If X

so what

It turns out that I have all these saved drafts of blag(ish) material post saved all over the place. Here's something I did a while ago, when I could write and was still funny.


Amusing things about D.C: it’s a common joke about D.Cists that D.C. is an expensive city. It is; there’s even a souvenir mug that quite popular which is effectively a semi-circle attached to a handle that says “D.C. was so expensive that I could only afford half a mug.” Other cities have this mug as well, but to the best of my knowledge, this mug started in D.C. (much like how the I Heart NY shirt got contracted out to every other thing imaginable; recently there's this strange souvenir design popping up on shirts everywhere. It’s got the name of the city in big block capitals running across and along the shirt, with faux-graffiti/painters splashes over them. I have no idea how such an idea got popular.)

My pet theory/crazy thought for why this is so is this: It’s all cause of the damn Gubmint (supported institutions). In many other cities, many travelers basically skimp on accommodations/food/basic necessities, in order to spend their money on that particular cities sightseeing attractions, theatre, events, drinking and so on. Most people don’t wish to respond to a ‘how was [insert place X]’ request with a ‘I don’t know, I spent all my money on the hotel. But the hotel was fantastic!’

(Though personally, I think that there is an exception to this: The Four Seasons. Despite whatever financial troubles they're suffering from, the service and comfort is supposedly so legendary that a) you will pretty much get anything you want, at any time you want, and b) it prompted both Julia Roberts and Oprah Winfrey to give unbidden, unsponsored endorsements of The Four Seasons linens. If anyone has stayed in a Four Seasons, lemme know. But I digress)

Ironically, this trend is reversed in D.C; there are so many free-to-low cost things to do in D.C. that the local government publishes low-cost/free attractions in their standard tourist booklet. The Smithsonian alone hosts about 14 different high-caliber museums, the majority of which are free. Then there’s the National Archives, the National Gallery of Art (which is so huge it has two separate buildings to house it all), all the memorials to every president ever, and the National Mall, a two mile strip of beautiful greenery and monuments and phallic white columns. The Canadian embassy has an art gallery open to the public, for god’s sake.

To support all of this, the theory goes, the government needs money. And how do governments get money Through theft taxation. D.C. has an absolutely punishing hotel tax of 14.5 percent, which is much higher than anywhere else in the nation. (Thankfully, unless you actually choose to stay downtown, it’s easy to avoid this and still get to see a lot of the city. D.C. and the surrounds are fairly well-serviced by public transportation, so it’s possible to stay just outside the city and still get around easy like.) All of the lodgings in downtown D.C. tend to be les pantalons fancies like The Four Seasons or the Ritz- Carlton. For sure, there are more economically priced places, but this is an expensive city to stay.

The instrumenal and the intrinsic

how liberals, conservatives and torturers get it wrong

I've been harping on about this difference between conceptual and empirical questions for a while now, and have recently been stumbling on a related point of analysis regarding the intrinsic and the instrumental.

When posing hypotheticals, asking questions, or doing whatever philosophy in general, it's important to separate out intrinsic reasoning and instrumental reasoning. This is indeed similar to the conceptual and empiric analysis, in so far as methodology (you debate logic on one side, and you debate facts on the other) is concerned, and that it also provides for some clearing up of the conceptual brush that tends to infest and bog down so many debates.

To illustrate with a first case: torture. Now, you can be intrinsically in support of torture, in that you are a welfare or utility or hedonic or whatever maximiser and believe that using torture to obtain information that increases those good things and decreases bad things are (whatever they may be).

However, you can also be against torture instrumentally, in that torture has been shown repeatedly to be a relatively ineffectual method of actually obtaining high-value, actionable and verifiable information. (there's something to be said about related ill-effects, like the fact that you're reducing someone's utility by torturing them, the side-effects of radicalisation, the consistently poor approach of excessive and inappropriate torture, etc etc) There's nothing inconsistent or incoherent about these positions; it's perfectly reasonable to do so.

Now, what that case illustrates is that it's not we're against torture per se; we're against actions or objects that reduce our overall utility, and for actions that do the opposite. A couple of other cases I can think of is the love of 'tradition' within many conservative ideologies, and the love of 'diversity' among liberal ones. A third case is of 'democracy', which is beloved by pretty much all political stripes.

Many conservatives value 'tradition' (by which I mean something like continuity in cultural customs, practices and social attitudes) as somehow being sacred and valuable in its own right. But that doesn't make any sense; after all, racism and slavery have both had long and storied histories. What we value in 'tradition' is that there are certain cultural customs, practices, and social attitudes that are useful in certain ways (mostly because we think they increase utility or whatever) and we want to preserve those, and discard the ones that are damaging. This love of 'the way things were', regardless of what those actual things were, is missing the point: the distinction is that 'tradition' is primarily instrumentally useful, and not intrinsically so.

In a similar parallel, many liberals think to value 'diversity' (meaning something like political participants who have identifiable in backgrounds and lifestyles) in a comparable manner, as though it is a aim to be achieved for in its own right. It is not; it just so happens that instrumentally, 'diversity' serves us enormously well, in that you achieve more equitable outcomes, less fractious and more harmonious societies, greater welfare, and so on.

I'll go on with one more case, just to drive the point home: democracy. Everyone seems to love democracy, and I find increasingly that people have no idea or are just plain wrong on why they love democracy. Remember: "Democracy is the worst kind of government, except for the all other ones we've tried." Our belief and support of democracy come from instrumental means, not intrinsic ones; this means that democracies can, and often do, make decisions that are stupid or wrong-headed or insane (At the risk of Godwinning myself, Hitler was elected by a democracy). It's just that, in so far as we know, democracy is the least worst option of government - there may be a time in the future when we find a better one.

So, all these cases are making a point: whenever you do philosophy, figure out what your instrumental goals are, and what your intrinsic goals are, and adjust accordingly.

P.S. There's way more to be said about these 'intrinsic' goods/goals are, but that's much more a 'turtles all the way down' sort of proposition. For the record, I think i'm some kind of welfarist. More on this at some point, maybe.

P.P.S. I'm not going to post links or argue over the empirical points i've raised here; i'm too tired to do so, and I might do it later. For now, if you don't believe these points already, treat them entirely as hypotheticals - the general argument still makes sense. 

Seriously

I mean, seriously, come on

I've just did my long-overdue laundry, and feeling all stressed out. But i'm at that stage in life where you understand that feeling stressed out and shitty is all legitimate and shit, but come on: there are people starvin', folks a sufferin' and you're concerned about 30 dollars and credit cards and the goddamn fucking laundry powder (that somebody left out in the rain)? Get a fucking grip.

Anyway, i'll post something on philosophical analysis, some quick backlog stuff, and something on metacognition that sorta relates to the point I was making above.

I looked at some beautiful things today, while thinking about you

Moderation and placebos

Bus No. 1985: You need less shit.

When is a placebo a placebo, and when is it not?

Pour example, placebo buttons. There's an intersection near my house: There's a pedestrian crossing button there, which sometimes 'works' and sometimes doesn't. By works, I mean that if you push it, it stops traffic and changes the little red man to a little green man when the time to cross rolls around. Depending on the time of day and levels of traffic, however, it doesn't actually change the traffic light timing; it merely changes the little red man to a little green man when the time rolls around. That first clause is important; depending on the time of day and level of traffic. If you push the button late at night or early in the morning or really, any other period of time when traffic is light, then it actively changes the traffic light and changes the little red man to a little green man within seconds. Push the same button when traffic is heavy, and prepare to wait. So, is this a placebo button or not? Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't.

That's example one. Second example is about pharmacological placebos. I'm thinking of a case whereby it's possible to prime or boost the effectiveness of placebos through pseudo-homeopathic means Imagine a case whereby patients are divided into three groups to trial out a new drug. One group is given a traditional placebo, one group is given the drug, and one group is given something in between; they are given the drug, but not enough of it i.e. the dosages they are given are too small to be effective. I'm wondering what the results would look like, and whether this is too spookily homeopathic to try.

Gettier placebos? Functionalist placebos? What else could you do?

Watch what you say

and watch where it goes

"Too many philosophers...are content to simply invent the facts when they need factual claims to buttress their philosophical arguments." (Stephen Stich, pg 178, A Very Bad Wizard)

"Findings in experimental philosophy undermine a major methodology that philosophers have been using for a very long time...It's the method of supporting philosophical theories using intuitions." (Ibid, 179)

"For centuries, philosophers have been basing their theories on intuition without ever having asked why that's a legitimate thing to do." (Ibid, pg 181)

Too true, if somewhat (possibly totally) overstated. Firstly, there has been a substantial shift in philosophical methods that he's underestimating. It may be still be the case that philosophers use intuition to, err, intuit philosophical theories/concepts/structures; but

a) they admit that it's intuitive and subjective and such;

b) far far fewer (atleast credible) philosophers are willing to push the line that their intuition is universal. Many MANY philosophers are leery of intuitions altogether - it's viewed in many circles as being intellectual suspect, especially among the younger generation. Intuition head-butting is more common than Stitch supposes.

(sidenote: my intuition head-butting: internalism and externalism in moral motivation. I've always been a weak quasi-Humean externalist; my only support for this is that I can intuit a mentally coherent someone who can both see and understand the morality of an action, and yet be completely unmotivated to perform that action. Timothy Scriven, on the other hand, cannot conceive of this; he thinks that such a person is necessarily mentally incoherent. We have no real way around this; this is an intuitional impasse that I cannot see a way around.)

How this relates to the continental-analytic 'divide':

Continentals MAKE SHIT UP (short version).

Long version: Continental and analytics both make shit up. However, what analytics try to or should do or what the mission statement should be is: let us start with the facts. What we know for sure. What can establish clearly and correctly. Analytics try to build up: let us take what we know for sure, then attach further claims on top. What us analytics (us right-thinking, non-craven analytics) are afraid of is that continentals make empirical claims, without, well, the empirical justification. Don't get me wrong, us analytics aren't much better at it; our making-up-shit tendencies are just as fully developed as any other academic field. But that doesn't get the continentals off the hook.

A little bit more: there's also a pretty common metalogical rule that comes into play here, namely the whole 'you can't disprove a negative' business. If you have a claim, you have to have evidence for it; otherwise you can't advance that claim. Which is why most analytics tend to say less rather than more, and why they are skeptical of the kinds of claims continentals make. You need to point out as clear as possible the mechanisms for how certain claims support certain conclusions; the onus in the claimant to do so.

I realise i'm repeating myself a lot, but you know, trying to make a point here.

Doin' Philosophy

And doing it right

This is a quick and dirty shortlist/summary of various aspect of doing philosophy well as I see it, academic and/or otherwise.

1) Hypotheticals: crucial, and frequently will be outlandish. Learn to love them, respect them, pay attention to them; they are important in pointing out inconsistencies, illustrating key points, stating cases effectively.

2) Outcomes/Conclusions - more often than not, you will come to crazy/unusual or just plain old disgusting conclusions. This is normal; learn to accept them. Try not to tailor your arguments to pre-concieved conclusions.

2a) Disgustingness - Get used to it. Reject emotional responses to disgust - philosophy sometimes starts, and sometimes ends, with disgusting/unpleasant ideas.

3) Questioning - Question everything, including very deeply held beliefs. Do not dismiss questions that seem absurd/unusual/unpleasant/disgusting unless they are unwarranted or irrelevant; even so, they may point you towards something interesting.

4) Methodology - How arguments are constructed, the nature of claims, distinguishing premises from conclusions, using conclusions for further building blocks, consistency, and especially conceptual analysis.

4a) Logical skills - you will need them, or need to develop them fast. Refers to both symbolic/quantitative/abstract logical skills (truth conditions i. e. disjuncts, conjuncts, validity and to a lesser extent, soundness) and argumentative logical skills (pointing out logical fallacies such as ad hominems, hypocrises, strawmen, necessary and sufficient conditions) The former isn't as important if you don't plan to study much symbolic logic, but is useful anyway. The latter I find invaluable pretty much anywhere.

4b) Conceptual analysis - upon further reflection, this is ridiculously useful, useful enough to warrant its own entry. It can take many forms (necessary & sufficient conditions, term definitions, empirical/conceptual claims as outlined below, and many other ways i'm sure) but the important thing is that it's hugely helpful.

4c) Distinguishing conceptual and empirical claims - this is really part of the conceptual analysis aspect above, but I find it so useful that it really should be emphasised. Methodologically, it's one of the best tools philosophy has. Basically, we can prove things right in two ways: conceptually, and empirically. Separating these two out greatly reduces and solves many many headaches and arguments. More on this coming. It's not particularly a massively difficult or radical idea, just one that seems to be underapplied, in my opinion.

This is what I can think of the top of my head, and i'm sure there's more. And yes, this is specifically written with 'analytic' philosophy in mind, because you continentals can go take a hike over to Cultural Studies you hacks have a different way of doing things, but I think a lot of this stuff applies. Feel free to add!

EDIT: slight additions, reordering in response to Markey's comment. TY BREN-DAN

The perils of doubt

A primer on informed agnosticism

Cynicism - why the bad rap?

Cynicism gets lumped with these labels of do-nothingness, laziness or with pessimism altogether. And I don't think that's fair or true. You can be a cynic, and wholeheartedly idealist; I want to try and rescue cynicism from these do-nothingness/laziness/pessimism labels that it's been attached with.

Cynicism is basically a form of informed agnosticism: it's not saying as the pessimist does, 'the world is never going to get better' or as the optimist does, 'the world is always going to get better'; it does not seek to ask or answer that question. You can be a cynic, and still give a full-faith effort to try things out.