Month: September 2004

  • Multiple Intelligences

    Athletic, interpersonal, conversational, fainting in coils…

  • Recipe for Realism

    Multiple intelligences. Why has the idea always made me want to laugh? Because I’m a mean rotten swine, that’s why. Obviously. Yes but also because it is quite funny. It’s so easy to think of more of those alternative intelligences. Watching tv intelligence, eating intelligence, using the potty intelligence.

    Now, one aspect of the general idea seems perfectly unexceptionable.

    Gardner’s ideas appealed to many traditional teachers who extolled hard work but also had some students who did better on tests if multiplication tables were set to music or works of literature were acted out in class.

    Well, obviously – if it works, do it. (That is, do it if you can, which seems unlikely when most teachers have classes of 30 to 35 students, five times a day. When are they going to get the time to teach everyone differently?) But that’s a different thing from drawing large conclusions about multiple intelligences.

    This summer, two university professors accused Gardner, 61, of encouraging elementary school teaching methods, such as singing new words or writing them out with twigs and leaves, for which there is no scholarly evidence of success. Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, wrote in the journal Education Next that Gardner’s theory “is an inaccurate description of the mind” and that “the more closely an application draws on the theory, the less likely the application is to be effective.”

    And Gardner says one thing that’s slightly alarming.

    He added that “the standard psychologist’s view of intelligence is a recipe for despair. It holds that there is but one intelligence and that intelligence is highly heritable.”

    Yes but…the fact that something is a recipe for despair is a separate question from whether there is good evidence for it or not. Sad to say, there are a lot of accurate descriptions of the world that are indeed recipes for despair, as well as hopeful ones that are not accurate. Gardner’s benevolence is a good thing, but benevolence-driven research can get things badly wrong.

  • Drug Trials ‘Distorted’

    Eleven medical journals have told researchers to register trials at the start so unflattering results cannot be covered up.

  • ‘Healers’ Licensed in South Africa

    They’ll be barred from treating fatal diseases.

  • MMR Vaccine Safe

    Finds UK study of more than 5000 children.

  • Happy Birthday to Us Again

    Well it’s that time again. Yup, it is – I know that’s hard to believe, but it is. September 10. It’s our birthday. We’re two. Two!! Would you believe it! Well of course you would, why not – but still it does seem very respectable and elderly and established. They haven’t driven us away yet! They haven’t shut us down, they haven’t silenced us, they haven’t sent a plague of locusts. We’re still here! (Who’s they? Oh you know, just the paranoid’s fantasy army. All those faceless Darth Vader types in black plastic outfits who were going to better I mean butter I mean batter down the doors and throw our computers out the window and trample on us until we whimpered and promised to go to Business School.)

    And we’re not only still here, we have a book coming out in a few weeks. B&W’s first book. Awww. Don’t websites grow up quickly these days. One minute it just has a logo and nothing else, and the next thing you know it has a book slung over its shoulder and another on the way. (Has nobody heard of birth control these days? I blame the Pope.)

    You would probably like to look at last year’s celebration. It was very rowdy. You wouldn’t think it to talk to me, but I am one hell of a rowdy partyer. I get drunk the instant I cross the threshold, I turn the music up until the plaster starts falling off the walls, I aim food in the general direction of my mouth and usually miss, I grope everyone that breathes including the hamster, I smash glasses in the fireplace, and I dance the tarantella. I am fun, man. A few days in the slammer are a small price to pay.

  • Epistolary

    I don’t know if you ever have a look at our Letters page, but if you don’t, you might want to. There are some very interesting letters in there – some of them are brief articles in themselves. I’ve just seen one of that kind, the one at the top of the page (at the moment), a short essay on the Whig interpretation of history and moral relativism (taking issue with an article of ours on the subject), by one Michael Davis. If I had the faintest idea who he was or how to email him, I would ask him if he would like to write an article for us. I wonder if he is the same MD as the MD who wrote some previous letters and quite a few comments here. Anyway, his letter is well worth a read.

  • Serbia Thinks Better of It

    Government reverses ban on teaching evolution in schools.

  • Utopia, Freedom, the State, part 2

    Norman Geras discusses three models.

  • Powell Goes One Step Farther

    ‘This was a coordinated effort, not just random violence.’

  • Powell Calls it Genocide

    US Secretary of State says killings in Darfur constitute genocide.

  • Because Serbia Doesn’t Have Enough Problems?

    Education minister orders schools to stop teaching evolution.

  • Ought without can

    The Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader, Menzies Campbell, said the government should use its influence with the US president, George Bush, to secure [the] freedom [of nine Britons detained for more than a year at Camp X-Ray and at Bagram air base after being taken prisoner during military action in Afghanistan].
    The Guardian, 25 April 2003

    The principle that “ought” implies “can” is usually attributed to Immanuel Kant, although he never actually said anything quite so pithy. (See chapter eight of the Critique of Practical Reason for his more convoluted expression on the idea.) Whether we credit Kant with the discovery or not, the principle itself is pretty self-evident. It makes no sense to say we ought to do something unless we can actually do it. It is absurd to say “you ought to be eight foot tall” or “you ought to eradicate world poverty by dinner time” since neither of these are genuine possibilities. How can you have a duty to do what is impossible?

    The logic of the principle is clear enough, and frequently ignored. People call on politicians to do what is not within their power, or athletes to perform above their capabilities. For instance, in Britain, many people felt that the world’s greatest woman distance runner, Paula Radcliffe, ought to have performed better at the Olympics, where she retired from the two races she competed in. What they don’t seem to have taken seriously is the probability that Radcliffe was performing as well as she could. For whatever reason, she wasn’t able to win on those days.

    The example of Paula Radcliffe is instructive, because although the “ought” implies “can” principle is crystal clear in theory, in the real world, “impossible” carries more than one sense, some looser than others. Radcliffe could never have run the marathon in one hour, not because it is logically impossible but because it is physically impossible. That means there is nothing logically wrong with saying she ought to run that quickly. Rather, the problem is a failure to appreciate the facts concerning what is physically possible.

    Where things become more tricky, and more interesting, is that in ordinary discourse it is perfectly legitimate to say something is not possible even though there is nothing either physically or logically preventing us doing it. Radcliffe, for example, could almost certainly have finished the race if she had put her all into it. To say she couldn’t do so, and that therefore we are wrong to say she should have done so, is to say that the obstacles were such that it would be unreasonable or unrealistic to expect her to have done so.

    That may seem to extend the reach of “ought” implies “can” too much. We have moved from can’t (logically) through can’t (physically) to can’t (realistically) where the notion of what is “realistic” is somewhat vague. It would certainly be accurate to describe this version of the principle as an adjunct or extension of the core one and not simply a corollary of it. But I think we need something like it in order to make the principle really effective in critical thinking about the real world.

    Consider, for example, Menzies Campbell’s statement about what the British government ought to have done about the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. It may be that he was reported a little loosely, and what he meant to say was that the government should use its influence to try to get the prisoners released. Whether you agree with him or not, there is nothing incoherent about that. However, even if that is what Campbell meant, there were plenty at the time who thought the government ought to do more, namely, actually secure the release of the prisoners. And it can only make sense to say it ought to have done that if it actually could do so. But it is not at all obvious that the government could realistically have done this. Certain measures, such as threatening a trade war or resorting to other extreme measures, remained physically possible, but politically impossible.

    We can see the “ought” implies “can” principle as therefore having two versions. One concerns the link between duty and what is logically or physically possible and should be uncontroversial. But arguably the more interesting and useful version, though also the more controversial and imprecise one, is that we cannot say people ought to do what “realistically speaking” they cannot. Any controversies such a principle would generate I would suggest are more a consequence of how we define what is realistic, and do not show any intrinsic flaw with the principle itself.

  • Does Truth Matter?

    Unswerving allegiance to what you believe is dogmatism, not truth.

  • ‘Homophobic’ artists dropped

    MOBO (music of black origin) nominations withdrawn after apologies were not forthcoming.

  • Utopia, Freedom, the State

    Norman Geras on the Marxian idea of a future stateless utopia.

  • Predictable, Parochial, and Philistine

    Why no Xenophon, Suetonius, Kyd, Tasso, Huysmans, Cozzens?

  • Twenty Tiny Little Books

    And every single one is by some dead European guy.

  • Shan’t

    Okay, I give up, you win.

    For months (months? weeks? years? I forget) I’ve been kind of defending CT to my colleague. Kind of – which means admitting they have a tendency to groupthink, to call people trolls just because they disagree with them, but still thinking they (CT, that is) have their good points. But I give it up.

    Everyone knows that comments can get out of hand. A lot of blogs don’t have them; a lot have them only for some threads; a lot have them intermittently, disabling them when things get tiresome. It is also sometimes possible to keep things civil by asking people to be civil, and/or by deleting comments when they’re not. I’ve only deleted comments here once – but then that’s not surprising: the people who read B&W are a civil, polite, rational crowd.

    So that’s one way to keep things civil. Another way is just to tell people to go fuck themselves – which seems like a fairly oxymoronic method, frankly. Seems to defeat the purpose. Also it seems ill-advised to resort to it just because you disagree with what a commenter has said, as opposed to because the commenter has gotten out of hand. Well – you know what I’m going to say. No, you don’t, quite, because I didn’t actually get sworn at – I got threatened with being sworn at. But I’m afraid I just don’t find that kind of thing conducive to interesting or rewarding discussion. I can get plenty of that kind of thing in my own living room, thank you very much, I don’t need to go elsewhere for it.

    But more to the point, I find it too symptomatic of what Jerry S is talking about – too indicative of what he’s been saying all along. Too groupthinky, too orthodoxy-enforcing. So. I’ll just do my talking here, where men are men and the beer is flat.

  • Davies’ Really Dangerous Idea

    Natural freedom is good enough, we don’t need the supernatural kind.