The Perils of Pop Philosophy 484
ThousandStars tips a new piece by Julian Sanchez, the guy who, in case you missed it, brought us a succinct definition of the one-way hash argument (of the type often employed in the US culture wars). This one is about the dangers of a certain kind of oversimplifying, as practiced routinely by journalists and bloggers. "This brings us around to some of my longstanding ambivalence about blogging and journalism more generally. On the one hand, while it's probably not enormously important whether most people have a handle on the mind-body problem, a democracy can't make ethics and political philosophy the exclusive province of cloistered academics. On the other hand, I look at the online public sphere and too often tend to find myself thinking: 'Discourse at this level can't possibly accomplish anything beyond giving people some simulation of justification for what they wanted to believe in the first place.' This is, needless to say, not a problem limited to philosophy."
Re:new tag needed: verbalmasturbation (Score:1, Informative)
Being able to spell 'sophisticated' is not a sign of being an intellectual elitist.
You might want to check your sarcasm meter. It seems to be malfunctioning.
Re:I think I speak for many of us when I say... (Score:2, Informative)
--H. L. Mencken
Re:Wrong, Wrong, Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
I don't if he meant "simulation", but a simulation of justification makes sense (something appears to be justification even though it is not).
Re:Communication (Score:3, Informative)
I believe Feynman made exactly that point, and created a lecture series to do just that with Quantum Electro Dynamics.
Apparently it worked, which suggests that the point has some validity.
Re:You don't have to be a generalist... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, some aspects of computer science can be more like science (you know, hypothesize, create experiment and test your hypothesis) than pure math.
This is particularly true in applications (i.e. programming) where this cycle of write code to implement some functionality, compile, run to test if it works, modify code again etc. is how we really work.
That's Software Engineering, not Computer Science.
Re:The web gives us all a voice (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dangers of being an arrogant ass (Score:5, Informative)
Most people over the age of about 12 (well 16 in some places) understand that you won't get all the detail from a popular article.
Never been to a Mensa meeting, eh? Not to knock a group I belong to, and where I met my wife, but the Expert-on-Everything is common. Really, it's just GIGO at work coupled with a state of mind. Reading widely does not make one literate if the content read is Time, Newsweek, Reader's Digest and Discover. However, the sad thing is that said Mensan can be excused in American culture because reading Time, Newsweek, Reader's Digest and Discover actually is relatively elite. A soc professor I had got off topic many years ago and asked our class what we thought were the most popular American reading materials. Some people were coming up with outrageous answers like the New Yorker. I thought I was being sociologically clever with the supermarket shelf Reader's Digest. I was on the right track but he said it was the National Inquirer. That makes me conclude that a large part of the sociology of the pop expert is that the standard for popular reading is so abysmal in America that a person can feel justified as a lay expert merely by reading faithfully from among a selection of the mediocre.
Re:I think I speak for many of us when I say... (Score:5, Informative)
I was a philosophy minor and even I find these arguments to be silly. Most of the upper-level philosophical arguments I've seen against "bias" were usually written by scholars who just didn't realize their OWN bias. There is no such thing as an "unbiased" argument or perspective--even in hard science (much less something as "soft" as politics). In history, we used to call the pursuit of objectivity "the noble dream" (after Peter Novick's excellent critique That Noble Dream [amazon.com]).
As for the "one way hash" argument: while it's certainly true that laymen can be duped by impressive credentials (pretty much anyone can be duped under the right circumstances, layman or not), the whole argument reeks of a peculiar variety of arrogant elitism (really more a kind of paternalism) which has plagued academia in general and philosophy in particular for a very long time. In the field of philosophy, this whole argument reminds me of one of the great masters himself, Plato. Plato argued in the Republic (through Socrates) that only philosophers were suited to be rulers. This was, of course, a very convenient argument for Plato and his fellow academy members. And it was also evidence that his own arrogance had clouded his vision of his OWN biases (though he could still clearly enunciate in great detail the biases of the tyrant, democrat, oligarch, and monarch).
When he almost laments that "a democracy can't make ethics and political philosophy the exclusive province of cloistered academics," Sanchez seems to critique democracy in the same way that Plato does. But anyone who has ever been a part of an academic department can damn well tell you that the politics among scholars is every bit as silly and immature as the politics of the rest of the world (perhaps more so). Sanchez's hidden assumption that cloistered academics would naturally make the better leaders or judges in arguments is as ultimately deluded as Plato's contention that only philosophers are suited to be kings.
Generic greeting (Score:1, Informative)