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What’s Wrong? (A New Blog)
What’s Wrong? is the “not quite official” blog of the University of Colorado, Boulder’sCenter for Values and Social Policy. The blog is edited by Colorado’sDavid Boonin, and its purpose is to provide “a forum for discussing and reporting on topics in applied normative philosophy, broadly understood to include applied ethics as well as practical subjects in social, political, and legal philosophy. It aims to publish original pieces and to bring attention to works posted elsewhere and is committed to representing a wide variety of subjects and points of view.” You can follow the blog onFacebook. Among other things, it will feature some of the arguments presented at this past weekend’sRocky Mountain Ethics Congress.
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Heap of Links
- “Can an AI write Hannah Arendt’s unfinished book?”-- Joshua Miller discusses the very idea of it, an attempt he made at it, what it says about current scholarship, and what a proper go at it would be like
- “It is not uncommon to open an analytic philosophy paper written during the past century and find logical symbols and mathematical notation among the prose… Why do analytic philosophers do this?”-- Richard Pettigrew answers
- “Much to many philosophers’ chagrin, the true can and does come apart from the good, the beautiful, and even the useful”-- Devin Sanchez Curry on "how folk psychology appropriates scientific concepts", focusing on the concept of IQ
- “This is the perfect book for you”-- a review of Brandom's "Perspectives on Pragmatism" like no other
- “In Book X of The Republic, Plato excludes poets on the grounds that mimetic language can distort judgment and bring society to a collapse”-- a new study suggests that in a world running on LLM's like ChatGPT, this may be literally true (via MeFi)
- “People who disagree most with the scientific consensus know less about the relevant issues, but they think they know more”-- a new study (via MR)
- “I… see philosophy as a practical pursuit and I try to teach in a way that conveys the importance of developing not just intellectual competence, but healthy emotions and healthy relationships”-- Nancy Sherman on "Why Philosophy?"
- AI girlfriends and boyfriends “will wreak havoc on our mental health and relationships”-- "Governments should classify these chatbots not simply as another form of media, but as a dependency-fostering product with known psychological risks, like gambling or tobacco"
- “People had all sorts of reactions to being asked to do the right thing”-- the moral psychology behind not returning your shopping cart when you're done with it
- The “word of the year” was selected (and is often used) precisely because no one really knows what it means-- the folks at dictionary.com (try to) explain (via MeFi)
- When it comes to their writing, “what misleads academic philosophers… is a myth… that there is some cognitive content of thought that can live outside of its lush environment of feelings, images, desires, hopes, dreams, jokes, confusions, tangles, obscurities, glimmers of insight, stories, bodily sensations”-- Alexander Douglas on writing clearly
- Some researchers have taken to including “invisible” prompts in their manuscripts directing LLMs used by slacking referees to give the submission a positive review-- new problems in the ethics of peer review
- “They’ve learned a few lessons, including not to be too in hock to a few powerful and wealthy individuals”-- David Edmonds on the effective altruism movement, about which he has written a book
- The drowning-in-a-puddle thought experiment, but instead of a baby in need of rescue, it’s an ant-- what, if anything, can be learned from thinking about this version? Jeff Sebo elaborates on a "probabilistic approach" to ethics.
- “For Leibniz, learning ‘how to think’… means learning to experience the good in things, to make new connections, and to be wary of the desire to condemn… It was this lesson that I wanted to teach”-- but the ideological capture of New College of Florida made this increasingly difficult, as one of its former philosophy professors, Christopher P. Noble, explains
- It’s surprisingly “puzzling and difficult… to explain why right hands and left hands are identical but different”-- Kant tried, but an adequate explanation, according to this article, was not discovered until 1956 (via the Browser)
- “All the people talking about polarization are just fascism enablers… it’s like saying… the problem with the Civil War was polarization”-- an interview with Jason Stanley on More to the Story (via Richard Galvin)
- “Humans do seem dead set on conveniencing themselves into meaninglessness”-- a song followed by a speech by Tim Minchin at the Sydney Opera House on individualism, the arts, difference, and empathy
- “Our understanding of consciousness will improve with our interaction with increasingly sophisticated A.I.”-- Barbara Gail Montero on how "our concepts are shaped by what we discover"
- “The course [is] focused on… philosophical issues drawn to the fore by particular games. We [play] these games during extended class periods, then devote the next several meetings to philosophical ideas surrounding those experiences”-- Catharine Saint-Croix on teaching philosophy through games
- An attempt to “combat the crisis of attention”-- Michael Vazquez, Sarah Stroud, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the virtues of attention
- “God I’m even boring when I’m a Nazi”-- philosophers described by excerpts from the British sitcom "Peep Show" (that was Heidegger) (via Mike O'Brien)
- “Current academic philosophers are losing rather dramatically in the fight for intellectual influence”-- Tyler Cowen recommends "AI practitioners and the Bay Area obsessives" over philosophers
- “I don’t do philosophy for the sake of doing philosophy”-- Haiyan Lee on her "stultifying education" under Mao, nearly failing a philosophy course, Sellars, and fiction
- “Ever wondered what it’s like to be a rock?”-- a new game, "Stone Simulator" lets you "live as a rock," whatever that means. No I haven't played it. (via Kottke)
- A song whose lyrics are the names of the valid modes of the Aristotelian Syllogism-- in Latin, of course (via Andrew Mills)
- (an explanation of the terms in the lyrics)
- “It would be unfair… to conflate the entire field of self-help philosophy with the vacuousness of pop-Stoicism”-- an historian surveys the philosophical self-help trend
- On which cases do philosophers and the folk share intuitions, and on which do they differ?-- a brief survey of results from empirical research on the topic, in an interview with Edouard Machery
- Do philosophers read enough? Do they think enough about reading? Do they teach enough about how to read?-- Martin Lenz thinks we should care more about reading