Consensus Theory Quotes

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means,

This just gets worse and worse," Rob Pierre sighed as he skimmed Leonard Boardman's synopsis of his latest gleanings from the Solarian League reporters covering the PRH. "How can one person—one person, Oscar!—do this much damage? She's like some damned elemental force of nature!" "Harrington?" Oscar Saint-Just quirked an eyebrow and snorted harshly at Pierre's nodded confirmation. "She's just happened to be in the right places—or the wrong ones, I suppose, from our perspective—for the last, oh, ten years or so. That's the official consensus from my analysts, at least. The other theory, which seems to have been gaining a broader following of late, is that she's in league with the Devil.

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers. To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!

The results show how unreliable peer consensus can be, even when it is a peer consensus of highly intellectual people, if those people share a very similar vision of the world and treat its conclusions as axioms, rather than as hypotheses that need to be checked against facts.

It is the question that is also asked by modern political theory: Can politics accept truth as a structural category? Or must truth, as something unattainable, be relegated to the subjective sphere, its place taken by an attempt to build peace and justice using whatever instruments are available to power? By relying on truth, does not politics, in view of the impossibility of attaining consensus on truth, make itself a tool of particular traditions that in reality are merely forms of holding on to power? And yet, on the other hand, what happens when truth counts for nothing? What kind of justice is then possible? Must there not be common criteria that guarantee real justice for all—criteria that are independent of the arbitrariness of changing opinions and powerful lobbies? Is it not true that the great dictatorships were fed by the power of the ideological lie and that only truth was capable of bringing freedom?

we find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge, and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.

Longino argues that in order to be able to distinguish rationality from irrationality we should take the social group as our basic unit. Science is rational to the extent that it chooses theories from a diverse pool of options reflecting different points of view, and makes its choice via a critical dialogue that reaches consensus without coercion. Diversity in the ideas in the pool is facilitated by diversity in the backgrounds of those participating in the discussion. Epistemology becomes a field that tries to distinguish good community-level procedures from bad ones.

Conspiracy theorists and fringe groups may hold individually coherent theories, but there is no true consensus, just the assumption of consensus. If they hung out together, they might catch on to that, but since they rarely do, they can each keep their individual theories and still assume they have the backing of a tribe.

For me, the characteristic features of a mystical and therefore untrustworthy, theory are that it is not refutable, that it appeals to authority, that it relies heavily on anecdote, that it makes a virtue of consensus (look how many people believe like me!), and that it takes the moral high ground. You will notice that this applies to most religions.

When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty.

The generic concept of capital without which economists cannot do their work has no measurable counterpart among material objects; it reflects the entrepreneurial appraisal of such objects. Beer barrels and blast furnaces, harbour installations and hotel-room furniture are capital not by virtue of their physical properties but by virtue of their economic functions. Something is capital because the market, the consensus of entrepreneurial minds, regards it as capable of yielding an income. This does not mean that the phenomena of capital cannot be comprehended by clear and unambiguous concepts. The stock of capital used by society does not present a picture of chaos. Its arrangement is not arbitrary. There is some order in it.

[Asked by an audience member at a public Q&A session] Considering that atheism cannot possibly have any sense of 'absolute morality', would it not then be an irrational leap of faith – which atheists themselves so harshly condemn – for an atheist to decide between right and wrong? [Dawkins] Absolute morality...the absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include, what, stoning people for adultery? Death for apostasy? [...] These are all things which are religiously-based absolute moralities. I don't think I want an absolute morality; I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed, and based on – you could almost say intelligent design. [...] If you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people – among 21st century people – we don't believe in slavery anymore; we believe in equality of women; we believe in being gentle; we believe in being kind to animals...these are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Koranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time; through a consensus of reasoning, sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the 'good bits' in religious scriptures, you have to cherry-pick. You search your way through the Bible or the Koran, and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality – and you say, look at that! That's religion!...and you leave out all the horrible bits. And you say, 'Oh, we don't believe that anymore, we've grown out of that.' Well, of course we've grown out of it. We've grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion.

Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty. It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care. All Republicans want to do is beat the team playing the Giants. They aren’t voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans. Their role is to cheer and fund their team and trash-talk whatever team is on the other side. This removes any of the seeming contradiction of having spent years supporting principles like free trade and personal responsibility to suddenly stop and support the opposite. Think of those principles like players on a team. You cheered for them when they were on your team, but then management fired them or traded them to another team, so of course you aren’t for them anymore. If your team suddenly decides to focus on running instead of passing, no fan cares—as long as the team wins. Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days. It’s the crazy person who lunges at the ref and jumps over seats to fight the other team’s fans who is cheered by his fellow fans as he is led away on the jumbotron. What is the forum in which the key issues of the day are discussed? Talk radio and the television shows sponsored by the team, like Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity.

Barack Obama contradicts the image they have in their head for what a President looks like and sounds like, and it unsettles them on a subconscious level. And then somebody presents an answer to why they feel uncomfortable. He's not from here. He wasn't born in this country, he was born in Kenya. It doesn't matter that you or I can disprove that theory six ways to Sunday. There's a part of their brains that feels relieved, because that lie gives them a sense of order. They aren't bad people for feeling unsettled by a black President. They aren't racist. They're just smart enough to see through the ruse. And that's when things get very dangerous for us.

The social nature of anti-Semitic beliefs is substantiated by the fact that dur­ing the late nineteenth century, most Germans had little, if any, contact with Jews. Jews made up only about 1% of the total German population (Goldhagen, 1996). Because of the general anti-Semitic social representation associated with Volkstum, many Jews had left Germany for safer havens elsewhere. Thus, most of what people knew (or thought they knew) about Jews was based on social consensus, not actual experience. As Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory argues, social reality becomes paramount when physical reality provides few, if any, cues upon which one can base an opinion.

Yet because the foundations of our political philosophies and constitutions were elaborated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is still a tendency to distinguish sharply between politics and technology, the one supposedly based on rights, the other on knowledge. Much political theory argues that consensus can be achieved through the democratic exercise of those rights. In reality, political consensus is largely shaped by the available technological form of life rather than rational deliberation. But today most technological choices are privately made and are protected from public involvement by property rights and technocratic ideology. What can be done to reverse the tide? The

Political economist and sociologist Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self. One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another. Our image of Homo sapiens underlies our everyday practice and culture; it shapes the way we treat one another as well as how we subjectively experience ourselves. In Western societies, the Judeo-Christian image of humankind—whether you are a believer or not—has secured a minimal moral consensus in everyday life. It has been a major factor in social cohesion. Now that the neurosciences have irrevocably dissolved the Judeo-Christian image of a human being as containing an immortal spark of the divine, we are beginning to realize that they have not substituted anything that could hold society together and provide a common ground for shared moral intuitions and values. An anthropological and ethical vacuum may well follow on the heels of neuroscientific findings. This is a dangerous situation. One potential scenario is that long before neuroscientists and philosophers have settled any of the perennial issues—for example, the nature of the self, the freedom of the will, the relationship between mind and brain, or what makes a person a person—a vulgar materialism might take hold. More and more people will start telling themselves: “I don’t understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio- robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I’ve seen through the game.

Two predominant strategies characterize reactions to the unfolding environmental and social breakdowns evident in climate change, political paralysis and corruption, spreading poverty, and the failures of mainstream institutions of education, health care, government, and business: “muddling through” and “fighting back.” Muddling through is the strategy that characterizes most of us in the rich northern countries. It embraces a combination of working to preserve the status quo combined with an almost hypnotic fascination with wondrous new technologies that, so the belief goes, will solve our problems. Fighting back, as is evident in the vocal protests of millions of people around the world opposed to the “Washington consensus” view of globalization, combines a longing for an earlier social and moral order with anger at having lost control over our future.

In the nouveau roman of Robbe-Grillet there is an attempt at a more or less Copernican change in the relation between the paradigm and the text. In Camus the counter-pointing is less doctrinaire; in Dostoevsky there is no evidence of any theoretical stand at all, simply rich originality within or without, as it chances, normal expectations. All these are novels which most of us would agree (and it is by a consensus of this kind only that these matters, quite rightly, are determined) to be at least very good. They represent in varying degrees that falsification of simple expectations as to the structure of a future which constitutes peripeteia. We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. But unless we are extremely naive, as some apocalyptic sects still are, we do not ask that they progress towards that end precisely as we have been given to believe. In fact we should expect only the most trivial work to conform to pre-existent types. It is essential to the drift of all these talks that what I call the scepticism of the clerisy operates in the person of the reader as a demand for constantly changing, constantly more subtle, relationships between a fiction and the paradigms, and that this expectation enables a writer much inventive scope as he works to meet and transcend it. The presence of such paradigms in fictions may be necessary-that is a point I shall be discussing later--but if the fictions satisfy the clerisy, the paradigms will be to a varying but always great extent attenuated or obscured. The pressure of reality on us is always varying, as Stevens might have said: the fictions must change, or if they are fixed, the interpretations must change. Since we continue to 'prescribe laws to nature'--Kant's phrase, and we do--we shall continue to have a relation with the paradigms, but we shall change them to make them go on working. If we cannot break free of them, we must make sense of them.

According to Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one’s “cultural worldview”—that would be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us—explains “individuals’ beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual characteristic.”16 More powerfully, that is, than age, ethnicity, education, or party affiliation. The Yale researchers explain that people with strong “egalitarian” and “communitarian” worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power) overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely, those with strong “hierarchical” and “individualistic” worldviews (marked by opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly reject the scientific consensus.17 The evidence is striking. Among the segment of the U.S. population that displays the strongest “hierarchical” views, only 11 percent rate climate change as a “high risk,” compared with 69 percent of the segment displaying the strongest “egalitarian” views.18 Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight correlation between “worldview” and acceptance of climate science to “cultural cognition,” the process by which all of us—regardless of political leanings—filter new information in ways that will protect our “preferred vision of the good society.” If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.19 As Kahan explained in Nature, “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.” In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore, leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see among those who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered up the link between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is marshaled to disprove their theories, it doesn’t matter to these crusaders—it’s just the system covering up for itself.20 This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate issue today. As

Oligarchy: Rule by the few, usually the richest One Percent. In Aristotle’s political theory, oligarchy is the stage into which democracy evolves, and which ends up becoming a hereditary aristocracy. “The essence of oligarchic rule,” wrote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life ... A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors ... Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.” The word “oligarchy” has been applied to Russia’s kleptocrats who obtained natural resources and other assets under Boris Yeltsin, most notoriously in the 1994-1996 “bank loans for shares” insider deals. It also applies to Latin American and other client oligarchies that concentrate wealth in the financial and propertied class at the top of the pyramid. However, U.S. media vocabulary defines any country as a democracy as long as it supports the Washington Consensus and U.S. diplomacy.

The two hit it off well, because de Broglie was trying, like Einstein, to see if there were ways that the causality and certainty of classical physics could be saved. He had been working on what he called “the theory of the double solution,” which he hoped would provide a classical basis for wave mechanics. “The indeterminist school, whose adherents were mainly young and intransigent, met my theory with cold disapproval,” de Broglie recalled. Einstein, on the other hand, appreciated de Broglie’s efforts, and he rode the train with him to Paris on his way back to Berlin. At the Gare du Nord they had a farewell talk on the platform. Einstein told de Broglie that all scientific theories, leaving aside their mathematical expressions, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description “that even a child could understand them.” And what could be less simple, Einstein continued, than the purely statistical interpretation of wave mechanics! “Carry on,” he told de Broglie as they parted at the station. “You are on the right track!” But he wasn’t. By 1928, a consensus had formed that quantum mechanics was correct, and de Broglie relented and adopted that view. “Einstein, however, stuck to his guns and continued to insist that the purely statistical interpretation of wave mechanics could not possibly be complete,” de Broglie recalled, with some reverence, years later.

Changing what we think is always a sticky process, especially when it comes to religion. When new information becomes available, we cringe under an orthodox mindset, particularly when we challenge ideas and beliefs that have been “set in stone” for decades. Thomas Kuhn coined the term paradigm shift to represent this often-painful transition to a new way of thinking in science. He argued that “normal science” represented a consensus of thought among scientists when certain precepts were taken as truths during a given period. He believed that when new information emerges, old ideas clash with new ones, causing a crisis. Once the basic truths are challenged, the crisis ends in either revolution (where the information provides new understanding) or dismissal (where the information is rejected as unsound). The information age that we live in today has likely surprised all of us as members of the LDS Church at one time or another as we encounter new ideas that revise or even contradict our previous understanding of various aspects of Church history and teachings. This experience is similar to that of the Copernican Revolution, which Kuhn uses as one of his primary examples to illustrate how a paradigm shift works. Using similar instruments and comparable celestial data as those before them, Copernicus and others revolutionized the heavens by describing the earth as orbiting the sun (heliocentric) rather than the sun as orbiting the earth (geocentric). Because the geocentric model was so ingrained in the popular (and scientific!) understanding, the new, heliocentric idea was almost impossible to grasp. Paradigm shifts also occur in religion and particularly within Mormonism. One major difference between Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift and the changes that occur within Mormonism lies in the fact that Mormonism privileges personal revelation, which is something that cannot be institutionally implemented or decreed (unlike a scientific law). Regular members have varying degrees of religious experience, knowledge, and understanding dependent upon many factors (but, importantly, not “faithfulness” or “worthiness,” or so forth). When members are faced with new information, the experience of processing that information may occur only privately. As such, different members can have distinct experiences with and reactions to the new information they receive. This short preface uses the example of seer stones to examine the idea of how new information enters into the lives of average Mormons. We have all seen or know of friends or family who experience a crisis of faith upon learning new information about the Church, its members, and our history. Perhaps there are those reading who have undergone this difficult and unsettling experience. Anyone who has felt overwhelmed at the continual emergence of new information understands the gravity of these massive paradigm shifts and the potentially significant impact they can have on our lives. By looking at just one example, this preface will provide a helpful way to think about new information and how to deal with it when it arrives.

When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community,” future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in a piece which formed the basis for what we now know as the “right to privacy,” it “destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.” Brandeis’s words reflected some of the darkness of Kierkegaard’s worries from fifty years earlier and foretold some of that sullying paranoia that was still to come fifty years in the future. Thiel had read this article at Stanford. Many law students do. Most regard it as another piece of the puzzle that makes up American constitutional legal theory. But Peter believed it. He venerated privacy, in creating space for weirdos and the politically incorrect to do what they do. Because he believed that’s where progress came from. Imagine for a second that you’re the kind of deranged individual who starts companies. You’ve created cryptocurrencies designed to replace the U.S. monetary system that somehow turned into a business that helps people sell Beanie Babies and laser pointers over the internet and ends up being worth billions of dollars. Where others saw science fiction, you’ve always seen opportunities—for real, legitimate business. You’re the kind of person who is a libertarian before that word had any kind of social respectability. You’re a conservative at Stanford. You’re the person who likes Ayn Rand and thinks she’s something more than an author teenage boys like to read. You were driven to entrepreneurship because it was a safe space from consensus, and from convention. How do you respond to social shaming? You hate it. How do you respond to petulant blogs implying there is something wrong with you for being a gay person who isn’t public about his sexuality? Well, that’s the question now, isn’t it?

Reliable senses shared across all normal humans can be expected to deliver consensus. But it is also possible that we could have wide agreement without reliability; we might all be deluded in the same way. Some philosophers have thought that color vision is like this. Colors are not really "out there" in the world, even if we all experience them that way.

The Positive School is characterized by a consensus perspective. All the theories developed under its mantle assume the existence of a core set of values in society that can be used to determine and treat deviance. Positivists did not question the validity of their categories of harmful acts or the desirability of treating people. In fact, their assumption of consensus was so strong that they rarely ever questioned their own actions, even when “exterminating” groups of people designated as socially harmful. Other than the consensus perspective, the wide range of positivist theories makes any attempt at categorizing them very difficult. Positivist theories can be either structural or processual, so no definitive classification is possible. However, we can state that sociological theories have, as a rule, been structurally oriented and macrotheoretical, while biological and psychological theories have been processual and microtheoretical. Summary The work of the Positive School, diverse as it was, represented the first real concern with studying the behavior of the criminal. As Rafter (2006) explains, before Lombroso, crime was studied only by metaphysicians, moralists, and penologists. His work turned the field into a truly biosocial science. Embracing the scientific method, positivists took a deterministic stance toward behavior and left behind the Classical School’s insistence that humans are rational beings with free will. In the process, the notion of punishment for deterrence began to make less sense. If an individual’s behavior was not predicated on rational decisions, then how could that individual be deterred? The thing to do, obviously, was to find those factors that cause the criminal behavior and remove (or treat) them. Further, the ability to predict which individuals would be likely to become criminal and to treat them before they could harm themselves and society would be valuable in creating a better society.

claSSIfIcatIon of the School The Positive School is characterized by a consensus perspective. All the theories developed under its mantle assume the existence of a core set of values in society that can be used to determine and treat deviance. Positivists did not question the validity of their categories of harmful acts or the desirability of treating people. In fact, their assumption of consensus was so strong that they rarely ever questioned their own actions, even when “exterminating” groups of people designated as socially harmful. Other than the consensus perspective, the wide range of positivist theories makes any attempt at categorizing them very difficult. Positivist theories can be either structural or processual, so no definitive classification is possible. However, we can state that sociological theories have, as a rule, been structurally oriented and macrotheoretical, while biological and psychological theories have been processual and microtheoretical. Summary The work of the Positive School, diverse as it was, represented the first real concern with studying the behavior of the criminal. As Rafter (2006) explains, before Lombroso, crime was studied only by metaphysicians, moralists, and penologists. His work turned the field into a truly biosocial science. Embracing the scientific method, positivists took a deterministic stance toward behavior and left behind the Classical School’s insistence that humans are rational beings with free will. In the process, the notion of punishment for deterrence began to make less sense. If an individual’s behavior was not predicated on rational decisions, then how could that individual be deterred? The thing to do, obviously, was to find those factors that cause the criminal behavior and remove (or treat) them. Further, the ability to predict which individuals would be likely to become criminal and to treat them before they could harm themselves and society would be valuable in creating a better society.

Chapter 3•The Positive School claSSIfIcatIon of the School The Positive School is characterized by a consensus perspective. All the theories developed under its mantle assume the existence of a core set of values in society that can be used to determine and treat deviance. Positivists did not question the validity of their categories of harmful acts or the desirability of treating people. In fact, their assumption of consensus was so strong that they rarely ever questioned their own actions, even when “exterminating” groups of people designated as socially harmful. Other than the consensus perspective, the wide range of positivist theories makes any attempt at categorizing them very difficult. Positivist theories can be either structural or processual, so no definitive classification is possible. However, we can state that sociological theories have, as a rule, been structurally oriented and macrotheoretical, while biological and psychological theories have been processual and microtheoretical. Summary The work of the Positive School, diverse as it was, represented the first real concern with studying the behavior of the criminal. As Rafter (2006) explains, before Lombroso, crime was studied only by metaphysicians, moralists, and penologists. His work turned the field into a truly biosocial science. Embracing the scientific method, positivists took a deterministic stance toward behavior and left behind the Classical School’s insistence that humans are rational beings with free will. In the process, the notion of punishment for deterrence began to make less sense. If an individual’s behavior was not predicated on rational decisions, then how could that individual be deterred? The thing to do, obviously, was to find those factors that cause the criminal behavior and remove (or treat) them. Further, the ability to predict which individuals would be likely to become criminal and to treat them before they could harm themselves and society would be valuable in creating a better society.

The violence [Gewalt] of positivity that derives from overproduction, overachievement, and overcommunication is no longer “viral.” Immunology offers no way of approaching the phenomenon. Rejection occurring in response to excess positivity does not amount to immunological defense, but to digestive-neuronal abreaction and refusal. Likewise, exhaustion, fatigue, and suffocation—when too much exists—do not constitute immunological reactions. These phenomena concern neuronal power, which is not viral because it does not derive from immunological negativity. Baudrillard’s theory of power [Gewalt] is riddled with leaps of argument and vague definitions because it attempts to describe the violence of positivity—or, in other words, the violence of the Same when no Otherness is involved—in immunological terms. Thus he writes: The violence of networks and the virtual is viral: it is the violence of benign extermination, operating at the genetic and communicational level; a violence of consensus. . . . A viral violence in the sense that it does not operate head-on, but by contiguity, contagion, and chain reaction, its aim being the loss of all our immunities. And also in the sense that, contrary to the historical violence of negation, this virus operates hyperpositively, like cancerous cells, through endless proliferation, excrescence, and metastases. Between virtuality and virality, there is a kind of complicity.

Today, the number of individuals killed by sanctions actually rivals and in some cases surpasses those killed as a result of American military intervention. Yet the use of sanctions as a tool is puzzling from a strategic perspective, given the academic consensus that they do not work

Blockchains are possible because of consensus protocols – sets of rules that determine what kinds of blocks can become part of the chain and thus the “truth.” These consensus protocols are designed to resist malicious tampering up to a certain security bound. The blockchains we focus on currently use the proof of work (PoW) consensus protocol, which relies on a computationally and energy intensive lottery to determine which block to add. The participants agree that the longest chain of blocks is the truth. If attackers want to make a longer chain that contains malicious transactions, they must outpace all the computational work of the entire rest of the network. In theory, they would need most of the network power (“hash rate”) to accomplish this – hence, the famous 51 percent attack being the boundary of PoW security. Luckily, it is extraordinarily difficult for any actor, even an entire country, to amass this much network power on the most widely used blockchains, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.

The weight of evidence now leans heavily against the theory.

I did a study, called Men, that I’m hoping to make into a film. It’s about testosterone and how it acts in homogenized groups of male leadership. It’s about looking at what happens when you just have men at the fore of the political, financial, religious and cultural systems of the world. Historically, these systems were-and let’s be honest, still are-run by men: mostly white men. The continuation of this could be the end of us, because it’s one of the reasons we’ve had such intractability around climate change. In a closed system of male-dominated leadership, men’s testosterone and cortisol levels rise, which produces a really negative cascade of effects. It produces an acute focus on short-term threats and a very long-lens focus on long-term threats: so terrorism feels very, very immediate, but climate change-which is much more likely to be the bigger catastrophe-is put off. Men also fire dopamine and serotonin when they engage in conflict, so in these situations they exhibit much more risk-taking behavior. Women have somewhat of a different leadership style, so when you inject a tipping point of 30 per cent women into a ruling system of men, the entire group changes biochemically-communication, collaboration and consensus-building becomes more possible. My big theory is that, if more women were involved in the leadership of the world, in every country, we might see less war and more action on some of the direst threats. There are studies that bear this theory out; the countries that have the most progressive policies toward women generally have more women in office and in business. These countries also have the highest gross domestic products, they have the highest happiness indices and they have the lowest incidences of war. The countries that have the most repressive policies towards women are in endless cycles of war and tend to be doing very, very poorly.

Following from this, it is not accurate to say that until the Enlightenment, there was an untroubled consensus to read Gen 1 as six ordinary days. An unbroken stream of pre-Enlightenment exegesis of Gen 1 felt free to interpret the days as other than normal (although “day-age” models, strictly speaking, did not emerge until the age of science). It may not have been the majority opinion, but an important minority of influential theologians throughout the ancient and medieval period deviated from literal interpretation. Therefore, attributing nonliteral exegesis simply to the church’s compromise with Enlightenment science does an injustice to complexities in the history of interpretation.

The global economy is collapsing, and we can't rely on the government to bail us out. They've "shut down" until they can reach a consensus on a hundred separate topics on their plate, and the government hasn't agreed on much since the Declaration of Independence was penned.

When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty. It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care.

While there was a general consensus that I was now America’s public enemy number one, there was considerable debate about who I was working for. Each channel had a coterie of experts discussing this, and every last one of them had a different conclusion, all of which were wrong. Within fifteen minutes, I was accused of being connected to six different extremist terrorist groups, twelve hostile foreign governments, and three crackpot conspiracy theories, one of which involved the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and NASA. Even the “experts” who suspected I was acting alone couldn’t agree on why. My attempted assassination was blamed on everything from video games to Facebook to a misguided crush on the president’s daughter.

Much about fun remains mysterious. Scientific knowledge about its origins is largely speculative. One theory is that early in our evolution we figured out having fun supports our brain's development. Having fun with others taught humans how to cooperate and develop mutual agreements that set the stage for future social norms and consensus. As our ancestors engaged in fun and play, they developed rewarding relationships and beneficial, prosocial agreements that are the underpinning of modern group dynamics.

Despite these shifts, materialist queer theory has reached an apparent impasse and finds itself continuously absorbed into the liberal project of diversity management, where the concept of class is read as a static form of social advantage among others.

The thesis of gender variability (between, for example, lesbians and heterosexual women in the modern West) becomes a thesis of cultural variability (between Western and non-Western worlds).

The year 1990 is remembered by many as the annus mirabilis of queer theory. In addition to the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, David M. Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, 1990 also saw Teresa de Lauretis’s coinage of the term queer theory as the title of a conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz. But 1990 was also the year when a new economic relationship of mutual vassalage between the United States and China began to take shape, one that would eventually lead commentators to speculate, in the wake of the 2007–10 subprime mortgage crisis, that an alternative Chinese economic model called the Beijing Consensus—with its huge holdings of US government debt, productive capacity, and high savings rates—would enable the formerly socialist country to displace the United States as the center of global capitalism.

This analysis lays the groundwork for the discussion of the intellectual trajectories of queer theory’s own encounters with materialism in the next chapter, “The Specter of Materialism.” Here I consider various historical attempts to synthesize queer theory and Marxism since the 1990s and their limits.

The rise of commodified male same-sex sexual labor forms an important aspect of China’s “pink capitalism,” which has created a significant expansion of queer public spaces, including parks, bars, clubs, community centers, and, most important, social-networking mobile applications that make these encounters possible.

Why do we have a singular perception if we have thousands of models? When we hold and look at a coffee cup, why does the cup feel like one thing and not thousands of things? If we place the cup on a table and it makes a sound, how does the sound get united with the image and feel of the coffee cup? In other words, how do our sensory inputs get bound to a singular percept? [...] Instead of converging onto one location, the connections go in every direction. This is one of the reasons why the binding problem is considered a mystery, but we have proposed an answer: columns vote. Your perception is the consensus the columns reach by voting.

Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones-gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus do not seem to apply.

Hume emphasized education and experience: men of taste acquire certain abilities that lead to agreement about which authors and artworks are the best. Such people, he felt, eventually will reach consensus, and in doing so, they set a ‘standard of taste’ which is universal. … Hume said men of taste must ‘preserve minds free from prejudice’, but thought no one should enjoy immoral attitudes or ‘vicious manners’ in art … Kant too spoke about judgements of taste but he was more concerned with explaining judgements of Beauty. He aimed to show that good judgements in aesthetics are grounded in features of artworks themselves, not just in us and our preferences. Kant tried to describe our human abilities to perceive and categorize the world around us. There is a complex interplay among our mental faculties including perception, imagination, and intellect or judgement. Kant held that in order to function in the world to achieve our human purposes, we label much of what we sense, often in fairly unconscious ways.

Because other mammals have expressions, does that mean they have feelings—a subjective experience of the emotional states they display? That idea was scientifically risible not so long ago. Now some emotion scientists endorse the proposition that other mammals possess emotional consciousness—that they feel. This reversal delights animal advocates eager to make an argument for panprotoplasmic parity. But when the zoophile Mark Derr writes, “The question of whether animals possess consciousness, intelligence, volition, and feelings has long been settled in the affirmative,” he must be reporting the consensus from a species other than our own. Animals may have decided the matter to their own satisfaction, but human beings, as far as we know, are still debating it.

Because the reality is that the theory of evolution does not explain — nor is it expected to explain — how life started (we will speak about this later on), but neither is there consensus in explaining how this already-created life evolved, whether gradually or by little steps or by great leaps or in all these ways, and if in all these ways, then at the same time or successively; neither is it known whether these forms of evolution affect “macroevolution” or “microevolution,” or both, equally; we also do not know the subject of evolution, since there is no consensus about whether it is the individual of a population or the species; and, for that matter, neither is there agreement about the very concept of species.373 Neither is the degree of intervention of natural selection known; there is not even unanimity about whether, in reality, it acts at all — something admitted even by great admirers of Mr. Darwin, such as the Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller:374: “We have seen that if (natural) selection could be avoided in such a way that all varieties would survive and multiply, the highest forms (of life) would have arisen in any case,” or to put it another way, natural selection does not explain the result.

Europeans had highly developed regional and national cultures and societies before they bolted on Protestantism. America, on the other hand, was half-created by Protestant extremists to be a Protestant society. American academics accept the idea of American exceptionalism in one of its meanings—that our peculiar founding circumstances shaped us. “The position of the Americans,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “is…quite exceptional,” by which he meant the Puritanism, the commercialism, the freedom of religion, the individualism, “a thousand special causes.” The professoriate rejects exceptionalism in today’s right-wing sense, that the United States is superior to all other nations, with a God-given mission. And they also resist the third meaning, the idea that a law of human behavior doesn’t apply here—scholars of religion insist that explanations of religious behavior must be universal. The latest scholarly consensus about America’s exceptional religiosity is an economic theory. Because all forms of religion are products in a marketplace, they say, our exceptional free marketism has produced more supply and therefore generated more demand. Along with universal human needs for physical sustenance and security, there’s also such a need for existential explanations, for why and how the world came to be. Sellers of religion emerge offering explanations. From the start, religions tended to be state monopolies—as they were in the colonies, the Puritans in Massachusetts and the Church of England in the South. After that original American duopoly was dismantled and the government prohibited official churches, religious entrepreneurs rushed into the market, Methodists and Baptists and Mormons and all the others. European countries, meanwhile, kept their state-subsidized religions, Protestant or Catholic—and so in an economic sense those churches became lazy monopolies.*10 In America, according to the market theorists, each religion competes with all the others to acquire and keep customers. Americans, presented with all this fantastic choice, can’t resist buying. We’re so religious for the same reason we’re so fat.

not just a matter of “doing the right thing” but of figuring out what the right thing is. This proliferation of options generates confusion in our world and, for many, a sense of despair. Will we ever reach a cultural consensus that will stabilize the shifting sands of pluralism? All this talk of “theories of ethics” may

The frequency of these brain waves has been crudely correlated with states of consciousness. Delta waves (0.5 to 3 cycles per second) indicate deep sleep. Theta waves (4 to 8 cycles per second) indicate trance, drowsiness, or light sleep. Alpha waves (8 to 14 cycles per second) appear during relaxed wakefulness or meditation. And beta waves (14 to 35 cycles per second), the most uneven forms, accompany all the modulations of our active everyday consciousness. Underlying these rhythms are potentials that vary much more slowly, over periods as long as several minutes. Today's EEG machines are designed to filter them out because they cause the trace to wander and are considered insignificant anyway. There's still no consensus as to where the EEG voltages come from. They would be most easily explained by direct currents, both steady state and pulsing, throughout the brain, but that has been impossible for most biologists to accept. The main alternative theory, that large numbers of neurons firing simultaneously can mimic real electrical activity, has never been proven.

Ask anyone today working on foundational questions in quantum theory and you are likely to hear that there is still no consensus on many of these questions—all the while, of course, everybody seems to be in perfect agreement on how to apply the quantum formalism when it comes to making experimental predictions.

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means, and Bakke was an engagement whose antecedents were at Gettysburg and Shiloh.

The general public typically traces the death of Jim Crow to Brown v. Board of Education, although the institution was showing signs of weakness years before. By 1945, a growing number of whites in the North had concluded that the Jim Crow system would have to be modified, if not entirely overthrown. This consensus was due to a number of factors, including the increased political factor of blacks due to migration to the North and the growing membership and influence of the NAACP, particularly its highly successful legal campaign challenging Jim Crow laws in federal courts. Far more important in the view of many scholars, however, is the influence of World War II. The blatant contradiction between the country's opposition to the crimes of the Third Reich against European Jews and the continued existence of a racial caste system in the United States was proving embarrassing, severely damaging the nation's credibility as leader of the "free world." There was also increased concern that, without greater equality for African Americans, blacks would become susceptible to communist influence, given Russia's commitment to both racial and economic equality. In Gunnar Myrdal's highly influential book The American Dilemma, published in 1944, Myrdal made a passionate plea for integration based on the theory that the inherent contradiction between the "American Creed" of freedom and equality and the treatment of African Americans was not only immoral and profoundly unjust, but was also against the economic and foreign-policy interests of the United States.

During the modern period and particularly in the last two centuries in most Western countries there has developed a broad consensus in favor of the political philosophy known as “liberalism.” The main tenets of liberalism are political democracy, limitations on the powers of government, the development of universal human rights, legal equality for all adult citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion. These liberal values developed as ideals and it has taken centuries of struggle against theocracy, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, fascism, and many other forms of discrimination to honor them as much as we do, still imperfectly, today. . . . However, we have reached a point in history where the liberalism and modernity at the heart of Western civilization are at great risk on the level of the ideas that sustain them. The precise nature of this threat is complicated, as it arises from at least two overwhelming pressures, one revolutionary and the other reactionary, that are waging war with each other over which illiberal direction our societies should be dragged. Far-right populist movements claiming to be making a last desperate stand for liberalism and democracy against a rising tide of progressivism and globalism are on the rise around the world. They are increasingly turning toward leadership in dictators and strongmen who can maintain and preserve “Western” sovereignty and values. Meanwhile, far-left progressive social crusaders portray themselves as the sole and righteous champions of social and moral progress without which democracy is meaningless and hollow. These, on our furthest left, not only advance their cause through revolutionary aims that openly reject liberalism as a form of oppression, but they also do so with increasingly authoritarian means seeking to establish a thoroughly dogmatic fundamentalist ideology regarding how society ought to be ordered.

It seems that whenever there’s a word for something everyone agrees to be desirable—“truth,” “beauty,” “love,” “democracy”—then there will be no consensus as to what it really means.

characteristic features of a mystical and therefore untrustworthy, theory are that it is not refutable, that it appeals to authority, that it relies heavily on anecdote, that it makes a virtue of consensus (look how many people believe like me!), and that it takes the moral high ground.

The Bayesian Invisible Hand … free-market capitalism and Bayes’ theorem come out of something of the same intellectual tradition. Adam Smith and Thomas Bayes were contemporaries, and both were educated in Scotland and were heavily influenced by the philosopher David Hume. Smith’s 'Invisible hand' might be thought of as a Bayesian process, in which prices are gradually updated in response to changes in supply and demand, eventually reaching some equilibrium. Or, Bayesian reasoning might be thought of as an 'invisible hand' wherein we gradually update and improve our beliefs as we debate our ideas, sometimes placing bets on them when we can’t agree. Both are consensus-seeking processes that take advantage of the wisdom of crowds. It might follow, then, that markets are an especially good way to make predictions. That’s really what the stock market is: a series of predictions about the future earnings and dividends of a company. My view is that this notion is 'mostly' right 'most' of the time. I advocate the use of betting markets for forecasting economic variables like GDP, for instance. One might expect these markets to improve predictions for the simple reason that they force us to put our money where our mouth is, and create an incentive for our forecasts to be accurate. Another viewpoint, the efficient-market hypothesis, makes this point much more forcefully: it holds that it is 'impossible' under certain conditions to outpredict markets. This view, which was the orthodoxy in economics departments for several decades, has become unpopular given the recent bubbles and busts in the market, some of which seemed predictable after the fact. But, the theory is more robust than you might think. And yet, a central premise of this book is that we must accept the fallibility of our judgment if we want to come to more accurate predictions. To the extent that markets are reflections of our collective judgment, they are fallible too. In fact, a market that makes perfect predictions is a logical impossibility.

shrugged. No point making a big thing out of it. “Well, according to game theory, you should never tell anyone when your birthday is.” “I don’t follow.” “It’s a lose-lose proposition. There’s no winning strategy.” “What do you mean, strategy? It’s a birthday.” Chelsea had said exactly the same thing when I’d tried to explain it to her. Look, I’d said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It’s kind of a slap in the face. Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied. Then you don’t know whether they’re doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they’d rather have ignored. But if you don’t tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there’s no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And if someone does buy you a drink then you know it’s sincere because nobody would go to all the trouble of finding out when your birthday is—and then celebrating it—if they didn’t honestly like you. Of course, the Gang was more up to speed on such things. I didn’t have to explain it verbally: I could just grab a piece of ConSensus and plot out the payoff matrix, Tell/Don’t Tell along the columns, Celebrated/Not Celebrated along the rows, the unassailable black-and-white logic of cost and benefit in the squares themselves. The math was irrefutable: The one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.

At the same time, it has to be recognized that the conditions for this objectivity are not easily won. They cannot rely on the outmoded claims of positivist social science or a comfortable consensus that can hide real differences. It also has to be accepted that serious attempts to establish a social realist theory of knowledge have not progressed very far. Claims to objectivity have to be based on the intellectual grounds and the traditions and values of the discipline that go back more than a century. With regard to the

While metaethical moral relativism is by no means a consensus view among contemporary theorists of this dimension of normativity (though it has a number of distinguished proponents), its popularity and easy accessibility will be attested to by anyone who has taught undergraduate introductory surveys of moral theory. In this population, at least, as a matter of sociological fact it seems to be contested principally by those whose religious convictions lead them to premodern rejection of any form of attitude-dependence of moral norms.

Had Newton served on more faculty committees at Cambridge, his first law of motion might have read: A decisionmaking body at rest or in motion tends to stay at rest or in motion in the same direction unless acted upon by an outside force.

That’s very Chantal Mouffe of you ;) Eric wrote. She has a theory called Agonism that says there’s no such thing as true consensus, but that the struggle for it should be seen as positive. These were the magic words, the theory that worked for me. I’d always seen struggle as negative, something to be hurried through on the way to agreement, a state I associated with a deep and pleasing harmony. I had forgotten that harmony requires at least two different voices singing two different notes.

The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics.

The idea of government separate from religion was floating around during the Enlightenment. John Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and the greats of the day discussed it. But while other ideas in political science had real-world antecedents on which the founders could rely, there was no example of a truly secular government. No other nation had sought to protect the ability of its citizens to think freely by separating the government from religion and religion from the government. Until the theory was put into practice, true freedom of thought and even freedom of religion could not have existed. The United States realized those concepts because it embarked “upon a great and noble experiment…hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent—that of total separation of Church and State,” according to President John Tyler.46 America was the first nation to try this experiment; it invented the separation of state and church. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Garry Wills put it nicely: That [separation], more than anything else, made the United States a new thing on earth, setting new tasks for religion, offering it new opportunities. Everything else in our Constitution—separation of powers, balanced government, bicameralism, federalism—had been anticipated both in theory and practice…. But we invented nothing, except disestablishment. No other government in history had launched itself without the help of officially recognized gods and their state-connected ministers.47 Americans should celebrate this “great American principle of eternal separation.”48 It’s ours. It’s an American original. We ought to be proud of that contribution to the world, not bury it under myths. The founders’ private religious beliefs are far less important to the Judeo-Christian question than their views on separating state and church and the actions they took to divorce those two institutions. They were as close to consensus on separating the two as they were on any subject. In the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published the same year that America declared independence, historian Edward Gibbon wrote that “the various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”49 Most of the founders agreed with Gibbon and recognized that religion can be exploited for political gain and that religion, when it has civil power, is often deadly. These beliefs were common among the founders, but not universal. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration, believed that “the Christian religion should be preferred to all others” and that “every family in the United States [should] be furnished at public expense…with a copy of an American edition of the BIBLE.”50 However, in spite of, or likely because of, their divergent religious beliefs and backgrounds, the founders thought that separation made sense.

Well, according to game theory, you should never tell anyone when your birthday is.” “I don’t follow.” “It’s a lose-lose proposition. There’s no winning strategy.” “What do you mean, strategy? It’s a birthday.” Chelsea had said exactly the same thing when I’d tried to explain it to her. Look, I’d said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It’s kind of a slap in the face. Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied. Then you don’t know whether they’re doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they’d rather have ignored. But if you don’t tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there’s no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And if someone does buy you a drink then you know it’s sincere because nobody would go to all the trouble of finding out when your birthday is—and then celebrating it—if they didn’t honestly like you. Of course, the Gang was more up to speed on such things. I didn’t have to explain it verbally: I could just grab a piece of ConSensus and plot out the payoff matrix, Tell/Don’t Tell along the columns, Celebrated/Not Celebrated along the rows, the unassailable black-and-white logic of cost and benefit in the squares themselves. The math was irrefutable: The one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.