Cure-alls and Remedies
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Deirdre McCloskey describes her project : I have been trying for thirty years to revive the rhetorical tradition, and lately to introduce language into the economists’ models in which talk is cheap and therefore of no consequence. On the contrary, sweet talk, persuasion, is one quarter of national income, earned by managers and teachers,…
Here’s the post: Game theory and the Super PACs . Levine points to the recent shift in campaign finance focus from the presidency to Congress, and adds nuance to a debate that is frequently overrun by absolutist intuitions: No wonder Karl Rove is spending his money on behalf of Senate Republicans. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that conservative super-PACS…
Another way of putting this question is: how does your ideology and social setting blind you? One way to answer is to look at those beliefs that you have the most incentive to deceive yourself about. What are your biases? For instance, I’m probably not as smart or as caring as I think I am, because…
(This post is a continuation of Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Chicago Teachers’ Strike .) Another way of thinking about public sector unionization is as an effort to force democratic public institutions to remain accountable to the professional standards and know-how of those who work within them . Citizens want better, more accountable teachers, yet they…