Month: October 2012
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Some Crime & Punishment Links
I originally put this together for my students. On Solitary Confinement: Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America’s Prisons. by Shane Bauer Subjects Without a World: A Husserlian Analysis of Solitary Confinement, by Lisa Guenther The Inhumane Conditions of Bradley Manning’s Detention, by Glenn Greenwald On the Cost of Prisons and Prison…
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Naturalism and the Truth of Human Values
Peter Levine has been blogging on various aspects of truth recently: democracy in a “post-truth era,” issues in prediction, and now a piece on scientism: if all truths were scientific truths, we would be in deep trouble. We would then reject any claims that science cannot support. For example, do all human beings have equal value or…
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The Bayesian Conspiracy: “What matters is that Bayes is cool, and if you don’t know Bayes, you aren’t cool.”
Yudkowsky offers to decode the secret: Maybe you see the theorem, and you understand the theorem, and you can use the theorem, but you can’t understand why your friends and/or research colleagues seem to think it’s the secret of the universe. Maybe your friends are all wearing Bayes’ Theorem T-shirts, and you’re feeling left out. …
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In-Groups Defend Their Turf? Philosophy versus Psychology in the New York Times
A showdown of sorts with Jonathan Haidt is brewing on The Stone. Michael P. Lynch gives us “A Vote for Reason.” The judgment that reasons play no role in judgment is itself a judgment. And Haidt has defended it with reasons. So if those reasons convince me that his theory is true, then reasons can play a…
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Empathy, Cognition, and In-Group Preferences
The speculative post on empathy generated a great set of comments over on Facebook, but I think the discussion was weighed down by the framing from the original article regarding “Extreme Female Brain.” Those (like Cordelia Fine) who have rejected the account of autism-spectrum disorders as “Extreme Male Brain” have largely done so because of the…
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Can there be an excess of empathy? How would we know?
BPS has a gloss on this paper by Bremser and Gallup, which suggests that eating disorders and social anxiety may be an example of Extreme Female Brain: too much concern about what other people think and feel is associated with fear of negative evaluations, which may be expressed through apprehension and distress over negative evaluations by…