Can agroecology and CRISPR mix? The politics of complementarity and moving toward technology sovereignty

Can gene editing and agroecology be complementary? Various formulations of this question now animate debates over the future of food systems, including in the UN Committee on World Food Security and at the UN Food Systems Summit. Previous analyses have discussed the risks of gene editing for agroecosystems, smallholders, and the concentration of wealth by and for agro-industry. This paper takes a different approach, unpacking the epistemic, socioeconomic, and ontological politics inherent in complementarity. I ask: How is complementarity understood? Who is asking and defining this question? What are the politics of entertaining the debate at all? I sketch the epistemic foundations of science and technology that organize different notions of evidence used in agroecology and genetic engineering. On this base, I offer 8 angles on the compatibility question, exploring the historical contradictions that complementarity discourses reveal and the contemporary work they do. I work through questions of (1) technological neutrality, (2) “root cause” problems, (3) working with nature, (4) encoding racism, and dilemmas of (5) ownership and (6) access. These questions, I argue, require a reckoning with (7) ontologies of coloniality-modernity, which help us get underneath—and beyond—the complementarity question. Finally, I offer (8) a framework for thinking about and working toward technology sovereignty.

Is Common Sense neither Compatibilist nor Incompatibilist?

<p>In the debate between the compatibilist and the incompatibilist, there has been significant dispute about who has the burden of proof. While both sides often agree that the burden lies on those who argue against commonsense belief, they disagree on what those beliefs actually are. Kadri Vihvelin takes the rare position that there is actually no commonsense belief about the compatibility question. This is derived from the claim that there is no commonsense belief about whether or not determinism is true. And from this, Vihvelin concludes that both sides have an argumentative burden. She then applies a burden according to the modal claims made by each side of the debate, issuing the verdict that the higher burden is on the incompatibilist because they make an impossibility claim. Though Vihvelin clearly makes empirical claims about commonsense beliefs related to free will and determinism, she also presents a critique of philosophical intuitions that suggests scepticism with regard to empirical results bearing on such beliefs. She suggests that the materials may produce intuitions that do not reflect beliefs held prior to the experiment. But this betrays a dilemma: either we can use experiments to answer these empirical questions, in which case we should look at the best available evidence, or we can’t use experiments to answer such questions, in which case we should remain silent on them. Ultimately, the current state of research does provide answers, albeit incomplete. There is still room for improved materials and wider studies, but there is nonetheless strong evidence against Vihvelin’s empirical claims. This has implications not only for Vihvelin’s arguments, but for burden of proof claims regarding the compatibilism/incompatibilism debate more generally and emphasises the need for philosophers of free will to take the empirical results more seriously.</p>

Is Common Sense neither Compatibilist nor Incompatibilist?

<p>In the debate between the compatibilist and the incompatibilist, there has been significant dispute about who has the burden of proof. While both sides often agree that the burden lies on those who argue against commonsense belief, they disagree on what those beliefs actually are. Kadri Vihvelin takes the rare position that there is actually no commonsense belief about the compatibility question. This is derived from the claim that there is no commonsense belief about whether or not determinism is true. And from this, Vihvelin concludes that both sides have an argumentative burden. She then applies a burden according to the modal claims made by each side of the debate, issuing the verdict that the higher burden is on the incompatibilist because they make an impossibility claim. Though Vihvelin clearly makes empirical claims about commonsense beliefs related to free will and determinism, she also presents a critique of philosophical intuitions that suggests scepticism with regard to empirical results bearing on such beliefs. She suggests that the materials may produce intuitions that do not reflect beliefs held prior to the experiment. But this betrays a dilemma: either we can use experiments to answer these empirical questions, in which case we should look at the best available evidence, or we can’t use experiments to answer such questions, in which case we should remain silent on them. Ultimately, the current state of research does provide answers, albeit incomplete. There is still room for improved materials and wider studies, but there is nonetheless strong evidence against Vihvelin’s empirical claims. This has implications not only for Vihvelin’s arguments, but for burden of proof claims regarding the compatibilism/incompatibilism debate more generally and emphasises the need for philosophers of free will to take the empirical results more seriously.</p>

Methodology and free will

The existence question asks whether actual human agents have free will. By contrast, the compatibility question asks whether free will is compatible with determinism. Most philosophers hope that answering the compatibility question will subsequently help to answer the existence question. However, standard approaches to free will tend to result in empirical and dialectical stalemates about how to analyze the concept of free will. At the very least, these approaches leave us unable to definitively establish the application or reference conditions of the concept, and so they make it difficult to answer not only the compatibility question, but also the existence question. The main goal of Chapter 1 is to survey a number of problems with standard approaches to free will, which rely heavily on intuitions. The aim in doing so is to motivate an alternative approach, which does not rely on intuitions.

Naturally Free Action

Do we have free will? This book argues that the answer to that question is “yes,” by showing how the concept of free will refers to many actual behaviors, and how free actions are a natural kind. Additionally, the book addresses the role of phenomenology in fixing the reference of the concept, and argues that free-agency phenomenology is typically accurate, even if determinism is true. The result is a realist, naturalistic framework for theorizing about free will, according to which free will exists and we act freely. For the most part, this verdict is reached independently of addressing the compatibility question, which asks whether free will is compatible with determinism. Even so, the book weighs in on that question, arguing that the natural-kind view both supports compatibilism and provides compatibilists with an attractive way to be realists about free will. The resulting position is preferable to previous natural-kind accounts as well as to revisionist accounts of free will and moral responsibility. Finally, the view defuses recent empirical threats to free will and is able to address emerging questions about whether an artificially intelligent agent might ever act freely or be responsible for its behaviors.

Naturally free action

Adopting the alternative approach motivated in Chapter 1, this chapter argues that free will is a natural kind, by relying on the influential idea that natural kinds are homeostatic property clusters (HPCs). The resulting HPC natural-kind view about free will answers the existence question positively: free will exists and we act freely. Moreover, it does so without directly addressing the compatibility question, although the view favors compatibilism over libertarianism. The chapter also rebuts a prominent objection to natural-kind views about free will, including the HPC view. Finally, the HPC view builds on Andrew Sims’s recent view that agents are a natural kind and it yields an appealing alternative to standard approaches as well as to recent revisionist approaches to free will and moral responsibility.

The Inflation Technique Completely Solves the Causal Compatibility Problem

The causal compatibility question asks whether a given causal structure graph — possibly involving latent variables — constitutes a genuinely plausible causal explanation for a given probability distribution over the graph’s observed categorical variables. Algorithms predicated on merely necessary constraints for causal compatibility typically suffer from false negatives, i.e. they admit incompatible distributions as apparently compatible with the given graph. In 10.1515/jci-2017-0020, one of us introduced the inflation technique for formulating useful relaxations of the causal compatibility problem in terms of linear programming. In this work, we develop a formal hierarchy of such causal compatibility relaxations. We prove that inflation is asymptotically tight, i.e., that the hierarchy converges to a zero-error test for causal compatibility. In this sense, the inflation technique fulfills a longstanding desideratum in the field of causal inference. We quantify the rate of convergence by showing that any distribution which passes the nth-order inflation test must be $\begin{array}{} \displaystyle {O}{\left(n^{{{-}{1}}/{2}}\right)} \end{array}$-close in Euclidean norm to some distribution genuinely compatible with the given causal structure. Furthermore, we show that for many causal structures, the (unrelaxed) causal compatibility problem is faithfully formulated already by either the first or second order inflation test.

HTTP SECURITY HEADERS

Nowadays security becomes more important than the content and the SEO of a web application. Due to a lack of protection, the number of attacked websites augments in the past few years. In most of the cases, developers are either uninformed or unqualified to implement security during the application development, which causes a huge amount of data flaws. Supporting the developers and easily managing the workflow, some organizations have developed different kind of guidelines for security integration. Such guide helps handling the security from the outset of the development process, which influence over the protection of the entire application. The one used in this article is a project developed by Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation named OWASP Secure Headers Project. Its aim is to show the developers the balance between usability and security implemented through http headers. By giving general data and examples of HTTP response headers usability it is a platform which help increasing the security of the application. In this article, we explain the necessity of HTTP Security Headers and how they can help in preventing a cyber invasion in our web application! We will give details on the most important HTTP headers and will retrieve a basic information for some with a lower need. We will give examples for their implementation in one ASP.NET web application to provide more descriptive perspective of their use! In the recent years, browsers have integrated certain security header controls to support the web application security. Those headers give instructions to the browser how to behave when handling sensitive content and data of the application. If developers enable them in the application, browser will prevent attacks automatically. But not all browsers support them, which brings a compatibility question: what are the alternatives in a case of deprecated header on a specific browser. As a part of the research we will provide an analyze of the use of the HTTP headers in some of the most common sites used in Bulgaria with the help of ALEXA Top 1 Million sites. There have already been developed a lot of applications to show if a certain website has HTTP security headers implemented. Most of them are freely to use and gives detailed information on what was done and what should be done in case that specific layer of security is missing from the web application. The need of security in the web applications become more and more necessary. Along with other security implementations on a programming and on a server level the ones described in the article bring another layer of security management that mitigates certain types of cyberattacks and vulnerabilities.