Philosophy Updates

[axocanth]

I absolutely love that article above, CC. It was almost . . . surreal to read it, as if my own thoughts were being typed out in front of me It's so encouraging to see scientists themselves speaking out against this kind of thing. What did you think of it yourself?

I also wonder how many other people out there are sick to the back teeth of what I refer to provocatively as the "Ministry of Scientistic Propaganda" (MSP): the dogmatic, self-aggrandizing (not to mention self-enriching), philosophically clueless mediocrities who have appointed themselves spokespeople of science, or more correctly scientism (religious-like blind veneration of science), their Youtube mouthpieces, and the countless hordes of unthinking, uncritical, mindless sheep -- what I refer to as the "Red Guards" of scientism (and this site has a few) -- who follow them like football hooligans, attacking any perceived heretics with a savagery that is nothing short of breathtaking.

All of whom collectively engage in vacuous sloganeering ("We have evidence. The bad guys don't.") and the massive dissemination of untruths, misinformation, and scientistic propaganda (e.g. "Science is the opposite of dogma" -- don't laugh!).

This is no anti-science statement on my part. It is, rather, an expression of disgust at how science is being represented, or more correctly, misrepresented, at the highest levels, drowning out the voices of sensible, intelligent scientists, and destroying trust. I do not trust these people. And clearly, I am not alone.


Some excerpts (my bold emphasis):

Scientific publishing has been gamed to advance scientists’ careers, not knowledge. While science communication has turned into a means of public indoctrination. In this essay, Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that real experts don’t know “the truth,” and that we should become pilgrims towards the unknown rather than the squatters of the broken records of ideological mantras.

Science is in trouble. The problem comes from within and from without. Not only has scientific publishing been gamed to advance one’s career rather than everyone’s knowledge, but scientific communication has turned into a mechanism of public indoctrination. We don’t seem to live in a world where people can “trust the experts” anymore.

I certainly don't trust them, at least the "experts" who constitute the Ministry of Scientistic Propaganda, inveterate bullshit artists every one of them. Sensible, reasonable scientists are another matter entirely.

There are, no doubt, great communicators of various sorts in the media landscape but some of the most notorious ones have steadfastly slanted towards promoting what could be called “the public misunderstanding of science”. Such professionals do not exemplify what they profess. They substitute certitude for curiosity. They throw stigma upon enigma. They conflate their myopic and dogmatic views of science with “the science”. They transmute a kind of inferiority complex into a superiority contest, making science digestible at the expense of making us swallow their covert ideologies. It is shameful, pathetic, and detrimental to us all.

Think Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Lawrence Krauss. On Youtube, think Professor Dave, Forrest Valkai, and Aron Ra.

You probably know who I am talking about without indulging in specific examples but, if you don’t, lucky you (and stay tuned). Such sci-com gurus (and their minion wannabes blogging and trolling from their couches) conflate scientific outreach with scientific outrage. They hunt academic dissenters down and bully good-spirited amateurs.

I know exactly who you're taking about.

Confusing solemnity with seriousness, they make fools of themselves, as John Cleese brilliantly illustrates here.

Science is represented at the highest level by a handful of ignoramus buffoons. Clearly, I'm not the first person to have noticed. These things don't come without a price, and the price will be loss of public trust.

In a word, scientism has been institutionalized in the name of science. But, in the end, scientism is more dangerous than pseudoscience because it is an inside job. Error, bias, and hype are minor sins compared to scientific hubris. Arrogance is antithetical to progress.

Bravo!

The distinguished Professors of the Public Pulpitry of Science have done a huge disservice not only to science itself but to the humanities (and to humanism writ large) by straw-manning philosophy and disdaining religion.

Quite so. If there is one discipline above all which promotes free autonomous critical thought, it is surely philosophy. The Ministry of Scientistic Propaganda, then, is effectively spreading the gospel of "Don't think! Just listen to your High Priests". What is most dangerous in all this is that those who have already absorbed the "Don't Think" indoctrination do not realize it. They go around spreading MSP mantras and slogans that they never pause for one second to question. It happened during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s too, taking decades to recover from. I submit that science is being de-intellectualized, free thought is being eradicated, and the Red Guards will make sure that all dissidence at the grass roots level is silenced.

In sum, scientistic televangelism is alienating genuine truth-seekers, eroding public trust in science, and indoctrinating young minds. Let us reject such terms of disservice and reverse the dead-ending of science from within and without.

Or is it too late already?

 

[James R]

Rah rah rah! What could science communicators know about science? Let the philosophers do it, I say!

 

[C C]

A new theory argues humans evolved through competition.
https://nautil.us/the-last-hominin-standing-896953/

What they found in our own branch of the evolutionary tree came as a shock—the complete opposite of a pattern found in other vertebrates. For Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and other vertebrate groups, as the number of species in a group went up, competition increased, and the rate of forming new species slowed down...

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Against designing AI persons to be safe and aligned
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2024/09/against-designing-ai-persons-to-be-safe.html

Let's call an artificially intelligent system a person (in the ethical, not the legal sense) if it deserves moral consideration similar to that of a human being. (I assume that personhood requires consciousness but does not require biological humanity; we can argue about that another time if you like). If we are ever capable of designing AI persons, we should not design them to be safe and aligned with human interests...

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Uncertain guilt
https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2024/09/uncertain-guilt.html

Suppose there is a 75% chance that I have done a specific wrong thing yesterday. (Perhaps I have suffered from some memory loss.) What should be my attitude? Guilt isn’t quite right. For guilt to be appropriate, I should believe that I’ve done a wrong thing, and 75% is not high enough for belief...

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Recently published book spotlight: Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory
https://blog.apaonline.org/2024/09/...ht-illusion-and-fetishism-in-critical-theory/

Vasilis Grollios is currently an independent postdoctoral researcher and author of the new book, Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory: A study of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis and the Situationists. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Grollios discusses how this book fits in with his larger research project in Marxist critical theory, his reason for including Cornelius Castoriadis in his analysis, and its relevance to our everyday life and ways of relating to one another...

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My dinner with Nozick
https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=2010

Robert Nozick and his Harvard colleague John Rawls were giants of twentiethcentury political philosophy. While no one comes close to Rawls in terms of citations or influence, no one comes closer than Nozick. Nozick said, “Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls’s theory or explain why not” (1974, 183). There is truth in the compliment, but when it came to explaining why not, no one did more than Nozick...

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Do all roads lead to philosophy on Wikipedia?: They do about 97.3% of the time
https://www.openculture.com/2024/09...wikipedia-they-do-about-97-3-of-the-time.html

There is, of course, a Wikipedia page about this, called “Getting to Philosophy.” “Following the first hyperlink in the main text of an English Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually leads to the Philosophy article,” it says. “In February 2016, this was true for 97% of all articles on Wikipedia (including this one).” As for the rest, they “lead to an article without any outgoing wikilinks, to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops.” This is actually the case with the path starting from “Plastic Love,” after Philosophy of Language goes in circles around concepts, abstraction, and logic itself, never quite reaching Philosophy proper.

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The surprising origins and politics of equality
https://www.thenation.com/article/s...rrin-mcmahon-teresa-bejan-david-lay-williams/

McMahon charts how equality has zigged and zagged throughout human history. As amazing an achievement as McMahon’s book is, his very ambition forces him to tell competing and potentially contradictory stories, sometimes giving the impression that he thinks they add up to a single, coherent whole.

McMahon is surprisingly grudging about the French Revolution’s catalyzing effect on the spread of equality in subsequent history. ... The equality within hunter-gatherer tribes found in what the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called “the original affluent society” doesn’t mean that our ancestors were ideologically committed to equality.

Christians, on the other hand, were, but saying that all people are equal in the eyes of God by no means implies political and economic equality. Equal circumstances may not depend on ideological commitment; nor do ideologies of equality imply any demand for more particular forms of equality in fact.

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Behavioural strategies in simultaneous and alternating prisoner’s dilemma games with/without voluntary participation
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-73353-4

ABSTRACT: The Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of the most classic formats for exploring the principle of direct reciprocity. Although numerous theoretical and experimental studies have been conducted, little attention has been paid to the divergence between theoretical predictions and actual human behaviour. In addition, there are two additional essential challenges of experimental research.

First, most experimental approaches have focused on games in which two players decide their actions simultaneously, but little is known about alternating games. Another is that there are few experiments on voluntary participation.

Here, we conducted experiments on simultaneous games, alternating games, and games with and without voluntary participation for a total of four game patterns and examined the deviation from theoretical predictions for each. The results showed that, contrary to theoretical predictions, humans chose cooperation even after being exploited.

We also observed that, with or without voluntary participation, people tended to take the same action they had taken in the previous round. Our results indicate that to understand the mechanisms of human behaviour, we need to integrate findings from behavioural science, psychology, and game theory.
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[TheVat]

They go around spreading MSP mantras and slogans that they never pause for one second to question. It happened during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s too, taking decades to recover from. I submit that science is being de-intellectualized, free thought is being eradicated, and the Red Guards will make sure that all dissidence at the grass roots level is silenced.

Don "Axo" Quixote, ever tilting at windmills! Well at least you haven't started attacking Michio Kaku. Please, if he's next, I don't want to know about it.

 

[C C]

The most sophisticated AIs are most likely to lie, worrying research finds (philosophy of AI)

The Most Sophisticated AIs Are Most Likely to Lie, Worrying Research Finds

As AI chatbots get bigger and more powerful, they are also lying more, instead of declining questions they can't answer.

futurism.com

INTRO: It seems that this logic also applies to large language models, which are becoming more powerful with each iteration. New research suggests that this smarter crop of AI chatbots are actually becoming less trustworthy, because they're more likely to make up facts rather than avoiding or turning down questions they can't answer. The study, published in the journal Nature, examined some of the leading commercial LLMs in the industry... (MORE - details)
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[exchemist]

The most sophisticated AIs are most likely to lie, worrying research finds (philosophy of AI)

The Most Sophisticated AIs Are Most Likely to Lie, Worrying Research Finds

As AI chatbots get bigger and more powerful, they are also lying more, instead of declining questions they can't answer.

futurism.com

INTRO: It seems that this logic also applies to large language models, which are becoming more powerful with each iteration. New research suggests that this smarter crop of AI chatbots are actually becoming less trustworthy, because they're more likely to make up facts rather than avoiding or turning down questions they can't answer. The study, published in the journal Nature, examined some of the leading commercial LLMs in the industry... (MORE - details)
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Why am I not surprised? On the other science forum we are constantly getting posts by AI bots. They are full of bullshit, and read like a bad student's essay, full of padding and circumlocutions. You can tell them almost immediately. Their science is terrible.

I came across another article recently, which I'm unsure whether I've reported on this forum or not, saying that one problem is that these models read all the crap as well as good sources and there is so much bad, AI-generated stuff now that they are ingesting their own exhaust fumes, as it were, making things worse!

 

[exchemist]

Don "Axo" Quixote, ever tilting at windmills! Well at least you haven't started attacking Michio Kaku. Please, if he's next, I don't want to know about it.

 

[C C]

Why am I not surprised? On the other science forum we are constantly getting posts by AI bots. They are full of bullshit, and read like a bad student's essay, full of padding and circumlocutions. You can tell them almost immediately. Their science is terrible.

I came across another article recently, which I'm unsure whether I've reported on this forum or not, saying that one problem is that these models read all the crap as well as good sources and there is so much bad, AI-generated stuff now that they are ingesting their own exhaust fumes, as it were, making things worse!

And perhaps that portends a whole underground of AI development conducted by rogue actors, that many watchdogs neglect in the course of myopically applying their concerns and forecasts to the regulated mainstream industry.
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[exchemist]

And perhaps that portends a whole underground of AI development conducted by rogue actors, that many watchdogs neglect in the course of myopically applying their concerns and forecasts to the regulated mainstream industry.
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It's going to get AI a bad name, which is a pity as there is a lot more to it than LLMs. But there is so much hype around it that I think we have all got to be very careful how to use it. (I've just turned 70 and I've decided I'm not going to touch AI at all, just as I won't have anything to do with Facebook, X or What's App. )

 

[C C]

The importance of recognizing what's rational and what's not
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...he-seven-irrational-habits-of-highly-rational
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...istinguishing-the-genuinely-rational-from-the

INTRO: If someone was as rational as could be—with sound decisions and many accurate and trustworthy judgments about the world—would we recognize it? There are reasons to think the answer is “No.” In this post, I aim to challenge prevailing intuitions about rationality and argue that the philosophy and science of judgment and decision-making reveal several ways in which what appears to be rational diverges from what actually is rational.

This post takes its title from Stephen Covey’s well-known book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” I argue that, similarly, there are seven habits of highly rational people—but these habits can appear so counter-intuitive that others label these habits as “irrational.” Of course, the rationality of these habits might be obvious to specialists in judgment and decision-making, but I find they are often not so obvious to others of the sort for whom this post is written.

In any case, not only are these habits potentially interesting in their own right, but recognizing them may also help to open our minds, to help us better understand the nature of rationality, and to better identify the judgments and decisions we should trust—or not trust—in our own lives... (MORE - details)

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Do animals understand death? The latest science might surprise you
https://gizmodo.com/do-animals-understand-death-the-latest-science-might-surprise-you-2000505062

INTRO: Few things have earned as much as thought and attention in the collective human mind as death. For as long as we’ve had the capacity to express ourselves through words and other forms of communication, the subject of death and dying has loomed ever present. But Susana Monsó, a Spain-based philosopher, argues that while humanity’s particular flavor of fascination and dread at the notion of death may be unique, our perception of it actually isn’t.

Her book, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death, was first published in Spanish in 2021 but has now received an update and a revised English translation that will be out later next month. In the book, Monsó discusses the emerging field of science that seeks to understand how animals view and react to death. And she makes the strong case that humans are far from the only animals to know the meaning of dying, even if our vocabularies differ. Gizmodo spoke to Monsó about the origins of her book, the “romantics and killjoys” of animal cognition research, and why the possum’s ability to play dead reveals so much about how other animals grasp the nature of mortality. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity... (MORE - details)

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85% of Americans want animal experiments phased out, new survey shows (ethics)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1059750

INTRO: A new survey shows that Americans’ attitudes toward experiments on animals have changed significantly in recent years, with the vast majority now favoring phasing out animal experiments in favor or other research methods. The poll was conducted by Morning Consult on Sept. 5, 2024, and included 2,205 adults... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

The unraveling of space-time
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unraveling-of-space-time-20240925/

Now it’s Einstein’s fabric that needs unraveling. A belief has come to dominate theoretical physics that even nothingness ought to come from something — that space-time must break up into more primitive building blocks that don’t themselves inhabit space or time...

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The hunt for the laws of physics behind memory and thought
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-hunt-for-the-laws-of-physics-behind-memory-and-thought

EXCERPTS: . . . The behavior of single neurons is well understood. But put them together into networks and much more significant behaviors emerge, such as sensory perception, memories and thought. The hope is that a statistical or mathematical approach to these systems could reveal the laws of neural physics that describe the bulk behavior of nervous systems and brains.

[...] The nature of these laws is, of course, fundamentally different to the nature of conventional statistical physics. ... One challenge here is that networks can demonstrate emergent behavior. This is not the result of random correlations or even weak correlations. Instead, the correlations can be remarkably strong and can spread through a network like an avalanche... (MORE - details)

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Clock time contra lived time
https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-when-bergson-and-einstein-debated-time

EXCERPT: Though Einstein was forced to speak in French, a language of which he had a poor command, he took only a minute to respond. He summarised his understanding of what Henri Bergson had said and then shrugged away the philosopher’s ideas as irrelevant to physics. Einstein believed that science was the authority on objective time, and philosophy had no prerogative to weigh in.

To end his rebuttal, he declared: ‘There is no time of the philosopher; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.’ But despite what many have come to believe about the debate that began that night, Einstein was wrong. There is a third kind of a time: a time of the philosopher... (MORE - details)

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Milgram’s infamous shock studies still hold lessons for confronting authoritarianism
https://www.scientificamerican.com/...k-studies-still-hold-lessons-for-confronting/

EXCERPT: By reexamining the data from Milgram’s experiments and considering the outcomes of several conceptual replications (more recent studies that used different approaches to probe people’s susceptibility to authority figures), we determined that, in fact, Milgram’s work and conclusions still stand. That finding has several important implications, particularly for confronting the knotty question of how people might overcome the tendency to submit to malevolent authority... (MORE - details)

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When data is missing, scientists guess. Then guess again.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/when-data-is-missing-scientists-guess-then-guess-again-20241002/

EXCERPTS: Data is almost always incomplete. Patients drop out of clinical trials and survey respondents skip questions; schools fail to report scores, and governments ignore elements of their economies. When data goes missing, standard statistical tools, like taking averages, are no longer useful.

[...] Outside of statistics, to “impute” means to assign responsibility or blame. Statisticians instead assign data. If you forget to fill out your height on a questionnaire, for instance, they might assign you a plausible height, like the average height for your gender.

That kind of guess is known as single imputation. A statistical technique that dates back to 1930, single imputation works better than just ignoring missing data. By the 1960s, it was often statisticians’ method of choice. Donald Rubin would change that... (MORE - details)

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AI-generated college admissions essays exhibit male, privileged bias
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1060132

EXCERPTS: In an examination of thousands of human-written college admissions essays and those generated by AI, researchers found that the AI-generated essays are most similar to essays authored by students who are males, with higher socioeconomic status and higher levels of social privilege. The paper, published in the Journal of Big Data, also found the AI-generated writing is also less varied than that written by humans.

[...] “It’s likely that students are going to be using AI to help them craft these essays – probably not asking it to just write the whole thing, but rather asking it for help and feedback,” said Rene Kizilcec, associate professor of information science at Cornell and co-author of the paper. “But even then, the suggestions that these models will make may not be well aligned with the values, the sort of linguistic style, that would be an authentic expression of those students.

“It’s important to remember that if you use an AI to help you write an essay, it's probably going to sound less like you and more like something quite generic,” he said. “And students need to know that for the people reading these essays, it won’t be too difficult for them to figure out who has used AI extensively. The key will be to use it to help students tell their own stories and to enhance what they want to convey, not to replace their own voice.” (MORE - details)
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[C C]

London Standard’s AI-generated review, by late art critic Brian Sewell, exposes a significant philosophical threat
https://theconversation.com/london-...ses-a-significant-philosophical-threat-240230

EXCERPT: Critics have scoffed at the AI-written review, deeming it a pale copy that fails to capture “the waspishness and hauteur of Sewell’s writing”. But this view obscures a greater realisation of the philosophical threat this technology poses – the reduction of the human to the machine... (MORE - details)

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The beyond-spacetime meme (John Horgan)
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/the-beyond-spacetime-meme

INTRO: Decades ago, I coined the phrase ironic science to describe theories that shouldn’t be taken too seriously, because they can’t be tested as genuine science can. Ironic science is more akin to philosophy or literature than real science. An ironic theory, like Freudian psychoanalysis, might be interesting, fun to argue over, but you can never say it’s true.

That brings me to “The Unraveling of Space-Time,” a special issue of Quanta Magazine. This bundle of articles explores the possibility that space and time, which Einstein fused into spacetime, emerge “from more primitive building blocks that don’t themselves inhabit space and time.”

For brevity, and levity, I’ll call this notion the beyond-spacetime meme. The meme isn’t exactly new, as Quanta acknowledges and as the invaluable physics watchdog Peter Woit points out on his blog “Not Even Wrong.” The beyond-spacetime meme is linked to physicists’ quest to find a unified theory describing all of nature’s forces... (MORE - details)

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Is digital technology leading us to the ‘extinction of experience’?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/i...s-to-the-extinction-of-experience/ar-AA1rl8ns

EXCERPT: Social media is bad because it “gives everyone the opportunity to promote themselves,” while digital communication is bad because it prevents us from registering one another’s facial expressions, thereby abolishing what anthropologist Edward T. Hall called “the silent language” of physical communication. Surveillance technologies are bad because they allow employers to monitor employees. Looking at screens is bad because it leads us to ignore the people in need of help around us... (MORE - details)

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Is ideology more than just an orienting worldview?
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/maps-meaning

EXCERPTS: So conceived, ideology is what blinkers the ideologue’s vision, whether willfully or by way of the mystifying propaganda of certain powers that be. It is to be contrasted with one’s own ideology-free common sense, strictly rational technical analysis, or moral clarity. You’re wearing distorting glasses you don’t even realize are there; I see naturally, and with perfect vision.

[...] According to this perspective, we can’t hope to see without ideological glasses, nor can we simply rip them off the faces of the mystified and misled. We must instead settle for careful, humble interpretive study of how ideologies, including our own, tend to overemphasize some facts while obscuring others, how they fall prey to internal incoherence, and how they “naturalize” arrangements that are in fact socially constructed... (MORE - details)

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What makes a person seem wise? Global study finds that cultures do differ – but not as much as you’d think
https://theconversation.com/what-ma...o-differ-but-not-as-much-as-youd-think-238808

EXCERPT: This large-scale project required a joint effort of 34 researchers across fields of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, social science and psychometrics – and from all over the world, connected in a research consortium called The Geography of Philosophy.

What we found was somewhat surprising. Wisdom may appear to be shaped by cultural differences, but the core aspects of what makes someone wise are largely the same across cultures. From urban college students in Japan to villagers in South Africa, participants associated wisdom with two key characteristics: reflective orientation and socio-emotional awareness. We explain what that means below.

Contrary to widespread stereotypes, people recognise wisdom in a similar way across east and west, south and north... (MORE - details)

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The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/terry-eagleton/the-excitement-of-the-stuff

EXCERPTS: In the later decades of the last century, a new wave of ideas broke across the study of literature throughout the world. Known simply as ‘theory’, it ranged from structuralism to feminism, semiotics to hermeneutics, Marxism to deconstruction. All this was formidably abstract stuff, but it managed to be sexy as well. Its intellectual ambitiousness, along with its readiness to raise fundamental questions, attracted some of the most talented students of the day. It also gave birth to a cluster of international superstars – Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Umberto Eco – who were sometimes to be found lecturing in Sicily or Slovenia when they should have been teaching a class in New Jersey. At once prestigious and contentious, prized and reviled, theory was a way of amassing cultural capital for oneself as well as a source of genuinely exciting insights... (MORE - details)

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George Grant & conservative social democracy
https://www.compactmag.com/article/george-grant-and-conservative-social-democracy/

EXCERPT: Liberal praise of individual liberty and material progress, George Grant had concluded, was the only moral language that could sound a commanding note in our public realm—but it wasn’t the language that commanded him. His early epiphany that “we are not our own” led him to reject what he took to be the core tenet of modern liberalism: “the affirmation that our essence is our freedom.” Guided by the belief that to be human was to be an autonomous will, modern politics joined hands with modern technological science to push back the frontiers of anything that limited the exercise of that will.

The modern affirmation of the primacy of the will had implications for our understanding of justice that troubled Grant. With liberal modernity, justice becomes something human beings legislate for themselves in their freedom, in contrast to the Platonic conception of justice as “something in which we participate as we come to understand the nature of things through love and knowledge.” On this older view, justice was a set of practices and dispositions that contributed to the perfection of our nature. Being what human beings are “fitted for,” it directed us to the higher goods of virtue and contemplation and bade us to give other beings their due, what was properly owed to them. Within the Christian tradition, justice was especially concerned with protecting the most vulnerable members of society... (MORE - details)

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Fredric Jameson, the world’s greatest Marxist critic, is dead – long live Utopia!
https://theconversation.com/fredric...arxist-critic-is-dead-long-live-utopia-240104

EXCERPTS: Over 60 active years, against all odds, Jameson carved out one of the great unbroken adventures in unapologetic Marxist thinking in that howling wasteland of unchecked free enterprise we call the United States of America.

In one of his most eccentric undertakings, An American Utopia (2016), he imagined a communist seizure of the military apparatus via universal conscription and the withering away of the largest state in history. There was nothing that could not become grist to the dialectical mill of Jameson’s restless utopian thinking – even the nation whose partisan anti-intellectuals regularly named him as one of those dangerous “Marxist professors” we hear so much about.

Utopia was, for Jameson, more than a hope deferred or a crazy workbench covered with unfinished social blueprints... (MORE - details
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Even so, the menace of utopians peddling what always collapses into dystopia lives on...
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[C C]

Error is Infinite and Chaotic
https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2024/10/error-is-infinite-and-chaotic.html

INTRO: A conversation with a colleague the other day prompts me to explain in more detail why I think myself and most of those like me are wasting our lives. I have already explained that I think analytic philosophy is a degenerative research programme building shoddy structures from inadequate material. But the sunny optimism of Daniel Stoljar's engaging book has given me the tools to explain in somewhat more detail where exactly my worries lie... (MORE - details)

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Why intellectual humility isn’t always a virtue
https://aeon.co/essays/why-intellectual-humility-isnt-always-a-virtue

EXCERPTS: . . . One might argue that neither Robert nor Anne is genuinely intellectually humble. Rather, they only pretend to be humble. Both use a pose of humility to hide what is, in reality, just cowardice. As such, one might think, neither makes genuine trouble for the idea that intellectual humility is a virtue. Rather, these cases simply show that the virtue of intellectual humility must be married to that of intellectual courage.

[...] We have reason, then, to be sceptical of the ambitious virtue epistemologist’s claim that we understand what knowledge is via our grasp of the intellectual virtues. Still, that’s compatible with thinking that intellectual humility makes for a genuine virtue, and, as such, that we should aspire to cultivate it.

But what if it turns out that our intellectual icons – our exemplars of the intellectual good life – tend not to be humble? What if it turns out that the growth of knowledge proceeds not via humility, but rather via stubborn pig-headedness? These are not hypothetical questions. A look at the history of science suggests that intellectual humility, far from being a crucial ingredient in intellectual flourishing, might serve to corrode it... (MORE - missing details)

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The big idea: should we be thinking about luck differently?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...-should-we-be-thinking-about-luck-differently

EXCERPT: Luck comes in three main flavours. Philosophers have identified “circumstantial luck”, meaning being in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time – such as Stephen’s family taking that particular flight. Then there’s “resultant or outcome luck”, where in a particular situation some people have good and some have bad outcomes due to factors beyond their control. Stephen had the good resultant luck of surviving.

But perhaps the most important is “constitutive luck”, which covers all the fortunate or unfortunate circumstances of your very existence; the period of history in which you were born, your parents, background, genes and character traits... (MORE - details)

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Whatever happens, do not cry in the conference room (Helen De Cruz)
https://helendecruz.substack.com/p/whatever-happens-do-not-cry-in-the

EXCERPTS: On the rare occasions that speakers do become emotional during talks—for instance, talks about gender, or abuse, or discrimination—my main feeling is discomfort. [...] I certainly do not want to cry during a presentation. ... One virtue of being an academic philosopher is to be dispassionate. We should be masters of our passions...

[...] And yet, I cannot help but fear that by my years of enculturation in academia and my training, I have cut off something important and crucial about myself. ... when we eschew emotions in academic writing, we block off an entire register which, at least historically, was an integral part of philosophy. Nietzsche, for instance, wanted to create a specific joyful mood to countervail the stifling morality of customs in works such as Dawn and The Gay Science... (MORE - details)

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(review) Spinoza’s Argument for Substance Monism: Why There Is Only One Thing
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/spinozas-argument-for-substance-monism-why-there-is-only-one-thing/

INTRO: Christopher Martin has two aims for his book, Spinoza’s Argument for Substance Monism: Why There Is Only One Thing. The first is to explore and defend Spinoza’s arguments for the claim that there “must and can only be one independent existing thing”, while the second is to “provide readers curious about Spinoza, or Modern philosophy more generally, with an illustration of what one living philosopher who focuses on the era does in their research”.

While Martin generally succeeds in both of these aims, Martin’s defense of Spinoza’s substance monism is probably more sophisticated than what a reader looking for an introduction into Spinoza or modern philosophy would appreciate, while Martin’s aim at being accessible to those unfamiliar with Spinoza or Modern philosophy more generally leads him to neglect some questionable elements of his analysis. Nevertheless, Martin does a wonderful job fleshing out the basis of Spinoza’s monism with illuminating references to Ancient and Medieval philosophers and this is something I believe any reader of his book will appreciate...

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Atlas Schlepped (Review of "Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success")
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/literature/17180/atlas-schlepped/

EXCERPTS: As Alexandra Popoff observes in a new entry to Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series of short biographies, Rand [...] never wrote about Jews. ... As a young man growing up in the Bronx, I, like most other immature intellectuals, read and discussed Rand, but if anyone was aware of her Jewish background, no one mentioned it.

[...] Rand utterly rejected the idea that some issues are ambiguous or call for compromise. “One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture,” she declared, “is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: ‘There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays.’ . . . Just as, in epistemology, the cult of uncertainty is a revolt against reason—so, in ethics, the cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. Both are a revolt against the absolutism of reality.”

Middle-of-the-road thinking is for Rand “the typical product of philosophical default—of the intellectual bankruptcy that has produced irrationalism in epistemology, a moral vacuum in ethics, and a mixed economy in politics. . . . Extremism has become a synonym of ‘evil.’”

[...] Both Rand and the Soviets believed that, without the aid of supernatural power, humanity will accomplish what had always been regarded as miraculous. There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm, declared Stalin, while Rand attributed the same power to unfettered capitalism. Enlightened by the right philosophy, human will can accomplish anything.

[...] It followed for Rand that there can be no innate—that is, unchosen—ideas. Neither can there be original sin or any inborn tendencies. John Galt calls such thinking a “monstrous absurdity” because either man is free or he isn’t; if his will is limited in any way, then he “can be neither good nor evil.” Had she read Darwin?

So insistent was Rand that behavior is entirely governed by will that when her long-suffering husband, Frank, developed dementia, she insisted on treating his lapses as voluntary failures... (MORE - details)

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Philosophy could help pupils discuss hard topics such as Gaza war, says NEU
https://www.theguardian.com/politic...ulum-england-discuss-hard-topics-gaza-war-neu

EXCERPTS: The leader of the UK’s biggest education union has called for philosophy to be embedded in England’s school curriculum, allowing more time for pupils to discuss difficult world topics such as conflict in the Middle East.

[...] Daniel Kebede said: “I think we should embed philosophy for children across the curriculum and reduce curriculum content. I used to teach philosophy for children. It’s a dialogic approach that allows children to form their own opinions and come to a clearer understanding themselves of the world around then. But it’s not always easy to find the time to do that in today’s education system.” (MORE -details)
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[C C]

Why Stephen Hawking gave up on scientific realism (philosophy of science)
https://iai.tv/articles/why-stephen-hawking-gave-up-on-a-theory-of-everything-auid-2966?_auid=2020

In 2012 Stephen Hawking abandoned belief in the ability of science to describe reality, in favour of a model-dependent account of truth. We tend to think it is the job of scientists to discover truths about the universe. Yet, Hawking rendered this an impossible task and came to argue that truth is an illusion. For Hawking, in the end, there was no idea of reality that made any sense. All we have are our models. Written by Paul Hoyningen-Huene...
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[C C]

In Praise of Misinformation
https://daily-philosophy.com/john-shand-misinformation/

The fashionable word ‘misinformation’ is not one I like as it comes loaded with an assumptive catch-all normative condemnation and is ironically misleading, to the point that it is in itself an example of putative misinformation – but as it is in use one has to deal partly in its currency. By coining the word ‘misinformation’ there is the suggestion that something ominously new is happening when in fact there is not...

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The Mind-Body Problem and Metaphysics (book review)
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-mind-body-problem-and-metaphysics/

Is property dualism really the best way out between the Scylla of physicalism and the Charybdis of substance dualism? Ralph Weir’s book builds on the growing discontent with physicalism among philosophers of mind, accompanied by a simultaneous aversion to substance dualism, with property dualism allegedly being a more adequate and defensible metaphysics of mind. His main argument, the parity argument, builds on the common ground between virtually all dualists (property or substance)—the conceivability argument—and concludes that if one accepts the conceivability argument, one should accept the existence of mental substances. The book is thus a defense of substance dualism...

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Cryonics, Survival, and the Irreversibility of Death
https://blog.apaonline.org/2024/10/10/cryonics-survival-and-the-irreversibility-of-death/

Despite this relative stability and cryonics’ more prominent place in the mainstream public consciousness (even if still usually accompanied by a sarcastic smirk), the technology raises a number of questions, including some that, as philosophers interested in personal continuity and ethics of technology, we find intriguing and troubling. But before addressing what we find philosophically questionable about cryonics, we need to clear up some misconceptions about the practical side of the process...

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Gun Owning Philosopher Speaks Out
https://blog.apaonline.org/2024/10/11/gun-owning-philosopher-speaks-out/

I am a professor of philosophy. I am also a gun owner. And I think that advocates of gun control need to stop all this nonsense about banning “assault rifles.” True “assault rifles” in the technical sense are not used in mass shootings in the US. [...] When the government tries to ban so-called “assault rifles,” they are really banning semiautomatic rifles with certain features, but many of the features that legislators pick out are not especially important. ... So is there nothing we can do about the epidemic of mass shootings in the US? There is something...

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Choas (substantive SEP revision Fri Oct 11, 2024)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chaos/

The phenomenon of chaos is studied in disciplines as diverse as mathematics, astronomy, meteorology, population biology, economics, and social psychology. While it’s unlikely such diverse disciplines have any causal mechanisms in common, the phenomenological behavior of chaos—e.g., sensitivity to the tiniest changes in initial conditions or seemingly random and unpredictable behavior that nevertheless follows precise rules—appears in many models in these disciplines. Observing similar chaotic behavior in models across such diverse fields presents a challenge to understanding chaos as a phenomenon and what might count as unification of such phenomena...

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How to Recognise Pure Awareness
https://daily-philosophy.com/brentyn-ramm-pure-awareness/

I will refer to the experience of ‘awareness itself’ as a pure awareness experience. Most people, aside from those familiar with spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, have never heard of pure awareness, let alone believe that there is such a phenomenon. They think that consciousness is just the qualities of experience such as seeing the pinkness of the water lily and smelling its sweet fragrance. According to many meditative traditions this is to miss the essence of consciousness. It is to focus on the contents of awareness, while overlooking awareness itself. There is a growing interest amongst philosophers and scientists in pure awareness experiences reported by contemplatives. A recent example is a study by Alex Gamma and Thomas Metzinger which surveyed the characteristics of pure awareness experiences in 1,400 meditators.

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Noble Savage Redux: Rousseau meets the Pirahã
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/noble-savage-redux-rousseau-meets-the-pirahã?c=waitwhat

Over the past 20 years, there have been a series of debates in the field of linguistics concerning the Amazonian language Pirahã. For the most part, those debates have revolved around a claim by the linguist Daniel Everett, that Pirahã lacks a formal property called “recursion” and that this poses problems for a research program advanced by Noam Chomsky. Discussion surrounding that single issue made the rounds in general academia, surfacing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and then in the mainstream media, notably in a 2009 article in "The New Yorker" and a book ("The Kingdom of Speech") by Tom Wolfe. From there, the debate metastasized into the broader popular culture.

I will say a bit about the recursion debate in what follows, but in this essay, I want to put greater focus on a more important claim that Everett makes about Pirahã in his article “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã” (hereafter CCG). In that article, Everett argues that the (alleged) simplicity of the Pirahã language and other aspects of Pirahã life flow from the in-the-moment, immediate-experience nature of the Pirahã culture. As he puts it in CCG, “Grammar and other ways of living are restricted to concrete, immediate experience”...
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[C C]

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?
https://celestemdavis.substack.com/...llege?r=11d&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

“Nearly 60 percent of all college students today are women. That’s an all-time high… U.S. colleges and universities have lost about 1.5 million students in the past several years. Men accounted for 71 percent of that loss.”

[...] White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in. White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value. Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued...

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Anyone can turn you into an AI chatbot. There’s little you can do to stop them
https://www.wired.com/story/characterai-has-a-non-consensual-bot-problem/

Drew Crecente has no idea who created the Character.AI persona of his deceased daughter. While he may never find out who created the persona of his daughter, it appears that people with ties to the gaming community often get turned into bots on the platform. Many of them don't even know the bots exist, and can have a much harder time getting them removed. Legally, it’s actually easier to have a fictional character removed...

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The illusion of information adequacy
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0310216

We found that treatment participants assumed that they possessed comparably adequate information and presumed that they were just as competent to make thoughtful decisions based on that information. Participants’ decisions were heavily influenced by which cross-section of information they received. Finally, participants believed that most other people would make a similar decision to the one they made. We discuss the implications in the context of naïve realism and other biases that implicate how people navigate differences of perspective...

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On expertise
https://mostly.substack.com/p/on-expertise

Expertise slows the progress of knowledge, some say. First, it delays arrival at the cutting edge: if you must master everything that came before, you may not begin original research until your 30s, when your brain is a rigid fossil and retirement is already near. Also, it blinds you to new ideas: after years of seeing with accepted principles, reliance on those principles becomes second nature, a dusty, comfortable cow-path in your mind, and new and better ideas—the advances possible by coming at things sideways—become invisible.

In "The Lever of Riches" Joel Mokyr documents one after another innovation created by amateurs just messing around, or discovered by accident by people working in other fields, while the so-called experts got nowhere. Serious money was invested by governments and corporations into the research and development of flying machines, only for all of them to be beaten by two bicycle mechanics from Ohio, working on their own. On the other hand, there’s the story of...

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How reality shapes our Language—and vice versa
https://nautil.us/josh-armstrong-interview-language-shapes-reality-951169/

Language shapes how we think about reality, and how we think about reality can shape our patterns of acting on reality in ways that make reality different than it would otherwise be. For example, feminists have long noted the ways in which describing women as being better at childcare than men can result in structural situations where women are expected to do more childcare than men and, as a result, do more childcare, in some cases becoming better at it. This is language shaping reality. But I think our ecological and social realities also shape the form and meanings of natural languages and the human capacity to acquire and use a natural language at all...

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The coming second Copernican Revolution
https://www.noemamag.com/the-coming-second-copernican-revolution/

The planetary is a new “cosmology” — emerging as an alternative to the social, cultural and political-economic orders of global modernity. The planetary is a radically new worldview and paradigm grounded in revolutionary scientific advances about biospheres and the planets that support them. It also yields insights into the fate of world-spanning “technospheres” like the one we’ve already assembled that’s driving the Anthropocene. Using this science as a frame, the planetary promises a new design for our future in a climate-changing world...
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[C C]

The death and rebirth of attention (free will)
https://iai.tv/articles/the-death-and-rebirth-of-attention-auid-2973?_auid=2020

Attention is the basis of our free will, allowing us to direct our minds as we choose. Technology poses a threat to this individual agency, writes Carolyn Dicey Jennings, but may also yield new rewards. Social media harnesses our attention for incentives that aren’t our own, sublimating it into the interests of the group. We are trading our individual power for collective power, and we need to understand the risks and benefits of doing this.

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Are brains and AI converging?—an excerpt from ‘ChatGPT and the Future of AI: The Deep Language Revolution’ (neurophilosophy)
https://www.thetransmitter.org/larg...he-future-of-ai-the-deep-language-revolution/

My new book, “ChatGPT and the Future of AI: The Deep Language Revolution,” takes a look at the origins of large language models and the research that will shape the next generation of AI. (I continue to cover this topic in my substack, Brains and AI.) This excerpt describes how the evolution of language influenced large language models and explores how concepts from neuroscience and AI are converging to push both fields forward.

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Srinivasa Ramanujan was a genius. Math is still catching up. (philosophy of mathematics)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/srinivasa-ramanujan-was-a-genius-math-is-still-catching-up-20241021/

More than 100 years later, mathematicians are still trying to catch up to Ramanujan’s divine genius, as his visions appear again and again in disparate corners of the world of mathematics.
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[C C]

The developmental roots of aphantasia nescience
https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2024/10/13/the-developmental-roots-of-aphantasia-nescience

EXCERPTS: Aphantasia is a recently coined cognitive norm variant characterized by a severe deficiency or complete absence of voluntary mental imagery, most commonly the inability to visualize [...] In what follows, I will outline an answer to the question of how aphantasics can remain in a state of ignorance (or, in my own terminology, nescience) about their aphantasia.

Puzzle of aphantasia nescience (PAN): How is it possible that aphantasics remain unaware of their inability to visualize (i.e., remain in a state of aphantasia nescience)?

The argument that I will outline is that it is the aphantasics’ ability to express a certain type of behavior, instead of any failed introspection, that explains the phenomenon of aphantasia nescience. Furthermore, I will argue that the solution to the PAN lies in the early developmental stages, especially the stage where the aphantasic child learns to use and respond to certain terms such as ‘visualize’ or ‘imagine’... (MORE - details)

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Independence of mind requires sustained submission to authority
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/why-individualism-fails-to-create-individuals

EXCERPTS: Learning requires that a student place trust in a teacher, or in an authoritative text, without yet knowing if the trust is warranted. One has to trust that the teacher knows what he is talking about...

[...] The necessity of trust in education is not much appreciated because it sits uncomfortably with our public creed of individualism. Individualism tacitly posits a kind of epistemic self-sufficiency that everyone has by default, or can achieve simply by following a clearly stated method of reasoning (“critical thinking skills”), applied to “information” that is readily available.

[...] The paradoxical thesis I wish to consider is this: Real independence of mind can be won only by a sustained process of submission to authority. There is a related paradox: A democratic society, precisely because it requires such independence of thought if it is to be something other than mob rule, requires education conducted with an aristocratic ethos... (MORE - details)

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How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-human-brain-contends-with-the-strangeness-of-zero-20241018/

EXCERPT: In recent years, research started to uncover how the human brain represents numbers, but no one examined how it handles zero. Now two independent studies, led by Nieder and Barnett, respectively, have shown that the brain codes for zero much as it does for other numbers, on a mental number line. But, one of the studies found, zero also holds a special status in the brain.

“The fact that [zero] represents nothing is a contradiction in itself,” said Carlo Semenza, a professor emeritus of neuroscience at the University of Padua in Italy who wasn’t involved in either study. “It looks like it is concrete because people put it on the number line — but then it doesn’t exist. … That is fascinating, absolutely fascinating.” (MORE - details)
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[Magical Realist]

Zero, or nothingness, is the essence of abstraction. It is a posited unqualified pure state of nonbeing, or being in a state of not being in a state. As with math, we will never grasp the nature of reality and consciousness without incorporating this fundamental paradoxical absence at the root of everything.

“And then, by some inscrutable incandescent insight, Leibniz came to see that what is crucial in what he had written is the alternation between God and Nothingness. And for this, the numbers 0 and 1 suffice.”---David Berlinski

 

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Bridging the analytic-continental rift: Nonsense vs nothingness
https://iai.tv/articles/nonsense-vs-nothingness-the-great-philosophical-divide-auid-2979?_auid=2020

INTRO: There is a great divide running through philosophy. Analytic versus Continental. The proponents of each see their version of philosophy as more valid and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the other. Philosopher Simone Mahrenholz here argues this divide is the product of contingent events in history. Tracing the origins of both schools in part to outstanding personalities in early 20th-century Germany and Europe, in conjunction with world-political developments, she reveals this rift in philosophy as caused and radicalized by a peculiar course of events, including the rise of Hitler... (MORE - details)

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There is no common sense about consciousness
https://iai.tv/articles/there-is-no-common-sense-about-consciousness-auid-2980?_auid=2020

INTRO: Theories of consciousness like dualism and panpsychism often assume that conscious experiences involve acquaintance with mental qualities – qualities wholly internal to the mind. These qualities are supposed to be totally obvious to anyone who introspects, and so part of our “common sense” picture of the mind. Yet, argues Justin Sytsma, people who are untrained in analytic philosophy don’t find these qualities obvious at all. Philosophers of consciousness should therefore beware of making assertions about “common sense” in their arguments, for “common sense” turns out to be a shifting ground, even when the topic is our own mental life... (MORE - details)

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A new spin on the “Stoned Ape Hypothesis”
https://bigthink.com/the-past/a-new-spin-on-the-stoned-ape-hypothesis/

KEY POINTS: In 1992, the ethnobotanist Terence McKenna proposed the controversial “Stoned Ape Hypothesis,” which argued that psilocybin mushrooms long ago helped spark rapid evolution in human cognition, consciousness, and culture. One key objection to the hypothesis is that psychedelic-induced changes can’t be inherited genetically. Cognitive neuroscientist and journalist Bobby Azarian proposes an update to McKenna’s theory, arguing that psilocybin triggered useful worldview shifts that “went viral” and ultimately reshaped society. (MORE - details)

NOTE: Philosophy of science oriented from the standpoint of arguably illustrating how even partial buffs of a proposal can reciprocally modify a defective _X_ to either make it more palatable or keep it in play.

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Is science progressive or conservative?
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2024/10/is-science-progressive-or-conservative/

EXCERPTS: Bohr did not seek to change nature; he simply formulated a theory that represented it as faithfully as possible and aimed to apply this theory to accurately describe the experimental results it provided. In this sense, he was conservative or, as John Archibald Wheeler put it, a “daring conservative”

Einstein [...] wanted his theory of general relativity to describe all physical interactions and for the mystery to finally be resolved. He wanted to understand and explain everything. But for that to happen, nothing should move, time should stop, instant should be eternal, and duration should cease to exist. Therefore, time had to be killed, and progress along with it. Einstein truly was the greatest of conservatives!

[...] On the complex relationship between humans and progress in science, we can summarize the lesson that history teaches us with the following maxim: progress is not necessarily found where we want it to be...

[...] Progress is necessary when we want to better understand the world, but without continuity, there is no progress because change does not endure. Progress, therefore, lies not in rupture but in what endures. Otherwise, this change ceases to be progress and becomes a transition to something else. Continuity thus implies the preservation over time of evolving knowledge that approaches truth... (MORE - details)

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The Big Bang is a mirror, hiding another universe behind it ("cosmic inflation is a figment of scientists' imagination")
https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-ban...other-universe-behind-it-auid-2978?_auid=2020

The conventional wisdom among cosmologists is that the universe experienced a period of “inflation,” a brief burst of accelerated expansion, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. But theoretical physicist Latham Boyle argues that inflation is a figment of cosmologists’ imagination, and that a better theory of the early universe suggests the Big Bang is a cosmic mirror hiding another universe just beyond the beginning of time.

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NOTE: Crossover items below. One foot arguably in the "compromised science" thread and the other here. ... RELATED: The value—and risk—of political activism in science
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If the science disagrees with your agenda...suppress it?
https://www.science20.com/content/if_the_science_disagrees_with_your_agendasuppress_it

EXCERPT: So ____ put the results in a drawer - despite the work being taxpayer-funded - and refuses to publish them, not because the data were flawed, but because, she says, “I do not want our work to be weaponized.”

[...] If none of that reads authentic, you see the problem for public trust in science and why scientists need to take a stand against this kind of overt nefarious behavior even if it is by a political ally. Even postmodernists in philosophy departments see the flaws in her reasoning.

If you insist negative results will be culturally weaponized, it's challenging to deny you were trying to create positive results to weaponize your cause.... (MORE - details)

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Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings
https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/progressives-should-worry-more-about

EXCERPTS: The same journal just published a reanalysis of the data. It turns out that the effect disappears once you take into account that Black doctors are less likely to see the higher-risk population of newborns that have low birth weight.

[...] All the same concerns about fraud, poor statistics, and so on apply. But now there’s something else. This sort of finding fits the ideology of most people who review papers for Nature Human Behaviour. It’s the sort of finding that improves the journal's prestige. It’s a result that ends up reported in the New York Times and The Guardian; it will get cited in briefs to the Supreme Court that support progressive policies.

These are all additional reasons, above and beyond the paper’s scientific quality—above and beyond the possibility that the finding is true—that make it more likely to be published. So, while you shouldn’t dismiss the finding entirely, you should take it less seriously... (MORE - details)
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