Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
e-life is distracting, but rarely as pathologically as described in this article (which, of course, I read online).
The complex economics, and morals, of pornography, especially in the age of the internet.
Long but very good summary of the current status of the neuroscience of “free will” (i.e., human decision making).
The philosophy of non existent objects. (See also here.)
A defense of biological Platonism (response coming soon…).
Do we live in a post-ironic age? And is that a good thing?
Mr. Spock as multi-cultural icon.
The problem with science writing and the middle ground between science worshiping and science denialism.
Battle of the vegetarian philosophers: Tatjana Višak vs. Peter Singer.
Seven movies that teach us key philosophical lessons.
Hitler, the drug addict, and the horrors of Nazi drug culture.
Apparently, at the top of the list of people who need not be competent to keep their job are economists.
Footnotes to Plato 
Andreas Wagner’s article – cute slogans can’t take the place of understanding a concept.
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A lot of the support for the notion that the social sciences are not making progress stems from economists being ‘unable’ to predict accurately despite furthering their theories. It seems that the last article is hinting that this is not good enough evidence, since economists can apparently predict, but are not being encouraged to actually do so. It seems this shows that there is the potential for progress in the social sciences, but it is not happening due to a lack of incentive and general complacency, (at least in economics).
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I haven’t finished reading the free will article yet, but I very much agree that re-framing the concept in the sense of capacities and developed skills that allow appropriate environmental resoonse is the way to go.
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The problem with science writing
My big objection to science writing is hype. Both in books and newspapers. If you read the science times you’d think there was a revolutionary discovery ever week.
An NYT reports wrong results a lot.
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Here is an example of a terrible book that hypes up the weirdness of the admittedly pretty weird QM:
Musser, George. Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time–and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything (p. 90). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
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I’m not a fan of Andrew Sullivan, and this piece shows why. Nonetheless, addiction to our internet devices appears to be just as real a psychological addiction as something like gambling addiction, so I’ll have to separate company somewhat with Massimo on that. (And, we could probably analogize to drugs and alcohol and talk about something like “abuse below the level of addiction,” too.)
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Some of the other stuff:
1. I told Massimo that Bill Shatner’s new mini-bio of Nimoy touches on some of the same Spock as multicultural icon issues;
2. Porn? Two issues. First, yes, like with Sully’s article, and without being Puritan or SJW, there is a risk of addiction. Second, on the financial side, it’s like newspapers that didn’t put up paywalls.
3. Non-existent objects? To tie back to point 1, what about characters in literature, movies, or 1960s TV?
4. Science writing? I can tell you from the inside in general, but not inside the Beltway on political news coverage, etc., that the media industry in general ranks very, very high in Peter Principle percentage.
5. Massimo and I, as “light meat eaters,” however exactly either of us splits that, I think generally agree on some broad issues. I approach it in part from a utilitarian stance, but far different than Singer. It’s resource usage, especially in an era of climate change. It takes more vegetable matter to put a pound of weight on a cow than on a hog, which in turn ranks a bit above sheep/goats, which in turn rank above poultry, which then rank above fish. And cows and hogs produce the most methane, too.
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Nature has not existed eternally or metaphysically, and is not a capitalized Essence. Therefore, evolution is not based on a “library of Platonic forms.” That subhed was enough; I’ll probably pass. Massimo, I expect your response will include that in part?
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Erm, WRONG on the seven movies. I overcame the saccharine of “It’s a Wonderful Life” years ago: http://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2012/06/why-i-loathe-its-wonderful-life.html
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The author misses JFK’s drug addiction and how it changed history too. Because of it, Khrushchev perceived him as weak at their 1961 Vienna meeting, which was a factor in him planting missiles in Cuba.
And, Allied troops, especially long-range bombers, used meth too in WWII, and apparently, at first, independent of knowledge of German use. A precis: http://healthvermont.gov/adap/meth/brief_history.aspx
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While this might seem a light article;
https://aeon.co/essays/you-don-t-have-to-be-stupid-to-work-here-but-it-helps
I think it raises some profoundly deep issues of how we structure organizations and the pressures they put on our abilities to act.
To mix aphorisms; The bigger they come, the deeper the rut.
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Free will, volition, etc.? I’d started the piece a couple of days ago; haven’t finished yet. That said, it, and the book I finished at the start of the week, and other items, make clear that in other areas besides a veto on movement decisions, there’s a gap of about 300 milliseconds between brain stimulation and the sensation of consciousness. What it means may be debated; I know I disagree to at least some degree with Massimo, DB, and others. But it does exist.
On the bigger issue, of course, I’ve talked repeatedly of psychological determinism, and that being on an issue-by-issue sliding scale, not a polarity.
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Finally, welcome Caley, whatever relation you are to Massimo.
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Socratic, she’s my daughter, currently double majoring in psychology and philosophy at the University of Vermont…
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Social graces, folks! And elbows off the table and no slurping the soup.
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So, Massimo, you’ve raised a proud young Humean? 🙂
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The article on economics pretty much answers its own question with the title of the book it mentions “Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer”.
If the rich did, in fact, become richer then the predictions of the economists did happen and top economists did do their job.
As I asked before, imagine an airline which does no maintenance on their aircraft, overloads it with passengers and flies it directly into a storm. When it crashes everyone blames physicists and ask why they didn’t predict the crash, then hand over a heap of public money to the company to buy a new aeroplane and carry on as usual.
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Massimo, HERE is one for you on food ethics. Vegans are reminded that their farmer’s market veggies were probably fertilized in part by bone meal or other animal products: http://www.hcn.org/articles/meat-eaters-feel-the-heat-from-vegans?utm_source=wcn1&utm_medium=email
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My goodness, you guys read fast. I started with Sullivan’s piece, but couldn’t make it through it. He made some valid points in the parts I read, but I lost interest and focus. I began to wonder if he was being paid by the word or laying the groundwork for a book, or if New Yorker Magazine has editors remaining on its staff. Any others out there who believe that this piece is rather long-winded?
I will try to work my way through the other selections, but honestly I cheat, by which I mean I usually wait for others to comment and then focus my attention on the article that generates the most commentary from others. 🙂
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Oh, and per Internet addiction, when outdoors companies make backpacks with solar panels so people can take their “devices” backcountry, Houston, we have a problem: http://www.hcn.org/articles/oh-goody-you-can-check-your-email-in-yellowstone?utm_source=wcn1&utm_medium=email
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Thomas, I’ve usually read most of Massimo’s pieces on G+ before they’re posted here. The porn one, per my own line of work, I knew “what was wrong” before reading.
Oh, as for Sully? For the unfamiliar, he’s the one-time editor of The New Republic who devoted a whole issue to a defense of “The Bell Curve.” Hence my photoshopping:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/43577246@N02/5702360716/in/album-72157626554663131/
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I have a couple of friends who say they suffer/suffered from “porn addiction.” They started a sort of Pornography Anonymous modeled on some AA Steps and with guidance priests in the Catholic Church. (Don’t laugh. They are really trying to serve as a support group for those who feel their lives have become unmanageable because of pornography.) This began after I invited one to an “open” GA meeting. Forrester’s article is well-done and structured, even if, like me, you find porn to be rather boring. To each his own, or some de gustibus statement. Plus, there are some bon-bons in her piece, whether intentional or not, like “Sometimes, though, porn’s defenders overcompensate.”
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With the biology and Platonism I just couldn’t get past that they used that phrase that natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest, something you tend to hear from the Discovery Institute mostly these days.
The whole point of the theory is that it does explain the “arrival” , the “survival” not being something that really needs explaining.
It is a bit of a problem for humans that a proposition is more memorable for being euphonius, not for being true.
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The idea that one can both be alive and do no harm is contradictory. Animals die in the production of plants. Common ancestry diffuses the idea of sharp distinctions between living things. A new study in PNAS shows that our direct and indirect importation of mammals (dogs, cats, rat, pigs, etc.) have caused mass extinctions in the past 500 years. Not that it isn’t something to think about, but it is something for which we can’t completely eliminate harm.
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Andrea Lavazza’s is a great piece for the layperson interested in the subject of free will and how or whether neuroscience will be at the forefront of this discussion. Penn has yet to convince me that free will is analogous to a magic act, and Teller remains astutely silent on the matter.
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Ok, I just got here,; but noted:
“The complex economics, and morals, of pornography” – the Republican party has simplified this; if you want to shame a former Miss Universe, accuse her of a porn film she was never in; but if you’re also an opportunistic millionaire, do a cameo in a soft-core girl-on-girl film for Playboy. And always remember, as the Republican platform reminds us, that pornography is destroying our society.
But wait, what does that mean about the Republican candidate for president…?
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Nice to see Meinong getting air time. I suppose Graham Priest has some good reason for not reducing the issue to a lowest common denominator, but Astrodreamer does not. Basically is it not a matter of Russell having attempted to rebut the suggestion that there can be any non-material reality? to block, as if with a gigantic boulder of thudding logic, the common language proposition that there are different kinds of existence and that existence cannot be restricted to material entities?
Graham Priest also takes the opportunity to suggest that regardless of the actual logical strength of Meinong’s argument, its current resurgence may be the sign of a Kuhnian, that is to say social-historical, shape to philosophical progress, the idea of which is as distasteful to many philosophers no doubt as it has been to scientists. Bringing these two, Meinong and Kuhn together rather reinforces my point that philosophers born under Cancer, mostly continentals (in addition, Leibniz, Vico, Rousseau, Bachelard, Benjamin, Derrida, Latour, Sloterdyjk) are by astrological temperament impelled to attack the rational/material axis of the philosophers of the orthogonal Aries, originating in Descartes and consolidated in the Descartes/Kant detente, which extends through Russell to today’s analytics.
Quine, also a Cancer, would seem to be on the wrong side of things, however his
serpentine subtlety only for a while filled in the cracks of Russell’s blockade, not with argument but with caricature (according to Graham Priest).
Priest is himself a representative of this alleged Kuhnian ‘sea change’, as part of a gang known as Speculative Realists, who brandish paralogical swords against the defenses of the analytic camp,
to the furious annoyance of staunch upholders like Brian Leiter. Not merely that their contrarian positions offer redoubts for any sort of hermeticism, but one of their leaders, Graham Harmon, goes so far as to discuss his own horoscope in an impressionistic essay collected in “Circus Philosophicus’ (2010).
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Massimo, now don’t hold out on Astro — what’s your sign? We know you have serpentine subtlety.
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Further to the Wagner piece on redundancy/synonymous texts, consider anti-idiotypic antibodies (antibodies to an antibody that recognizes a particular target protein). The similarity with the target protein is just geometric, but you can often mimic the target’s function pretty well. So function (what evolution “sees”) is very loosely related to amino acid and DNA sequence.
Combining non-existence and economics, is an opportunity cost real or fictional?
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Hi all,
As the resident Platonist here I find Andreas Wagner’s thoughts interesting and I entirely agree with him that it is useful and reasonable to characterise the process of evolution as a search through a Platonic space of possibilities.
This is not actually true, however. Neither is it false. Platonism is just a mental tool, a way of thinking about things. There is no fact of the matter. Whether these possibilities (and other abstract mathematical objects) exist or don’t exist depends only on how you think of existence, and as a Platonist I am an advocate of this way of thinking, not saying that, for example, Wagner’s piece is any kind of argument that Platonism is factually true.
@michaelfugate
You don’t think he understands what he’s talking about?
@Socratic
That doesn’t follow. Given a certain genetic code, such as that used by earth biology, there exists a set of possible genomes. This is no different from the idea that, given a certain set of axioms, there exists a set of possible proofs. Platonism is entirely applicable.
@Robin
Not really. Natural selection can only explain how adaptive traits spread throughout a population. It can’t by itself explain where the adaptive traits come from. Darwin had very little idea at the time he came up with natural selection. He basically just took it as a given that there was variability of traits to select from. The point Wagner is making is that the kind of evolution we see in earth biology would not be possible without the genotype networks he talks about in his article, something Darwin knew nothing about.
@David
Yeah, great example.
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