Socialism for Corporations

"Bailout bill fails; Dow plunges"

What now? In the capitalist spirit, the damn corporations need to "pick themselves up by the bootstraps," rather than relying on government intervention. After all, that's what we the people have been doing. (No one helped me pay for my doctor's visits when I didn't have health insurance.) What an absurd, stupid, irrational, infuriating, illogical, inconsistent, profit-over-people, business-first-people-last double standard!

"Predator lenders." Nice.

Palin's Astounding Ignorance

Wow.

Doesn't God care about overpopulation?

Headline: "Canadian Woman Gives Birth to 18th Child." Explanation (from the father): "We never planned how many children to have. We just let God guide our lives, you know, because we strongly believe life comes from God and that's the reason we did not stop the life." See post below.

Added July 30th: Yet another example of utter stupidity.

Pareidola and "the God illusion"

As the bottom of this blog page states, I'm an exponent of the thesis that humans are not, despite what one might prima facie think, particularly smart organisms. The following pictures are cases of pareidolia: Random textural "patterns" in various quotidian objects (mis)interpreted, like a Rorschach inkblot image, as significant (e.g., as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, etc.).

Does reality have a liberal bias?

At the White House Correspondent’s Association Dinner in 2006, Stephen Colbert declared that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Is this true? Consider the following few points:

(i) A recent study published in The Forum found that only 15% of professors at U.S. universities identify as conservative, while an overwhelming 72% identify as liberal.
(ii) A New York University study recently found that “individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners,” but that the reason for this asymmetry of subjective well-being is that “conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities” more than liberals.
(iii) One finds a revealing prima facie statistical relationship between education level and political orientation. (There are of course notable exceptions among both conservatives and liberals, and it’s worth keeping in mind that although an education may incline one towards a more rational, fact-based worldview, it does not entail that one assume such a posture.) Take some of the most prominent ideologues of the conservative pole: Sean Hannity, an “indifferent student,” dropped out of New York University, never to earn a college degree; Rush Limbaugh, whose mother reports that “he flunked everything,” including a Modern Ballroom Dancing course, dropped out of Southeast Missouri State University, never to earn a college degree; George W. Bush, a self-described “average student,” received “mostly Cs” at Yale University; Karl Rove, who is probably least well-known as an MC, (apparently) dropped out of three colleges (he stayed in college to avoid the Vietnam draft), never to earn a college degree; etc. One the antipode of the political sphere, one finds the paradigms of liberal thought, most of whom are highly educated, rational, and fact-based in their worldviews; e.g., Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn, Keith Olberman, Rachael Maddow, etc.
(iv) Take note someday of the Junk Science articles written by fideist Steven Milloy for the Opinion section of foxnews.com. Very often, one finds headlines such as “Global Warming Alarmists Aim to Lower the Standard of Living,” while just below, in the Science section, one finds headlines such as “Report: North Pole May Be Ice-Free This Summer.” I wrote Milloy about this embarrassing discrepancy—viz., that on the very same page, apposed one section apart, a pontifical opinion piece claims that arguments for global warming are specious and alarmist while a peer-reviewed science paper (or AP article summarizing the paper) states just the opposite—and his editor, Barry Hearn, replied as follows: “You'd have to ask FNC's editors why they uncritically post AP items, or site layout or anything else. […] The root cause here would seem to be NOAA's fundraising oportunism [sic] waving the ‘warming’ flag.”

It's no surprise that Bush has consistently cut funding for education. As George Orwell once said, “hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.”

Hitchens and Falwell

An absolutely hilarious interview, on FoxNews, with Christopher Hitchens about the late Jerry Falwell's timely demise.

Song #5

This song is entitled "Smile (The Arboretum)." It was inspired by the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Planes, outside of Boston. The lyrics are: Blue mist skies/I miss your sighs/Green washes to white eyes/Smile/Flitting field/Sways in the breeze/Shadows of blissful ease/Smile all day long/Cool spring air/All through my hair/Movement is everywhere/Smile/Restless mind/Some peace to find/Nature for humankind/The arboretum.

Humanism vs. Scientism

The following is an email I sent to a friend—an aspiring neuroscientist—who espouses a rather pejorative, and surprisingly common (especially, my wife reports, at institutions such as MIT), view of the humanities. The question posed was: If you had to choose between science and the humanities to propagate through/to society for its amelioration, which would you choose? His answer was, of course, the former, on the assumption that the humanities are (what Bertrand Russell calls, in Education and the Good Life) "ornamental" rather than "instrumental," and that disciplines with instrumental value are axiologically better than those with mere ornamental value. Here it is:

The answer would depend entirely upon the purposes of "spreading" it to society; and these purposes might depend on the nature of that society itself. For example, the modern era of Baconian "technoscience" is marked by (i) (borrowing from Weizenbaum's critique of AI) an "imperialism of instrumental rationality," (ii) a "technological mood," and (iii) what some thoughtful critics of modernity call "reverse adaptation."

The first points at the ability of clever educated people today to solve increasingly abstruse problems—i.e., to acquire means to an end, but (very often) without questioning the end itself. (E.g., we know how to build thermonuclear weapons, but fall short with respect to the more reflective, thoughtful, philosophical task of determining why we build them.) The second points to a natural offshoot of the capitalist ideology (which has deeply penetrated even—or especially—science): one begins to see nature (including other human beings) as "standing reserves"—as objects for exploitation (Heidegger). The third points to the fact that, along with the first two, the standards and criteria by which we judge the value of technology are universalized, now being applied to everything (Langdon Winner). The point is this: the statement that you'd choose science over philosophy because it (philosophy) is not "useful" is loaded with unexamined and thoroughly "normative" notions about what ought to count as valuable; and these unexamined notions are not self-evident, but must be justified before one accepts them. In other cultures—indeed, some would argue, in far more enlightened cultures, even though their capacity to manipulate and deform nature (thanks to science) was less developed—the usefulness of X was not the criterion by which X's value was determined. Again, in our capitalist milieu, it's common for people to uncritically assume that use alone (or at least primarily) is criterial of value; but this needs to be examined.

Two points: (1) I'd be very careful about "discipline chauvinism," especially without familiarity of the disparaged discipline (e.g., philosophy, literature, etc.). As someone (part of a growing number) of academics who "swing both ways"—towards the humanities and science—I encounter individuals on both sides with a rabid and often highly irrational abhorrence for those on the other side. This is very upsetting, since (at least in my experience) the primary reasonStructures, in which he adduces a substantial amount of empirical (i.e., historical) evidence to show that scientific theories do not in fact describe reality, and that one theory replaces another, over generations, not through a rational process in which evidence is objectively examined, experiments are carefully performed, etc., but rather through a merely rhetorical process of persuasion and, for lack of a better word, coercion (although such coercion is subtle and insidious). And again, there is a lot of empirical evidence supporting this, which at least renders it plausible. for such a posture is that these hard-core exponents (of humanism or scientism) are simply unaware of what the other side does, what it offers, what it accomplishes, what it is about, etc. For example, many scientists would be surprised—and, I think, rather enlightened—to discover extremely robust "metascientific" theories that see the enterprise of science as no more progressive than, say, the enterprise of painting (which clearly doesn't move forward). In fact, the most cited book of the twentieth century was Kuhn's

(2) It would help, I think, to read those SEP articles to get an idea of what exactly philosophers do. (Incidentally, I should add that almost every major scientist since the Scientific Revolution has been an omnivorous reader—and active contributor!—to the philosophy of science, including: Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Hawking, etc. Darwin, Morgan, Watson & Crick, Gould, Pinker, Dawkins, etc. just to name a few that come to mind; as well as many in numerous other scientific domains. Thus, a pejorative view of philosophy offends not just philosophers, but most of the "great" scientists as well ;-) Philosophers of science, for example, ask the most fundamental—and therefore difficult—questions about science: What are theories? What are laws of nature? What does it mean to explain a phenomenon? Is science really objective? etc. These issues have attracted attention of many great philosophers and scientists, and they turn out to be many orders of magnitude more stymieing than might be thought at first glance. It would take many books to explicate them in detail—but the point is simple: Such questions are not in the least superfluous, but concern, in the most fundamental way, the very validity, rationality and objectivity of science.

Thus, the philosophy of science adds a profound richness and depth to one's understanding of science as a (maybe the best?) "strategy" for acquiring knowledge about the universe. Suddenly, what was once accepted without critical reflection becomes an entirely new and extraordinary realm of intellectual curiosity: If theories explain through the formulation of laws of nature, how is Darwinian theory explanatory, since it posits a mechanism rather than a universal generalization? Or, if the theoretical entities that scientific theories posit don't really exist (as many of the greatest scientists and philosophers of the mid-twentieth century claimed), then what good is science as a source of knowledge? Or, if our observation is always influenced by the theories we hold, can scientific experiments ever really be objective?

This is a long email, I know—but far, far shorter than it ought to be. [...] Anyway, I've convinced many humanists of the value of science, and I'd love to convince you of the value of philosophy as well. Talk to you later, Phil