EPA’s top air policy official steps down amid scrutiny over possible ethics violations

The Washington Post
Originally published June 26, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Less than one month after joining the EPA, Wehrum met with two former clients at his old firm without consulting in advance with ethics officials, even though they had cautioned him about such interactions. That same month, Wehrum participated in a decision that appeared to benefit a former client, DTE Energy, in which then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a memo stating that the agency would not be “second guessing utilities” when they projected whether they would need a few federal permits after expanding their operations.

Wehrum, who heads the air and radiation office at the EPA, acknowledged both incidents in an interview with The Post but said he had determined that he did not violate federal ethics rules.

“I have, from day one, tried to be absolutely strict and assiduous as to what I do about complying with my ethical obligations,” Wehrum said, “because it doesn’t do me any good, and it doesn’t do the agency any good, to be doing things that people see as unethical.”

Still, the fallout from reporting on Wehrum’s ties to his former firm and the utility industry by The Post and other outlets — including Politico, the New York Times and E&E News — has continued to reverberate. The Utility Air Regulatory Group, a group of power companies that paid Hunton Andrews Kurth millions in membership dues, disbanded earlier this year.

Wehrum’s decision to leave is the second high-profile EPA resignation in the past year. Last July, Pruitt stepped down after facing probes by Congress, the EPA Office of Inspector General and the Office of Special Counsel for his management and spending practices.

The info is here.

Moral Decision Making, Religious Strain, and the Experience of Moral Injury

Steven Lancaster and Maggie Miller
PsyArXiv Preprints

Abstract

Moral injury is the recognition that acts perpetrated during combat, or other stressful situations, can having lasting psychological impacts. Models of moral injury examine the role of transgressive acts, moral appraisals of these acts, and the symptoms of moral injury. However, little research has examined potential pathways between these elements. The current study examined everyday moral decision making and aspects of religious functioning as possible mediators of these relationships in a military veteran sample. Our pre-registered structural equation model supported a relationship between acts and appraisals; however, this relationship was not mediated by moral decision making as we had hypothesized. Our results demonstrated that religious strain significantly mediated the relationship between moral appraisals and both self- and other-directed symptoms of moral injury. Additional research is needed to better understand how and which transgressive acts are appraised as morally wrong. Further research is also needed to better integrate moral decision making into our understanding of moral injury.

From the Discussion:

Contrary to our predictions, moral decision making did not mediate the relationship between acts and appraisals in our hypothesized model.  This is surprising due to moral conflict being seen as the core of moral injury experience (Jinkerson, 2016).  Given the importance of moral evaluations of one’s actions in moral injury, we expected that one’s “moral compass would make a significant contribution to this model (Drescher & Foy, 2008, p. 99).  It is not clear whether this null finding is due to the method in which moral decision making was assessed or if perhaps moral decision making for everyday experiences (or non-combat experiences) fails to play a role in how one evaluates their potentially transgressive experiences (Christensen & Gomila, 2012).  The EDMD is limited in at least two ways which may have affected our results.  First, the test lacks a contemplation component which is necessary for the psychological processing of an moral decision (Gunia, Wang, Huang, Wang, & Murnighan, 2012).  Second, given that the EDMD focuses on everyday experiences, it may be limited in its ability to assess the moral decisions made during stressful situations (Yousef et al., 2012).  While moral decision making did not mediate as the act-appraisal relationship as hypothesized, it was correlated with other-directed symptoms of moral injury and the MODINDICES output in MPLUS indicated this pathway would improve model fit.  While not hypothesized, one reason for this finding could be that higher altruism leads an individual to give the “benefit of the doubt” to others, particularly those with whom they have endured stressful or traumatic experiences (Staub & Vollhardt, 2008).  Given the relatively young status of the field, additional research is needed to better understand who experiences these acts as negative/wrong and for which types of events does this occur.  Future studies may want to incorporate a broad range of potential mediators including multiple indices of moral decision making.

The pre-print is here.

House Panel Subpoenas Kellyanne Conway over ‘Egregious’ Ethics Violations

Jack Crowe
The National Review
Originally posted June 26, 2019


Here is an excerpt:

Henry J. Kerner, the special counsel, whose role is unrelated to Robert Mueller’s investigation, argued in his Wednesday testimony that Conway’s repeated violations of the Hatch Act — which stem from her endorsement of Republican congressional candidates during television interviews and on Twitter — created an “unprecedented challenge” to his office’s ability to enforce federal law.

Conway has dismissed the accusations of ethics violations as an unprecedented and politically motivated attack on the administration.

“If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work,” Conway said when asked about her alleged violations during a May interview, adding “let me know when the jail sentence starts.”

Kerner, in his letter to the president and in his testimony, argued that Conway’s refusal to accept responsibility created a dangerous precedent and was further reason to dismiss her.

Conway’s repeated violations, “combined with her unrepentant attitude, are unacceptable from any federal employee, let alone one in such a prominent position,” Kerner testified.

Representative Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), who chairs the Committee, said he is prepared to hold Conway in contempt if she defies the subpoena.

The info is here.

How do you teach a machine right from wrong? Addressing the morality within Artificial Intelligence

Joseph Brean
The Kingston Whig Standard
Originally published May 30, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

AI “will touch or transform every sector and industry in Canada,” the government of Canada said in a news release in mid-May, as it named 15 experts to a new advisory council on artificial intelligence, focused on ethical concerns. Their goal will be to “increase trust and accountability in AI while protecting our democratic values, processes and institutions,” and to ensure Canada has a “human-centric approach to AI, grounded in human rights, transparency and openness.”

It is a curious project, helping computers be more accountable and trustworthy. But here we are. Artificial intelligence has disrupted the basic moral question of how to assign responsibility after decisions are made, according to David Gunkel, a philosopher of robotics and ethics at Northern Illinois University. He calls this the “responsibility gap” of artificial intelligence.

“Who is able to answer for something going right or wrong?” Gunkel said. The answer, increasingly, is no one.

It is a familiar problem that is finding new expressions. One example was the 2008 financial crisis, which reflected the disastrous scope of automated decisions. Gunkel also points to the success of Google’s AlphaGo, a computer program that has beaten the world’s best players at the famously complex board game Go. Go has too many possible moves for a computer to calculate and evaluate them all, so the program uses a strategy of “deep learning” to reinforce promising moves, thereby approximating human intuition. So when it won against the world’s top players, such as top-ranked Ke Jie in 2017, there was confusion about who deserved the credit. Even the programmers could not account for the victory. They had not taught AlphaGo to play Go. They had taught it to learn Go, which it did all by itself.

The info is here.

Doctors are burning out twice as fast as other workers. The problem's costing the US $4.6 billion each year.

Lydia Ramsey
www.businessinsider.com
Originally posted May 31, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

To avoid burnout, some doctors have turned to alternative business models.

That includes new models like direct primary care, which charges a monthly fee and doesn't take insurance. Through direct primary care, doctors manage the healthcare of fewer patients than they might in a traditional model. That frees them up to spend more time with patients and ideally help them get healthier.

It's a model that has been adopted by independent doctors who would otherwise have left medicine, with insurers and even the government starting to take notes on the new approach.

Others have chosen to set their own hours by working for sites that virtually link up patients with doctors.

Even so, it'll take more to cut through the note-taking and other tedious tasks that preoccupy doctors, from primary-care visits to acute surgery. It has prompted some to look into ways to alleviate how much work they do on their computers for note-taking purposes by using new technology like artificial-intelligence voice assistants.

The info is here.

Understanding Unbelief: Atheists and agnostics around the world

Stephen Bullivant, Miguel Farias, Jonathan Lanman, & Lois Lee
Research Report - 2019

Eight key findings

1. Atheists (i.e., people who ‘don’t believe in God’) and agnostics (i.e., people who ‘don’t know whether there is a God or not, and don’t believe there is a way to find out’) exhibit significant diversity both within, and between, different countries. Accordingly, there are very many ways of being an unbeliever (i.e., atheists/agnostics combined).

2. In all six of our countries, majorities of unbelievers identify as having ‘no religion’. Nevertheless, in Denmark fully 28% of atheists and agnostics identify as Christians; in Brazil the figure is 18%. 8% of Japan’s unbelievers say they are Buddhists. Conversely, in Brazil (79%), the USA (63%),  Denmark (60%), and the UK (52%), a majority of unbelievers were brought up as Christians.

3. Relatively few unbelievers select ‘Atheist’ or ‘Agnostic’ as their preferred (non)religious or secular identity. 38% of American atheists opt for ‘Atheist’, compared to just 19% of Danish atheists. Other well-known labels – ‘humanist’, ‘free thinker’, ‘sceptic’, ‘secular’ – are the go-to identity for only small proportions in each country.

4. Popular assumptions about ‘convinced, dogmatic atheists’ do not stand up to scrutiny. Atheists and
agnostics in Brazil and China are less confident that their beliefs about God are correct than are Brazilians and Chinese as a whole. Although American atheists are typically fairly confident in their views about God, importantly, so too are Americans in general.

5. Unbelief in God doesn’t necessarily entail unbelief in other supernatural phenomena. Atheists and (less so) agnostics exhibit lower levels of supernatural belief than do the wider populations. However, only minorities of atheists or agnostics in each of our countries appear to be thoroughgoing naturalists.

6. Another common supposition – that of the purposeless unbeliever, lacking anything to ascribe ultimate meaning to the universe – also does not bear scrutiny. While atheists and agnostics are disproportionately likely to affirm that the universe is ‘ultimately meaningless’ in five of our countries, it still remains a minority view among unbelievers in all six countries.

7. Also perhaps challenging common suppositions: with only a few exceptions, atheists and agnostics endorse the realities of objective moral values, human dignity and attendant rights, and the ‘deep value’ of nature, at similar rates to the general populations in their countries.

8. There is remarkably high agreement between unbelievers and general populations concerning the
values most important for ‘finding meaning in the world and your own life’. ‘Family’ and ‘Freedom’ ranked highly for all. Also popular – albeit less unanimously so – were ‘Compassion’, ‘Truth’, ‘Nature’, and ‘Science’.

The research is here.

‘We as a species need to come to terms’ with CRISPR technology

Ashley Turner
www.CNBC.com
Originally posted May 21, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Tuesday that He’s research was a “horrible experiment and it established a horrible precedent.” Gottlieb said He’s experiment risked causing people to “rightfully” turn away from the science.

Gottlieb said he has yet to see any compelling arguments in favor of human germline editing.

Paul Dabrowski, CEO of Synthego, a genome engineering company, agreed the scientific community is not yet ready for germline editing. He wondered whether allowing parents to choose to genetically alter their future children can be ethical if they’re not the one who is having their DNA changed.

“How do you make sure you can align the person who is consenting and the person who is taking the risk?” Dabrowski asked.

Stanford’s Hurlbut said there are risks to editing DNA, as those traits can then be passed down to future generations. Editing certain genes can also cause changes in other genes, according to Hurlbut.

“We want to be very careful, nature is a profound balance and if we intervene in a way that is not profound we can upset things,” Hurlbut said.

The info is here.

Moralized memory: binding values predict inflated estimates of the group’s historical influence

Luke Churchill, Jeremy K. Yamashiro & Henry L. Roediger III
Memory (2019)
DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2019.1623261

Abstract

Collective memories are memories or historical knowledge shared by individual group members, which shape their collective identity. Ingroup inflation, which has previously also been referred to as national narcissism or state narcissism, is the finding that group members judge their own group to have been significantly more historically influential than do people from outside the group. We examined the role of moral motivations in this biased remembering. A sample of 2118 participants, on average 42 from each state of the United States, rated their home state’s contribution to U.S. history, as well as that of ten other states randomly selected. We demonstrated an ingroup inflation effect in estimates of the group’s historical influence. Participants’ endorsement of binding values – loyalty, authority, and sanctity, but particularly loyalty – positively predicted the size of this effect. Endorsement of individuating values – care and fairness – did not predict collective narcissism. Moral motives may shape biases in collective remembering.

The research can be found here.

The Wayfair Walkout Is a Different Kind of Tech Worker Protest

April Glaser
slate.com
Originally posted June 26, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

This time, the Wayfair employees went very public—and they did so during a week of renewed public outrage over the Trump administration’s border policies, thanks to reports of appalling conditions at a facility in Clint, Texas, holding migrant children who had been separated from their families. When Wayfair employees disrupt business on Wednesday by walking out, they’ll highlight that even a company best known for cheap sofas is entangled with a system that has split up families, locked asylum-seekers in cages, and detained children who have been found sick and without access to sufficient food or places to bathe.

This isn’t a typical use of organized labor, but it’s of a piece with the methods used by white-collar workers in the technology industry over the past two years. So far, the movement to force companies to oppose various activities of the Trump administration has had mixed success. Wayfair’s case suggests it will now grow beyond the very largest tech companies—and that employees are realizing signing a petition isn’t their only move.

The Wayfair protesters aren’t fighting to improve their own working conditions: They’re organizing to change their employer’s business practices. Google employees did this in 2018 with a petition that lead to the nonrenewal of a Department of Defense contract to build software systems for drones. Microsoft and Salesforce employees were less successful last year when they sent letters to their respective CEOs demanding they stop contracting with federal immigration agencies. More than 4,200 Amazon employees recently called on the company, unsuccessfully, to reduce its carbon footprint and stop offering cloud services to the oil and gas industry.

The info is here.