Hello, everyone, and welcome to this broadcast. Firstly, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the Non-Aul and Nambri peoples, and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging. We're delighted to have you all join us this morning, and this is our second HMI Data, AI, and Society seminar in the series. And we're absolutely delighted, of course, to welcome the wonderful Lily Hu from Harvard University and hear more about her work. She's going to discuss what is race in algorithmic discrimination on the basis of race. And just before we get into that, I'll just do a little few little announcements. Lily will speak for 30 minutes, in which time please feel free to add any of your questions to the chat here on the Zoom channel. And then we'll have a 30 minute Q&A session, and we'll have a hard stop at 10am. And after that, we can continue our conversation in Slack. So without further ado, Lily, please, if you would like to start. Thank you. Thank you so much for that introduction, Shell. First, I want to say thank you to everybody who's at HMI and making the Data, AI, and Society seminar series possible.  Fortunately, a brave soul jumped right in. So Claire, I believe, thank you for which I'm so grateful. So I hope today's talk will make up a bit for last week and maybe even exceed what I would have done last week because I'm super prepared now. Okay, well, thanks again. So this is what is raised in algorithmic discrimination on the basis of race. I'm going to start off with this court case. In August 2018, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, that's HUD, filed a housing discrimination complaint against Facebook, saying that the company's algorithm based advertising system quotes minds extensive user data and classifies its users based on protected characteristics, and thereby quote unlawfully discriminates by enabling advertisers to restrict which Facebook users receive housing related ads based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin and disability. Facebook responding to this complaint pointed out that its machine learning system does not even make use of a race feature. So it doesn't even have the ability to target individuals based on race. But this line was unconvincing. In March of the following year, HUD put forth an actual charge of discrimination that earlier was a complaint and I'm going to read the text in its entirety here but it's on the slide. It's an excerpt respondent that is Facebook combines the data it has about user attributes and behavior on its platform with data it obtains about user behavior on other websites and the non digital world. Respondent then uses machine learning and other prediction techniques to classify and group users so as to project each user's likely response to a given ad. In doing so, respondent inevitably recreates groupings defined by the protected class by grouping users who like similar pages unrelated to housing and presuming a shared interest or disinterest in housing related advertisements. Respondence mechanism functions just like an advertiser who intentionally targets or excludes users based on their protected class. So I think there are two questions that I want to focus on here. First, we might ask, well, why does the algorithm reconstitute these protected class groups. And I think some simple laws are sociological observation and as well as observations about how machine learning works makes that quite clear right. There are sociological facts about how certain groups of people, what kinds of pages they tend to like and also facts about clicking on certain and apparently as long as the behavioral tendencies are true in the world. The machine learning system will learn them. So I think the first question. I can kind of set aside. I think the second question though is rather interesting, which is, why does count as discrimination. So if we suppose that HUD reconstruction of the events is is in fact what is happening why would this kind of behavior constitute discrimination. This exchange between Facebook and HUD drills down on a critical point of contention in debates about algorithmic discrimination, which is, what does it take for a database system to act on or on the basis of race. And here HUD proffers a negative proposition. They say look an algorithm can discriminate on the basis of race, even when it does not have access to a race feature. So I want to ask that my kind of talk today will be asking, you know, could such a bold claim be true in what theory of discrimination what theory of race would make it so. So, I think database predictive tools like the ones at the center of the HUD versus Facebook case clarifying underappreciated problem for discrimination theory, which I'm going to call the puzzle of algorithmic discrimination. And I'm going to refer keep referring back to this as the puzzle. So this is really, we got to keep this one in our minds here. And the question is simply this when our decisions made on the basis of features that are correlated with race decisions made on the basis of race. And I think this question is not just relevant to current debates about algorithms, I think a version of it has dog philosophers legal scholars for decades under the descriptor proxy discrimination, in which an attribute that is a proxy for race or sex or so on is used in decision making. And I think predictive machine learning simply kind of cast this old problem in new light, but also allows us I think to drill down on like, you know what exactly is going on here that's making this so puzzling. So, here is the roadmap for today's talk. So I'm going to set up the puzzle, I'm going to pursue a solution to the puzzle, not by elaborating a distinctive account of discrimination, but rather a distinctive a social constructivist account of race.  I'm going to show how that will offer a solution to the puzzle. And then I'm going to talk about some implications for discrimination theory more broadly. So let's set up the puzzle setting up the puzzle. Okay. The hub versus Facebook case, I think well illustrates a central dispute in cases of potential algorithmic discrimination with each party, taking a distinct interpretation of this notoriously vague because of race clause that we tend to see an analysis of discrimination. So consider the following I think rather uncontroversial, but non moralized analysis of discrimination, which I'm going to call our D. So X discriminates on the basis of race if X treats why differently from how X treats or would treat some Z because why supposedly has racial status R and Z supposedly has a different racial status or crime. So, because in the literature tends to be read in two ways. On one reading, we're asked because refers to X is kind of taking race as a reason for the differential treatment, right. So the reasons interpretation of because asked us to look into the considerations X took and acting the way that she did. Another reading because refers to X is treatment of why is just being constantly affected by race in just a non reasons way. So we're going to consider how race might have affected or played a causal role and how X treated why, aside from being a part of X is reasons perhaps even in a way unbeknownst to her. So I want to first set aside some easy cases of algorithmic discrimination. So I think that everybody would, I hope that everyone would gather that center cover intentions to recreate racial groupings and then assign them differential ad outcomes on the basis of those groupings would be discrimination on the basis of race and wrongful discrimination on basic race at that. So for the sake of argument I want to set aside those cases where there's like, you know, a band of engineers in the background doing something. I also want to set aside cases where the algorithm explicitly has a race feature because remember this is the kind of key point of Facebook's defense they didn't even have a race feature right. And this is a bit of a simplification which I'll continue I'll talk more about later on, but I don't want to have to develop a full account of what it takes for a machine to take something as a reason. So I'm just going to say look now, you know, take. In fact, that that'll be the only way that it can take races or reason for now I'll make that stipulation and then that simplification and then I'll go go on to revise it. And that's because I just want to make I want to set aside kind of more complicated reasons or sorry more complicated accounts of what is take something for a reason. Okay, so the really the tough cases are cases when the race features not in the machine learning algorithm or machine in the database and there's also not these covert intentions right. I think for these cases, the reasons versus causes framing exposes a rather deep fault line.  I mean so long as they don't have the race feature, but if you go with the cause interpretation it looks like if, at least if the machine learning system is working properly in many cases, they almost necessarily discriminate on the base of race. Right, like race just cause effects so many aspects of our lives. I want to set aside the reasons account because I want to talk a little bit about the literature the kind of more technical literature on the causes account which there's been quite a bit on so scholarship on algorithmic discrimination has overwhelmingly advanced a version of this causal interpretation. And I want to say a little bit about why I find these accounts to be lacking, but I'm happy to discuss this more in question Q&A. So I can't fully address the full breadth of the scholarship that I wanted to kind of acknowledge it for especially computer scientists who are maybe quite familiar with causal fairness or causal counterfactual accounts of fairness. So there's this there's a lot of literature on what's called like path specific accounts of fairness where really what the algorithm with the kind of framework is to think about this causal diagram of how race affects all the other attributes in your data system. And then to designate which causal pathways are bad, and then to say my algorithm computation is not going to take into account those pathways. I think the problem with this approach is that the grounds that you need to identify those suspect pathways they can't come from solely within the causal framework. And I think most work in the area concedes as much, but and they submit the task of that designating the the unfair pathways should be should be just directly drawing on normative considerations. But I think this suggestion is simply unresponsive to the puzzle of algorithmic discrimination as I framed it, because that calls for a descriptive account of what it is to act on race, right, setting aside any particular moral theory about why acting in that way would be wrongful. And I think skipping to a moralized conception of discrimination actually overlooks what makes algorithms so interesting in the first place because oftentimes we're asking like, did the algorithm even act on race right like that's kind of the thing. That's at the heart of this HUD versus Facebook case. So I think, so I think just kind of going the moralized direction kind of misses it. Furthermore, though, I think any such method that does aim to provide a descriptive account is only able to pick out those pathways that count as acting on the base of race in light of a fundamental theory of race. Right. But I think causal causality based approaches have been largely silent on these matters of metaphysics. I think causal counterfactual approaches. And if you're not familiar with these, I'm almost done here, causal counterfactual approaches also I think suffer from similar silences.  I think there too, a theory of race is required to even get the method off the ground. Just saying that race stands in an important causal relationship with a given feature doesn't by itself make any headway in determining whether acting on that feature is acting on race, unless that observation works from an account of race in light of which that feature and causal relation are privileged over others. Okay, I'm going to really quickly mute my video because they're trained passing by. Okay, so the principal issue with these approaches is not just that facts about causation don't give us enough information to pick out, you know, the race features from the non race features, but it's that any implications that these approaches have for solving the puzzle will just depend entirely on the theory of race that they posit. Right. And the theory that I think that the approaches themselves can't deliver. So I think the disagreements across the different solutions to the puzzle stem from disagreements about what race as a social category. And I do want to say, though, approaches are in fact suggestive of an account of race, right, they highlight a picture of race as producing causal effects in the world. And they suggest in doing so they suggest that what race does is a key feature of what race is. How is it possible that there is another train. I'm sorry about this. I wholeheartedly endorse this proposal of thinking race to be a social cause but I think we need to think really deeply about what kind of a social cause is and I think they're a social constructivist account can. Okay. Well, surely there won't be another one in the next 15 minutes. All right. So, I think to make sense of a causes interpretation of discrimination on the basis of race, we need to elaborate an analysis of race as a social category that is causally efficacious. Right. But I think the straightforward thought that race acts as a cause. And I think that's kind of an embrace being just an individual attribute that kind of trigger certain responses right so that the claim the police person stop Jamal because he was black seems to suggest something like at time T zero the police person perceives Jamal perceives race, and then that triggers a certain set of behavioral responses that ends in the police person stopping Jamal at time T one. And that kind of causal understanding leaps kind of completely opaque the background conditions of the interaction right so why did black have the causal effect that it did. Why did the police officer react the way did with, you know, with stop and search rather than with pass. And I think if a causes interpretation discrimination is primarily concerned with the systemic nature of racial disadvantage, then answers to these causal questions should explain why black has the causal capacities that it does, and why black has the causal capacities are configured in this way. So I think that here, what we want is I think a picture of race not as a kind of attribute that is perceived by, but as a social category that structures certain kinds of social responses. The definition of why Jamal being Jamal's being black caused the police officer to search him or stop him has to address the fact that the black carry social meaning, right, or that the concept of black is linked to in America concepts of kind of danger or violence. And I think we can't really understand how black acts constantly, you know, causes the police search, without understanding the origins of this representational content. And this is what social constructivism really highlights. Social constructivism highlights that the myriad causal powers of Jamal being raised black are connected with the social kind of thing that being raised black is and how the category is socially constructed as such. So constructively foreground this idea that racial categories are socially constructed to have the causal powers that they have right and socially constructed because of social and political forces continually shaping the boundaries of racial categories, their meanings and as a result of their causal capacities. And since races don't share any essential characteristics that naturally mark them off from each other, the divisions can only be maintained and produced a new by race making institutions. So I'm going to use the example of police and the prison system in the US, though I'm not a scholar of policing and prisons in the US and for people who, you know, want to learn more about this which we all should I think this little like explanation isn't going to do justice to the work that so many scholars have done and so just to name a few. Elizabeth Hinton, Ruthie Gilmore, Julie Kohler house and like I'm happy to kind of give names I think this work is really important. And also don't want people to think this cursory explanation of it is, you know, kind of covers the expansive scholarship. But, let me say a little bit about this which is that the expansion of the American carceral system, starting in the late 60s reinforced representations of blacks as deviance as criminals as generally dangerous and the rise in black crime which was itself a product of race laden policies further justifies certain policing practices right practices like racial profiling, such that blackness can be becomes both equated with criminality at this, you know, micro level of everyday social meeting and police interaction, but also this macro level of legitimized racial policing policies and just general policymaking rationale. And these effects have spilled over in the past 50 years, and in many other spheres that making blacks further socially economically and politically marginalized and very in highly specific ways. And the concept of race is thereby further embedded in our society figures into new and different non accidental generalizations and asserts new and different causal pressures on black lives. So I think a further way to flesh out this critical constructivist project is to think about race as essentially hierarchically constructed. And I'm going to call this kind of strand of constructivist thought thick constructivism. So, for instance, Sally Haslinger for Sally Haslinger, you know, race and gender or social positions, where in certain characteristics of phenotype and ancestry. In the case of race justifies certain kinds of differential treatment and positioning. In quote, racial oppression or racial oppression is directly connected to correlations of race. So she writes group domination and the effects of earlier injustice positions, coordinate groups socially and economically so that their members have much more in common than their group membership. And I think seeing that the race structure as a hierarchical structure means seeing continuity in how blacks are subordinated, even if the particulars of that subordination might vary by historical moment. Because the category is essentially constructed in such a way that black individuals occupy a social position that is defined by a set of norms and expectations. And as a whole oppressive, and I think this fact of racial oppression connects directly with the correlations with race issue at the heart of the puzzle of algorithmic discrimination. Because these correlations, you know, robust non-accessual correlations between outcomes of disadvantage and the black label that we often see in machine learning and in data sets generally, there are simply just manifestations of an unjust race structure at work. Because look, if races are constructed as different, then seeing these consistent non-accidental correlations of race are not just kind of unfortunate statistical regularities that, you know, algorithms have to find a way to skirt around in order to not, you know, not to discriminate. But I think they track empirical facts descriptive of what races qua thick social positions are, right, what it is to be raised in the first instance. So, for the thick constructivist the racial category black is defined in reference to its overall position of disadvantage. So for instance to be black is to be marked on the basis of one's phenotype and supposed ancestry for certain norms expectations and practices of support nation. And I think different thick constructivist accounts can be distinguished by the kinds of subordinating factors that they're emphasizing and defining the category.  So the boy's response, he says, the black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia. And he therefore he thereby defines black by its relationship to legal institutions of racial subordination. While Taylor expands this kind of thick constructivist like approach to the race concept more generally so for Taylor races are probabilistically defined population that result from the white supremacist determination to link appearance and ancestry with social location and life chances. Notice in these accounts that race continues to be a causal factor in individuals lives absolutely right being marked black causally subjects into black individuals to certain types of social treatment. But the constructivist account is of the categories constitutive because black is in fact defined as to be black is to define to be standing in some relation to social factors and social agents. So taking this view we would kind of you know if we have for instance an example here being black is partly defined in terms of standing one standing in a certain relation to institutions of policing. Right. If we took this view then we would expect policing data to be racially skewed.  And if we kind of continue on thinking about the racial hierarchy racialized policing institutions actually for the distinct pillar in that racial hierarchical race structure. And so they partly actually form the thick social position that is the category black. And you know if you take this view then there is really no clean distinction between something. This race are kind of itself and the complex of social factors that constitute the thick social position of race are. Okay so I want to make a few caveats and clarifications before I get to the upshot. At this point I want to first say that I think constructed this account of race doesn't need to take all non accidental correlations with the feature black to be constitutive of the racial category black. I think some I think I would posit like most causal effects of being labeled black and encountering the world as black are not defining features of the category but I think the question of which ones are essential and which ones aren't is an important conceptual. And I was just like a political question that isn't reducible to data mining right so I don't want I don't mean to suggest like. Oh constitutive you know those features that are constitutive are the ones that exhibit the strongest or most robust correlations or anything like that. I also, you know, a potential objection might be well, you know, doesn't a feature need to be kind of perfectly correlated with the racial label black in order for it to be kind of this essential. constitutive feature of the category. And I want to say no and I think this is because standing in certain relations of subordination to policing doesn't mean having to have certain kinds of policing outcomes right so not every individual experiences. And I think that doesn't mean that subordinating standing in a subordinate relation with to policing isn't constitutive of the category, because I think in fact all black individuals quaw black individuals do experience race based harms and injustices because of policing and I can talk more about that maybe in the q amp a. And I want to say, which again will sound very cursory because I think a lot of work should be dedicated to this is that, you know, intersectional theorists intersectionality theorists have, you know, urged us to break out of single axis thinking right like thinking that there is on the one hand, you know, the race hierarchy and the gender hierarchy and you can kind of like just add them up to take to think about oppression. And I want to say that that's absolutely not the case. And I think that constructivism what must be developed further to kind of account for intersectional social categories. But I think that that's going to require a ton of other work and deserves its own kind of dedicated attention. Okay. So what is the cash value of this. I think theoretical resources in place I claim we can elaborate a causal analysis of discrimination on the basis of race. The answer is the puzzle that I set forth at the beginning of this talk. But I think we need to understand how race acts as a cause in the right way. And I think the right way is understanding advanced by the thick constructivist account. So here it is. So let's kind of run through an example. So, you know, the constructivist defined being black in terms of a certain set of supporting social factors.  And I have some examples here be on the receiving of the race. Now, here we have social facts in this box. There are social facts that constitute the racial category black, aquatic, social position. And I want to say that acting as a social factor is a social factor. And I think that's a good example. So, you know, the constructivist defined being black in terms of a certain sort of supporting social factors.  And I have some examples here be on the receiving end of a stop and frisk action be a victim of state violence and so on. So let's say that acting on the feature black in a data set and acting on these features the features in this box are kind of the dividing line between those for the thick constructivism that constructivist is not really there, right. So the constructivist might see that an algorithm that includes the race race feature and algorithm that includes these features that exhibit non accidental correlations that tracking the social facts are constitutive of being raised or might both be discriminating on the basis of race. It helps understand something that I think maybe many of you might have heard in discussions about algorithmic discrimination, which is this this claim that an algorithm can learn race, even if you exclude race. Right. I think the thought here seems to be that in so far as race leaves its marks, leaves its mark on so many non race features, keeping those features around in the machine learning pipeline is going to contribute to certain racially biased outcomes. I think the thick constructivist interpretation is to interpret the claim quite literally it literally learns race. It learns via these correlations with race what race is and acting on the basis of correlations produced by social facts that constitute race in a social position just is acting on the basis of race, because races just are social positions that subject their members, member individuals to this matrix of privileging and supporting social relations that are just precisely what it is, you know, define what it is to be raised. Okay, some implications for discrimination theory I know I'm at the half hour mark so I'll kind of try to run through this. Rather quickly I think I only have like two slides, maybe one slide for I think one slide. I think there are a lot of implications for discrimination theory more broadly I want to discuss a few here. So I think one place where the standard machinery of discrimination theory seems to malfunction is this commonly held distinction between direct and indirect discrimination. You know, kind of to, to, to explain that distinction rather roughly, which there's still like scholarly debate about how best to characterize it. It's, you know, the thought roughly is that indirect, indirect discrimination. Kind of against blacks harms blacks, but not by kind of acting on race itself but it has some negative disparate impact on the group right so for instance, you know because blacks have been more often been subject to certain supporting policing practices, they indirectly bear the brunt of other policies that kind of use those police encounters as a decision making criterion. So that's an indirect kind of discrimination. But if as that the constructivist holds the category black is defined in terms of those social facts that constitute the position in a hierarchical race structure, then the gap between acting on being black and acting on having been targeted by violent policing practices narrow significantly. Right, it seems to act on black in an important sense when that challenges the idea that doing so only acts on being black kind of indirectly. And also, you know, I said, you know, here's this account it solves the puzzle and I want to give you a quick reason or two for why we should adopt the thick constructivist account. I think that the accounts of our social categories, you know should be constructed with certain theoretical and practical goals. And I think the thick constructivist account has, you know, gives us payoff. And let me, I'm going to work with an analogy to economic class. To show that I think the thick constructivist account like gives us theoretical and practical payoff to suppose I'm an Orthodox Marxian and I take class to be defined as an Orthodox objective as Marxian terms so I think your economic class 100% established by your relationship to the means of production. So under capitalism you're a member of the proletariat or a member of the bourgeoisie. And I remember that what Marx called being a proletarian is correlated with having a long working day, limited personal property, and being subject to behavioral control on and off the job. I find that my algorithm can predict with great accuracy which of these individuals will experience financial hardship in the next months, and that the people who will experience financial hardship. It's heavily skewed towards those labeled proletariat, even if I remove the class category. One interpretation that says okay well being a proletariat causally you know influences you having a long working day and so on. I think this conclusion is fine but it seems unsatisfying and maybe even a little bit wrong. It seems that when I use an algorithm to draw on the fact that you frequently experience financial hardship and behavior discipline. I act directly on the fact that you are any particular precarious and subordinated position within the economic structure. A distinctive social position that perhaps warrants attention as a class category. But this thought isn't really available to me if I'm kind of pre committed to the Marxian account. I kind of can't see that in fact these features in fact constitute a really important category of theoretical interest. It seems right to me to say that if I deny you social benefits on the basis of the fact that you have a long working day limited personal property and are subject to behavioral discipline that I'm doing so on the basis of your class directly. And I think this is a claim that we can make on the thick constructivist conception. So that example is just to show I think different conceptions of our categories bear different theoretical and practical normative fruit. The thick constructivist category would serve us well both theoretically and in many of our political projects or many of my political projects. I also think okay this is really one minute now I also think that the constructivist the thick constructivist account of race shows why acting on the basis of races often wrongful. So in discrimination theory there's a question of what the wrong making feature of discrimination is. I think if you take the constructivist account. It's kind of clear to see how acting on the basis of being black is demeaning as Deborah Hellman would say is a wrong making feature of discrimination or compounds injustice or reinforces hierarchy. So I think it kind of connects the descriptive and the non or sorry that more lies than non more lies quite well. And the last thing I'll say is that there are really serious practical limitations of talking about certain features is only causally related to and not our constitutive of race, aquatic social positions, and that cashes out in a series of really horrible, in my view, judicial decisions in discrimination cases in the US context and I'm happy to talk about that more in Q&A, but I'll leave that at that. Thank you for inviting me and allowing me to go a bit over. Thanks. Thank you so much, Lily. That was a really wonderful talk. I realized I didn't introduce my own self, which is also I'm Shelly Adlanson, the chief operations officer of the HMI grand challenge. And what I'd like to do right now that was hand over to Sarita Rosenstock, the research fellow at HMI and she's going to moderate our Q&A. So Sarita, would you like to take over please. Thank you. Hi everybody. So today I'm going to start by calling on our interdisciplinary panel who's associated with the HMI group here, and then I'm going to move on to audience questions and so you can ask the question in the Q&A function here, and you can either I can either or you can ask it for yourself just to indicate in the question. So I'm going to start by calling on Atuza, who's another research fellow here with the HMI group based in the computer science department. Atuza. Hi Lily and thank you so much for the great talk. I'm totally on board with the defense of the thick constructivist account of race and I think maybe that's the right way to think about race if we are thinking about like ontological questions about race. But what I'm a little bit fearful is that if we like imagine we want to apply this notion which is a correct conception of metaphysics of race to the case of Facebook like the example that you started. And so the worry is that if we adopt this dislike very socially kind of picture, it could be that in a couple of legal systems it wouldn't allow us or we wouldn't allow the legal system to demarcate when this notion of race or basically when there was a racial discrimination or not because at some point maybe you can you know if you say that okay there's not much we don't need to have like very strong correlations between features, particular features and the notion of race or any other social category. Then at some point we can end up like saying that yeah at some point, many different features are correlated with these social categories. And that seems to be a kind of a problem for for like legal decision making in practical settings. And I was wondering if you have something to say about that kind of worry. Yeah, um, sorry so I'm going to try to phrase the worry and you can correct me if I'm getting it wrong. So the concern is if we don't have this kind of clear operationalization of the constructivist account that kind of maps on to correlations, then it might be in fact difficult. We kind of have to like not have any knowledge of which features are problematic to act on is that the concern. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that first I think that there are a lot of first there are a lot of like social scientists who are working on issues of race, both empirical social scientists and also social theorists who've studied all sorts of hierarchy and I think that, you know, our conceptions of race have to kind of take into account historical as well as empirical phenomena that might not be born out directly in things like correlations right sometimes they will be like for instance, policing really you know we can see the stark divisions in policing, but you know other other kinds of cases of oppression are not so easily identifiable from the data. And I don't know I don't want this to be hand wavy question but I just think that it's something that we're going to have to do we're going to have to come come to like what in what specific ways certain groups are oppressed and marginalized, and keep note of that kind of cluster of social facts, whenever we try to adjudicate questions about group inequality or group discrimination. And I think another thing to say that about that is that we have to do this. We have to do this because this is part of, I can kind of squeeze in a response, a little bit about my practical limitations, because I write a lot about how race reasoning about race and discrimination cashes out at the US legal system, and how it cashes out is that nothing is constitutive of race right and so all you need to do to show that there's no discrimination. The statistical the econometrician comes in waves their statistical wand, and says look if I condition on neighborhood poverty rates neighborhood crime rates socioeconomic status, you know, by condition on all these extremely racialized factors. There's no race difference at all. And it's true you'll see this across in policing cases, you know, for the people from the US Floyd versus city of New York, NYPD. That's a case where we had to ask whether stop and frisk was racially biased, and both sides said look, if we take this thin account of race, you can condition on anything and ask what the marginal effective race is so I think it just as a practical matter you do have to decide what are the things you cannot condition on as a matter of statistical practice, because it is constitutive of race. So I think, you know, it might be hard to get at that question but like otherwise we're never going to be able to prove discrimination practically. Sorry if that didn't answer. All right, so next on the queue we have Colin Klein from here in the philosophy department. Can everyone hear me all right. Good. Let's hope. All right, good. No thanks it was really interesting, like, I think much more subtle than a lot of these usually are. So I'm going to show this is partly my contrastivist roots thinking about causation but when you were thinking through this it seemed like you were focusing mainly on this question of is something discriminating on the base rather than not. But it seems like in many cases people care about some other contrast so just but to one is on the basis of race versus income. And you might put it in terms of like does income completely screen off the effects of race. So you're quite focused on the U.S. context and particularly African American experience. Does it discriminate on the basis of race. So sometimes you say look it doesn't because we treat Jews and Asians fine. So I'm not discriminating on the basis of race. We're really what you mean is African American versus everyone else or what you mean is white versus everyone else. I'm partly curious in the last one because this is a kind of generalization question because in Australia we don't have a lot of African Americans they mostly work for the State Department. And the indigenous say, you know, they don't face heaps of discrimination unless they're mistaken for indigenous people who are horrifically discriminated against but in a different pattern than us. So this is trying to tease out how much the social constructivist account is just focused on that first question of race rather than not or whether you've got a sense of how it could be extended to cover the other kinds of contrasts as well. Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks. Well, the first thing which is raised rather than something else I think a lot of and I didn't talk about this too much in this paper in this talk but a lot of my work is interested in like well what do you mean race and some non race thing. Right like race rather than let's say like socioeconomic status right. I think that for people who are familiar with these kind of perennial debates in in the left about whether something is in fact a racial disparity or a class disparity. Oftentimes the way that these kinds of conversations cash out statistically is like, well when I just for class, I, the racial disparity shrinks by this much.  Right. Like why would you think that in a world in which black people had the same incomes that blackness in that world reflects what blackness in our world is today so I think. So I want to problematize the this like clean distinction. A little bit. The second thing about remind me sorry the second thing was generalizing okay generalizing.  Yeah, yeah, totally. So for people who might be familiar there's this, there was this case at Harvard discrimination against Asians and admissions to Harvard, right. And I don't want to give this more airtime than it deserves, but I, I've been thinking about this for a while and part of the issue is like, we have a racial minority in this case Asians, but their character lines of attributes like academic attributes. And there's a question of whether acting on the basis of certain positive attributes or, you know, when we're acting against Asians right. I, I think the, you know, one of the things that I think is interesting about racial discrimination is it's is the way I parse it is like, how do we treat similar people similarly, given that they have one particular difference which is that they're different racially. Right. And I think the only way to fill in that question of given their different racially is to kind of think about how these two groups in not just the black white case but let's say Asians and Latinx people, how they are compared relative certain like for me like certain material outcomes. And I think those kinds of axes really affect what it means to treat those groups similarly or differently. Again to think about these groups as social positions that are constituted by certain advantages and privileges and disadvantages and injustices. But you know I do think it is compared comparative. It has to be a comparative question, you know, the default is not just like white right the default isn't just like how are you compared to white but they have to be comparative across racial categories. I'm being a good interlocutor and letting other people ask questions. I have plenty more to say if no one else wants to say. So next I want to call on Katie Steele from philosophy department here. Hi, Lily, thanks. So, yeah, I like your constructivist account of race. And I took your point that we no longer on this account get such a clean distinction between direct and indirect discrimination. But I mean this kind of ties in a little bit with what I too so was getting at earlier. There's still going to be a problem of a spectrum of directness of discrimination.  But then there's like stuff that's a bit further causally downstream from that maybe credit history or, you know, whatever. So, yeah, there's still going to be a question of like where you draw the line perhaps. Yeah, yeah, totally. And I guess what I would say is I, I think that the direct I don't want to say that my account totally like eviscerates the direct and indirect distinction. And I think it, you know, I leave space because a lot of times the direct indirect discrimination is cashed out is just disparate impact. So I'm going to leave room for the fact that you can act on correlations with race that are not constitutive that nevertheless produce disparate impact and say I'm happy to take on board that that's going to be indirect. I also think there's a danger of subsuming too much we want to we want this concept discrimination to do too much for us. And I think the critiques of indirect discrimination are right when they think when they say something like oftentimes we're concerned about distributive justice. And, you know, things can be kind of wrong for many reasons and it doesn't need to be because it's discrimination on the basis of race it could be wrong or unjust as a matter of distributive justice just as a matter of what people get. So I'm kind of willing to say this might shrink the cases, you know, I don't feel a need to kind of make the concept discrimination do a lot. If things are more causally distal, but they nevertheless have disparate impact. I'm happy to call them indirect discrimination. I'm also happy to charge that they're unjust on other grounds. I see. All right. Next is will from the law department here. Thanks, Rita. And thanks, Lily. That was such a fantastic paper. Good on you. Really excellent work. And I particularly liked it because I'm someone who's who left philosophy about a decade ago and then went into law and your paper was really engaged with the nuts and bolts and the concrete aspects of law in a really admirable way, which is often lost in a lot of the engagements with this topic outside outside law faculties. Of course, law faculties have our own problems because we don't think about any of the conceptual stuff in a sensible or sophisticated way. But so thanks. Thanks so much for scratching that itch for me. I've got a comment and then a question. The comment is on the direct and indirect discrimination division as you put it. I want to suggest that indirect discrimination or adverse impact. And I know that there's overlaps between those ideas, but they come from a single source as a matter of history. I want to suggest that that that is formulated as a legal category to attempt to target direct discrimination in an absence of meaningful evidence of the mental state at the discriminator. And I'm not sure exactly what impact that has on on your paper, but it seems that there's there's a there's a weight attached to some kind of meaningful categorical distinction between the types of discrimination, which are targeted by direct and indirect discrimination. And if you look at just just as a matter of the kind of the raw intellectual history of the law here, you see it really clearly in the Griggs case, that originated adverse impact. That kind of consequential approach to attaching liability is the result of consequential consequences of actions, which is discriminatory is can be understood and I think should be understood as an attempt to say look, we're actually targeting the mind, the meant the specific mental process of the perpetrator, but we don't have sufficient evidence of that mental state so we have to adopt a proxy and the proxy is group impact. So that's the comment. The question is, and it's probably a bit of a difficult question. How would you draft the discrimination statute which expressed a constructivist conception of protected attributes. Oh boy. Oh my gosh. That's a hard question because I'm asking you to be a legislator on the spot, but it's just, it's a provocation to help you to think about the positive. I so. Okay, so in the US content. Okay, I don't want to get into the nuts and bolts because I know we don't have that much time but I'm going to say something that perhaps seems like even more radical but I don't. I think as a result of my willing to indirect and indirect discrimination is I'm kind of willing to give up on this like prioritization of mental states this like racial animus mechanism that direct discrimination like intentional discrimination tries to get out. I actually think that most many cases of disparate impact peer disparate impact. I'm kind of happy at, you know, if discrimination theory could be a lot of that, you know, I would be happy for that to kind of take primacy over direct discrimination. I'm not directly responsive but I do want to say something that your earlier comment made me think of so people on here might be familiar with the bus dot case the US Supreme Court had just decided, which says that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender non conforming status and trans status is discrimination on the basis of sex. I think that is quite happy, you know, aligned with something I want to say here, which is there I think there's a blurring of the lines of what it means to act on the base of where it would seem that acting on, you know, how you dress would only be kind of causally related to rather than constitutive of but it seems like then the acting on gender non conforming status. Yeah, can be seen as saying look the way you dress is so you know how you present how you dress is so tied in with the category of sex that we're going to say that acting on the base of that is acting on the base of sex. And I think that's right. Sorry, well, that that was me just shoehorning in the thing I wanted to say in response to your difficult practical question, but I'll own up to it. We can we can go bilateral on the difficult practical question. Yeah. Okay, so next I'm going to call on Tiberio who is coming from the Gradient Institute in Sydney. Hello, ladies. Thank you so much for such a lovely talk. It's a subject that I'm very interested to learn more about. I think my question is around. If you within this account, right, you know, how could you tell if you're making progress towards less racial discrimination? Would, you know, one way to think about it, if you if you could conceive of a test that would determine whether racial discrimination had been completely eradicated. Which, how would you think about that? Which test would would you be would actually within this account be able to answer that question? Or even incremental progress, right? Because from the point of view of, for example, the Facebook case you described and for any pragmatic purposes. One is restricted to make decisions about make deliberations based on limited amount of information, right? And we need specific criteria to make decisions about, you know, whether we should do A or B. And that hinges on notions of what a baseline is. Where are we today in terms of racial discrimination? Where we're going to be tomorrow in terms of racial discrimination? For instance, is there a simple test to within this account to answer the question of whether today we have more racial discrimination than we had last year? Even though today there's much more awareness than there was last year or five years ago. So how would you respond to that? Thank you. I think this question of how much racial discrimination there is in the world or in our in a given society is a really important one. And I think that current accounts. So, okay, let me start with this. In the paper version of this talk, I kind of end on this observation of the stark disparities in how, for instance, racial minorities in the US perceive the prevalence of racial discrimination and how white people perceive the prevalence of racial discrimination. You can like kind of every year that Pew Center does these surveys and they're they're astonishing. We're talking about three times four times the amount of expect of racial discrimination that people of color say exists versus white people. So I think what this draws out to me is the idea of like that there is an objective number amount of racial discrimination out there that an account can kind of like get a hold of is it's really challenging. And I think part of the reason that many of the conclusions kind of of my my paper or my talk here and how it might differ from standard accounts of racial discrimination is it makes at least I think on my account there is a lot more racial discrimination. And I think a lot more cases look like count as cases of racial discrimination. That I think other accounts miss and I think part of the problem to kind of put the discipline a little bit on blasts to say, well, it's not surprising right if the thick constructive is kind of races true, then it wouldn't be surprising to see that there are actually material kind of differences in the perception of race, and what kinds of cases are canonical cases that my theory has to get right, and what kind, you know how my methodology continues right. So that's to say, I think, like this, this really important empirical question like how much racial discrimination is out there. I don't even know how to really respond to that because these stark disparities and in the perceptions of ordinary people show there to be just. I think not even overlapping, not just like empirical measurements are different like people are exposed to more or less racial discrimination. But I think it shows that there might not even be convergence on a concept right philosophers and legal scars might have one concept of racial discrimination. But I think other people might have people people of color might have a different concept and I think that challenges the question of how much racial discrimination is out there because whose concept are we trying to measure. Again, I don't mean to be evasive. So we have one last question from Jenny in sociology before we move this conversation over into the stack. Sorry. Hi, that was a fantastic talk. I'm really interesting to really appreciate the things that you're thinking about in the way that you're integrating the sort of social critical lens with the technical issues of how we manage it. And so I'll say that this question is also written in slack so if people are interested in talking more about it since we've got I think a minute left. I'll come over and do so, but my question is this so. So given that race profoundly shapes life chances which it does and which I think of course underlies the thick reading of race. What if we put this idea of race as a reason back on the table right so it's already clearly a cause might highlighting race rather than trying to diminish this importance help us sort of think about unambiguously how race matters. And potentially in both technical and social ways, mitigate racial disparities or at least sort of weigh them plain, make them clear. Yeah, thank you so much. So in I tried to cut out a lot of content but in the paper I kind of say like well it looks like I did a sleight of hand like I started talking about the causal analysis and all of a sudden I'm saying like, no what it is to take, you know act on race is to act on these other features and now it looks like I'm doing the reasons analysis like what is this trickery. So like I try to acknowledge that a little bit. The, in the end, I think that I do want to advocate for. I mean, it's tough because like, I think it's very hard our current conceptions of what it is to take something as a reason. They don't, at least the ones that like at least how that is tends to be taken in conversations of racial discrimination are rather unsatisfying when you talk about race as a reason and all of a sudden you're in intentionality world you're in like, you know, what was your mental state, you know, were you acting with the racial animosity mechanism on turned on or not like were you in fact in, was it bias land or were you act just acting I was acting a race I was acting on like their attire or something. I think that that picture is is really unhelpful so like I don't if I if time myself to the reasons view means to commit myself to this kind of intentionality standard racial animus racial prejudice view I don't want to do that. But I want to rather I want to say like we need to have a better understanding of what it is to act on the basis of race period, even as a reason and and I don't yet have that. But I think that would require us to do a lot more thinking about how to revise what it is to take social categories as reasons when they're markers of really hierarchical or social meaning. And that requires just a lot more in depth revision of reasons generally, which I didn't want to have to dig through in this paper but I'm absolutely interested and advocate for that project.


In his analysis by equations of an infinite number of terms, Newton showed how to find a series for some quantity y in terms of some variable x. Newton also considered an important related problem. Suppose y can be expressed in terms of powers of x, find x in terms of y. So we might begin with a concrete case, solve y cubed minus 2y minus 5 equal to 0. And here notice that x doesn't even show up. Still the basic principles are the same. What we'd like to do is we'd like to express y in terms of other stuff. So Newton begins by noting that y is approximately 2. In other words, an approximate solution to this equation is y equal to 2. So y is approximately 2, so if we let y equal to plus something and substitute, we obtain an equation in p. Now remember that y is approximately 2, so that means p is a small number. Since p is less than 1, then p cubed and 6p squared are small, so our equation is approximately 10p minus 1 approximately 0. And that gives us p is approximately 0.1. Well, what we've done once we can do again. p is approximately 0.1, so if we let p equal 0.1 plus q, where q is an even smaller number, and substitute, we obtain, which gives us a new equation in q. But since q is small, q cubed and 6.3q squared are even smaller, so we can ignore those terms and get an approximate linear equation, which gives us an approximate value for q. And lather, rinse, repeat. If q is approximately negative 0.0054, then q is negative 0.0054 plus r, then r satisfies, well, some horribly messy equation, and so y is 2 plus p.1 plus q, negative 0.054 plus r, whatever it is, and so on. Newton also shows how this could be done with what we would call an implicit relationships between x and y. For example, suppose we have the relationship y cubed plus a squared y minus 2a cubed plus axy minus x cubed equal to 0. Let's find y for x close to 0. As before, Newton begins by noticing that if x equals 0, then our equation becomes, which has solution y equal to a. So let y equals a plus p, then substituting this in to y cubed a squared y axy minus 2a cubed and minus x cubed gives us, now all of these on the left hand side together equals 0, and all the stuff on the right hand side, which gives us an equation that a and p and x have to satisfy. Now by assumption, p is small, so the only relevant terms are the terms of least degree in p and in x. Well, let's consider this. p cubed and x cubed are both degree 3. 3a p squared and axp are degree 2. Remember, a is actually a constant. a squared p and a squared x are degree 1 terms. So if we keep only the lowest degree terms, we get 4a squared p plus a squared x is approximately 0. And we can solve this for p. Again, let p equal negative 1 fourth x plus q. Substituting into our equation, we get a new equation in q and x. Now remember, our goal is to find y as a series in powers of x. And since we are letting p equal minus 1 fourth x plus q, then we'll treat q as an x squared term. And so we note the degrees of the terms in our equation. The degree 4 terms, 1 sixteenth x squared q and 3a cubed squared. And again, this is since q is an x squared term. Our degree 3 terms, 6564 is x cubed and 1 half axq. Again, treating q as an x squared term, this is an x times an x squared. And our degree 2 terms, 1 sixteenth ax squared and 4a squared q. So taking our least degree terms, our equation is approximately 4a squared q minus 1 sixteenth ax squared. And that gives us q is approximately, and lather, rinse, repeat to get additional terms of our series.


Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce the final panel in our session this morning. We've saved some very good speakers for last. Just to put this in context, Kirk, since you just arrived, we teed off this morning with excellent remarks by the Prime Minister, talking about really sort of an expectation of maybe a new era in U.S.-Malaysian relations, certainly going back to building, I think, the way he put it, was building from strength to strength, and I thought that was very positive. Then we heard about the trade and investment relationship, the outlook for that also seems to be some strong possibilities. We had a real treat from the General just now, and Mike Green, talking about the history of the U.S.-Malaysia security relationship, and it's a great reminder of how closely we've worked together. This panel will look at U.S.-Malaysia security cooperation and the relationship looking forward, and we're honored indeed to have a good friend, Admiral Anwar, who is the Chairman, former Chief of the Malaysian Armed Forces. He's a Navy man, he's an incredible athlete, and he's sort of one of these renaissance men that quietly lead Malaysia in a very competent way, and it's had the honor to work with him also in the private sector. He's the Chairman of the Armed Forces Fund Board in Malaysia, which is a very active investor in Malaysia. We're also joined by someone, all of you in Washington know well, all of you in Malaysia know well, Kurt Campbell, he's the Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, so one of the most proactive, interested policy makers that we have in the United States, really providing great leadership on the relationship, not only with Malaysia and ASEAN, but throughout East Asia, so we're deeply honored that both of you gentlemen could join us. We've given the honor to tee off to Tansri Anwar, so please Tansri, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Dr. Ernest Bauer. First of all, let me say thank you very much for inviting me to the CSIS, and also thank you for ISIS, for inviting me to come back to Washington, D.C. I remember four years ago, I was here, but the same discussion we did was in Pentagon with the Chairman and Joint Staff General Pete Pace, my counterpart. We discussed a lot about the way forward in the security and defense cooperation between the United States and Malaysia. I was asked, what do I think about Iraq and Afghanistan? Of course that was within the four walls. So ladies and gentlemen, apart from that, I've been visiting Hawaii every year, because I believe in networking with my peers, especially with the emeralds, the high echelon and US Navy. Recently I was in Hawaii, witnessing the change of command of Admiral Walsh, succeeding Admiral Keating, Paycom, of course my counterpart was Admiral Fallon, and we're still very much in touch with the US Navy, because in the other company that I've not mentioned, which is the Glenn Defense Marine Asia, which I'm a chairman, we actually process all the peer-side requirements of the US Navy in the Asia Pacific. So ladies and gentlemen, certainly we have heard how historically Malaysia has always been a steady and reliable friend of the United States military. I think one of our common interests, so ladies and gentlemen, is in defense and security cooperation. Undoubtedly the emergence of various issues has brought about greater challenges in the defense and security environment. Therefore today I would like to point to a few areas and explore as a subject matter would want us to do some of the interests and challenges in the regional security architecture. The US and Malaysia certainly share a common and a few areas of possible cooperation or actions in our relationship that in particular represent the unrealized potential. I know during my tenure as Chief of Navy, in fact, if you look at Malaysian foreign policy, we are supposed to only deal bilaterally, not multilaterally. But today this morning I'm encouraged by the announcement of the Prime Minister saying the way forward is multilateralism. My experience, when we first suggested that during the hype of the piracies that was mentioned by our Honourable Prime Minister this morning, in 2000 it was about 242 incidences and it went down to 24. And then I suggested that we do a trilateral coordinated patrol Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. And our legal boy said you can't do that. It is only bilateral approach. But I was very lucky working for the Prime Minister who was then the Defense Minister. I said I suggest it's on the merit of the situation that we have to adopt its urgent and important approach that would enable these operations to be conducted in the Malacca Straits. And at that time my good friend Tom Fago, Admiral Tom Fago, has made a special announcement saying if the littoral states do not do anything, we will come and patrol your straits. So it's a big brouhaha. Everybody was very excited. The papers printed is a man in naval uniform in our front page. And I think we broke through, it's a breakthrough performance when we managed to launch the trilateral coordinated patrol. I think the one that really triggered this is the United States of America, the US Navy. And I always say I'll thank, I really thank my good friend Tom Fago for saying this because otherwise we'll be lulled into our bilateral policy. Four months later during the Shangri-La dialogue, we move ahead. I think we launched the Eyes in the Sky, which is a fantastic thing, it's a breakthrough among the littoral states where the maritime aircrafts with three national operators on board, which is a fantastic breakthrough because it is an example today for all maritime agencies to make it an example of what we did in the Malacca Straits. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we were addressing about counterterrorism, this is also alluded to by the Prime Minister. Looking at the current security scenario, Malaysia and US have closely worked together to fight this threat since 2002. And when Admiral Fallon was paycom, he visited me in Malaysia and I brought him to the exotic east, the eastern seaboard, which is Sabah, the Sulussis. At that time we had a threat by the Abu Sayyaf group, but then it showed him that we have deployed two battalions of troops and also the police to all the inhabited islands. And he was very surprised, he said, I didn't know you have had all your troops in all the islands. This is to deny, the strategy is to deny the ASG to utilize that island as their launchpads. So slowly we worked very closely with the US forces, especially the SEAL team that came with the fastboats and conduct more exercises now to combat counterterrorism. We have taken various measures to implement the UN Security Council resolution of 1373. After the collaboration as it resulted in Malaysia, establishing the Southeast Asia and regional center for counterterrorism, SEAL said. And we have also established a center for peacekeeping. This we have worked very closely with paycom. We have also engaged with other nations and has been very supportive for the security of the region and beyond the global war on terror, you have heard from the Prime Minister and General Ashim how this effort has been enhanced. And again, he did alluded to the US government approved some funds under the initiative FY 1206. And I was a CDF at that time, I was approached. Admiral, would you like the offer by the United States for you to have the FY 1206? That is these radar systems and the centric system, COM system to be placed in the eastern seaboard of Sabah. They told me that the Indonesian will be getting eight Thailand at that time was about to get also eight radar systems. And I approached the defense minister and said, we ought to accept this. We must accept this because it will enable us for a common system to cross-stail, especially the centric system and also the radar system, in terms of our effort to counter terrorism operations. Malaysia actually has benefited from this initiative to the installation of this coastal surveillance radar. And we in order to monitor all the maritime movements in the area, in particular transnational crimes are of concern in this area. And this initiative has generally assisted in the efforts to combat these tracks. The collective role of the littoral states that I mentioned earlier, we have been very successful and Thailand has joined us from the three littoral states now, Thailand joined us last year to be part and parcel of the Malacca State's patrol and the Eyes in the Sky initiative. Apart from the piracy tracks, there are other non-traditional security concerns such as drug trafficking, small arms trafficking and human trafficking alluded to by the general just now. So Malaysia and the United States can look into these areas of collaboration, especially in mitigating the non-traditional security tracks. I'm of the view that we could expand our cooperation and engagement towards building a closer relationship between now that we mentioned about this new Coast Guard that virtually is also during my time a tenure as a Chief of Navy which we sacrifice 17 ships and 1200 men from the Navy to form a Coast Guard. Sometimes my officers ask me, is the Chief getting crazy giving away men and but I said we believe in having this Coast Guard to conduct enforcement operations and search and rescue and this is the only way, the only solution that I think we can be very effective and it's proven now that our Coast Guard has been very effective in countering and of course conducting enforcement in our waters and now we have invited the U.S. Coast Guard to join hands with us but in bytec that was mentioned by General Ashim, bytec the U.S. Coast Guard is a member but not our Coast Guard. I think efforts have been made to propose that our Coast Guard would be part and parcel of the bytec arrangement. The humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, the Prime Minister alluded to about the tsunami and how we are poised to assist in this sectors. Issue of human assistance and disaster relief is becoming big in the region. We have participated and provide provision of humanitarian assistance and with our experience in 2004 after the tsunami I think our arrangement with the U.S. is getting stronger. What we have done is now the World Food Programme will set up a hub in Kuala Lumpur. We are moving to that humanitarian relief hub under the World Food Programme which will see the development of regional warehouse to store food, supplies, medicine and other basic amenities. As you recognized during the tsunami we allowed the use of our airports, the U.S. used the Langkawi airstrip, Australian part of the world airstrip and French and all the rest in the Subang airstrip. In human assistance disaster relief recently the ASEAN tabletop exercise on these was co-hosted by Indonesia and Singapore and it was a tremendous success. I think the tabletop is a military thing. We did a lot of rehearsals and I hope subsequently this will pave the way and anchor the structure of this ambition ASEAN security architecture. The U.S. has expressed its interest in harder operations, human assistance disaster relief operations. And we understand, we'll explore ways in which U.S. can contribute in capacity building, equipment information and of course intelligence. Military training and interoperability, it's been mentioned by General Hashim, I'm not going to say any more but we are actually looking at more areas of especially capacity building from the U.S. forces, how to develop this. And I think the both the forces, the PECOM, which they have this meeting, the bi-tech meeting in Hawaii very soon, they will address is not just military to me, not just IMED education and training but they're looking at human assistance disaster relief operation. Just to share an example, General Hashim mentioned about corpora goal, it has been a very sensitive thing for us to really send our troops. The government has not sent troops but send observers to corpora goal in Thailand but when Admiral Raffae, the CNO, approached me and said, Admiral, why don't you send the troops? I said, Admiral, you know, my government not enable these but we continue to send observers but could you help us in reshaping the scenario to read human assistance disaster relief operations are going to send my troops the next day? Of course, he said, but of course I can do that. When Admiral Raffae went back before he could launch that, it was a coup in Thailand. So there was no corpora goal that year. Moving ahead from the current status, I think we can expand this bi-tech arrangement. We must try and look at, as I mentioned, other enforcement agencies and we look service to service activities in terms of joint and combined multilateral exercises. Although we don't have the policy that will enable us for multilateralism, but I brought in WPNS, Western Pacific Nables Impulse here, a Mynex and Divex exercise hosted by Royal Mission Navy, it's also another breakthrough from our policy. It was done and again we brought in a very big conference with all the chief of defense forces. There were 17 of them in Kuala Lumpur, the Sheraton Imperial, we discussed a lot of things in terms of how to move forward ahead in terms of this multilateral approach. Now you have heard about the provision of assistance to Afghanistan. Today we have a small delegation that's gone, they are actually in Afghanistan now, they are in Kabul, they are assisted by the U.S. forces, they are on the ground exploring how to realize what the Prime Minister has said this morning. We are waiting for them to come back and we should be looking into medical assistance and reconstruction of Afghanistan. Alignment of export controls and non-proliferation, we are very supportive of the efforts towards the ratification of relevant international conventions such as nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the biological weapons convention and also the convention of land mines. You have heard we are just moving into nuclear power but we will certainly cooperate with international community in eradicating nuclear weapons, smuggling especially through our waters. Please include the support for the proliferation of PSI security initiative. To this end, we have made important contributions to the global system and institution related to non-proliferation. As an example, nature is a productive member of the Asia Pacific Group on money laundering, financial action task force style, regional body committed to the effective implementation and enforcement of internationally accepted standards against money laundering and the financing of terrorists. Ladies and gentlemen, I could continue to give more examples of the excellent states of bilateral relations in our two countries but suffice to say that the strong bonds of friendship and networking between the higher management and between both forces are based on the basis of shared values and principles have enabled our two countries to expand our security and defense cooperation. With that, ladies and gentlemen, I would say thank you for your attention. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Admiral Kurt. Can I give you the floor? Thank you very much, Ernie. Thank you very much. It's great to see so many friends here. It's been a busy couple of days and I'd just like to say a word if I can about how impressed all of us are, all of us who care and focus on Southeast Asia. There have been some wonderful programs in Washington which are focused on the region but I must say I don't think I've ever seen a program come into being so rapidly and have made such an important contribution on the landscape than the one that Ernie and Mike Green and John Hammery have put together. Just like if you wouldn't mind, trust me, I know this world pretty well and you rarely get a pat on the back. Please just join us and a thank you for it. It's been terrific. It's been a home for friends who visit an opportunity to meet and it has helped us establish or if I can say really reestablish a community of people who are deeply interested in the region. And for me, I'm just very grateful. And I just, every day or every other day, I get something from Ernie. It's one of the first things I print out and just very much appreciate the insights, the guidance, and the advice and the leadership in terms of this program. This is an expert group so I don't think it's appropriate to rehearse, you know, all the issues that I think that are well known about what President Obama said and what Secretary Clinton said about trying to increase US engagement with Southeast Asia. We've tried to make clear about with some visits, signing Treaty of Amity in cooperation, Mekong Initiative. I've tried to go through the region establishing some new machinery mechanisms for increased bilateral engagement. We're going to do this with Malaysia. Invitations to the Nuclear Summit. We had the largest number of Southeast Asian friends visit for such an effort in history, a variety of things. And also, I think most importantly, have taken the first tentative steps on issues related to trade. This is an issue that most friends in Southeast Asia and Asia will say, it's great to see you. We welcome you. Thank you very much. But ultimately, they're looking to the United States to regain its confidence, to feel confident in dealing on economic and trade issues in the Asian Pacific region. I think that's very much in our interest. And we welcome and support the encouragement that we've received from Asian, ASEAN friends. So I would say overall, we have tried to make a clear statement both with individual states, with ASEAN as a whole and hopefully in a larger architectural setting that the United States wants to increase our activity in the region. I will say that from my general travel in the region, I would say that the United States does have the residual capacities of a very strong presence in Southeast Asia. But I would also say that at a general level, there has been a bipartisan lack of focus on Southeast Asia for a sustained period of time. And it is important for powerful states like the United States that already have important and critical levels of engagement in a region that is frankly quite important for longer-term American strategic interests to appreciate when that position has eroded or that there are challenges to that position. So I think one of the most important things, and it's difficult often for the United States, it's almost much more comfortable to talk about triumphs and achievements and major sets of initiatives, but the truth is the United States has to do a better job. And that's one of the reasons that we're so grateful for these visits and also for the programs that Bernie has put together. So I'm not going to go through all the basic components, but I think you have a sense that there is a recognition that the United States, not just in this administration but in subsequent administrations, has to do more if we are to be effective. And I must also say that this is not simply about Southeast Asia. If we want to have an effective China policy, we need to make sure that we have a strong set of relationships, political, strategic, economically in Southeast Asia. If we want to be clear about including and working with India playing a strong role in Asia, we need to make sure that we're talking with India about Southeast Asia and with Southeast Asia, about India. If we want to continue a strong set of partnerships with our friends in Northeast Asia, enduring commitments in Japan, but new opportunities for engagement with Korea, it's going to be critical for the United States to step up its game in Southeast Asia. And so I hope very much to see that come into being. I must say that I think it would be fair to say that American friends that have worked for a long period in Malaysia were uncertain about what we would find when we tried to step up our interactions. I think, you know, some of us remember a complicated period in the 1990s where on the military side we were going extraordinarily well, but occasionally politically we would get bogged down and rhetorical flourishes, so we say, they're teaching me diplomatic terms. What we're finding more and more, however now when we interact with Malaysian friends, is rather than initial commentary about our culture or about our way of doing, our peculiar way of doing diplomacy or occasionally our objectives not only in Asia but elsewhere, the first and most substantial comments that we receive from Malaysian friends is, you are most welcome. Please visit often and we want a stronger relationship. Now one of our challenges is, of course, to communicate that clearly and to run it through what we might call the universal translator for our senior officials in the United States, what we are finding in almost all of our encounters in Asia is hearing a similar, please come visit often, we want to see more of you, thank you very much. Of course in Asia that is generally the polite way of saying, you know, we have maybe a few concerns about China. So instead of saying that, you say you're most welcome Americans, visit as often as frequently as you'd like and we've tried to hear that and interpret that appropriately. Obviously all of Southeast Asia seeks a strong stable relationship between the United States and China but they feel more reassured if the United States in addition to working closely with friends in Beijing are also involved in a parallel deep sustained engagement in Southeast Asia and that's what we're trying to do overall. So there is a substantial tonal change and in a very short period of time that has increased confidence in Washington. I think there was a little bit of nervousness, what are we going to hear on specific issues. And I think for Malaysian friends a similar concern, what are Americans going to raise. But in a very short period of time I think we have seen evidence that U.S.-Malaysian relations could ascend rapidly. Now the truth is we have to be careful. I liked Ernie's statements about, you know, take off and I want to be more careful than that because I'm learning that at the State Department. It's a hard thing for me. But the truth is there's something to point to here. I, you know, when people say, well gee, what are the countries where you could imagine a dramatic improvement in relations between the United States and Southeast Asia in addition to a region-wide engagement at the ASEAN Regional Forum and other larger initiatives. People generally point to either Indonesia or Vietnam and there is good reason to expect and hope for those relations to improve rather substantially. But I will also say there are sometimes forgotten, sometimes overlooked, sometimes somewhat disguised, some very powerful component elements in U.S.-Malaysian relations that should give us some confidence about the ability to take off. So for instance behind the scenes has been an extraordinarily robust military defense relationship, much more so than people recognize. Much deeper between the United States and Malaysia than anything we have between Indonesia for obvious reasons and Vietnam. Now we do not talk about this relationship in public. We just go about doing the business of it in private. But it's deep. The trust and confidence that exists not only between the military partners in KL and Hawaii but also in the Pentagon. And that's also shared at the level of civilian components as well. In addition, if you look at the economic relationship, say for instance between the United States and Indonesia, it is fairly, it's substantial in certain areas, certain kinds of construction, land clearing, some sales of high tech, but primarily it is in the extractive arenas where if you look overall at the relationship between the United States and Malaysia, we've had a very strong economic relations very much beneath the radar screen for decades. I can recall a few years ago being in a situation where we asked a group of people to name the top seven or eight trading partners for the United States. And of course at that time Malaysia was number eight and no one in the room of a very esteemed and well-educated group of people understood how deep the economic investment relationship was between our two countries. Now in the bilateral meeting between the two leaders in a very courageous way and a very far-seeing way, the Prime Minister laid out his desire to help Malaysia take that step from what he called the middle level to the next level and what would be needed in terms of investment and commitments. And he saw that as a multi-decade set of challenges but essential if Malaysia is to maintain its current path and course of potential over the course of the next several years and given the very real economic challenges from others in the region and particularly in China. So I simply mention this by saying that don't count this relationship out. Don't focus too much on the United States and Indonesia or the United States and Vietnam. Those are important relations but I must tell you I hope when we have subsequent meetings in the next couple of years that we will surprise people and in many respects one of the things we learn in Asian politics and we get this from our Japanese friends is sometimes it's not effective to be the one that's out in the spotlight. Sometimes you can make a lot of progress by making progress quietly and I think you're going to see that in US-Malaysian relations. I don't want to convey too much out of school here but I must tell you for those of us who were treated to a wonderful bilateral, we're in lots of meetings and you can tell almost immediately whether there's chemistry between two leaders, whether two leaders understand how to interact with one another or they just don't click or whether there's a race for dominance or who's going to control the agenda. Prime Minister Ajeeb was as relaxed, confident, capable in this meeting as almost any leader I've seen witnessed in some time. So I don't have that much experience but in my last 10 years, the three best bilateral meetings I've seen between two leaders, this was one of them. So that should tell you something and the Prime Minister was extraordinarily effective not only at conveying a vision of what he wanted to see in his own country but also talked about the steps that he was prepared to take to advance US-Malaysian relations and the role that Malaysia wanted to play not just in the region but increasingly globally as a multicultural democracy on a host of issues. He was also quite clear about the areas of vulnerability and anxiety that Malaysia are coping with and asked for support for the United States and understanding as well. But overall, a deeply powerful set of commitments and exchanges between the two leaders in a way that I left feeling had a little bit more bounce in my step overall. I just wanna go through, the Edmonds already talked about some of those things but a very specific set of commitments on the part of Malaysia on nonproliferation. Without the United States asking, Malaysia decided to dispatch a team to Afghanistan. The Prime Minister laid out some areas that Malaysia, I don't want to get in front of his formal announcements but I think they've decided that they'd like to do take some efforts in the arena of capacity building and human capital investment. Very impressive and again, recognition that Malaysia could play an important out of area role in this critical UN endeavor. Some specific quiet commitments on counter-terrorism from procedural steps to training that meshed nicely with the specific legislative and judicial steps that helped promote much stronger nonproliferation standards. The PM was very clear on areas that he thought Malaysia had not taken significant steps in the past and he sought to remedy and close those loop holes and very impressive in that respect. We also talked substantially about the defense relationship and I think he too understands that this has been in many respects the backbone of our relationship and I think his desire is to spread the culture of that cooperation to, shall we say, other elements of the Malaysian government. Now, I very much enjoyed my meetings with our friends in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but not uncommon. Sometimes you will find in certain countries that the attitude sometimes lingers a little bit in Ministries of Foreign Affairs and there isn't the same sense of engagement and personal commitment there that you might find in the business community or the defense community and I would take it as our challenge over the course of the next couple of years to try to overcome some of those cultural and sort of residual anxieties and perhaps even a little bit suspicions and I was struck on my visit after two days of talks. The last hour of those talks were considerably better than the first hour and we hope to continue that so that it's not simply in certain pockets of the Malaysian government but basically in the Prime Minister's office and other parts of bureaucracy, a general consensus that it is the interest of the country to move forward on a stronger relationship between our two countries and lastly, the PM made a very clear statement on the desire to play a more substantial role in the TPP and encourage the United States to be confident on these issues in a way that we've seen from various leaders in Southeast Asia and Asia as a whole from the Minister Mentor in Singapore from friends in Korea and the like and I must say these expressions of confidence in the United States during capacities of the United States to recover from our current challenges and difficulties, a desire to see the United States to be a confident player in the trading engagement of the Asian Pacific region, the new investment opportunities. It's most welcome and it gives us a sense of confidence that others see this in the role that we could play but some specific ideas on TPP. Now, conclude Ernie, just two last things. Let us also be clear that the two sides tried not to avoid the issues on which there will be continuing discussions, perhaps some difficulties and challenges and I think any good relationship is able to deal with those issues. I saw in the meeting between the President and President Hu that the United States and China has had to deal with some very challenging issues over the course of the last couple of months. I think there is a strong desire on the part of our Malaysian friends to see the United States play a more consequential role in trying to bring peace in the Middle East. And so the fact that Malaysia has, in their perspective, a very purposeful commitment to these issues is something that the United States must take seriously and we recognize that there is a global Islam now that not just focuses on their own backyard but on issues of what they consider justice and peace beyond their borders. And so that was made very clear to us. And from our perspective, we cherish and support the general process of democratization inside the country. We occasionally have some anxieties about the role of Islamic law, how it is applied with the Malaysian Commonwealth Law and how these two secular and religious trends in the country can be reconciled. And we watch that carefully. We want very much for a benevolent, open, engaged, traditional form of Southeast Asian Islamic worship and philosophy to continue to be the dominant trend inside the country. And occasionally we see some signs that concern us. I also, in our meetings, we must say, and I think it's well known to all of you, Anwar has many friends in the United States. Very high level friends, people who care about him and we want very much for his treatment to be just and we are watching carefully in this regard. And so the fact that we were able, I think, both to talk about the issues that we're closely aligned but also issues of some challenge without getting our feelings immediately heard and saying, well, that's it. I think it's a tribute to growing maturity in the relationship as a whole. Now going forward, Ernie, I would just say there are in addition to these five areas which are the dominant areas. They are the backbone of the relationship. They are the areas that we are going to put substantial effort and focus on. We've also seen Malaysia step up in a very exciting way on climate change, not just in limiting traditional emissions but also looking at questions associated with forestation. Some of Malaysia's commitments are as robust, far reaching and almost game changing as any country in the world. And the PM was able to discuss and talk about these issues in an extraordinarily nimble way in a way that many other leaders cannot. Malaysia has also played a very important role on thinking about next steps on architecture. And I must say in stark contrast to the 1990s where there was some ambivalence about the United States, far from it now. The question is the terms, the appropriate mechanism about how the United States can and should be a more active member in this next phase of multilateralism. I think it is all well understood that the 1990s was primarily trans-specific. Lots of institutions in which the United States played a more important role, APEC, ASEAN Regional Forum. I think the last decade was one in which much of the action was Pan-Asian. And the United States perhaps wasn't as actively involved as we might be. And I think the next phase, we want to see a role in which both the United States but also other critical countries like India are more actively engaged in how we do that and try not to be in a situation where we over promise and under deliver. And I must say, quite honestly here, it's very easy when you're out of government to talk about canceled meetings and missed summits. But the truth is that the president has been in power only a year, year and a couple of months. He's made very clear he'd like to do a better job of engagement. But we've had to postpone two trips. This is just the nature of how challenging these jobs are and how difficult it is for chief executives to be able to find the time to ensure the proper level of engagement. We want to be careful that we do not over promise and under deliver. But I think Malaysia in particular, working with other countries in Southeast Asia, have communicated to us their desire to have us more actively engaged, whether it's in the East Asia summit or some sort of configuration of ASEAN plus 150, whatever the new group is, I'm not sure. I think that would be important. We also think the third and final thing, Ernie, is that it perhaps is time for the United States to think a little bit creatively about how we can encourage steps in the South China Sea to ensure that we do not have a competition devolving to bilateral or unilateral steps. We think the code of conduct has been important. The United States has occasionally in 1995 and again in 2002 had statements or made suggestions or contributions to this overall effort. I think we're going to be watching closely. We've seen some things that cause us some concern and they're not just concerned with one nation but several nations. And I think we'd like to think creatively about how the United States can make a clear set of statements that underscore our commitment to maintaining peace and stability and maintaining other strong and central American strategic interests in terms of freedom of navigation like in places like the South China Sea. So with that, I have to say I'm fairly bullish. I try not to over commit here but I think you have all the ingredients for a careful, quiet liftoff in US-Malaysian relations. And I thank you, Bernie, for the opportunity to be here today. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


Thresonical. All of us are prone to arrogance, but research has shown that people who are considered geniuses are more likely to be thresonical.