When Science Outpaces Ethics

Plus: A 'West Point for cops'

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What do you watch or read or see portrayed in the media that is most at odds with your own observations and personal experiences, whether at home, at work, in your dating or family life, or in any other area where your reality and portrayals by others seem incongruous?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

What happens when science advances in ways so hard to comprehend that our society’s ethical norms––and the ethical intuitions of many people––aren’t sophisticated enough to encompass them?

The question is brought to mind by a news item in The Guardian about a recent breakthrough in reproductive science:

Scientists have created synthetic human embryos using stem cells, in a groundbreaking advance that sidesteps the need for eggs or sperm. Scientists say these model embryos, which resemble those in the earliest stages of human development, could provide a crucial window on the impact of genetic disorders and the biological causes of recurrent miscarriage. However, the work also raises serious ethical and legal issues as the lab-grown entities fall outside current legislation in the UK and most other countries. The structures do not have a beating heart or the beginnings of a brain, but include cells that would typically go on to form the placenta, yolk sac and the embryo itself.

Perhaps an ethicist AI chatbot will supply us with answers in the future.

Let It Be

In National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke objects to Paul McCartney’s decision to use an old John Lennon recording and AI to make what McCartney calls “the last Beatles song.” Cooke writes:

Lennon and McCartney were great friends. They were also passionate enemies. And, like many creative duos, they fought like hell with one another over their work. We have no idea whether Lennon even wanted to release this demo recording, let alone in what manner he would have wanted it prepared for public consumption. Throughout his life, Lennon exhibited strong opinions on structure, production, instrumentation, harmony, and—in his later years—the sound of his own voice (that ethereal, delay-heavy “Lennon sound” you hear throughout his solo work was the product of a profound post-1967 distaste for his own singing).

Of all the people in the world, Paul McCartney probably has the best idea of how John would think. And yet, as the cornucopia of information we have about the Beatles’ canon amply demonstrates, McCartney’s tastes were often radically different from John’s. That despite this tension the two men managed to make it work for eight years does not accord to McCartney an open warrant to harvest “John’s voice from a ropy little bit of cassette,” to carve the extracted raw materials into his own image, to simulate with computers what was not there, and then to “print” the results under someone else’s byline.

He predicts many future instances of using AI to simulate the resurrection of dead artists.

Whither Portland?

In City Journal, Michael Totten explains why crime in the city gets so much media attention:

Portland is hardly the most dangerous city in America: the homicide rate in St. Louis is more than four times higher, with 65 murders per 100,000 people, compared with Portland’s 15 in 2022. Portland’s rate peaked at more than double the national average, but of all the cities with higher crime rates than Portland, only Chicago gets as many national headlines. That’s probably because Portland’s increase in crime was the worst in the country. No other city’s homicide rate rose so spectacularly. And unlike St. Louis, Baltimore, and other notorious hot spots, Portland was recently a destination city that touted its high quality of life as a reason to move there. Of late, though, rather than attracting new residents, Portland has actually lost population, either to the suburbs or out of state.

He goes on to argue that its residents may be turning things around:

Shootings and homicides exploded 300 percent between 2019 and 2022, robberies rose 50 percent in 2022 alone, vehicle thefts hit record highs, and work-order requests for graffiti removal shot up 500 percent between 2020 and 2022. The City of Roses suffered 413 shootings in 2019 but 1,306 in 2022 and nearly twice as many homicides as San Francisco, though Portland is only three-fourths its size. Meantime, statewide crime actually declined from 2019 to 2021.

The homelessness crisis also intensified. The slow-motion collapse of Oregon’s mental-health infrastructure, a dramatic surge of cheap and deadly fentanyl and a far more potent and addictive form of psychosis-inducing meth, and a crippling housing shortage led to the formation of more than 700 tent cities in residential neighborhoods and business districts across the city.

But while it’s too soon to declare that Portland’s troubles have passed, the worst may now be over. Despite ongoing woes, Portland looks and feels much better than it did in dystopian 2020. The riots stopped, and the crime wave seems to have peaked, with shootings down by nearly 40 percent and homicides down more than 50 percent in the early months of 2023. A sober mood shift has taken over the city. Voters passed a ballot measure to restructure city government, while the three newest elected officials on the city council are steering Portland in a different direction. The city, county, and state are taking steps to reverse the decline.

How to Improve Policing and Reduce Crime

Megan McArdle has an idea: establish a national academy for police officers. In The Washington Post, she writes:

A West Point for cops could serve as a research center for learning what works in policing, and as a place to transmit that information to new generations of officers, who can be attracted to the profession through a combination of free, high-quality education and opportunities for elite public service.

As a condition of receiving this education, recruits would promise to serve for eight years—as West Point officers do—on a major urban police force. The federal government could pay their salaries during that time, possibly including hazard pay for more difficult assignments. This would inject more federal money into policing and spread the lessons graduates have learned into police departments across the country.

A graduate program, something like the War Colleges, could also be established for mid-career and senior police officers. This would not only improve training but also create a new national network of elite officers through which best practices could be shared.

The Sexual Revolution, Feminism, and the Pill

Louise Perry is the author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century. The economist Bryan Caplan wrote a critical review of the book at his Substack. And Perry responded with a critical review of the review. I love too-rare back-and-forths like this, where two intellectuals are uncompromising in setting forth their unusual views, where there is a real clash of viewpoints, and where the conflict remains on the level of ideas. I always learn from such exchanges, especially when, as here, all involved keep their sense of humor.   

Meanwhile, UnHerd’s Kat Rosenfield is weighing in on “the contraception wars.” She writes:

Two things are true.

First: hormonal contraception has been unequivocally a tool of female empowerment. It gives women an unprecedented and invaluable level of control over their fertility, and, by extension, their lives. Second: the utility of the pill for women in general does not mean that it is right for every woman individually. And in the mad rush to celebrate hormonal contraception for the world-changing invention it is, some women have been silenced, and side-lined.

More on Kids, Smartphones, and Social Media

My colleague Kelli María Korducki opines on what the debate says about adults:

Those of us old enough to remember navigating jobs and social lives before everyone carried around a tiny pocket computer are wont to idealize that now-improbable-seeming before time … Nostalgia colors perspective, and all but certainly shapes widespread hypotheses of the clear and present dangers young people face. Because of this, adults across generations, and in every day and age, have demonstrated a knack for neglecting to apply the lessons of prior eras’ panics to the present moment. Today’s Gen X and Millennial parents fretting about their children’s social-media use may or may not be comforted to learn that, according to some studies, the overconsumption of TV and video games that marked many of their late-20th-century childhoods likely had a comparable impact on their tender, developing brains—for better and for worse.

After a decade of work and hundreds of studies on the relationship between mental health and social media, my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany writes, the science isn’t as settled as many Americans seem to think:

Social media’s effects seem to depend a lot on the person using it. It may play a different role for different demographics, and the role it plays may also change for people at different stages of life. It surely doesn’t affect everyone in the same way … If social media isn’t bad for all teenage girls, we need to know which ones it is bad for, and what makes a specific girl susceptible to the risks. Some girls are suffering, and social media is exacerbating their pain. Some girls use the internet to find community that they don’t have offline, or to express creative impulses and questions about their identity that their families aren’t open to. We also need to know which aspects of social media are riskiest.

Is it harmful because it cuts into sleep hours or IRL friend time and exposure to sunlight, or is it the envy-inducing images that invite comparison and self-doubt? Is it bullying we should worry most about, or the more ambient dread of being liked but not liked enough?

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Provocation of the Week

In an Aeon essay on experimental data in quantum physics that seems consistent with the possibility of multiple worlds, Timothy Andersen argues:

The most powerful reason why the multiverse has infiltrated culture is because people are storytellers. Research shows that this tendency is universal and appears in early childhood. It is written in our DNA. Implicit in storytelling is the modification of details such that one possible world becomes another. Such narratives are essential to how our species has understood the world for millennia. Meta-stories containing conflicting possible worlds simultaneously become not only plausible but essential to how we interpret our perceptions: personal, nonlinear and qualitative, rather than objective, linear and quantitative.

The human mind even creates its own multiverses through dreams, where alternative realities appear. Who hasn’t dreamed of a loved one acting in ways they never would, or living in a house that they’ve never seen before? Fundamentally, the human mind has evolved to imagine multiple possible futures branching out from the present. Whether this is actually the case is an open question that physics still must resolve, if it ever can.

While the many-worlds interpretation has at times been overused, the pervasiveness of the multiverse in culture is a shift with benefits. There is more than one way to see the world, and every conscious mind may create its own version of reality. In a world awash with data, hard facts have become difficult to come by, and everyone needs to have their minds open to the possibilities that what they believe or have been told is only one of many possible worlds.

On the other hand, when we start longing to live in one of those alternative realities, it can make us desperately unhappy. This is the curse of imagining all these branching pathways in our lives. As the American novelist James Branch Cabell wrote in The Silver Stallion (1926): ‘The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.’ What greater despair than to believe you are living the wrong life?

That’s all for today––see you next week.

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