about what it was like to be a woman in philosophy, and I read the blog to find out, I don't think it would give me an accurate picture of the reality for most women. I know for sure that it does not describe my experiences at all; it's at the other end of the spectrum. So I think cherry-picking goes a long way towards explaining why my experiences are so different from those detailed on the blog.

The repercussions and the future

Do some men in philosophy make occasional sexist remarks or actions? Yeah, some probably do. But the vast, vast majority of men in philosophy that I have met - and men outside of philosophy for that matter - are kind, decent, friendly, professional, and not sexist.

The BAWIP blog may inadvertently be contributing to the very problem it seeks to eradicate: gender imbalance and gender inequality. Suppose that a 17-year old girl is considering studying philosophy for her degree, and suppose that a female MA student is considering doing a PhD in philosophy, and suppose that a female PhD student is considering following a career as an academic philosopher - and that all three of these women read the BAWIP blog to find out what it's "really" like to be a woman working in philosophy. It's plausible to think that some such women will read the blog, and run a mile. Why would any sensible woman want to enter into a career which is so horrendously sexist, where women are frequent victims of sexual harassment and even sexual violence? The BAWIP blog probably puts at least some young women off studying philosophy, and puts some women off a career in philosophy; this will only contribute to the under-representation of women in philosophy. Under-representation of a particular group is a recipe for discrimination, and so it continues. This is not a foregone certainty, but I think the blog may put some women off a career which they could otherwise have been well-suited to... and if it does, that's quite sad.

Of course, some people will argue that there is something to be gained from making any acts of bigotry and harassment public; that in making them public, we are better able to guard against them. I can see why people find such an argument appealing, but I am not wholly convinced by it. If one experiences harassment, discrimination or bigotry, one should absolutely report it to the Head of Department if not the police, but I think there is little to be gained from going public (ish) on a blog.

For my own case, I will continue to expect and look for the best in the men (and women) around me, and I won't try to add spin and reinterpret every action as if it's one motivated by sexism. I won't gather together all the tiny minutiae of times when someone referred to a philosopher as 'he' by accident, or didn't include "enough" women on the reading list for a module. I haven't seen any sexism until now, and I doubt I will see any in the near future. If that means I am happy in ignorance, then I am content indeed to be happy in ignorance.

Writing - or writing up?

I've been working on my PhD for about 2 weeks now. I've bought some subject-related books (about care, AI, and the robotic revolution) and I've bought 3 books about PhD research. The books I've bought are:

• How to write a thesis - Rowena Murray 
• Authoring a PhD - Patrick Dunleavy
• Writing your thesis - Paul Oliver

...and of course I've chatted to numerous students who are currently studying for - or about to start studying for - their doctorate. And something which has come up both in the books and when chatting to other students is this thing called "writing up". I admit I haven't read the above books from cover to cover, so it's possible that they will solve the mystery for me. But I am, at the moment, at a loss: I just don't see what people mean by 'writing up' as though it is something fundamentally different from writing or editing. I've started to wonder whether others work in a different (better?) way than the way I work.

Typically, this is how I would write something; it's the approach I've used to write textbooks, it's how I wrote all my MA essays, including the dissertation, and it's the approach I intend to use to write my PhD thesis:

1. Have an idea and make some handwritten notes in my notebook
2. Make more substantial notes / a plan on the computer (eg a 500 word plan of the steps my argument will take)
3. Read some relevant articles and make notes on the PDFs
4. Transfer some quotes / arguments to my essay to support my argument or as something to argue against (and edit my argument so as to agree or disagree with the literature)
5. Refine my question and argument by writing more, and deleting less useful parts
6. Repeat steps 3-5 a few times
7. Write introduction and conclusion
8. Decide that my essay is almost finished, and proofread for typos, formatting, and other small errors
9. Repeat step 8 several times until I can read through it without making any corrections
10. It's finished!

Which, if any, of these steps is 'writing up'? It seems to me that none of them are. Sure, some steps involve writing, but the study texts and PhD students talk as though 'writing up' is something distinct from mere writing. For example, I've heard PhD students say things like "I'm in my third year now, so I've done all the work; now I'm just doing the writing up" or "I'm allowing myself six months for writing up" and I find myself wondering: if they 'write up' in their final year, what have been doing the rest of the time? Reading I presume, but then does this mean that they read for 2.5 years without doing any writing, and then do all their writing in one go? Who knows?

Perhaps one day in my PhD journey I'll fathom the difference
between writing and editing, and writing 'up'.

I'm two weeks in and I have written about 3000 words so far. It's not amazing; it's not polished; it will probably be unrecognisable if it makes it into the finished thesis, having gone through several edits and re-edits - or it might not make it into the finished thesis at all. But I have done some writing (and some reading) and I will keep adding to my writing, improving what I've done and adding clarifications and detail, until it is done. If that's how I work (and it is how I work!) then it seems that I won't be doing any 'writing up' at all. 

Perhaps 'writing up' is more relevant to non-philosophical subjects (xphi notwithstanding), where a PhD involves a literature review, an explanation of methodology, results gathered and interpreted, and then conclusions drawn? Perhaps in such disciplines one spends a lot of time reading and explaining literature (without much argument of their own), collecting and analysing data, and then the 'writing up' is something that can (only?) be done afterwards, to draw together all these different threads and create a finished piece?

The thing is that I've dabbled in xphi (a piece of MA coursework I wrote about trustworthiness) and I was writing throughout. I wrote my argument and methodology, and a tentative interpretation of early results as I went along: I didn't just gather the data and then 'write up' my work as a separate process. This meant that once all the results were in, I only needed to edit and tweak my interpretation of the results rather than write it from scratch, meaning that there was no distinct time when I 'wrote up' my essay. I guess maybe my approach wasn't best practice, or maybe there are some disciplines that simply can't do things the way I did my Xphi study?

So it seems to me that there are only these two possibilities:

EITHER:

• Writing a Philosophy thesis is fundamentally different from other PhD theses

OR

• The way I work is fundamentally different from the way other students work

Perhaps I am displaying a woeful naïvety, and over the next year or two I'll have some sort of 'writing up epiphany' whereupon I'll realise what writing up entails... or perhaps I will do things my own way, only to discover all too late that my work is shoddy because I merely wrote it and edited it and proofread it, but I never wrote it 'up'. Because despite my having pondered this for the last week or so, I still cannot fathom how 'writing up' is a thing in itself, distinct from writing and editing.