Our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
Psychology’s reproducibility problem is exaggerated – say (some) psychologists.
Reading from Behind: a Cultural Analysis of the Anus. “The anus, you see, is democratic.”
Was Wittgenstein right that philosophy is too scientistic? Or was his mentor, Bertrand Russell, on target when he said that his pupil seemed to have “grown tired of serious thinking and invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary”?
Speaking of the devil, here is a Wittgensteinian defense of literature against postmodernist deconstruction.
Did we say psychology may have a reproducibility problem? There’s more…
What has philosophy done for us?
A philosopher is arguing that vegetarianism is impossible. I think he’s just confused about biology.
Footnotes to Plato 
Gadfly,
“goes back to the various documented horrors of the British boys boarding school?”
I am the product of a British public boarding school and can recall no documented horrors. I have keen memories of my time there and consider that experience an important formative period of my life.
Perhaps you are referring to the frequent canings? I set the school record for the number of canings in one term(I’m sure my record did not last long, given the kind of rambunctious boys we were). Bend over, thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack. I remember so well the dreadful apprehension and then the severe pain. The most important thing of all was never let my school mates see that I experienced pain and so I would return to my place with a rigid posture and immobile face. Later an admiring crowd would gather to inspect the vivid weals on my bum. No, it was nothing, I would assure them. The stiff upper lip. That was how my training in Stoicism began. It was a lesson in hardiness that I would carry onto the rugby field and into later life.
LikeLike
On reproducibility:
So in physics:
Back in the early 50’s later 40’s the particle data book (PDB) was stuffed with new particles mostly discovered by Russians.
What they did was publish ever 5 sigma (about 5%) ‘bump’ they found in any spectra they took.
For these guys publish or perish may have been more literal. Stalin was still alive and/or barely dead.
LikeLike
Reproducibility:
We had a conference on stats at SLAC, much of it about reproducibility
http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/statisticalissues2012/
Some of the results about medicine and drug trials are quite shocking.
I gave a talk:
I botched the initial Joke. It gets rather technical as it about one particular technique for estimating the look elsewhere effect (the Russians were looking everywhere the could).
LikeLike
Synred,
“For these guys publish or perish may have been more literal”
You should read ‘In The First Circle’ by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is not quite the same thing but illustrates the point quite well.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In 8th grade my daughter went to Dana Goldstein’s birthday party and game back a vegetarian. This was a real nuance for us, we were highly irritated with Dana, but Liz stuck with it for at 15 years and came to think meet was ‘disgusting’
Then she got pregnant and suddenly developed a graving for meat and hasn’t gone back to ‘veg’ since though she still eats a lot fewer animals than most of us.
LikeLike
Hi SG:
One of the first things to do is to quit ‘looking elsewhere’ on purpose! This is elementary honesty.
Margaret’s advisor did publish a valuable study on length of sentence vs. wealth of the criminal. He corrected for severity of the crime. The effect is so big, that even his sloppy stats didn’t matter. One saying among physicist is ‘if you need statistics, it’s probably BS.’
One problem with stats is that the math is easy…nothing more than Algebra, so people think they understand it. However, the concepts are difficult and get people into trouble. Most of what I know about it, I learned by making mistakes.
LikeLike
Massimo:
Sorry it’s taken me so long to answer, but I am traveling and have limited time to post.
So, why do I “quite dislike” ethical veganism/vegetarianism? Why do I not find them “praiseworthy positions” as you do?
A number of reasons.
1. Many, many of those who are ethical-vegans fall into what I would call “Susan Wolf — Moral Saints” territory, and not only do I not believe such a position is admirable, I find it rather repulsive.
2. I do not believe that moral values are always overriding or even necessarily mostly overriding. Indeed, I believe that moral values have to compete with other values, including aesthetic values, prudential values, and others.
3. The ethical vegan’s belief system entails a number of very extreme, negative moral judgments about a *huge* number of people that, in my view, constitute an informal reductio of the view itself. If the ethical vegan is correct, every kid’s lunch is a moral catastrophe in a box and every fishing trip with grandpa is a moral crime, which strikes me as borderline insane. Actually, not borderline. Just insane.
4. Ethical veganism involves a morally based philistinism regarding cuisine, which I take to be a high art form. In that sense it is similar to religious iconoclasm and other crazy views that lead people to destroy great works of human culture. If the ethical vegan got the world he/she wanted, much of the world’s greatest cuisine would vanish from the earth, and frankly, I care much, much more about that than about a chicken or a clam.
There are more reasons, but these are the main ones.
LikeLike
Labnut, yes, it’s stuff like that. And, whether the rumors of “buggering” come close to reality … they’re surely not non-existent.
I’m glad you made it through, but don’t forget, you’re a sample size of one. I’ve read many a comment from British authors etc. about the effects.
LikeLike
First, as B-12 deficiency issues show, we didn’t evolve to be vegan. And, overall, our large brain size, etc., shows that a certain amount of meat protein, etc., is not necessarily bad.
I agree that we should raise at least our sentient vertebrates more humanely. (I don’t think an oyster in an oyster bed is sentient, said the Walrus to the Carpenter.)
That said, my food ethics relate to something else: environmentalism.
It takes 8-10 pounds of vegetable matter to put a pound of weight on a cow, 6-7 pounds for pound of pork, about 3-4 for poultry, and 2-3 for fish.
Plus, the methane from cow farts and belches, plus that from hog crap lagoons at CAFOs, contributes to climate change.
So, eat a lot less beef, a fair amount less pork and as much poultry and fish as now.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Gadfly,
“And, whether the rumors of “buggering” come close to reality … they’re surely not non-existent.”
Perhaps not, but I never saw any sign of that. A boarding school is a closely shared space where nothing is private and so any untoward behaviour immediately becomes obvious. On the other hand I remember well the fevered speculation about the nearby girls high school, fondly known as the Heifer Boma. We made so many plans to breach those well guarded walls. I served in a British regiment and a South African regiment and similarly saw nothing of that kind of behaviour. Perhaps I was blind to it but I think it was suppressed and rare.
“I’m glad you made it through”
We sailed through and came out as hardy individuals, well prepared for the adversities we would meet in life.
LikeLike
Sorry, Philip, but I’ll stand by what I said on Massimo’s previous post. I still think Wittgenstein is a Platonist.
This:
Sounds quite Platonic.
Beyond that, Socrates, via Plato, never explicity says that Ideas are pre-existent, at least with non-mathematical Ideas. In fact, he might approach that issue the way that Confucius did when asked about “heaven.” Now, of course, Plato (let alone Socrates, to the degree his voice is his own in places like Republic) is not the same as Platonism as it developed after Plato.
That said, I don’t think Wittgenstein “freed us” from Platonism at all, whether that was actually his intent or not. Rather, I think he reformulated some Ideas-related issues, as I also indicated on the previous post.
Psychologically, of course, being a Platonist would have been derivative, so … Wittgenstein couldn’t have owned up to that anyway.
LikeLike
Gadfly,
“It takes 8-10 pounds of vegetable matter to put a pound of weight on a cow, 6-7 pounds for pound of pork, about 3-4 for poultry, and 2-3 for fish.”
All of that adds up to using a large amount of water. It is the high water usage which is the chief environmental objection to beef.
LikeLike
Right on the water (as well as the cow farts), Labnut. Now, if one eats beef that’s grass-fed its entire life cycle, that’s a somewhat different kettle of fish, as humans can’t eat wild grasses. However, we can eat the corn and soybeans they’re given at feedlots — which their ruminant stomachs aren’t designed to eat anyway.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Why did the chicken cross the world” which is our previous book for the Martin Perl book club.
I found it interesting and it might put you off chicken at the end.
LikeLike
There are just too bloody many of us. If we don’t somehow cut down (birthcontrol, educate women or something), something unpleasant will do it for us.
Volunteerism will not work either!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Gadfly,
there is a big difference between frugality and abstinence. Frugality we practice for practical reasons while abstinence we practice for moral reasons.
But let’s look closely at the moral reasons and see if they survive scrutiny. The foundational argument runs along these lines:
1. They are sentient animals (true)
2. They experience suffering as we do (true, with qualifications)
3. We cause them to suffer (true, with qualifications)
4. We ought not cause our own species to suffer (true)
5. Therefore we ought not cause other species to suffer (highly contentious)
So why is (5) contentious?
Living in Africa, as I do, I see a great deal of wild life. The first thing to note is that they are wild. Why should that be? That is because they are in continual fear of predators and they have good reason for this fear. Most of them will become someone else’s meal, a seriously unpleasant experience. Predation is a fundamental fact of nature and it always ends badly, in terrifying, awful, agonising fear and then agony, before merciful unconsciousness. But the predators will also suffer in kind. The leopard will lose his speed, find fewer prey, starve, until a hyena tears him apart. Or he will develop a disease, lose his abilities and still succumb to the hyena.
There are no hospitals, hospices or pain numbing drugs in nature. In nature your end will always come badly, in fear and suffering. It will not be quick and usually your own kind will desert you. I have seen this so often.
Suffering then is built into the fabric of nature. It has always been this way until humankind began to lift itself above suffering. Suffering in nature is not a moral wrong, it just is and one cannot make moral judgements about it. If one did one would take on the superhuman burden of relieving all suffering in nature. This is plainly impossible but it is also wrong. It is wrong because the defiant urge to avoid suffering is fundamental to Darwinism. Not only can we not prevent suffering in nature, it would be plainly wrong to subvert Darwinism.
So we would try to reduce the suffering of a few domesticated species of animal. But why only them? This is when our hypocrisy begins to appear. But it is not just hypocrisy, it is false reasoning when we try to extend our desire to avoid suffering to other species. It is false reasoning because it ignores the nature of ‘nature’. It is false reasoning because it equates our suffering with theirs.
That cannot be so because we have two unique traits that hugely amplify our capacity for fear. The first is episodic memory. Remembering clearly the past bad experiences greatly magnifies our fear. We know with near certainty what to expect whereas the rest of the animal kingdom, lacking episodic memory, experience generalised fear without knowing what to expect. The second is our capacity to envisage and reason about the future, something that no other animal possesses. Being able to envisage the future we can conceive of loss, the loss of others and the loss of our own future. It is the fear of the loss of our own future that transfixes us more than anything else. The remaining animal kingdom are not subject to this fear.
Thus we, the human species, have a capacity for suffering much greater that the remaining animal kingdom. We project that on to other species, mainly domesticated species and so demand the same reduction in suffering we expect for ourselves. That reasoning is based on a false foundation. It is hypocritical reasoning because we are so selective about which species should receive this consideration. It is ignorant reasoning because it ignores the simple and obvious fact that suffering is built into the fabric of nature. It wrongly makes moral judgements about things which have no moral content.
Finally we cause our own kind immense suffering. Surely we should first and foremost direct our attention at relieving the suffering of our own kind? I say this with so much feeling because I live in Africa where suffering is the norm.
Dan-K, I hope this contributes something to your argument.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Finally I want to suggest there is an even deeper hypocrisy built into the argument. We imagine their sufferings as being like the suffering of our own kind and so we suffer, vicariously for them. The underlying goal is to reduce our vicarious suffering and accompanying sense of guilt. This is the elephant in the room that makes nonsense of the argument.
LikeLiked by 1 person
God’s only excuse is he doesn’t exist.
Hey, it’s better than ‘the dog ate my homework.’
LikeLike
Synred: I am a lover of world cuisine and really not very interested in stuff that would “put me off” chicken. (Not that chicken is something I eat much of to begin with, preferring meats like duck and lamb.)
Labnut: You have made a far greater effort than I would. I feel no need whatsoever to give a moral defense for loving great cuisine. Indeed, focusing this sort of moral attention on Coq au Vin and Chorizo Empanadas strikes me as quite weird, almost a kind of fetishism.
LikeLike
Synred,
“God’s only excuse is he doesn’t exist.”
as a devout Catholic, I am duty bound to rise to the bait and protest that you have a faulty understanding of God. Having done that I will defer my justification to another time. We really should not be derailing the discussion with a lengthy exposition on the modern concept of God.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dan-K,
“I feel no need whatsoever to give a moral defense for loving great cuisine”
I have watched animals devour their prey with the same evident enjoyment that I experience at a barbeque. I feel no guilt at being a predator such as they are.
I have felt the joy of the hunt and know that the leopard, as he stalks his prey, with quivering, flicking tail, experiences the same thrilling anticipation.
I know that I am a predator, just as the leopard is, and I know I will enjoy my meal just as much as he does.
LikeLike
Labnut:
I doubt your assertion that we are the only animal with episodic me memory though we are the only species that can communicate it to us.
It seems likely that chimps and other apes have some at least rudimentary form of it. I seems likely when chimps engage in complex group behavior like a monkey hunt or ‘war’ with an adjacent group, they are remembering previous incidents.
Unless you’re going to plunk for ‘ensoulment [a]’ it can’t have just pop’d out of nowhere.
It could be that in only developed only in the Australopithecus/Homo line and so we are the only living animal with it, but that seems unlikely to me.
[a] Curiously Word Press dictionary doesn’t know this word, but Google does.
LikeLike
Labnut:
When we owned (or were owned) by”Sally the dog chase” (who looked like your picture), we lived next to the Sapsucker Woods Bird Sanctuary in Ithaca.
I always felt vaguely guilty about her forays into this cat paradise. Fortunately, she never brought us a rare bird as a ‘gift.’
LikeLike
Something here for everyone, I think.
Starting with the article on the problems in reproducing psychological studies, as I read the “back and forth,” I thought for a moment, “This is like listening to economists.” And had to chuckle upon reaching the sub-heading “Economics versus psychology.” And, then, one reaches the last paragraph and throws up one’s hands, speaking as a general reader, at what seems strangely vacuous question-begging: “is not essential for knowing what needs to happen next” and “the real urgency is to improve bad practices.” Am I just totally lost (please, don’t answer) or are these people looking for an already extinguished fire after being overcome by its residual smoke?
I’m tempted to agree with ejwinner’s comment “and here this guy is still grinding axes in a debate that nobody cares about anymore?” But, unlike ej, I did read the entire article. I don’t know if anyone cares about serious literary criticism anymore because I walked away from it in the latter part of the 1970’s when post-modernist “thinking” started to make its way into English lit courses.
I do have an in-law by marriage who is a tenured professor in the English department at a major public university who has published books on Foucault. But he seemed particularly insulted when I asked whether he might have considered such approaches more suited to philosophy or the social sciences than literary criticism. Things went downhill from there, and my consumption of wine didn’t help either, I should add. Reading the last paragraph of this article, I think ej’s decision to stop reading was a good one. It is depressing to me to read things like “powerful philosophical defense of literary humanism against the assaults of postmodernist theorizing” or “All those who care about literature.” There is something very wrong going on here that I can’t properly identify except the encroachment of pretense and the parasitic. It reminds me of Woody Allen’s comical aside as he stands in line to see a movie about the halocaust while the guy behind him pompously explicates:
LikeLiked by 2 people
Synred: The inherent capacities of the animal in question really have nothing to do with whether or not we think it right or wrong to eat it. This is one of the fundamental mistakes made by Singer and his ilk.
Consider: I am a very happy meat eater. And yet, I would never eat my dog. This, despite the fact that if I was in South Korea and came upon a restaurant that served dog dishes — there are such places — I most certainly would try it. And while I eat lamb whenever I can get it in good quality, if I had a pet lamb, I wouldn’t eat it.
Consider the ethical vegan: He will not eat meat, because it is wrong to cause a sentient creature to suffer. And yet, he also will not eat an animal who has died with no wrong having been done to it — whether being hit by lightning or dying by natural causes.
Finally, consider people:: We don’t eat other people. But not because they have some morally significant characteristic, like the capacity for suffering. We also do not eat our dead, even if the meat is good to eat. We don’t eat amputated limbs, where no wrong has been done to the person in question.
I highly recommend the following paper by Cora Diamond, who makes thess and other essential points re: the ethical vegan question. (Interestingly enough, given you recent reading, Diamond is a well-known Wittgensteinian.)
LikeLiked by 2 people
Synred,
“It could be that in only developed only in the Australopithecus/Homo line and so we are the only living animal with it, but that seems unlikely to me.”
And yet we are the only living animal with language. Consult your memories and try to recall them without using any language. It is pretty hard. We can recall embodied memories without using language. For example, I can recall the path down to the water hole by replaying it in my memory, without using language. Animals likely possess this kind of memory. We can recall situational memories without using language. For example, I will see a certain gate and recall the memory of the large dog behind that gate. Animals certainly possess this kind of memory.
True episodic memories require language for their recall and expression. Only we possess that kind of language.
LikeLike
Dan-K,
you have recommended Cora Diamond’s paper before. I must make a better attempt this time to understand it.
LikeLike
We can dream w/o language. Have you ever seen a dog chasing a rabbit in its sleep?
Since, we have language it’s hard not to use it, that doesn’t imply you need language to remember an episode.
LikeLike
labnut: Focus on the examples and then think though what they imply. That may be the best way in.
The punchline is that whether or not we are willing to eat something is a matter of the concept under which we think of it, said concepts being “morally thick.” “Neighbor,” “Pet,” “friend,” etc. But how any individual thing comes to *fall* under such a concept is entirely haphazard and unprincipled — it is not due to their having general, repeatable characteristics, like “capacity for suffering” or “rationality.” Hence the fact that I will eat lamb, but not my pet lamb. Hence the fact that I won’t eat my neighbor, but neither will I eat his amputated arm, even if the amputation was legitimate and the meat perfectly good.
It is interesting to note that Diamond herself, is a vegan. But she thinks the moral arguments made on behalf of it are just plain lousy. And she despises the moral hectoring that so many ethical vegans engage in.
LikeLike
Daniel:
Well, I’m not a vegetarian much less vegan.
I do feel uncomfortable about eating animals _we_ treat badly. We can’t do anything about nature (well we might destroy it, but that doesn’t seem like a good idea).
I would like food animals to be treated better. Perhaps this is ‘hypocritical’ — just to make me feel more comfortable, but that’s a philosophical rabbit hole we may not want to go down. I don’t do much about it –buy so-called ‘free range chicken’ but its not clear these marketing words mean much, if anything.
I did give some money to the Humane Society, but got somuch junk mail trying to get more, that I clearly cost the animal welfare movement more than I gave them. Maybe we should ‘eat;’ ‘marketers?’
LikeLiked by 2 people