Axiology / Morality / Law

Or the A/M/L distinction that comes up frequently.

From http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/

Axiology is the study of what’s good. If you want to get all reductive, think of it as comparing the values of world-states. A world-state where everybody is happy seems better than a world-state where everybody is sad. A world-state with lots of beautiful art is better than a world-state containing only featureless concrete cubes. Maybe some people think a world-state full of people living in harmony with nature is better than a world-state full of gleaming domed cities, and other people believe the opposite; when they debate the point, they’re debating axiology. 

Morality is the study of what the right thing to do is. If someone says “don’t murder”, they’re making a moral commandment. If someone says “Pirating music is wrong”, they’re making a moral claim. Maybe some people believe you should pull the lever on the trolley problem, and other people believe you shouldn’t; when they debate the point, they’re debating morality. 

(this definition elides a complicated distinction between individual conscience and social pressure; fixing that would be really hard and I’m going to keep eliding it) 

Law is – oh, come on, you know this one. If someone says “Don’t go above the speed limit, there’s a cop car behind that corner”, that’s law. If someone says “my state doesn’t allow recreational marijuana, but it will next year”, that’s law too. Maybe some people believe that zoning restrictions should ban skyscrapers in historic areas, and other people believe they shouldn’t; when they debate the point, they’re debating law.

I’ve been to write a lot more about this distinction and all its implications (like, write an entire book.) But to generalize it further – from an axiological perspective, the OP is correct that all social order no matter how unspoken is order and we should not deny that.

But from a morality/community perspective, we prefer something more concrete in defining social order. We still understand there are unspoken rules and ambiguities, but we acknowledge some unofficial rules like “the family patriarch” or “the gossipy sewing circle.”

And on the legal level, we don’t want to acknowledge any order than what is explicitly written down and we can pretend is objectively verifiable.

Where most Marxists go astray is that they are so committed to axiological values (like “no one should go hungry, even if that’s not one of your written down civil rights”) that they lose sight of how much normal people really really like having a distinction between that and the moral and social orders. It may be “good” to wish everyone in the world is well taken care of and loved, but almost no one wants the responsibility for doing that for the whole world themselves, and when you make people have that responsibility they become extremely unhappy and anxious.

 kenny-evitt
Are you not a consequentialist with respect to your ideal axiology?

Consequentialism is always the axiology answer. It does not care about the community or law, except as tools to achieve an optimal result, but always judged by your axiology. This is one of the many ways the True answer of a question will be the axiological one, and axiology can back itself up with facts and arguments the best.

That being said, you would have to be a bull-headed social engineer or philosopher to not realize that people are not pure axiology. They do not care just what the “best” action is, but what is allowed by the community and what is legal under the law.

(Imagine a law saying you are forced to marry… the person who will make you the happiest. Yes in some sense that encourages “more happiness”, but people would rebel over that coercion over the private sphere in a split second. I would rebel.)

Understanding how these three types of morality intersect are not really valuable as an ethical matter – since yeah, consequentialist axiology still wins the ethics – but they are key for building an accurate model of how people work and what will make them happy.

What is Rationalism?

I am not a rationalist, but this blog makes many references to being in dialogue with the rationalist community. So the few people who AREN'T rationalists, might appreciate an explanation of what the hell I am talking about.

Slate Star Codex, by Scott Alexander, is pretty clearly the most famous and public-friendly face of the rationalist movement at the moment.

• The Control Group Is Out Of Control on the weakness of a lot of modern scientific research and statistics.
• I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup on a general framework for thinking about tolerance vs prejudice.
• Toxoplasma of Rage on how the media works and why stupid topics keep coming up again and again.
• Meditations on Moloch, on the way efficient systems and ideas can grow and take over everything.

A lot of his thoughts come from the Less Wrong movement, best known for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. You can google them if you want more content, but Scott puts a much nicer and more humane face on them.

One tumblr that defends rationalism but with an extremely compassionate and thoughtful face, that most of my dashboard at least respects greatly, is The Unit of Caring.

I don't know any particular post of her to recommend that summarizes her (which is "rationalism but nice about it"), but this is a good recent post about "how to be nice." 

https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/169490044251/how-do-you-do-it-how-do-you-ooze-compassion-and

And here is a post about prison reform from her https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/170390580301/as-someone-with-a-brother-in-law-and-federal

Machine Learning and Ideology

Article: AI BIAS DOESN'T MEAN WHAT JOURNALISTS SAY IT WILL MEAN

The current political conversation over machine learning apps is so damn depressing.

(Also related: https://discoursedrome.tumblr.com/post/167714252325/joseph-heath-how-to-beat-racism )

Depressing, as in a missed opportunity for what could be amazing.

From rationalists, to social justice types, to every strain of thinker about our conflct-happy culture, we talk about “bias” a lot. Maybe it’s tribal bias to “like your ingroup” or maybe it’s structural bias that you need to cure yourself of, whatever. Is it the way our brain is built, our genes, what books we read as kids, our original sin of whiteness?

Zizek (and some other critical theorists) instead say the bias isn’t anything inherent in us. “Ideology is our spontaneous reaction to the world.” You drop a perfectly rational creature in a situation, it looks around, collects some data, then generates conclusions and a narrative based on that data.

A Martian looks around and sees many of the poor people are lazy, and the rich people are energetic. They conclude “wealth must be the result of how hard you work.”

With greater knowledge, we see the errors in this. Poor people may have learned helplessness, while the rich people perform useless work in order to feel meritorious. Or one culture literally conquered and stole stuff from the other, and just coincidentally it matches up to our lazy/energetic divide. Or our definitions of lazy and hard working and rich and poor are hopelessly loose and impossible to scientifically verify.

Rather than the traditional “we would see everything correctly if not for our bias”, with the clean slate neutral observer being the perfect judge, Zizek sees that biased ideology is our starting point, and we need to gather more information to climb out of our first, spontaneous biases.

Ethically speaking: you need to arrive at universal principles yourself (like that all humans are equal), but just going with the observable data is not going to tell you that.

So that’s the debate: is bias something we bring to the table, or a spontaneous result of rational observation of limited and complicated data environments?

Which makes the thing about machine learning controversies fascinating! We write some programs whose job it is to collect the data and give us conclusions… and it turns out they’re racist! They copy insults other users of social media are using, the tell you to stay away from minority neighborhoods when you walk home, rather than pure electronic angels, these bots fall into all our worst, lowest common denominator impulses. How could this fail to be interesting?

Instead we get a very predictable partisan argument. People on the right say it’s because all these stereotypes are objectively true, and now AI is validating them. And people on the left say that the original sin of implicit bias has managed to leak over from the programmers to their children. That if the right people had programmed it, the bots wouldn’t be so full of nascent ideology and *isms.

No one just accepts “if you put a pattern-matching mind into a situation with limited data, it will come to unethical conclusions.”

*****

 dedicating-ruckus

Rather than the traditional “we would see everything correctly if not for our bias”, with the clean slate neutral observer being the perfect judge, Zizek sees that biased ideology is our starting point, and we need to gather more information to climb out of our first, spontaneous biases.

Ethically speaking: you need to arrive at universal principles yourself (like that all humans are equal), but just going with the observable data is not going to tell you that.

Okay, but this is… like, false.

If you put someone with no preconceptions or relevant entanglements into a situation and let them come to conclusions, the conclusions more or less by definition cannot be “biased” in the common political sense. The alien comes and sees that many rich people are hard-working, and many poor people are lazy, and they come to the conclusion that wealth is related to how hard you work. And it’s correct.

(And of course it’s more complicated than that, and a full investigation of “what factors lead to wealth” will come out with a whole laundry list of factors including genetics, various character attributes, general social situation and pure contingent luck. But “hard work” will in fact be prominent in this list of factors. The more detailed analysis filled in and detailed the naive pattern-matching, it didn’t invalidate it.)

“All humans are equal” is true in a particular moral sense, but “all humans have an equal capacity to acquire wealth” is just sky-is-green obviously wrong.

Instead we get a very predictable partisan argument. People on the right say it’s because all these stereotypes are objectively true, and now AI is validating them. And people on the left say that the original sin of implicit bias has managed to leak over from the programmers to their children. That if the right people had programmed it, the bots wouldn’t be so full of nascent ideology and *isms.

No one just accepts “if you put a pattern-matching mind into a situation with limited data, it will come to unethical conclusions.”

In other words, “coming to the best possible conclusions given the data available to you is unethical”.

So if the disinterested pursuit of truth leads you to conclusions that violate certain previously received and unquestionable moral axioms, you must seek more information and overcome your biases until you can get yourself to conclusions that match with what you previously thought. Never mind if the extra information you seek continues to lead you down paths of wrongthink. Continue investigating until the answer is acceptable!

Also, make sure you walk through bad neighborhoods on your commute home, otherwise it would be racist!

*****

If our neutral alien were to land in early 1800′s America and look at black versus white people, they would probably conclude that black people had dramatically less intellectual capacity than white people did. Because they really weren’t as educated by most metrics.

Of course it was because they were denied education (and otherwise punished for being too smart.)

Look at this like a proper Bayesian: your priors are important. You can for instance start with “brains of roughly the same size and structure are probably roughly similar in outputs”, and even though you see a lot of examples of black people being able to read less than white people, you can hold firm to that prior until you’ve untangled the confounding nurture variables.

I would not stick to priors I had reason to believe are wrong. Just my prior of “most-to-all people are capable of complex thought, emotions, and motives” overrides almost every statistical inference I would make if I were a naive frequentist.

There’s nothing wrong with saying the current state of some people are such that they commit more violence or can read less. In fact, denying that is the sort of liberal idealism that refuses to face the ugly degradation of poverty, how being low class DOES make you worse off than others. But this is very different from the essentialism of saying “all people of that race are like that, and I don’t have to look at any individual case or check for other reasons they’ve become like that.”

Three Types of Economies

We discuss capitalism, communism, and anarchy a lot, which are both modes of society, but also references to types of economic exchange. The critique of society often gets confused for the economy type, even though these are rather separate things. So for the sake of simplicity and clarifying, let’s talk JUST about the type of economy today.

The thing people forget about the economy - because we get caught up in accusations of selfishness and assumptions of power - is that it is at heart an information problem, or rather, a method of solving this problem. We have some Stuff, it is distributed among different people, with different degrees of making it or acquiring it, and we would like it to be distributed to the people who need and want it the most, or can make the most productive use of it. Even if we solve every human sin regarding selfishness and power, we will still need to solve the problem of “where does stuff go.”

(Most people are in fact good, and willing to work for the overall good if there’s a solid plan - but just being altruistic isn’t enough to figure out how to feed the hungry.)

There are three different types of economies based on how much information you have. The information is in the form of “what resources do you have? How hard is it to extract them? What do you want? How much of it do you want?” You generally know all of this for yourself, and only some of this information for other people. Ie, you know how hungry you are and how much food from McDonald’s you want, but you are less likely to know how hungry your friend is, or what they are in the mood for.

***

Trust Economy - this is the type of economy where you have TOTAL INFORMATION about everyone (relevant to the problem in question.) Picture a family who has known each other for a long time, sitting down for a meal with food closer to some than others. They know who likes what dish, who needs more food, and they can see what is already on each other’s plates. They can quickly just give each other the food other people want, and judge what a fair allotment is weighed for how important things are to each people there.

We don’t think about this much, as it’s the behavior we do instinctually when the problem is so small we don’t even see an economy is going on. But whenever you are with a group of people who get along, and you’re distributing a limited resource (a turn at the videogame, snacks, conversational space) in a manner that’s trying to be considerate of everyone but is so easy you don’t even think about it -- that’s trust economy.

This is most associated with anarchy. Who needs rulers when people can just help themselves and each other?

Command Economy - This is for situations where a MODERATE amount of information is known by some parties. This means the capabilities of people, the total resources at play, the rough size of demands people need met, etc. But not everything, like “how will widget A fit into device B, who is sick today” or just because one person has a lot of information that does not mean everyone is informed. Most people’s workplaces - be they corporations or the government (especially the military) operate like this. There is one central unit who establishes the group goals and directs where resources go and who should be in which departments… and then lets the individual departments figure out their own structure and how they will use those resources, and those departments will usually just give their managers targets, and let the managers command employees to figure out how best to meet those targets.

(Or it’s just when Dad orders for the whole family at the restaurant.)

The advantages of this are great - you can focus everyone on an important goal, and just because one person happens to start with a lot of resources, those can still be driven to where they are needed the most. The disadvantages are obvious - the bottle-neck of any centralization, where if the leader is dumb or selfish or otherwise inefficient, they screw up the entire economy around them (and insulated leaders tend not to be responsive to changing conditions.)

This is associated with communism and war-time economies, though somewhat unfairly, as a communism will often have sub-markets for areas under it where the government lacks information -- just like as capitalist countries always have various command economies under them, within the corporations that make up the economy.

Market Economy - This is for situations for people share NO INFORMATION with each other, and yet you need to figure out how to disperse stuff. People just announce “I will trade X for Y”, and other people who themselves value Y over X can take that, making both better off, without having to know how important or plentiful X and Y were for any people other than themselves.

This is associated with capitalism, though as said above, you find markets in any type of country, and capitalist countries contain many different types of economies within them. Capitalist ideology just focuses on market economies as the type of ideal to attain.

They are kind of magic, because market economies can make large decentralized systems act incredibly efficiently without any central information processing. Economists are in love with this miracle, and it can indeed be pretty great.

But the magic is that they process all this in the adverse situation of limited information. It’s very impressive that they can do that, but that does not make them always the best. They are a good solution to the problem of lacking information, but if you have information, then they might just be inefficient. Resources might be squandered because the person who has them no longer has any reason to trade them away, etc.

***

The point is that none of these economies are universally better than others. They are optimized responses to different situations, and should be used as such. Using a market economy when you have enough information for a trust economy creates a dreadful waste of time and effort as every exchange is negotiated and verified. Using a trust economy when people don’t know anything about other people, will just lead to mismanagement disaster.

So when discussing capitalism, communism, and anarchy (as social models) we understandably make reference to the economy types we associate with them, but each of those ideologies are more about exalting one particular tool as the social ideal, even as it makes use of all three. We should instead take the detached view of tools, not looking at them as moral imperatives, but useful responses to different situations.

Bad Atheism

In today’s SSC post, Scott and his commenters come up with a lot of theories why the atheist movement isn’t a strong pillar of the left (like climate change, concerns about sexual harassment, and poverty), but rather a source of awkward disdain. This is in response to a long article in the Baffler making fun of New Atheists.

They come up with a bunch of theories (Islam became a protected group, atheists kept talking about the science of gender differences, etc), but the post is a perfect example of a wrong form of analysis.

1. Authority is making claims about a group.
2. I disagree with those claims, or the results of them.
3. Therefore they must just be making these claims up, and we must figure out wholly different reasons they must have for the end conclusion, and this argument is 100% post-hoc rationalization.

Instead, we should read the claims directly, and see them as evidence of how that speaker is thinking. Let’s look at the article.

The heirs to New Atheism may have a new target and a remodeled ethos, but their rhetorical crutches remain the same. They announce at every opportunity that they revere logic, evidence, and science, even if the opposite is plainly true. 

…

In a political cartoon by Ben Garrison, an ex-libertarian who now panders to the alt-right, Molyneux is drawn popping bubbles—labeled “Trump is a misogynist,” “Trump is stupid” and “my feelings”—using enormous needles tagged “logic,” “reason” and “evidence.” In another, Molyneux holds a golden shield emblazoned with “REASON EVIDENCE LOGIC” as Hillary Clinton fires arrows representing her various campaign slogans. 

Uh. I think the author doesn’t like (the way atheists use) logic, evidence, and reason. Hell even if the author is a 100% cynical propagandist, there’s a reason they felt these jibes would resonate with their audience.

What we’ve seen in the last decade with social liberalism is an embrace of one-directional subjectivity. Instead of gender-blind tests for hiring, the new left has discovered the tests themselves are biased (they are), and you need an out-right pro-women hiring policy in order to redress structural inequality before a level playing field can mean anything. And we’ve seen cultural social justice crash up against this again and again: due process, metrics of any sort but especially economic ones, anything that tries to use objective or extrinsic measurement, is deemed retrograde by an ideology that focuses on the subjective experience of the oppressed.

(In no small part because of postmodern academics who are able to poke holes in the biases of many objective measurements. And because of the many obvious cases where you can find these advocates fall to bias and prejudice.)

If the left chose subjectivity (a wise decision in theory, but in practice it’s been executed horribly), then where would we expect movements founded around objective tools to end up?

And I did this by looking at the words they themselves use, rather than solely my knowledge of what various scandals happened in an elevator and on bulletin boards afterwards. This doesn’t mean I think they are right, but I do think their own words are the best way to examine a groups grievances.

***

I find this type of analysis particularly important regarding the Trump phenomenon. A large cottage industry has sprung up of “understanding Trump voters.” Is it just because they are racist? Is it they want jobs that no longer and exist and aren’t coming back? There are so many reasons we can hypothesize, and the more we hypothesize the more our theories will just reflect our own preconceived notions.

We can ask them. We can go on reddit, and listen to campaign speeches, and just hear what they say about the other half of America. We don’t have to agree it’s true, but we can look at the logic behind it and conclude “this is how they are thinking.”

Sticky Conservatism

@slatestarscratchpad responds to an annoying Current Affairs article about a link he made on airlines.

4. Current Affairs wrote an article riffing off one of my links posts. I don’t think I can pad my response to the length of an entire blog post, but I want to address it here: I stand by my original sarcasm. I said it was silly to be angry at airlines offering a lower-fare standing option, since it’s just adding another choice to your list of choices. CA said I didn’t realize that actually some people are very poor and so couldn’t afford anything but standing room. I do realize that. My whole point was that if you are too poor to afford sitting fare, your only choice used to be “never fly”. Now it is “never fly” or “pay the affordable standing fare”. This is a gain for poor people, and in fact only for poor people (rich people will just sit regardless). This complaint reminds me of those people who put spikes on benches so that homeless people cannot sleep on them. It is true that in a perfect world nobody would have to sleep on benches. But you are not creating that world. You are just making sure homeless people can’t sleep anywhere. Likewise, in a perfect world nobody would have to stand up on flights. But you are not creating that world. You’re just making sure poor people can’t fly at all. If you want to help the poor, give them more money, not fewer options. 

@slatestarscratchpad ‘s rejoinder makes a bad-point-wittily, that you very often see from neoliberal or libertarian advocates. (And to be clear, the Current Affairs article he got dissed by, is completely incoherent and useless.*) You see this same logic from Matt Yglesias about mandatory parking minimums, or from Tyler Cowen, etc. Why would people, especially poor people with limited options, ever want there to be less choices at the low end of the spectrum?

The answer is so blindingly obvious that it’s clear none of the above put themselves in the shoes of the poor people they are trying to advocate for: because they don’t trust it.

The average working class consumer is cynical, pragmatic, conservative (in the small-c sense), and believes prices and wages are sticky. Their rough economic model is:

• Seats currently cost $150, come with a chair, and the airline makes $1 billion profit.
• With this new innovative pricing scheme, you will stand, seats will cost $150, and the airline will make $2 billion profit.
• The price won’t actually go down. Consumer just straight out loses out.

Same with why locals defend mandatory parking minimums. According to pro-development advocates, if you make parking less scarce, then rent will be a little cheaper because the greater availability of parking was operating as a sort of benefit you indirectly paid for. Except, whoops, in the practical and immediate case, rent ain’t going to fall, you’re just going to have more cars clogging your street.

One one hand, this is sometimes true. Especially if for some reason the price isn’t very liquid (like, say, because of rent control), then you are really bargaining with the sellers over side benefits. Or if the seller is a monopolist, and all new revenue just goes straight into profit instead of increasing quality to make the product more attractive. In economics terms, we call this “sticky”, and it’s extremely important for understanding the day-to-day experience of the economy.

On the other hand, sometimes it really isn’t true. Especially in the long term, pressuring companies to provide more, just means the price will be higher. Airlines used to be a hell of a lot more luxurious, and also way more expensive. On the abstract scale, the economists aren’t complete idiots.

But they completely fail to drop this academic mindset when talking about people directly effected in the short term by a change.

In any case, airline tickets or parking minimum’s effect on rental prices, the actual price change will be based on the context, and there’s no absolute rule here. For sure, sometimes the consumer advocates are wrong. But also they’re right, and instead of writing articles and posts about how “capitalists are always evil” or “leftists are always short-sighted” you really do have to say “what do we expect the actual impact of this specific change on the consumer will be? What do they personally believe it will be? Oh, do they distrust large corporations and expect to get screwed? Yeah, they might have a point.”

(And this was an awfully long post to say “people don’t think they’ll get cheaper fares, just crappier conditions”, but like, you have to lay out the paragraphs of logic so that neoliberal/libertarian thinkers internalize that cynicism and can come up with it on their own in the future.)

***

* Dear god it’s just really bad. If neolibs are annoying in some predictable ways, the standard bearers of the left are even more annoying in how they reduce any problem of exploitative systems to “no, you just haven’t thought about how evil and pig-eyed the super rich are.” Robinson is on one hand treating the reader like a member of the upper-class who can’t understand why these trade-offs are annoying, but also defining the upper-class around the experience of buying a $2000 Tiffany clickbait paperweight. It’s all “you don’t understand privilege maaaan” when, like, you could have convinced your target audience by saying “How do you feel when ISP’s claim that getting rid of net neutrality will mean they can give you more options?”

Review Types: Food and Therapy

Reading reactions to Justice League made me realize there are two ways of reviewing movies, in terms of the logic they present.

The most popular, and often mocked, is movies as food. You know the type “Sometimes I want an expensive steak, but hey, sometimes I want a fast food cheeseburger, and this movie was a good cheeseburger.” There’s plenty of snark about that specific metaphor, but the logic behind it is less absurd and worth critiquing.

In this sense, what matters in the movie is the ingredients. We’re asking “is the movie good?” and the determinant of that is “Were quality ingredients put together using a known recipe?” If a movie isn’t good, it’s just because you can point to one ingredient and say it’s bad. The pacing was bad, the writing was saccharine, or the director is overrated. Such reviews are not a discussion of how different elements work together to produce something, but just operate on the assumption that if one of the ingredients is bad, that explains why the whole thing is worse. Or in the positive direction, a review will tell us the actors have good chemistry, that the CGI is seamless, the director is hip and capable of working with politically challenging themes - though not how any of these elements interact, beyond goodness multiplying with goodness.

This all points towards a very mass produced view of art. After all, that’s how we think of hamburgers, right? Once you’ve figured out how to make hamburgers, well then, just keep getting good ingredients, put them together the way you know how, and viola, you reliably have a finished product that will please as much as the first time.

If you liked Iron Man 1, well then Spiderman: Homecoming has the exact same quality ingredients, why wouldn’t you like it.

(The moral public image and political leanings of the stars of the film, are just one more ingredient these days that adds to its goodness or badness.)

Empirically, the philosophy doesn’t really work (or else churning out box office successes would be as simple as running McDonalds), but it’s still the basis for almost all professional reviews. It’s just easier to understand.

I'm lazy and examples of these are everywhere, so here's a random Justice League review from Rotten Tomatoes: http://www.screenit.com/ourtake/2017/justice_league.html

The good news is that those behind the scenes finally figured out that audiences of superhero movies prefer them not to be as morose, grim and humorless as most of DC Comics latest offerings, and like them having a little Marvel style humor thrown into the mix. I can't say if the late in production replacement of original director Zack Snyder with Joss Whedon (due to a family tragedy for the former) had anything to do with that change, but it's a welcome one that greatly benefits the offering. 

I'd wager there's more humor in this single film than all of its immediate predecessors combined, and much of that stems from Ezra Miller showing up to play the hyperactive, lightning bolt activated The Flash character. Much like Quicksilver in the "X-Men" movies, he zips along at high speed (thus making everyone else seem frozen in a freeze frame collage), resulting in some similarly fun scenes. But his naive eagerness and interaction with others are what makes him stand out. 

Jason Momoa gets some less hyper moments of humor playing the loner surfer dude type Aquaman character, but it's the presence of Gal Gadot reprising her Wonder Woman character that truly saves the day...and the film. The actress is so natural and comfortable in the part and the character is so powerful (above and beyond the physical) that you simply can't take your eyes off her, and the film really excels whenever she's present. Ray Fisher is okay as the part-human, part machine Cyborg character, but isn't explored enough to make him that interesting. Ben Affleck seems tired and ready to hang up the caped crusader character (which sort of parallels his Bruce Wayne alter-ego), and a character from past films makes a return (guess who) and livens up the proceedings in the third act. 

Which is a good thing as both the villain (Ciarán Hinds, heavily assisted by CGI) and his plot (assembling some powerful boxes to destroy the world) aren't anything worth writing home about. Many of these films really fail to create compelling antagonists and this is yet another prime example. As a result, you're not as invested in watching him get his comeuppance that you automatically know is going to involve lots of CGI heavy, multiple character fight sequences where too much is occurring and looks fake up on the screen. 

Thankfully, the return of that one significant character along with the presence of Gadot, Miller and Marvel-like humor makes most of the film easy and sometimes quite entertaining to watch. I would have preferred a more compelling story (rather than the usual end of the world material), better villain and less reliance on special effects. But enough of the pic works, even considering its various issues, to earn a recommendation. "Justice League" rates as a 5.5 out of 10.

***

At the other end of the spectrum we have looking at movies… like a therapy session.

You would not say about therapy: the client was very charismatic, and the story of their childhood had excellent pacing, but the lighting was flat and boring. B+.

Instead of grading it at all, we’d discuss how the elements (which might be awkward on their own) worked together to say something larger. “The way the client stuttered while talking about his mother,” says one thing, and “the fact that the client brings up academic success at any opportunity” says another. We find meaning both in the plain content of their utterances, and the details around the way they are delivered. The result isn’t good or bad, but it’s interpretable.

This is where the Group 3 type of film critique (and most academic work) ends up. The type of acting (flat, naturalist, manic, sensual) is seen as a filter on the words said and the plot elements. A director’s history is seen as context for themes they deal with in this work. How does the beginning of the session/movie compare to where things are at the end - are things the same, are there important changes, and what does that say about the nature of the problem the characters were struggling to solve?

Sure the movie is ugly (or the client is disruptive.) What does that tell us? In what ways is it ugly, and how can those be seen as deliberate choices?

Compare the above Rotten Tomatoes to people deciphering David Lynch's Twin Peaks, which emphasizes various unpleasant aspects to tell us how they comment on the broader work. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/david-lynchs-late-style/#!

Lynch holds on this scene for an uncomfortable amount of time, lavishing seven cuts and nearly a minute of footage on Mr. C’s tactile show of dominance, the effect of his gesture passing from intimidation to a strange kind of tenderness, registering the tragic feeling of the strong for the weak they nonetheless mean to exploit. We later find out that Jack gets murdered in this scene, but we never see the act take place. His death, we feel, is already written in the lines of this gruff but malleable face, the skin gone slack, vulnerable, now just an unresisting sculptural material for the dark forces that menace and shape it. In this gloriously inexpressive pause, Mr. C seems to be asking himself: what can this goony, docile face be made to sing? 

In many ways, this long squeeze is perfectly representative of the oblique, beguiling aesthetic of the new Twin Peaks. It is not only that the pace is so exquisitely slow or that the scene’s narrative purpose is unclear. We are also left to wonder about the spotlight of lyrical dread lavished upon a character so soon to disappear from the story, just as we may be disarmed by the proliferation of arresting minor characters, stray images, and tangential action throughout the series. 

Lynch has always had a way of elevating peripheral performances to derail our sense of narrative logic (think of the man in Wild at Heart who quacks like a duck, or the inexplicable presence of anthropomorphic rabbits in Inland Empire). But no work of Lynch’s has been so gloriously digressive as Twin Peaks: The Return, nor has any work of his been so elliptical or so unforgivingly distracted by the characters, images, and scenes that seem to exist to the side of its story line. In this, the series embraces a narrative style that is arguably even more inventive and jarring than the narrative itself, with its baroque mythology of lodges, personified evil, and interdimensional rabbit holes. 

The new season challenges us most in the way it seems to undo the story it is telling, moving out of sequence and perversely out of rhythm, indicating a wealth of paths it has no interest in going down, spending long stretches of time in scenes that do not immediately further the plot, and jumping without warning from characters and locales we know to those we don’t (and never come to know). The result is a feeling of erratic, transfixing chaos. A greasy drug-addled woman sits in the Roadhouse talking with her friend about zebras and penguins, scratching the “wicked rash” in her armpit. A woman frantically honking her horn screams at Deputy Briggs to let her car through traffic because, as she puts it with incredible and hideous fury, “We’re laaaaaate!” while a diseased young girl lurches from the passenger seat, vomiting a dark trickle of green slime. A young girl waiting for a friend at the Roadhouse is removed from her booth by two grown men, drops to her knees in the middle of a concert, and crawls through the crowd of dancers before screaming at the top of her lungs. In any other series — even the original series of Twin Peaks — these scenes would have consequences: they’d be explained or taken up again or at least referred to in passing later on, in order incorporate them into the larger plot. In Lynch’s hands, they are left only as refractory trace variations of the show’s central action.

This way, every movie becomes a complex inkblot, a source for endless analysis and conclusions that are both more and less than “good, bad, should I see it.” This view has its flaws as well (such as the reader bringing so much subjective baggage to their interpretation that they can’t really provide useful information for anyone else) but the point is how different it is, and why it’s valuable to keep this attitude in your toolkit.

(This is not the same thing as SECRET MESSAGES delivered through a film, like explaining how random names are actually references to some historical event, a la a Wizard of Oz being about the gold standard, or Room 237 about The Shining. These sort of fan conspiracy theories aren't really substantive, anymore than if you believed your therapy client could best be interpreted by taking the first word of every anecdote, and stringing them together to find out their message from their Russian spymasters.)

The therapy mode is much more engaging with the Real of the work, picking up on random details and incorporating them. As I mentioned with Justice League, few of the professional reviews that wanted to tell us whether it was “humorless” or “grim” or not, said anything about the fact that the first minute is nothing but a diagetic paean to Superman, let alone what the meaning of that choice of introduction was. When you read a therapy review, at least you see the elements the critic is talking about - when you read a food-type review, you might wonder “did she even watch the movie?”

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oligopsoneia

Or: “reviews” vs. “criticism.”

(Also note that these aren’t just different styles of doing the same thing but different goals really: reviews/”food” finds its fundamental value for people who haven’t eaten the burger yet, while criticism/”therapy” is most useful for people who have already been to the session. A RottenTomatoes-style aggregator of critical reception of a work would be as stupid as a printed collection of food-style reviews.)

bambamramfan

I mean really it’s “types of discussion”, I’m not really sure any words like review or criticism properly categorize the difference. Youtube videos that tell you 100 things wrong with a movie would be called “criticism” but are the highest example of this ingredient-based analysis.

I think you’re wrong with the “different goals” and that is related to how badly the food-style gets its own goal wrong. All reviewers, myself included, would love the ability to look at a work, and be able to tell someone else whether they will like this movie. That’s basically the holy grail of the entire review edifice (including as you say, aggregators) and particularly Hollywood planning departments.

Food is just a very simple way of trying this, and it fails fairly badly. It does not turn out that “script by Whedon, acted by Blanchett, plus social justice themes, plus famous IP” makes something you can actually predict people will like. Certainly not to the degree that I can predict a friend will like my risotto recipe.

Therapy is a different attempt/style to figure out “what is going on with this movie” that ends up in a very different place, but really does start with the same question “why did I like Empire Strikes Back, but not really Return of the Jedi?”