Haidt has a tendency to step over from “is” to “ought” in the sort of seamless way that rightly annoyed David Hume.… Read the rest
Religion is the only discourse that encourages adults to pretend to know things they do not know.… Read the rest
Some very interesting stuff, some very dubious stuff.… Read the rest
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on So many? Like five?
Back in my Movement Skeptic days, before the “deep rifts”, for a while my thinking was heavily influenced by Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. While I still think Pinker made some valid points*, in the light of everything that’s happened since, I have grown much more sympathetic towards (or at least understanding of) the reluctance among certain feminists to talk about innate cognitive or psychological differences between men and women. As I remember there was a certain “gotcha” that was very popular among “anti-blank-slatists” at the time:
… Read the restSo what you’re saying is that if there were differences in the distribution of interests and talents between men and women
Very enlightening piece by Jonathan Haidt about the rise in depression among girls and how catastrophizing is involved.
… Read the restIn May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were
I’m seeing a weird little pocket of people on Twitter bragging about how much they don’t give a shit about Ukraine and how fake it all is and how people who are talking about it are just ____ – you know, showing off, virtue signaling, following the woke herd, that kind of thing.
Well, first of all, nukes.
Second – why wouldn’t we give a shit? Why is it wrong to give a shit, and enlightened not to?
I suppose one answer could be that we can’t do anything about it, and paying attention and giving a damn is just self-indulgent or showing off or whatever. But I don’t think that’s right. I think paying attention and giving a damn … Read the rest
Eve Fairbanks argues at the Washington Post that there is some overlap between the rhetoric of the dark web types and that of the “respectable” antebellum defenders of slavery.
… Read the restMy childhood home is just a half-hour drive from the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, and I grew up intensely fascinated by the Civil War. I loved perusing soldiers’ diaries. During my senior year in college, I studied almost nothing but Abraham Lincoln’s speeches. As I wrote my thesis on a key Lincoln address, Civil War rhetoric was almost all I read: not just that of the 16th president but also that of his adversaries.
Thinking back on those debates, I finally figured it out. The reasonable right’s rhetoric is exactly
A Nature editorial urges us to do the impossible – ” fight discrimination in all its forms” while not “excluding conservative voices from debate.”
How possible or impossible that is of course depends on what is meant by “excluding from debate.” That activity tends to be used in different senses depending on where the user is in the paragraph. It tends to mean one thing in its first appearance and another thing in the next sentence and a third in the one after that. Or, in other words, it tends to be deployed as a nice respectable goal in airy generalizations, without much effort to explain how it actually works.
Nature was prompted by a couple of Times think pieces, … Read the rest
Inayat Bunglawala is pondering (in a rather inconclusive and unproductive way, which I suppose in his case is probably just as well) the tensions between religious freedom and other kinds of freedom, religious rights and other kinds of rights. One thing he mentions needs more second-guessing than it usually gets.
… Read the restProfessor Roger Trigg kicked off last night’s discussion by pointing out that Article 9 of the European convention on human rights guarantees that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to … manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.” However, Professor Trigg argued that, in reality, a number of recent cases showed that this religious freedom was being
Tom Clark discusses David Sloan Wilson and Jonathan Haidt and the Beyond Belief 2 conference.
Both Wilson and Jonathan Haidt argued at the conference that a predisposition for religion likely played an adaptive role (perhaps via between-group selection) in allowing humans to achieve our current level of ultra-sociality, in which more or less stable societies of unrelated individuals have replaced nomadic tribes. This is an empirical claim under investigation. It’s therefore striking that both accept the normative claim that religion, or more broadly a departure from evidence-based beliefs, might be a force for good in promoting social cohesion in a way that allegiance to strict empiricism…perhaps cannot.
Let’s look at a little of Jonathan Haidt.
… Read the restMy first few weeks
Thought for the day. Sam Harris replying to Jonathan Haidt at Edge.
The point is that religion remains the only mode of discourse that encourages grown men and women to pretend to know things they manifestly do not (and cannot) know. If ever there were an attitude at odds with science, this is it. And the faithful are encouraged to keep shouldering this unwieldy burden of falsehood and self-deception by everyone they meet – by their coreligionists, of course, and by people of differing faith, and now, with startling frequency, by scientists who claim to have no faith.
Just so. Often we’re not just encouraged to pretent to know what we don’t and can’t know, we’re more or … Read the rest
