Plato’s weekend suggestions

readings

Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:

A brief history of television through the life of Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone.

The philosophy of behavioral genetics, a book review by my friend and former collaborator Jonathan Kaplan.

The rise of dataism: computers will soon know you much better than you do. Or will they?

I’ve read the new U of Chicago statement on trigger warnings and safe spaces, and I can’t find anything to object to…

Philip Kitcher as a model modern philosopher who escapes narrow interests.

Modern constitutionalism as an attempt to avoid repeating the mistakes of the late Roman Republic.

Will liberal democracy be threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence?

Dan Dennett doesn’t think much of contemporary analytic (or continental) philosophy.

The American national anthem is racist and colonialist. Perhaps it’s time to change it?

Why did Michael Crichton confuse Deinonychus and Velociraptor? On the philosophy of paleontology.

Western philosophy has seen two great periods: Ancient Greece and the European Enlightenment.

More philosophy of paleontology: are ammonites (scientifically) more important than dinosaurs? I go for foraminifera…

Watch psychologists rationalize increasing evidence of widespread failure in their field.

The myth of the moral brain and the limits of moral enhancement.

Unfortunately, Tom Wolfe seems to have gone down the deep end. Too bad.

A postmodern sounding essay on what may (or may not) come after postmodernism.

Speaking of the national anthem, why do Americans play it before every domestic sports event?

On the complex nature of friendship.

We need to bring back an appreciation of the cyclical into our lives.

Life either survived or evolved quickly after the Late Heavy Bombardment of the Archaean stage.

GMO labeling and the pathological lack of transparency of the food industry.

The multifaceted and controversial virtue of patience.

Another “we don’t have consciousness” article. It’s becoming a cottage industry. I’m quite conscious of it.

Mother Teresa was no saint, study finds (again).

A badly flawed libertarian argument against democracy (as bad as the latter truly is).

160 thoughts on “Plato’s weekend suggestions”

  1. aaronhardesty

    I know Massimo and Jerry Coyne have disagreed on a number of things, but I’m glad Massimo linked Jerry’s review of Tom Wolfe’s new book. It is a truly uninformed and nonsensically arrogant real. It saddens me that the man that wrote The Right Stuff churned out this garbage.

    Liked by 2 people

  3. Coel

    Hi Massimo,

    Another “we don’t have consciousness” article.

    Though it doesn’t say that. The closest it comes is: “it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the experience of free will (agency) and conscious rational deliberation are both biologically generated illusions“.

    “Illusion” from the OED: “a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience”. I think that people’s intuitive accounts of consciousness most likely are misinterpretations of what is actually going on.

    Robin, any chance of a fuller (actual) critique?

    Liked by 1 person

  4. Robin Herbert

    Hi Coel,

    Robin, any chance of a fuller (actual) critique?

    Did you read what I said? I said it was weird, like a Sokal style hoax. I am not sure how one can give an actual critique of that.

    I have no idea what he is trying to say, it just reads to me like a collection of disjointed, vaguely sciencey thought bubbles.

    At one point he seems to be reasoning that we don’t reason. Or something like that. I should know better than to even start reading articles in the NY Times by neuroscientists.

    Liked by 2 people

  5. Robin Herbert

    I mean this part:

    Reason allows us new ways of seeing, just as close listening to a piece of music can reveal previously unheard melodies and rhythms or observing an ant hill can give us an unexpected appreciation of nature’s harmonies. These various forms of inquiry aren’t dependent upon logic and verification; they are modes of perception.

    Does it actually mean anything?

    Liked by 1 person

  7. Robin Herbert

    How about this part:

    As neuroscience attempts to pound away at the idea of pure rationality and underscore the primacy of subliminal mental activity

    Do neuroscientists really attempt to pound away at the idea of pure rationality? If so then I imagine that neuroscientists must be the only group ever to have thought that there was such a thing as pure rationality in the first place.

    Anyone with common sense knows that reasoning is usually clouded by emotions. “Never attempt to reason when you are angry”. “Never go shopping when you are hungry, you end up buying too much”. How often does strong desire lead us to irrational actions.

    Liked by 2 people

  8. SocraticGadfly

    Coyne himself is wrong about Chomsky, as pieces both old and new by the likes of Michael Tomasello show. Beyond the linked piece, the likes of Ramachandran, on the neuroscience side, long ago demolished the massive modularity ideas about the brain that lie behind Chomsky’s original language ideas, much of Pinker’s thought, and more. Here’s Tomasello’s latest, very much worth a read: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-learning/

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Robin Herbert

    It is odd that we are always told that Facebook employs people of almost superhuman genius to write their data mining algorithms and yet Facebook has not once managed to advertise anything to me that I would even remotely want.

    Liked by 2 people

  11. Fernando Andrade

    Hello Massimo,
    I have recently read Kahneman’s book and it fit just right with one of your suggestions. One thing that I would like to ask your opinion about is why do you think psychological researchers seemed to replicate many priming effects decades ago and now it seems that no one can replicate them?

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  13. Daniel Kaufman

    Apropos the New Yorker piece, while I am often very critical of contemporary philosophy, I would argue that the period from the turn of the century to the post WWII period, up through the 60’s, was an incredibly fertile one in the history of philosophy, easy rivaling any period prior. Any century that has Wittgenstein and Quine in it, is strong, and when you add all the people from the next tier down — the Logical Positivists, Ordinary Language Philosophers, people like Wilfrid Sellars and Stanley Cavell — it is a remarkable period indeed.

    When it really took its downward turn was when it tried too hard to be too much like science and spent too much time in science’s bed. (And on might certainly blame Quine for this, though funnily enough, it isn’t true of his best work.) There hasn’t been anything since, roughly, Naming and Necessity, that has been at the level of the work done by the people listed.

    [Obviously, I have said nothing about the Continental tradition, but that’s only because it is not my area of expertise. ]

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  15. victor panzica

    Always felt the Libet observations were most revealing that our brains are an engineering system evolved from the mammalian motor system. The fundamental principle of any control-feedback system is control or we do not run “open loop” like the first steam engine design. Our fundamental drives are the source of our perceived irrationality and if anything it is our social interactions and fear of reprisal/punishment vs reward that governs our behavior. Maybe the Libet subjects were trying their hardest to please the experiment?

    Burton says in the article: “It’s pretty obvious that the difference in how we assign rationality isn’t dependent upon how decisions are made, but how we wish to see ourselves in relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom, and indeed even to plants and intelligent machines.”

    Just wonder if you were a member of the animal kingdom like a cow or chicken and were privy to what humans did with them because of our drive for nourishment, would you perceive the humans as rational?

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  16. Seth Leon

    I thought the piece on patience as a fundamental virtue was pretty interesting. At one point the author quotes Seneca on the role of patience in regard anger.
    “one must always be patient in situations that typically provoke anger . . . Taking one’s time involves patience in all of its different aspects: for it involves calmly waiting for the right moment to act . . . ”
    And then takes Aristotle’s side against Seneca in the argument for the possibility of virtuous anger. The essay author invokes the ‘no true scottsman’ fallacy against Seneca who argues that ‘true anger’ can never be controlled. The book author however seems to do something similar with patience as he gives patience hierachry over other virtues that it necessarily melds with such as practical wisdom. This is why I tend to think it is more useful to think of virtue in general as a cultivated capacity to apply a vast web of inter-connected inter-dependent sub-virtues appropriately to context. I suppose equanimity then becomes especially important, and some virtues certainly seem more foundational than others, yet still I think concept of interdependent contextually constrained virtues should serve as the background frame.

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  18. couvent2104

    To be honest: a previous book by Wolfe (“Hooking up”) already showed signs of the same disease his new one if suffering from.

    The man who taught me QM and introduced me to particle physics, once said to me;

    “There’s nothing more pitiful than a good physicist who becomes a bad philosopher in his old age.”

    Same seems to true for writers …

    Liked by 1 person

  20. couvent2104

    I thought Wolfe’s latest novel — Back to Blood — was fantastic. Amazing portrait of contemporary Miami.

    I like him when he’s a reporter or when he’s trying to be a modern day Zola or Balzac. I’m reading “La cousine Bette” at the moment, and the way Wolfe plays with status details often makes me think of Balzac.
    But it’s strange. In one of his works, Wolfe quotes an (unnamed) French person who says (more or less, I’m quoting from memory): an intellectual is someone who knows a lot about one thing, but speaks about something else (Wolfe isn’t very fond of American intellectuals)..And now he seems to do the same thing: offering opinions about things he really knows nothing about.

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  21. dbholmes

    Hi Massimo, this was definitely a nice selection of material. And I suppose I should say that I think your “weekend suggestions” concept was a great idea. Even where I don’t have time to comment it gives me a nice selection to read in spare moments (including comments here).

    I have always been ambivalent about Wolfe. I read his article (presumably in support of his book) in Harper’s Magazine and found it appalling intellectually even if it was interesting as some visceral account of scientific in-fighting. I really didn’t get his animosity toward Chomsky, and wondered if that was how he handled Darwin in the book (guess so).

    Kaplan’s review was not as clear to me (perhaps because it was a review) as his essay at Scientia (where he addressed an article from my own department). Behavioral genetics is problematic, and I say this as someone within (though recently, after my stem cell lab was absorbed by) a complex trait genetics group.

    University of Chicago got it right on trigger warnings et al. But what do you expect? It’s Chicago!

    The Dan Dennett piece didn’t really go anywhere. He had some opinions but (even if he is right) there were no real references to make it fully engaging. The fact that he still appears to support Sam Harris’s career as a celebrity philosopher makes his criticism of anyone else seem pretty lame. I mean the criticism he threw at students (of all people to criticize) could equally be thrown at his apocalyptic horse-buddy (who has no pressure to publish except… money and fame).

    I have yet to read the Serling piece but I look forward to it.

    ……………

    Hi Dan, Wolfe’s Back to Blood is on discount at my school book store. I’ve been vacillating on buying it for over a month now. The blurb on the back sounded interesting. Your comment may get me to buy it after all… but if it sucks I am holding your responsible 🙂

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  23. Daniel Kaufman

    dbholmes: Look, you either like Wolfe or you don’t. It is very much Wolfe. But in top form, I think.

    My interest in Wolfe has always been by way of the New Journalism, which I think was a tremendously important development in American letters. The triumverat of Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion not only completely transformed journalism, they are some of America’s best writers, after the Second World War. Our own versions of Orwell, whose journalism and essays have a similar quality, in an English context. They understood the culture in a way that few did, and chronicled the journey America took from the 50’s, into the counterculture, and then back out of it, into a new, worse version of the 50’s, in the form of Nixon’s “silent majority” and the Reagan revolution, a struggle we are still engaged in today.

    Indeed, I would go as far as to say that Didion is in the top half dozen American writers of the last century. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album” are as about as good as the New Journalism — and writing more generally — gets.

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  24. synred

    “Hi Dan, Wolfe’s Back to Blood is on discount at my school book store”

    The shelves at the Palo Alto Friends of the Library (FOPAL) where chock-a-block with “I am Charlotte Simmons” for years. They’ve largely disappeared now. “The Citadel” has to be the all time winner for library book sale longevity …

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  25. couvent2104

    The shelves at the Palo Alto Friends of the Library (FOPAL) where chock-a-block with “I am Charlotte Simmons” for years.

    I’ve read most of Wolfe and liked most of it, sometimes very much, but “I am Charlotte Simmons” is not his masterpiece. If I remember correctly, there’s an incredibly bad, 150 % ridiculous sex scene in it. OK, it’s only a sex scene, and practically nobody does them right, but this one was so unbelievably amateurish that it made me question Wolfe’s skills as a writer.
    If you like a great author, you forgive him a lot. Balzac, I forgive him almost everything. But Wolfe really tested my capacity to forgive to the limit with that scene.

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  26. Massimo Post author

    Dan, seems to me that the golden age of television got started recently, thanks to streaming channels and outlets like HBO. Nothing done earlier compares with the really high quality shows that have come out in the past few years, though of course The Twilight Zones is one of the few shining exceptions.

    Liked by 2 people

  27. Daniel Kaufman

    Massimo: In terms of production values, certainly, but that matters much more in film than in television.

    The last episode of MASH had a viewing audience of over 100 million people. “All in the Family” and the “Mary Tyler Moore” show had enormous cultural impact and were a part of major cultural developments in the United States. The television of today is very small potatoes in comparison, production values notwithstanding.

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