Ethics, Technology, and Society

So it’s UNESCO’s World Philosophy Day, and I’m suggesting you celebrate it by taking some time to think.

WTF?, you say.

The intention here is not to suggest that you don’t think. Rather it’s to remind you of what John Stuart Mill said so long ago about the frailty of our capacity to think well–use it, or lose it, was the gist of his message.

We have good reason to believe that he was right. Consider a question Lawrence Lessig recently posed during an interview for this week’s Spark – CBC podcast:

“How do we deal with a world where we need to convey information for an attention span that’s the size of a tweet, when some issues actually take more than a tweet to understand?”

He was referring to a 9-page article he recently published in The New Republic, entitled Against Transparency – the Perils of Openness in Government. The article has generated a huge response, primarily from people wondering why anyone would be against transparency in government.

In response to the response Lessig has been doing the media circuit explaining that his central thesis, which is only fully realised on or around page nine of the article, is clearly NOT against transparency in government.

Why the confusion? He says its partly because people’s ability to glean the relevant (if subtle) details from large sets of data is weak. The response to his article is proving to be a case in point.

So on a day devoted to philosophy, a pursuit that relies on necessarily long arguments in the pursuit of answers to some important questions–how should we act?; how do we know what we know?; what is the best way to organize society?–I would encourage anyone to flex the mind by taking some time to read a long article and think about its implications in life.

If John Stuart Mill was right, you’ll need to if you hope to make the world a better place.

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