How much information from experience does a normal adult remember? The “functional information content” of human memory was estimated in several ways. The methods depend on measured rates of input and loss from very long‐ term memory and on analyses of the informational demands of human memory‐based performance. Estimates ranged around 109 bits. It is speculated that the flexible and creative retrieval of facts by humans is a function of a large ratio of “hardware” capacity to functional storage requirements.

Athenian democracy is rightly recognized for its extensive network of accountability institutions. This essay focuses instead on popular unaccountability in democratic Athens: ordinary citizens participating but not speaking in the Courts and the Assembly were unaccountable. I explore possible justifications of popular unaccountability, including arguments from democratic sovereignty and epistemic arguments, and stress the importance of a third strand: the identification of jurors and assemblymen with deservedly unaccountable, because comparatively weak and powerless, idiōtai (private citizens), whose political activity failed to (...) reach a level requiring intense scrutiny and control. Nonetheless, such a justification was always tenuous in light of the power jurors and assemblymen collectively wielded in the city. As I show through a reading of Aristophanes’s Wasps, it was always possible to destabilize the juror idiōtēs identity and replace it with a much more troubling image: the identification of the juror with the dangerously unaccountable tyrant. (shrink)

We often talk loosely of the “tyranny of the majority” as a threat to the workings of democracy. But, in ancient Greece, the analogy of demos and tyrant was no mere metaphor, nor a simple reflection of elite prejudice. Instead, it highlighted an important structural feature of Athenian democracy. Like the tyrant, the Athenian demos was an unaccountable political actor with the power to hold its subordinates to account. And like the tyrant, the demos could be dangerous to counsel since (...) the orator speaking before the assembled demos was accountable for the advice he gave. With Dangerous Counsel, Matthew Landauer analyzes the sometimes ferocious and unpredictable politics of accountability in ancient Greece and offers novel readings of ancient history, philosophy, rhetoric, and drama. In comparing the demos to a tyrant, thinkers such as Herodotus, Plato, Isocrates, and Aristophanes were attempting to work out a theory of the badness of unaccountable power; to understand the basic logic of accountability and why it is difficult to get right; and to explore the ways in which political discourse is profoundly shaped by institutions and power relationships. In the process they created strikingly portable theories of counsel and accountability that traveled across political regime types and remain relevant to our contemporary political dilemmas. (shrink)

Parrhesia, or frank speech, is usually understood as a practice intimately connected to Athenian democracy. This paper begins by analysing parrhesia in non-democratic regimes. Building on that analysis, I suggest that most accounts of parrhesia overlook the degree to which its practice at Athens implied a comparison of the demos to an unaccountable ruler -- a tyrant. As a practice, parrhesia was paradigmatically undertaken by speakers addressing an audience with the power to sanction them in the event that their advice (...) proved uncongenial. As such it could be useful in both democracies and autocracies, serving as a possible counterweight to flattering rhetoric. But in both regime types it was in essence a remedial virtue, necessitated by a basic structural feature common to both autocratic and Athenian democratic decision procedures: at the centre of both was an unaccountable decision maker able to hold its advisors to account. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin argues that the supposed informational advantages of “foot voting”—exercising exit options and making market-based choices—over voting at the ballot box tell in favor of decentralizing and limiting government. But the evidence Somin offers for the superiority of “foot voting,” based on an analysis of the politics of the Jim Crow-era South, is unpersuasive and internally inconsistent. Second, even if Somin is correct that foot voters have greater incentives to acquire information than ballot-box voters (...) do, this would not in itself be a good reason to favor foot voting. For Somin shows little interest in considering why we might value democratic decision making. Thus, Somin's argument is unlikely to persuade anyone not already committed to the superiority of market-based solutions to social and political problems. (shrink)

Of Rule and Office offers an account of Plato as a pre-eminent theorist of ‘constitutional rule’. In this comment I’ll pose some questions about the relationship between ‘constitution’ and ‘rule’ (...

The hypothesis that perceptual mechanisms could have more representational and logical power than usually assumed is interesting and provocative, especially with regard to brain evolution. However, the importance of embodiment and grounding is exaggerated, and the implication that there is no highly abstract representation at all, and that human-like knowledge cannot be learned or represented without human bodies, is very doubtful. A machine-learning model, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) that closely mimics human word and passage meaning relations is offered as a (...) counterexample. (shrink)

The complex regulatory framework governing the U.S. health care system can be an obstacle to programming that address health-related social needs. In particular, health care fraud and abuse law is a pernicious barrier as health care organizations may minimize or forego programming altogether out of real and perceived concern for compliance. And because health care organizations have varying resources to navigate and resolve compliance concerns, as well as different levels of risk tolerance, fears related to the legal landscape may further (...) entrench inequities in access to meaningful programs that improve health outcomes. This article uses food and nutrition programming as a case study to explore the complexities presented by this area of law and to highlight pathways forward. (shrink)

Ancient Greek elite theorists and ordinary democratic practitioners shared a distinctive account of the institutional features of democracy: democracy requires both institutions that empower ordinary citizens to decide matters and the widespread diffusion of agenda-setting powers. In the Politics, Aristotle makes agenda control central to his understanding of what it is to be kurios in the city, to his distinction between oligarchy and democracy, and to his analysis of the preconditions for democratic control of the polis. For democratic citizens, isēgoria (...) (the equal right to speak and make proposals in the assembly) was more than an expression of the democratic commitment to equality. It was also an institutional tool to resist oligarchic domination of the agenda. Institutionalizing isēgoria was part of the Athenian response to a crucial problem for democratic theory and practice: how to ensure that popular participation reliably translates into popular control. (shrink)

The article focuses on the overlooked volume of Henry Sumner Maine's corpus, the posthumously published International Law and uses it to respond to the general critical difficulty in establishing Maine's posture. Maine, of course, makes it difficult with the numerous contrapuntal moves of this book and others. For example, he strongly criticizes the predominant view of international law as an accretionary process of commentary by one theorist following another and yet he places tremendous value on Grotius, "whose works acted on (...) the spirit of belligerency like a charm," and other early international legal theorists. He sees his contemporary environment as marked by increasing militarization, even of militarization of society during time of peace, while he describes the relative humanity of the present over the distant past.Ultimately, Maine is a realist who focuses on late nineteenth-century manuals of war rather than the idealism of the Anglo-American peace movement, and recognizes the importance of Czar Alexander II over any of nineteenth-century international legal theorists. If J.W. Burrow has identified social evolution as providing Victorians an "intellectual resting-place" between theoretical clarity and social diversity, Maine's broad social evolution allows him to mediate between the moral amelioration in international life and the practical realities of that life. (shrink)

The claim that language is shaped by the brain is weakened by lack of clear specification of what necessary and sufficient properties the brain actually imposes. To account for human intellectual superiority, it is proposed that language did require special brain evolution (Deacon 1997), but that what evolved was a merely quantitative change rather than a radically new invention.

Costa de Beauregard has criticized the notion of reversible computation, invented by Charles Bennett and expounded by this author. Costa de Beauregard states that my work includes fantastic claims. This is a rebuttal.