Kwame Anthony Appiah on Adultery

From the Ethicist feature in NYTimes Magazine: Should I Tell My Friend’s Husband That She’s Having an Affair?:

... [If] your assessment is accurate, you are in a deeply compromised moral situation — one in which the cure is worse than the condition. As is so often the case, there’s no way out from under the net. It’s a distressing bind. Moral narcissism is about being more concerned with the cleanliness of your hands than with how your conduct shapes the lives around you. Your sensitivity to this pitfall is commendable. So is the fact that what you’re doing — though the least bad option — bothers you. Life is messy, and the best outcome often has something deplorable about it. I suppose it’s all in the title of the great Bronzino painting that one of Iris Murdoch’s characters found so captivating: ‘‘Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time.’’ If the day comes when Peter asks you why you helped Jane conceal her betrayal, you can tell him the truth. He won’t forgive. But he just may understand.

"Wittgenstein, Schoolteacher"

That's the title of this charming Paris Review essay about the six-year slice of the philosopher's life spent as a teacher in several Austrian villages.

... [His] later work is full of references to teaching and children. His Philosophical Investigations opens with a long discussion of how children learn language, in order to investigate what the essence of language is. And Wittgenstein is sometimes explicit about the connection; he once said that in considering the meaning of a word, it’s helpful to ask, “How would one set about teaching a child to use this word?” If nothing else, the style of his later work is absolutely teacherly; his post-return writings are so full of thought experiments phrased in the imperative that they can feel like exercises in a textbook or transcripts of a class discussion. “Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’ … What is common to them all?—Don’t say: ‘There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’—but look and see whether there is anything common to all … ”

The style reflects Wittgenstein’s new aim, which was pedagogical. [...]

Philosophy of Word

Escape from Microsoft Word by Edward Mendelson in NYRB:

The original design of Microsoft Word, in the early 1980s, was a work of clarifying genius, but it had nothing to do with the way writing gets done. The programmers did not think about writing as a sequence of words set down on a page, but instead dreamed up a new idea about what they called a “document.” This was effectively a Platonic idea: the “form” of a document existed as an intangible ideal, and each tangible book, essay, love letter, or laundry list was a partial, imperfect representation of that intangible idea.

A document, as Word’s creators imagined it, is a container for other ideal forms. Each document contains one or more “sections,” what everyone else calls chapters or other subdivisions. Each section contains one or more paragraphs. Each paragraph contains one or more characters. Documents, sections, paragraphs, and characters all have sets of attributes, most of which Word calls “styles.” [...]

When philosophy professors go to hell

SMBC gives them a preview of what they are in for. Scary!

Links

1. A nice video from the Royal Institution -- Levitating Superconductor on a Möbius strip:

2. Bruce Upbin in Forbes: Debunking The Narrative Of Silicon Valley's Innovation Might:

   This is going to sound completely heretical to everything Forbes has stood for over 96 years (and The Economist for a few decades longer than that) but here goes: The real innovation engine in the global economy is not the entrepreneurial class blazing capitalist trails through the thicket of government red tape and taxation. No. The real engine of innovation is government.

3. Feminist Philosophers excerpts the Chronicle story entitled Philosopher’s Downfall, From Star to ‘Ruin,’ Divides a Discipline -- the star philosopher is UMiami's McGinn, and his career turned towards ruin "after a graduate student complained that he behaved inappropriately toward her."

4. The state of Oregon in the US is debating a plan in which students will receive free university education "in return for agreeing to be taxed a set percentage of their income for the first twenty years after they leave college." Calling it "an audacious, innovative, terrible idea," Matt Reed provides many arguments against this plan.

Links

1. Gordon Marino in The Stone: Try a Little Tenderness.

   The philosophers, the lovers of wisdom, have pondered and written a lot about love, even erotic and romantic love, but they have given a cold shoulder to that offshoot of love — tenderness. Indeed, I don’t believe I have ever heard a member of the Socrates guild even mention the lovely word in a remotely philosophical context.

2. Kate Clancy at Context and Variation: 5 Ways to Make Progress in Evolutionary Psychology: Smash, Not Match, Stereotypes.

   The biggest problem, to my mind, is that so often the conclusions of the bad sort of evolutionary psychology match the stereotypes and cultural expectations we already hold about the world: more feminine women are more beautiful, more masculine men more handsome; appearance is important to men while wealth is important to women; women are prone to flighty changes in political and partner preference depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles.

3. Noor Brara at India Ink: In India, a Rise of Private Universities and Liberal Arts Programs.

   A number of new private universities with liberal arts programs have sprung up in India. There were fewer than 20 such schools in 2005, and there are more than 100 now, according to a report by Shiv Nadar University. [...]

   One of the newest of these private schools is Shiv Nadar University in Noida, a suburb of Delhi. The university, when it opened its doors last year, offered programs in engineering, math and natural sciences to its first batch of 274 students. This year, it began its School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the student population has risen to 574. As at liberal arts schools in the United States, students at Shiv Nadar University are required to take a core curriculum of varied subjects, regardless of their major.

4. The Telegraph: Govt open to higher pay for IIM heads.

   "[HRD Minister] M.M. Pallam Raju today said the government should have no problems if the IIMs offered a higher package to new directors from their own funds"

Philosophers, Wikipedia, ...

... and infographics!

Lots of stuff for philosophers and historians to nibble at, and (eye) candy for the rest of us...

[Addendum: a bigger, richer infographic of all the influentials in Wikipedia.]

How about writing a thesis on comic books ...

... in the form of a comic book? This awesome idea is what Nick Sousanis is running with, and I think it's great that his advisers/mentors at Columbia University's Teachers College are supporting him.

On his blog, Sousanis has been posting some of his work (including his HASTAC talk in which he presents some ideas that will presumably go into his thesis). I especially liked his letter / tribute to Prof. Maxine Greene the comic entitled Maxine Says.

He gets it exactly right when he highlights the superiority of the comics format over the "research paper":

"I know if I took a research paper I wrote of the same topic, the same density, there's no chance I could hand it to somebody on the street [and they would read it]. My mom might read it, but that's about where it would end."

On Character

Iskra Fileva at the Opinionator: Character and Its Discontents:

What is character? Ordinarily, we envision character as a set of stable and unified dispositions: we expect the timid employee to be shy on a regular basis, not just on some days, and we picture him as a mellow father, not as a tyrant at home. Since we suppose that characters are unified in these ways, we are almost invariably surprised when it turns out that the different aspects of someone’s personality stand in tension with one another. It is news to us that Tolstoy’s attitude toward his own illegitimate son was worse than aloof, notwithstanding the humanism and sensitivity of Tolstoy’s writings, or that Richard Nixon was rather a good father and husband despite his mendacity in other contexts. [...]

What is the basis for our assumptions that people’s characters are unified, and that their behavior in one context will resemble their behavior in other contexts? [...] There are, indeed, various features of our perception of other people’s characters that make us prone to expect unity.

Consider first what I would call the “privileged perspective” bias. We tend to give priority to our own interactions with and feelings for the person we are called upon to judge, and since people are usually consistent in their behavior toward us, we form unfounded beliefs in the stability of their dispositions. [...]

There is another, more general limitation on ordinary observation that inclines us to find unity where none is to be found. Everyday experience rarely affords us grounds to discover what people are capable of and how they would behave in novel contexts. And the truth about what they are capable of may well contradict our beliefs about them. [...]

Links

1. Namit Arora at 3 Quarks Daily: The Bhagavad Gita Revisited: Part 1 Given the big bang summary -- "Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core" -- I can't wait for Part 2!

2. Sunshine has an article in Amreekan Desi: The FOB who became ABCD:

   Her acclimatization experience did not come without some ten dozen embarrassing experiences when she made a fool of herself. But she learned well. She learned that light switches worked differently, bathrooms were restrooms, baths were showers, notes were bills, bills were checks, and checks were also checks. She learned to run hot water without burning herself. She learned not to use the word dicky for car trunks, and learned that a fast food chain was called Dick’s. She learned that it was actually okay to ask for boxes for leftover food, and capsicums, brinjals, and lady’s finger had their own names here.

   She learned to drop the words sir and madam, and address her professor, as old as her grandfather, using his first name. [...]

3. Rahul Siddharthan: An h-index for test cricket batsmen.

   Suppose we modify it as follows: the nh index is that value of h, for a given n, such that on h occasions the batsman has scored nh or more runs. For examples, the 10h index would be: if on 5 occasions I have scored 50 runs or more (and I have not scored 60 runs or more on 6 occasions) I have a 10h index of 5. For n > 1, basically, I am giving more importance to higher-scoring innings, and also benefiting those who played fewer matches (most older players played far fewer games than Tendulkar and can’t remotely approach either his career aggregate, or his h-score).

The Power of the Unconscious

Let's say you see / hear some stuff that makes an impression on you. And then you seem to start seeing similar stuff at a rate far higher than what you think is normal. Does this phenomenon have a name? [Update: It does: Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. In a kind-of-BM, the moment I saw Nishant-Dasgupta's comment giving me the name, I knew I had asked the same question and got the same answer several years ago].

Anyways, here's a bunch of links that came my way within the last three days:

1. David Eagleman in Discover: Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize

   The Knowledge Gap

   There can be a large gap between knowledge and awareness. When we examine skills that are not amenable to introspection, the first surprise is that implicit memory is completely separable from explicit memory: You can damage one without hurting the other.

   Consider patients with anterograde amnesia, who cannot consciously recall new experiences in their lives. If you spend an afternoon trying to teach them the video game Tetris, they will tell you the next day that they have no recollection of the experience, that they have never seen this game before—and, most likely, that they have no idea who you are, either. But if you look at their performance on the game the next day, you’ll find that they have improved exactly as much as nonamnesiacs. Implicitly their brains have learned the game: The knowledge is simply not accessible to their consciousness.

2. Shreeharsh Kelkar: Propositional Knowledge and Tacit Knowledge: The Case of Tennis. Commenting on an article by Jonah Lehrer, he points out the role of coaches [and others] in translating "propositional knowledge of physics" into a bunch of practices that allow players to flaunt their "tacit knowledge".

   Lehrer points out - correctly - that that laws of tennis are ultimately the laws of physics but the speed of the game means that no player actually computes the trajectory of the ball using Newtonian mechanics while playing. Instead the knowledge is displayed tacitly, in the way their bodies move, in the way they adjust their footwork and their racket motion, etc. In Michael Polanyi's terms, this is tacit knowledge - knowledge that is expressed in action but is hard to express propositionally. [...]

   "The top-ranked guys are all intuitive physicists," Hofmann says. "They know how the ball will bounce even if they can't explain why. This is what allows them to change their strategy based on the surface."

   I don't want to de-emphasize how talented the top tennis players are. But this makes it seem as though that that the only way of bringing propositional knowledge of physics into the game is if the players start calculating in their heads. If you look at the role of knowledge in tennis, as simply something that gets displayed on courts, then, sure, there's only tacit knowledge. But if you look at the world of tennis as a network (channeling Edwin Hutchins and Bruno Latour), then the propositional knowledge of physics comes into it at a number of different points: [...]

   Coaching: Coaches help to get a lot of propositional knowledge on to the courts. What's a "good" service action? How much back-swing should you have while playing a stroke? Is a long back-swing bad for grass? A lot of this is backed up by actually thinking about physics and it gets incorporated into a player's game. Novak Djokovic recently improved his service by making a "minor" adjustment - but this may have been key to his recent success because he is able to get some free points on his serve (69 more aces, according to the article).

3. Samuel McNerny in Scientific American: A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You are not Your Brain

   Lakoff and Johnson to publish Philosophy in the Flesh, a six hundred-page giant that challenges the foundations of western philosophy by discussing whole systems of embodied metaphors in great detail and furthermore arguing that philosophical theories themselves are constructed metaphorically. Specifically, they argued that the mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. What’s left is the idea that reason is not based on abstract laws because cognition is grounded in bodily experience (A few years later Lakoff teamed with Rafael Núñez to publish Where Mathematics Comes From to argue at great length that higher mathematics is also grounded in the body and embodied metaphorical thought).

   As Lakoff points out, metaphors are more than mere language and literary devices, they are conceptual in nature and represented physically in the brain. As a result, such metaphorical brain circuitry can affect behavior. For example, in a study done by Yale psychologist John Bargh, participants holding warm as opposed to cold cups of coffee were more likely to judge a confederate as trustworthy after only a brief interaction. Similarly, at the University of Toronto, “subjects were asked to remember a time when they were either socially accepted or socially snubbed. Those with warm memories of acceptance judged the room to be 5 degrees warmer on the average than those who remembered being coldly snubbed. Another effect of Affection Is Warmth.” This means that we both physically and literary “warm up” to people.

4. And here's a great quote from Vaughn Bell:

   ... The drive to "understand ourselves", the mantra of 21st century pop psychology, often produces more complex, more acceptable, "reasons", but little additional understanding of what causes us to react as we do. Ironically, this is where psychology has helped me out the most. There are causes we will never know about and sometimes it’s better to live with the ambiguity. I suspect we understand ourselves better by knowing the limitations of our insight.

The Brown Curriculum

The Chronicle has a profile of Prof. Ruth Simmons who will be stepping down as President of Brown University at the end of this academic year. She is the first African American president (and so far, the only one) of an Ivy League university, and her Presidential career is nearly 17-years strong -- six years at Smith, and eleven at Brown. The profile covers quite a bit of ground, so you will have to go read it. What I wanted to highlight here is something that I learned through the article: the Brown Curriculum.

The freewheeling nature of Brown, however, is also one of its assets, Ms. Simmons added. In 1969 the university adopted the "New Curriculum," which allows students to chart their own courses of study.

That curriculum is a piece of Brown's distinctiveness, but it is also something its presidents are often called upon to defend and explain.

"This model we have might seem lax, but we think of it as being a very challenging and rigorous approach, fit for students who are highly motivated, very intelligent, and able to handle the responsibility of the open curriculum," Ms. Simmons said.

The same sorts of students for whom Brown is a good fit are also prone to questioning authority, and Ms. Simmons has faced some tough questions during her tenure.

"I don't think anybody fears me," she said in March. "I say that with a little bit of regret."

Bertrand Russell in Bollywood

YouTube link, which points to Shreevatsa's blog post as the source for Russell's Bacon number, which is 4.

Links

1. Jeremiah Jenne at Jottings from the Granite Studio: It’s a Mad Mad 90th Anniversary. "I present the Mad Men guide to 90 years of the CCP."

2. By Vanessa Fuhrmans in WSJ: In Search of a New Course -- Germany's once-lauded education system is under fire. But fixing it hasn't been easy.

3. Carl Zimmer in NYTimes: It’s Science, but Not Necessarily Right. "As a series of controversies over the past few months have demonstrated, science fixes its mistakes more slowly, more fitfully and with more difficulty than Sagan’s words would suggest."

4. Global University Rankings and Their Impact [pdf] -- a report from the European University Association.

5. David Leonhardt in NYTimes: Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite.

Links ...

1. Paul Krugman: Patients Are Not Consumers. How and why health care economics goes beyond demand and supply. On his blog, he says he's channeling Kenneth Arrow's classic work. See also: this precursor blog post which has this memorable line:

   There’s a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don’t have TV series about heroic middle managers or heroic economists.

2. Dan Ariely in Scientific American: How Self Control Works. "It's a skill, we are learning, that profoundly shapes lives. How does it work? Where does it come from?"

3. Terry Eagleton in CHE: In Praise of Marx. "The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition."

4. Benedict Carey in NYTimes: The Psychology of Cheating:

   “Cheating is especially easy to justify when you frame situations to cast yourself as a victim of some kind of unfairness,” said Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the use of prescription drugs to improve intellectual performance. “Then it becomes a matter of evening the score; you’re not cheating, you’re restoring fairness.”

Journal Editors Behaving Badly

They get guest editors for a special issue. All the papers have been posted on the journal's website. At this stage, can the editors ask (some of) the authors to revise their papers -- without consulting the guest editors? Can they then insert in the print edition a note that undermines the credibility of the papers, their authors, and the guest editors?

All these curious events have led some philosophers to urge their colleagues to boycott Synthese, the journal in question.

Here are some links:

1. Inside Higher Ed has an extended account of this sorry episode.

2. John Wilkins. Update 1. Update 2. Links to other commentary.

3. Brian Leiter. Update.

Links ...

1. Paul Krugman: Civility is the Last Refuge of Scoundrels.

2. Noahpinion: Idea of the Day: National Universities.

3. Dani Rodrik: Saif Qadafi and Me:

   The conundrum that advisers to authoritarian regimes face is akin to a long-standing problem in moral philosophy known as the dilemma of “dirty hands.” A terrorist is holding several people hostage, and he asks you to deliver water and food to them. You may choose the moral high ground and say, “I will never deal with a terrorist.” But you will have passed up an opportunity to assist the hostages. Most moral philosophers would say that helping the hostages is the right thing to do in this instance, even if doing so also helps the terrorist.

   See also: this comment from Mark Thoma.

Links ...

1. Jeffrey Young in CHE: Supercomputers Let Up on Speed -- With big money and competitiveness at stake, smarter—not faster—designs may be winners.

2. Derek Thompson interviews Daniel Gilbert: What Is the Secret to Happiness and Money? Follow these principles: 1) Buy more experiences and fewer objects. 2) Don't worry about insurance. 3) The frequency of happy events matters more than their intensity.

3. Jonah Lehrer in Espn.com: True Grit. An extended essay on K. Anders Ericsson's work on expertise, and Angela Duckworth's grit.

   [Lehrer's article frames the research by talking about some of the famous quarterbacks in American football. If he were to use bowlers for this purpose, he would pick those -- like Ian Botham, Glenn McGrath, Anil Kumble, and Muthaiah Muralitharan -- known for their consistent and accurate bowling (for an example from the other end of the spectrum, he might pick Shaun Tait). From the current crop of bowlers, I think his choice would be Lasith 'Slinga' Malinga who, apparently, practices his yorkers by hitting a pair of shoes placed at the crease where batsmen stand. In today's Mumbai-Delhi match three of Malinga's five wickets fell to his toe-crushers. Awesome.]

4. Gretchen Cuda-Kroen in NPR: Being Bilingual May Boost Your Brain Power.

   See also: Being Bilingual: Beneficial Workout for the Brain by David L. Wheeler in CHE.

5. Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Science and Ethics: How can you have a university without a philosophy department?

The Guardian profiles A.C. Grayling

The awesome profile, by Decca Aitkenhead, follows the publication of The Good Book: A Secular Bible which, according to Grayling, is "ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who've really experienced life, and thought about it". Halfway through the profile, Grayling gets a chance to respond to the charge that "the atheist movement has been ... by adopting a tone so militant as to alienate potential supporters, and fortify the religious lobby.":

"Well, firstly, I think the charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we're doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don't like it," he laughs. "So we speak frankly and bluntly, and the respect agenda is now gone, they can no longer float behind the diaphanous veil – 'Ooh, I have faith so you mustn't offend me'. So they don't like the blunt talking. But we're not burning them at the stake. They've got to remember that when it was the other way around it was a much more serious matter.

"And besides, really," he adds with a withering little laugh, "how can you be a militant atheist? How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don't collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It's like sleeping furiously. It's just wrong."

Namit Arora: What do we deserve?

Over at 3 Quarks Daily, he has a great article on several key theories of distributive justice. Here's how he sets up the what he discusses in the rest of his essay:

I often think of the good life I have. By most common measures—say, type of work, income, health, leisure, and social status—I’m doing well. Despite the adage, ‘call no man happy until he is dead’, I wonder no less often: How much of my good life do I really deserve? Why me and not so many others?

The dominant narrative has it that I was a bright student, worked harder than most, and competed fairly to gain admission to the IIT, where my promise was recognized with financial aid from a U.S. university. When I took a chance after graduate school and came to Silicon Valley, I was justly rewarded for my knowledge and labor with a measure of financial security and social status. While many happily accept this narrative, my problem is that I don’t buy it. I believe that much of my socioeconomic station in life was not realized by my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being at the right place at the right time.