Cure-alls and Remedies
Interfluidity on the Productivity Effects of Wealth as Insurance: Waldman is excellent and thoughtful, as always. Four Futures: No mix-and-match because futurists never hedge. Why Valve? Sounds like a great place to work, but I’m glad that the DC Department of Public Works doesn’t run this way: I like it when they collect my trash. Tabarrok…
Charles Stross is doing an “IamA” on Reddit right now. Vincent Ostrom died. (Am I wrong to find this kind of quick death following the loss of a spouse and co-researcher seriously romantic? Probably, but there it is.) Children bully an elderly bus monitor. The internet responds with $650,000 in donations. Also, many plot elaborate revenge…
I’ve been neck-deep in some writing projects of late, but I wanted to post a couple of cool links and give a hint of what’s coming next: Mark Lance, Daniel Levine, and I will be running a free course at the Baltimore Free School on Freedom. Daniel Levine has been doing some pretty kick-ass work…
Tyler Cowen writes: I have an irrational fondness for this sentence of Mann’s: The First World War distracted governments from the task of monitoring insect movements. The sentence from Charles C. Mann is quite good, but Cowen’s sentence is better: it encapsulates his exuberance for the written word and for heterodox points of view. (And…
If you teach philosophy, you should be reading In Socrates’ Wake , a group blog devoted to pedagogy. Here are some highlights: Becko summarizes the “disengagement compact” (and further coverage of Academically Adrift ) Michael Cholbi on testing and study strategies . Chris Panza parses our outlier GRE scores . Discussion of Martha Nussbaum’s Not…
Check out the results here . How to take the news? Should I be pleased that I blog in an accessible style or worried that the blog is only 18% advanced? I think this is a good “first principles” question for philosophers to ask themselves, especially since Google seems to be using sentence length and…
Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys? An individual psychology primarily disposed to consider the interests of all equally, without fear or favor, even in the teeth of social ostracism, might be morally admirable, but simply wouldn’t cut it as a vehicle for reliable replication. Such pure altruism would not be favored in natural selection over an impure altruism…
Was the credit crisis like an asteroid impact? A Thomist take on Hayek and ‘Scientism’: Part 1 and Part 2 An answering machine can help nudge us into monitoring our energy usage Implicit racial bias in empathic responses to the pain of others Does Stuart Buck’s Acting White echo the claims of Akerlof and Kranton’s Identity…
Bureaucracy .
DIY U by Anya Kamenetz (2010) A regularly updated version of this guide can be found here. I teach at the third-most expensive school in the country, where I regularly persuade students that they should major or minor in philosophy. For many students, this is a value question, and as I like to put it,…
What would you do with $100 and a case of altruism ? How about giving away umbrellas during a rainstorm: David Ibnale had no idea how tough it would be to give away umbrellas on Market Street the other day. He figured that he and his free umbrellas were going to change the world. The world…
I won’t spend much time justifying the duty to assist now, except to link to Ramsey Clark’s essay ” Haiti’s Agonies and Exaltations ,” but I do want to talk about the kinds of assistance we can offer: Personal: in the short term, we can all text “HAITI” to 90999 to give $10 to the…
I understand why folks do retrospective blog posts and best-of lists in early December, and I certainly benefit from it as I’m thinking about Christmas gifts, but it seems to violate the spirit of the list or retrospective itself to start before the year or decade is done. If this is the *only* lesson that…
Can Liberals Take Their Own Side in an Argument? (PDF) Robert Talisse takes on Robert Frost and Mozert v. Hawkins . Epistemic dependence is unavoidable because every individual has limited cognitive resources. However, this dependence in itself is not a bad thing; great stores of knowledge and information that could not be produced by a…
The other night I was discussing Lacan with a friend who practices psychotherapy, and he suggested that Lacan’s work ‘only makes sense in the clinic.’ We agreed that when philosophers and critical theorists try to invoke Lacan, they inevitably bungle the job. Today, I discovered Andrew Robinson’s nice little takedown of Zizek, Laclau, and Mouffe’s…
There is a deeply interesting discussion of energy policy going on at ask.metafilter. It hits on some of the best thinking in environmentalism right now, and takes that long-range speculative view that may not satisfy the average policy wonk but gives me the philosophical shiver that lets me know that some deep thinking is occurring….
The Tanner Lectures are available online . Here’s a selection that I found interesting: Ben Barber’s “” Democratic Alternatives to the Mullahs and the Malls ” Seyla Benhabib’s ” Reclaiming Universalism: Negotiating Republican Self-Determinism and Cosmopolitan Norms ” Stephen Breyer’s ” Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution ” Umberto Eco’s ” Interpretation and Overinterpretation: World,…
Please read these two extracts from Clive Stafford Smith’s forthcoming book Bad Men , recounting his experience as a lawyer for prisoners at the military base in Guantanamo: ” No fairytales allowed ,” and ” Have you received your gift pack? ” From the first: One of the escorts told me that, on pain of…
I’ve been distracted by travel… first I went to the Arendt Circle in Louisvlle, Kentucky, then to Pennsylvania where I selected a site for my wedding! I volunteered to become the Arendt Circle’s webmaster, which means my online time will be further divided between setting up a website for them, my time on metafilter, and…
My family likes the business self-help section of the bookstore. When I was an an awkward adolescent, my father made me read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and How to Win Friends and Influence People . Seriously. I’m not a big fan of this kind of thing; I think it’s a bit of…
It’s probably obvious to most people, but the complete works of Shakespeare are available online . I just discovered this, and am currently reading The Tempest . Some of my favorite Shakespeare lines appear in that play: PROSPERO Abhorred slave, Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied…
Arthur C. Brooks is a professor of public administration at Syracuse University. His recent book Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, develops a number of data sets to show that conservatives give a larger percentage of their income than liberals. There’s a review here , but it doesn’t answer some of the…
“A few weeks ago” is beginning to be the expected delay in these posts. Still, a few weeks ago, I got into a dust-up on metafilter about white supremacy. It started here , where I noticed that a character by the name of Milliken was engaging in some heavy-handed, long-winded, over-broad generalizations about black people….
Saw the movie version of Proof the other night. It’s a nicely written mystery, masquerading as a family drama. I especially liked these lines: “If I go back to the beginning. I could start it over again. Here. I could go line by line. Try and find a shorter way. I could try to make…
Kant is famous for inverting the claim that “there is no disputing taste.” Despite the fact that most people cannot imagine an argument for the pleasure or displeasure of flavors and foods, he supplies us a perspective from which we might establish a “common sense.” Namely, that each of us, in tasting or experiencing, might…
A fellow PSU alumnus, Dom Eggert over at Sentiments of Rationality , has been worrying about those crazy South Dakotans’ test-ban on abortions. He cites the reluctance of conservatives to actually criminalize abortion in the way that seems consistent with their views, i.e. by charging mothers who seek abortions with murder. The upshot of the…
So, if the last post was all vitriol and false hope, today I want to focus on options. Specifically, what’s possible today that was unimaginable a century ago? 1. Communes without communal bathrooms. Look, the real problem with communism is that half of the population are slobs. Yet the appeal of the commune is the…
Look, I’m not one for golden-age narratives. However, it has become increasingly clear to me that things are fucked in a manner unique to this place and time. Of course, there are all new possibilities, novel reasons to hope, that come out of this unique dilemma. But it also seems as if some of the…