Monthly Archives: November 2015

Ed Regis

As he searched the physics literature on the long-term future of the universe, Dyson noticed that the available papers on the subject shared a certain strange peculiarity. “The striking thing about these papers,” Dyson recalled afterward, “is that they are written in an apologetic or jocular style, as if the authors were begging us not to take them seriously.”

It was not a proper use of your time, apparently, to imagine what might or might not happen to the universe some billions of years down the road—a prejudice that was rather surprising in view of the fact that many physicists nonetheless lavished huge amounts of recycled paper, time, and attention on what had happened billions of years in the past.

Ed Regis, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly over the Edge, London, 1991, p. 270

Nature

Anyone reading Sigmund Freud’s original works might well be seduced by the beauty of his prose, the elegance of his arguments and the acuity of his intuition. But those with a grounding in science will also be shocked by the abandon with which he elaborated his theories on the basis of essentially no empirical evidence.

‘Psychology: A Reality Check’, Nature, vol. 461, no. 7266 (October 15, 2009), p. 847

Alexis de Tocqueville

[U]n homme politique […] cherche d’abord à discerner son intérêt, et à voir quels sont les intérêts analogues qui pourraient se grouper autour du sien; il s’occupe ensuite à découvrir s’il n’existerait pas par hasard, dans le monde, une doctrine ou un principe qu’on pût placer convenablement à la tête de la nouvelle association, pour lui donner le droit de se produire et de circuler librement.

Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Paris, 1840, vol. 1, pt. 2, chap. 2

Jon Elster

To justify a policy to which one is attached on self-interested or ideological grounds, one can shop around for a causal or statistical model just as one can shop around for a principle. Once it has been found, one can reverse the sequence and present the policy as the conclusion. This process can occur anywhere on the continuum between deception and self-deception (or wishful thinking), usually no doubt closer to the latter.

Jon Elster, Securities Against Misrule: Juries, Assemblies, Elections, Cambridge, 2013, p. 5

Paul Edwards

It is maintained that a question does not make sense unless the questioner knows what kind of answer he is looking for. However, while the fact that the questioner knows the “outline” of the answer may be a strong or even conclusive reason for supposing that the question is meaningful, the converse does not hold. One can think of examples in which a question is meaningful although the person asking it did not know what a possible answer would look like. Thus somebody might ask “What is the meaning of life?” without being able to tell us what kind of answer would be relevant and at a later time, after falling in love for the first time, he might exclaim that he now had the answer to his question.

Paul Edwards, Why?, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: Macmillan, 1967, vol. 8

Daniel Nettle

One of the key goals of feminism has been equity. That is, a man or a woman with the same set of aptitudes and motivations should have an equal chance of succeeding. We can endorse this without reservation. However, this does not mean that men and women on average actually have the same motivations, so we should not necessarily expect equal sex representation across all sectors of society. A second goal of feminism has been to celebrate and validate women’s values, which are often different from those of men. It is surely more important to value the pro-social orientation many women […] possess, than it is to lament that they are not more like men.

Daniel Nettle, Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are, Oxford, 2007, pp. 181-182

Francesco Algarotti

Io credo, disse la Marchesa, riguardando alla facilità, con cui gli uomini si scordano di quegli oggetti, que presenti anno più degli altri nella mente, che anco nell’Amore si serbi questa proporzione de’ quadrati delle distanze de’ luoghi, o piuttosto de’ tempi. Così dopo otto giorni di assenza, l’Amore è divenuto sessanta quattro volte minor di quel che fosse nel primo giorno.

Francesco Algarotti, Il newtonianismo per le dame, ovvero dialoghi sopra la luce, i colori, e l’attrazione, 9th ed., Naples, 1739, pp. 244

Evan Williams

Is it credible that my generation could be so special? Literally hundreds of generations have thought that they had the right moral values. Two thousand years ago, the Romans—the imperialistic, crucifying, slave-owning Romans—were congratulating themselves on being Bcivilized,^ because unlike the Bbarbarians^ they had abolished human sacrifice. This was genuine progress, but what they did not realize was that thousands of years’ additional progress remained to be made. We are in the same position: we know how much progress is embodied in our values, but not how much progress remains to be made in the future. This, then, is the Inductive Worry: most cultures have turned out to have major blind spots in their moral beliefs, and we are in much the same epistemic situation as they are, so we will probably also turn out to have major moral blind spots.

Evan Williams, ‘The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, vol. 18, no. 5 (November, 2015), p. 974