Michael Stevens, a philosopher, writing at Aeon: Indeed, I conjecture, modern science arose in the 17th century, in the course of the so-called Scientific Revolution, precisely because it stumbled upon the extraordinary motivating power of ‘only empirical evidence counts’ – a story I tell in my book The Knowledge Machine (2020). For thousands of years, …
Tag Archives: philosophy
Are you psycho? Then help push this fat guy off a bridge.
I saw an interesting paper a while back, via Crooked Timber, that applied a mixture of psychology and experimental philosophy to see just what kind of people have utilitarian intuitions. The punchline: Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. I sent a joking …
Continue reading “Are you psycho? Then help push this fat guy off a bridge.”
What is evolution good for?
In one of his essays in Philosophy and Social Hope, Richard Rorty noted the tendency of scientists to assume that they are best positioned to adjudicate questions on the philosophy of science. As Rorty compelling detailed, they are not. So I was reminded when reading Can Darwinism Improve Binghamton? in NYT’s Book Review. The author starts …
Exposing sacred arguments
Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt gave a talk in February arguing that the social psychology field was a “moral community” by virtue of its political liberalism, and that this was compromising its ability to do good science. I want to use one piece of his argument as a jumping off point to discuss what I see …
The epistemology of Wikipedia
The Atlantic tech has a great feature for Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary, featuring thoughts from a number of excellent contributors, including Shirky, Benkler, Zuckerman, Rosen and more. Check it out. One point of interest for me was a contrast in epistemologies offered by novelist Jonathan Lethem and Clay Shirky. Lethem: Question: hadn’t we more or less …
beyond the times 