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The examples in this article are just the tip of the iceberg. And appeals to “the science” in support of whatever action plan one has in mind are unfortunately, I think, a big contributor to public skepticism about things that should in fact be understood as well-established.

Source: Why doesn’t “do-re-mi” start on A?

A recent Quora question, asks “Is Noam Chomsky’s comment that ‘NATO should not have moved an inch east of Germany’ ignoring the desires of the eastern European states?”

The use of direct quotes there is dishonest unless Chomsky actually said those exact words. But regardless of whether or not he actually said it, why should NATO members not have ignored the desires of the eastern European states?

NATO is not a general purpose service organization, but a military alliance between states who see one another as sufficiently similar, stable, and responsible, to justify risking their own safety in defence of one another essentially without question. And the desires of others to be covered by that umbrella creates no obligation whatsoever to actually include them.

This is very different from whatever obligation may exist to protect all states from attack by neighbours – which is the responsibility of the UN and subject to a more deliberative and less hair-trigger response.

Source: (375) Alan Cooper’s answer to Is Noam Chomsky’s comment that ‘NATO should not have moved an inch east of Germany’ ignoring the desires of the eastern European states? – Quora

Source: It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war | Seumas Milne | The Guardian

Probably never. The idea of any person or ethnic group as being “inherently evil” seems to run counter to the basic ideas of Critical Race Theory. And the idea of teaching anything as sophisticated as actual CRT directly to elementary school students is as laughable as it would be for calculus or quantum mechanics.

It is not unlikely though that some teachers who have been influenced by CRT may have presented material which could be interpreted as saying that Caucasians are inherently evil.

A case in point is the book “Not my idea” (see also here for a polemically critical reading) that was criticized in a (subsequently deleted) post by C.S.Friedman and defended in a response from Tom Robinson.

It’s hard to imagine that Friedman had ever actually read the book. (She describes the story of a little girl’s frustration with her parents’ protection of her from evidence of society’s structural racism as being a tale of how “A white child encounters a red devil-figure who offers him a deal”.) But the page she refers to does occur, albeit in the supplementary material; and, although not in the story itself, the term “whiteness” is definitely introduced as a label for things that are evil.

Personally, I find this kind of linguistic overloading silly and dishonest at any level, but to ask an elementary school child not to identify “whiteness” with just the property of being white is worse than silly.

So, although I doubt that any teacher of CRT has ever actually affirmed that Caucasians are inherently evil, I am pretty sure from the evidence of this book that some teachers who think they are reflecting CRT have used language which a child might well interpret as saying Caucasians are inherently evil.

Source: (303) Alan Cooper’s answer to Opponents of CRT claim that CRT teaches a hatred for whites, but where does this claim come from? How many times exactly have teachers of CRT actually affirmed that Caucasians are inherently evil? – Quora

My response to the philosophers’ zombie argument is usually to do a kind of “reverse Turing test” – ie to challenge the philosopher to prove to himself (and to me) that I am not a zombie. If there was anything that had all the characteristics and (in principle completely predictable – or at least explainable) behaviours and responses of a human, then anyone (other than the solipsistic philosopher himself) might be not “really” conscious. The alternative is that we all are conscious but that what we perceive as conscious experience is just the physical property of recording memories into a system with some kind of recall and reprocessing mechanism. And if I think about it too much, that’s pretty much what if “feels like” to me ….. Oops!!!(maybe I just failed the real TTest)

My comment on ‘Moral molecules’ – a new theory of what goodness is made of | Psyche Ideas was as follows:

The idea of trying to identify various moral positions as combinations of just a few basic elements is interesting. And it may be useful for understanding where people’s moral positions come from and how to encourage them in other directions (if that is what we want to do). But to conclude that “the theory provides us at last with a scientific guide for how to be good” demonstrates both an unfortunate hubris and (as I see it) a complete misunderstanding of the problem of what it means to “be good” in the face of competing demands whose relative weights may vary from person to person and time to time (and may in the end just be functions of some chemical concentrations in our brains).

To which the author responded with a question – which was presumably rhetorical since Aeon+Psyche only allow one comment per responder, but which I will nonetheless respond to here.

The question was “Alan, what do you think it means to be good?”

And so, not being one to give in so easily, I had to find his email address and answer – as follows:

Hello Oliver.

    I was intrigued by your article and find the idea of trying to identify various moral positions as combinations of just a few basic elements both interesting and potentially useful (eg for understanding and maybe influencing those positions – both in others and in ourselves). But I found it a stretch to conclude that “the theory provides us at last with a scientific guide for how to be good”.

    I am sorry if my comment seemed to imply that I had anything better to offer. But unfortunately your response “Alan, what do you think it means to be good?” strikes me as a cheap shot, since (as I presume you know) the Aeon+Psyche commenting system gives me no opportunity to reply. But since you ask, I will answer.

    The answer though is just that I have no idea (and do not think my comment implied any claim otherwise). What I do think is that the very theory you discuss makes it quite plausible that there is no possible “scientific guide for how to be good” because the various moral elements might be mutually non-comparable. And I would be very interested in hearing of any path you can suggest for overcoming that challenge.

sincerely,

    Alan Cooper

One can, of course, change the meaning of words, but it may be counterproductive to expect that others will understand and agree.

In Some medical devices don’t mean to be racist, but they are | Psyche Ideas, the authors say “If it seems hyperbolic to call an inanimate object racist, it might be due to our tendency to think of racism and other forms of oppression as residing in people’s minds.” But others (and I am among them) may say that’s just because that’s how the word has always been defined in their experience – namely as an attitude or opinion. Those who define racism as an attitude may well be able to see oppressiveness as defined more in terms of the effect, and so agree that it makes sense to call inanimate objects and systems racially oppressive while denying that they are actually racist.

My own preferred usage would include the use of “racist” to describe a device or system developed and maintained with racist intent, but that would not necessarily include everything that may have racially biased and even oppressive effects (such as the fingertip pulse oximeter).

Given what we have by way of explicit historical documents, it seems clear that, whatever the intent of our current populace and leadership, there are still some features of some of our institutions that were imposed with racist intent and so do qualify as “systemic racism”. There are also many individuals with racist attitudes who have power in the system. And even if the intent of the system as a whole is no longer racist, the presence of such people also fits in with what I would call “systemic racism”.

But others (such as Monsieur Legault), who do not see the continued persistence of those elements as intentional, may need some clarification before being prepared to describe the elements of racism that persist in their system as “systemic racism”.

And if they agree to aggressively pursue and root out from their system all of its racially oppressive aspects, racistly motivated structures, and racist individuals, then perhaps it does not matter whether or not they agree to use that label.

I like this guy’s videos and certainly endorse the ideas expressed in this one:
But despite his byline he sometimes puts slickness ahead of veritacity and the bit about the astronaut selection model is unfortunately misleading. In the model both skill and luck are assigned by chance and the labelling was arbitrary, so the same argument would work the other way to show that if the selection was based 95% luck and 5% talent then all of the selected would in fact be talented – and more generally in a highly competitive selection process, any factor which contributes 5% to each evaluator’s judgement will turn out to be essentially a prerequisite for selection.

See also ‘The Drunkards Walk’ by Leonard Mlodinow

The animatronic moose twitched the skin of its flank, and as the flies buzzed off, water drops dripped from the hairs on its belly. Four days into a seven day circuit of the Bowron Lakes, we were in a swampy area where each lake seemed to have a moose or two which appeared off to the left of us as we paddled in from the river, and which bounded off into the woods a moment or two later; and about the third time this happened, on the same day that we had seen an osprey catch a fish and a couple of beavers poking their heads up from the water as we prepared to drag-portage across a dam,  I had joked that it was just like being in Disneyland with all the predictable animatronic displays in each section.

But this time I was nervous. Perhaps we were too close, because if the moose spooked and ran towards us, its hooves might do us more damage than a mere dunking in slightly smelly water.

_____________________________

That was real. But the picture that occupies the header for this Aeon/Psyche article gave me the tools to imagine an experience I have never had. Having paddled a kayak in ocean waters, and having seen ponds in glacial ice up close, I could already well imagine the experience of paddling up to a floating iceberg – and maybe into and over the slightly luminous pale turquoise of the shallow water between the two looming mounds of hard white ice (rendered completely opaque by the action of weathering on its sometimes smoothly puckered and sometimes ornately sculpted surface). And prompted by the picture (or by a verbal description) I could even imagine the concern I might have on looking up at the darkening sky – about whether I should cut my visit short for fear of being caught far from land in bad weather.

Of course, that imagined fear is different (at the time) from the real fear I felt about getting too close to the moose. But I am not sure that the memory of it is necessarily so much different (which may be why false memories of abuse can sometimes be as harmful to the victim as the reality). And the same applies to almost every aspect of every other travel experience I have had. We do not now have (and may never have!) the technology needed to create a truly immersive travel experience. But if we did, and if that experience could include interactions with real people (or avatars that we could not distinguish from such), so that ethical decisions about how much to tip and so on would be understood to have real consequences for other real people, then I am not sure that anything would be lost by replacing all travel with its virtual counterpart.

Quora: Alan Cooper’s answer to What is scientism? Why was Lewis against it?

The word “scientism” by its structure should refer to the belief system of a scientist, but it has been dishonestly appropriated by a bunch of religious philosophers to refer to a kind of worship of science as the only source of answers to anything – including questions of ethics and value (about which as yet science makes no claims).

A more honest name for that uncritical worship of science would have been “scienceism” and its followers could be called “scienceists” rather than scientists (who are practitioners of science, rather than believers in its exclusive power to answer all our questions). So I think that the wrong word was used deliberately in order to gain an advantage in arguments with scientists by subtly creating an impression that they all believe something that many do not.

[This may seem like an unfair claim, but I am disinclined to give the “scholars” who introduced the term much benefit of the doubt as they were just the kind of language specialists who, if not completely stupid, could not have failed to notice the problem with that word choice.]

C.S.Lewis (who was not the originator of that duplicitous naming game) was against scienceism for the very good reason that there are many questions we can ask which do not have empirically testable answers.

“What is ‘good’?” or even “What should I do next?” are questions to which the answers depend on the evaluation of competing claims, whose relative importance at any particular time may depend on many things from the community to the brain chemistry of the questioner, and for which we have no foreseeable means of definition and measurement.

According to the New York Times’ Book Review of ‘Time for Socialism,’ by Thomas Piketty ,

Piketty calls for a “universal capital endowment” for all citizens beginning at birth, funded by taxes on wealth and inheritances.

Though provocative, none of these ideas is remarkable or original.

Well I am sure the idea wasn’t original with me either. But what is remarkable (to me) is the lack of a strong movement arguing for this for decades.

I was actually a bit creeped out by the excessively phonetic transcription in this harrowing account that was reproduced by Cheryl Brown in Quora’s ‘Black History & Politics’ section. Commenter Linda Keres Carter shared this feeling and started an interesting thread of back and forth on the issue of how much phonetic transcription is appropriate.

To me it’s not so much a matter of the ‘dem’s and ‘dere’s being obtuse as disrespectful. There is a fine line between using phonetic transcription to create genuine atmosphere and sympathy and using it for mockery (of which there has been a long tradition). In the 1930′s, even sympathetic recorders (such as the one quoted by Cheryl) often quoted with a level of attempted phonetic “realism” sufficient to raise the suspicion of condescension and at least the enablement of outright mockery.

PS Cheryl (the OP) responded quite positively to Linda’s suggestion.