With essential projects, contractors become the agents in a principal-agent problem. They’re difficult to control; they know more than you do; and they have a personal profit motive.
This isn't really about this project in particular, but a couple years ago, at my state university, contractors were hired to do some rennovations in my department's (3-year old) building. They took up a whole wing of the 3rd floor, and it was rather intrusive (our weekly area colloquia were held in that wing), so one day while getting my mail (the mail room was also in that wing), I asked one of the construction supervisors how long they were going to be there. His answer was, "Until the money runs out."
Of course, now the university is in dire financial straights, laying people off left and right, and cutting programs. I can't imagine how that ever happened.
@Andy Smith, Massive modularity, which most Evolutionary Psychology assumes, is improbable, given what we know about the brain (Patricia Churchland says it’s impossible), but even if one believes that the brain is massively modular, one can reject Evolutionary Psychology for a whole host of reasons. Hell, Fodor himself rejects it, though his reasons are bizarre. The truth is, most of empirical psychology rejects Evolutionary Psychology, because it’s methodologically and theoretically inferior to most of empirical psychology. And I won’t even say what biologists think of Evolutionary Psychology, except to note that when referring to it, they tend not to use nice words.
And Pinker does good research. He just doesn’t do research in Evolutionary Psychology (or much of it), as he’s a psycholinguist by training.
@Andy Smith, Not at length here, no. Suffice it to say that I'm not confusing "the popular view of evolutionary psychology" with the actual science. I am trying to avoid confusing one type of evolutionary psychology, in the Tooby-Cosmides-Buss-Pinker mold (Pinker doesn't do much actual research in E.P., but is instead a popularizer), and a broader conception of psychology that considers evolutionary theory and history (e.g., the sort of comparative psychology that Marc Hauser does when he’s not making up data). That's why I, in keeping with a convention that has been around for a few years, refer to Evolutionary Psychology (with initial capitals) and evolutionary psychology, as distinct things, the former being the T-C-B-P type. Evolutionary Psychology is the sort described in the http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html”>Evolutionary Psychology Primer, and defined primarily by its position that “our modern skulls house a stone age mind,” that much/most of our behavior is the result of modules developed in the stone age Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, and by its use, with one real exception (Tooby and Cosmides use of a single method over 20+years), of non-experimental methods (e.g., Buss mostly uses surveys), and a generally poor grasp of evolutionary theory. This version is, thankfully, dying a slow death within academia. The other version, evolutionary psychology, is just psychology as it has been done for a while, combining various subfields like cognitive, social, developmental, and comparative psychology with a knowledge of evolutionary theory (actual evolutionary theory, as opposed to the perversion of evolutionary theory used in Evolutionary Psychology). Evolutionary Psychology (not evolutionary psychology) is shit science, period.
I hesitate to say this for various reasons, but this is the sort of pulled-out-of-the ass (but hinting at some superficial knowledge of actual theory and research), overly simplistic, quasi-social scientific claptrap that a certain breed of American liberal/progressive, one that is particularly common in the blogosphere (educated, worldly, “Type A” all the way, but not exceptionally bright), absolutely loves. That’s not to say that conservatives don’t have their equally wacky, though perhaps significantly more pernicious, equivalents, it’s just that this breed of “liberals are like x, while conservatives are like y” has enjoyed a fair amount of popularity among liberals/progressives since at least the Lakoff craze of 2004. And this, it strikes me, isn’t even the most offensive (to conservatives) version of this trend. It wasn’t uncommon a few years ago, even among some of the science blogosphere (one particular science blogger, whose name rhymes with Dora, was particularly bad about this), to hear from some liberals that research showed that conservatism was a mental disorder. Now the research showed no such thing, and you had to throw in a—pardon the pun—liberal dose of this sort of nonsense to get to that position, but once you set out in that direction, the temptation to feel that villainizing your opponents is just good science can be too strong to resist. What I find truly odd about it, though, is that these tend to be the same people who rail against Evolutionary Psychology (with capital letters) because it tends to just confirm popular prejudice, yet they have no problem accepting similar reasoning when it’s their (elite?) prejudice that’s being confirmed. Evolutionary Psychology really is shit science, largely because of the way it reasons about the mind and behavior, but that sort of reasoning about the mind and behavior doesn’t become less shitty because it’s no longer telling us the world is like it looked in 1950s television shows, but instead is more like it looks in an episode of Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
I should add that, as long as it’s merely confirming liberal prejudice and goes no further, it’s probably harmless, because only liberals will care (except for the conservatives who stop in, and who are enraged, enraged I tell you, which they would have been anyway), and everyone everywhere has their pet methods for confirming the belief that we’re better than they are in all of the ways that we think we are. I was a bit worried back when Lakoff had the ear of prominent politicians, but since his 15 minutes have now been up for some time, I think we can rest assured that this will remain a blogospheric phenomenon with no real practical implications.
@MFarmer, if you don't know what I am talking about, then you don't know anything about gentrification.
We're against it, many of us at least, because of its effects on the low income residents of areas that are targeted for gentrification. And I doubt my income history is relevant to that.
Hitchens I have less of a beef with, though in public he makes some pretty strange assertions about the history of religion. I feel even less offended by Dennett, though I think he gets some of the psychology wrong -- his understanding of science always seems to be on the level of someone who reads Discover or watches PBS; he is, as Nagel once described him, "Gilbert Ryle meets Scientific American."
It's Dawkins and Harris that are the real offenders. Dawkins pretty much dismisses theology and philosophy, for example, and when Harris is confronted with actual research that contradicts his armchair reasoning, he just puts his hands over his ears and screams "nah nah nah nah nah nah" (see, e.g., the exchange between Harris and Atran at one of the Beyond Belief conferences a few years ago; the video's on the web somewhere).
Jason, back in the day, I was one of those who criticized Dawkins et al. for their ignorance, and I stand by that criticism, and nothing in these survey results could make me change my mind, because they're not really relevant to the criticisms I and others were using back then, namely that, sure, they may know more about religion in general, and perhaps even Christianity, than the average Chrsitian, but the average Christian isn't writing a book saying that these are the reasons why we should believe, while Dawkins et al. were writing several telling us that these are the reasons why we shouldn't. If you're going to do that, then knowing more than the average bear isn't worth much, and anyone who does know more than the average bear and has read Dawkins on theology or Harris on suicide bombing, e.g., knows that their knowledge of theology, history, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, as they relate to religion, is pretty damn limited
RTod, I'm not dismissing it, I'm simply pointing out that it's not what people mean when they say that "New Atheists" don't know much about religion. Of course, most of those people (me included, and I'm an "Old Atheist") would also say that the religious don't know much about religion, including their own, and we wouldn't feel like we had to apologize for saying that because White Protestants did better than any other group on the Christianity questions.
@Jason Kuznicki, Sure, if this survey showed anything like that. For it to do so, a.) most atheists would have to be "New Atheists," which is almost certainly not the case, and b.) the survey itself would have to test some deep knowledge of religion.
I don't think anyone has ever said that "New Atheists" don't know that they, themselves, don't believe in God, Ramadan is a Muslim holy month, Mother Theresa was a Catholic, or that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. If this is "knowing a lot about religion," then I suspect most "New Atheists" do, in fact, know a lot about religion, but in that case, knowing a lot about religion is pretty cheap.
David, can you point to some of the liberals or even conservative mosque proponents (I assumethat if there are a lot of them, at least some of them have blogs) who argue as you claim? I mean, I’ve seen plenty talk about how arguing that the cultural center is offensive because it signals victory for Muslim terrorists, or celebrates the people who attacked us, assumes that all Muslims are the same as the terrorists, or at least support terrorists. They also often point out that this is about as classic an example of bigotry as you’ll find. However, I haven’t seen any simply argue that it’s not offensive, so there! Or anything close to that.
I don't mean this as a defense of Kaufmann, but Leiter's criticisms are almost universally exaggerated at best and completely unfair at worst. And while Anglo-American interpretations of Nietzsche, largely from within the analytict tradition, certainly dominate the literature now, that's as much because they dominate the literature period. Leiter's Nietzsche is a naturalist, obsessed with and dominated by contemporary scientist. This is convenient, coming from a bunch of philosophers in a naturalist-dominated philosophical tradition. Not saying that Nietzsche didn't have a naturalist streak, just that the history of Nietzsche scholarship is the history of people seeing what they want to see in Nieztsche, making it difficult not to be skeptical of this sort of convenience.
Also, it's clear Steorts has little knowledge of Schopenhauer (who played a big role in making Europeans pay attention to Eastern thought in the 19th century), in addition to Nietzsche. Though the Buddhist nonsense means he must have at least read about Parkes.
Also, whatever the scholarly worth of Kaufmann's translations, they remain the most fun to read. Oh, and I loved his intro to Buber as well.
You know, of course, that in the case of abortion, both parties, to the extent that a non-conscious bundle of semi-organized cells can be called a party, have their fists on the other's face, rendering the libertarian maxim useless. Of course, if we were to run with it, then your point about women already having made a choice would be easily dismissed (as it is on virtually any other grounds concerning will, freedom, or choice, to say nothing of practical realities -- does using birth control make the pregnancy resulting from failure different from those resulting from unprotected sex, morally?), because my choosing to step in front of you doesn't give you any more right to put your fist to my chin than you choosing to walk up to me does.
It's clear, then, that you are eliding certain complexities of the situation to score rhetorical points on top of your only non-sophistical argument, namely the one that begins from the premise that the fetus is a human life, and that the right to life that comes with that classification trumps the woman's right to make choices about her own body. This premise itself assumes conclusions about the nature of human life and its relation to personhood, or at least whether rights accrue to humans or to persons, but even if we accept the premise as it stands, and the conclusion about rights that you draw from it, we're still left with all sorts of difficulties for your slavery analogy. Both parties serve as slaves for the other equally well in the analogical mapping (especially when we consider that the woman's life may be at stake as well), for example. What's more, the woman's slavery can be considered to far outlast that of the fetus. Or, approaching it from a different direction, the slave and the slave owner could both exist without each other, and in the slave's case at least (one could argue in the owner's as well), the separate life would be preferable. In the case of abortion, at least pre-viability, no such option exists for the fetus. It is more analogous, in this sense, to a parasite (perhaps acquired from choosing to eat known risky food, or choosing to swim in known risky waters) than to a slave. Of course, this analogy too omits too much to lead to anything but sophistical reasoning, but it is no worse in this regard than yours.
@Aaron, Lord Jim is one of my favorite books, but if you want nested narratives, you have to read Melmoth the Wanderer (which, strangely enough, I just mentioned on Jason K's other blog, in a completely different context). In that book, there are narratives within narratives within narratives within narratives, and often the same narrative within a narrative within a narrative will have, over time, several nested narratives. At times, you have to stop and think to yourself, "OK, who's telling which of these stories right now?"
@Will, Ph? as a distinct dish is only about a century old, and is more similar to what Jason calls "cuisine bourgeoise" than to real Vietnamese peasant food, which was mostly just rice with occasional bits of meet or vegetable.
From what I can tell, main difference between east Asian or Pacific culture and French culture, with respect to Jason's points, is that rice replaces bread. There are other somewhat more subtle differences, in some areas, having to do with tribal cultures and the effects they have on the availability of food (those in hunter-gatherer societies tend to have hunted stuff and gathered stuff, e.g.), but for the most part, we don't eat hunter-gatherer dishes, because "hunter gatherer dishes" is borderline nonsensical.
At least, this is what I gather from the couple people I know who are historians of the far East.
On “Christie and Infrastructure Folly”
@Jason Kuznicki,
With essential projects, contractors become the agents in a principal-agent problem. They’re difficult to control; they know more than you do; and they have a personal profit motive.
This isn't really about this project in particular, but a couple years ago, at my state university, contractors were hired to do some rennovations in my department's (3-year old) building. They took up a whole wing of the 3rd floor, and it was rather intrusive (our weekly area colloquia were held in that wing), so one day while getting my mail (the mail room was also in that wing), I asked one of the construction supervisors how long they were going to be there. His answer was, "Until the money runs out."
Of course, now the university is in dire financial straights, laying people off left and right, and cutting programs. I can't imagine how that ever happened.
On “False dichotomies: Foragers vs. Farmers edition”
@Andy Smith, Massive modularity, which most Evolutionary Psychology assumes, is improbable, given what we know about the brain (Patricia Churchland says it’s impossible), but even if one believes that the brain is massively modular, one can reject Evolutionary Psychology for a whole host of reasons. Hell, Fodor himself rejects it, though his reasons are bizarre. The truth is, most of empirical psychology rejects Evolutionary Psychology, because it’s methodologically and theoretically inferior to most of empirical psychology. And I won’t even say what biologists think of Evolutionary Psychology, except to note that when referring to it, they tend not to use nice words.
And Pinker does good research. He just doesn’t do research in Evolutionary Psychology (or much of it), as he’s a psycholinguist by training.
"
@Chris, Sorry about the html issues there.
"
@Andy Smith, Not at length here, no. Suffice it to say that I'm not confusing "the popular view of evolutionary psychology" with the actual science. I am trying to avoid confusing one type of evolutionary psychology, in the Tooby-Cosmides-Buss-Pinker mold (Pinker doesn't do much actual research in E.P., but is instead a popularizer), and a broader conception of psychology that considers evolutionary theory and history (e.g., the sort of comparative psychology that Marc Hauser does when he’s not making up data). That's why I, in keeping with a convention that has been around for a few years, refer to Evolutionary Psychology (with initial capitals) and evolutionary psychology, as distinct things, the former being the T-C-B-P type. Evolutionary Psychology is the sort described in the http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html”>Evolutionary Psychology Primer, and defined primarily by its position that “our modern skulls house a stone age mind,” that much/most of our behavior is the result of modules developed in the stone age Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, and by its use, with one real exception (Tooby and Cosmides use of a single method over 20+years), of non-experimental methods (e.g., Buss mostly uses surveys), and a generally poor grasp of evolutionary theory. This version is, thankfully, dying a slow death within academia. The other version, evolutionary psychology, is just psychology as it has been done for a while, combining various subfields like cognitive, social, developmental, and comparative psychology with a knowledge of evolutionary theory (actual evolutionary theory, as opposed to the perversion of evolutionary theory used in Evolutionary Psychology). Evolutionary Psychology (not evolutionary psychology) is shit science, period.
"
I hesitate to say this for various reasons, but this is the sort of pulled-out-of-the ass (but hinting at some superficial knowledge of actual theory and research), overly simplistic, quasi-social scientific claptrap that a certain breed of American liberal/progressive, one that is particularly common in the blogosphere (educated, worldly, “Type A” all the way, but not exceptionally bright), absolutely loves. That’s not to say that conservatives don’t have their equally wacky, though perhaps significantly more pernicious, equivalents, it’s just that this breed of “liberals are like x, while conservatives are like y” has enjoyed a fair amount of popularity among liberals/progressives since at least the Lakoff craze of 2004. And this, it strikes me, isn’t even the most offensive (to conservatives) version of this trend. It wasn’t uncommon a few years ago, even among some of the science blogosphere (one particular science blogger, whose name rhymes with Dora, was particularly bad about this), to hear from some liberals that research showed that conservatism was a mental disorder. Now the research showed no such thing, and you had to throw in a—pardon the pun—liberal dose of this sort of nonsense to get to that position, but once you set out in that direction, the temptation to feel that villainizing your opponents is just good science can be too strong to resist. What I find truly odd about it, though, is that these tend to be the same people who rail against Evolutionary Psychology (with capital letters) because it tends to just confirm popular prejudice, yet they have no problem accepting similar reasoning when it’s their (elite?) prejudice that’s being confirmed. Evolutionary Psychology really is shit science, largely because of the way it reasons about the mind and behavior, but that sort of reasoning about the mind and behavior doesn’t become less shitty because it’s no longer telling us the world is like it looked in 1950s television shows, but instead is more like it looks in an episode of Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
I should add that, as long as it’s merely confirming liberal prejudice and goes no further, it’s probably harmless, because only liberals will care (except for the conservatives who stop in, and who are enraged, enraged I tell you, which they would have been anyway), and everyone everywhere has their pet methods for confirming the belief that we’re better than they are in all of the ways that we think we are. I was a bit worried back when Lakoff had the ear of prominent politicians, but since his 15 minutes have now been up for some time, I think we can rest assured that this will remain a blogospheric phenomenon with no real practical implications.
On “John Waters on Dive Bars, Perverts, Pasolini, and Levi Johnston”
@MFarmer, if you don't know what I am talking about, then you don't know anything about gentrification.
We're against it, many of us at least, because of its effects on the low income residents of areas that are targeted for gentrification. And I doubt my income history is relevant to that.
"
@MFarmer, yeah, screw the poor! What have they ever done for anyone?
On “That’s me in the corner, choosing my religion”
@RTod,
OK, the Borders thing is funny.
Hitchens I have less of a beef with, though in public he makes some pretty strange assertions about the history of religion. I feel even less offended by Dennett, though I think he gets some of the psychology wrong -- his understanding of science always seems to be on the level of someone who reads Discover or watches PBS; he is, as Nagel once described him, "Gilbert Ryle meets Scientific American."
It's Dawkins and Harris that are the real offenders. Dawkins pretty much dismisses theology and philosophy, for example, and when Harris is confronted with actual research that contradicts his armchair reasoning, he just puts his hands over his ears and screams "nah nah nah nah nah nah" (see, e.g., the exchange between Harris and Atran at one of the Beyond Belief conferences a few years ago; the video's on the web somewhere).
"
Jason, back in the day, I was one of those who criticized Dawkins et al. for their ignorance, and I stand by that criticism, and nothing in these survey results could make me change my mind, because they're not really relevant to the criticisms I and others were using back then, namely that, sure, they may know more about religion in general, and perhaps even Christianity, than the average Chrsitian, but the average Christian isn't writing a book saying that these are the reasons why we should believe, while Dawkins et al. were writing several telling us that these are the reasons why we shouldn't. If you're going to do that, then knowing more than the average bear isn't worth much, and anyone who does know more than the average bear and has read Dawkins on theology or Harris on suicide bombing, e.g., knows that their knowledge of theology, history, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, as they relate to religion, is pretty damn limited
"
RTod, I'm not dismissing it, I'm simply pointing out that it's not what people mean when they say that "New Atheists" don't know much about religion. Of course, most of those people (me included, and I'm an "Old Atheist") would also say that the religious don't know much about religion, including their own, and we wouldn't feel like we had to apologize for saying that because White Protestants did better than any other group on the Christianity questions.
"
@Jason Kuznicki, Sure, if this survey showed anything like that. For it to do so, a.) most atheists would have to be "New Atheists," which is almost certainly not the case, and b.) the survey itself would have to test some deep knowledge of religion.
I don't think anyone has ever said that "New Atheists" don't know that they, themselves, don't believe in God, Ramadan is a Muslim holy month, Mother Theresa was a Catholic, or that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. If this is "knowing a lot about religion," then I suspect most "New Atheists" do, in fact, know a lot about religion, but in that case, knowing a lot about religion is pretty cheap.
On “The Mosque and the Meta-Debate”
David, can you point to some of the liberals or even conservative mosque proponents (I assumethat if there are a lot of them, at least some of them have blogs) who argue as you claim? I mean, I’ve seen plenty talk about how arguing that the cultural center is offensive because it signals victory for Muslim terrorists, or celebrates the people who attacked us, assumes that all Muslims are the same as the terrorists, or at least support terrorists. They also often point out that this is about as classic an example of bigotry as you’ll find. However, I haven’t seen any simply argue that it’s not offensive, so there! Or anything close to that.
On “The Man Who Pretended to Know Too Much”
I don't mean this as a defense of Kaufmann, but Leiter's criticisms are almost universally exaggerated at best and completely unfair at worst. And while Anglo-American interpretations of Nietzsche, largely from within the analytict tradition, certainly dominate the literature now, that's as much because they dominate the literature period. Leiter's Nietzsche is a naturalist, obsessed with and dominated by contemporary scientist. This is convenient, coming from a bunch of philosophers in a naturalist-dominated philosophical tradition. Not saying that Nietzsche didn't have a naturalist streak, just that the history of Nietzsche scholarship is the history of people seeing what they want to see in Nieztsche, making it difficult not to be skeptical of this sort of convenience.
Also, it's clear Steorts has little knowledge of Schopenhauer (who played a big role in making Europeans pay attention to Eastern thought in the 19th century), in addition to Nietzsche. Though the Buddhist nonsense means he must have at least read about Parkes.
Also, whatever the scholarly worth of Kaufmann's translations, they remain the most fun to read. Oh, and I loved his intro to Buber as well.
On “Abortion, slavery & personhood”
You know, of course, that in the case of abortion, both parties, to the extent that a non-conscious bundle of semi-organized cells can be called a party, have their fists on the other's face, rendering the libertarian maxim useless. Of course, if we were to run with it, then your point about women already having made a choice would be easily dismissed (as it is on virtually any other grounds concerning will, freedom, or choice, to say nothing of practical realities -- does using birth control make the pregnancy resulting from failure different from those resulting from unprotected sex, morally?), because my choosing to step in front of you doesn't give you any more right to put your fist to my chin than you choosing to walk up to me does.
It's clear, then, that you are eliding certain complexities of the situation to score rhetorical points on top of your only non-sophistical argument, namely the one that begins from the premise that the fetus is a human life, and that the right to life that comes with that classification trumps the woman's right to make choices about her own body. This premise itself assumes conclusions about the nature of human life and its relation to personhood, or at least whether rights accrue to humans or to persons, but even if we accept the premise as it stands, and the conclusion about rights that you draw from it, we're still left with all sorts of difficulties for your slavery analogy. Both parties serve as slaves for the other equally well in the analogical mapping (especially when we consider that the woman's life may be at stake as well), for example. What's more, the woman's slavery can be considered to far outlast that of the fetus. Or, approaching it from a different direction, the slave and the slave owner could both exist without each other, and in the slave's case at least (one could argue in the owner's as well), the separate life would be preferable. In the case of abortion, at least pre-viability, no such option exists for the fetus. It is more analogous, in this sense, to a parasite (perhaps acquired from choosing to eat known risky food, or choosing to swim in known risky waters) than to a slave. Of course, this analogy too omits too much to lead to anything but sophistical reasoning, but it is no worse in this regard than yours.
On “Anne Rice quits Christianity”
@Aaron, Lord Jim is one of my favorite books, but if you want nested narratives, you have to read Melmoth the Wanderer (which, strangely enough, I just mentioned on Jason K's other blog, in a completely different context). In that book, there are narratives within narratives within narratives within narratives, and often the same narrative within a narrative within a narrative will have, over time, several nested narratives. At times, you have to stop and think to yourself, "OK, who's telling which of these stories right now?"
On “The Idiocy of Rural Food”
@Will, Ph? as a distinct dish is only about a century old, and is more similar to what Jason calls "cuisine bourgeoise" than to real Vietnamese peasant food, which was mostly just rice with occasional bits of meet or vegetable.
From what I can tell, main difference between east Asian or Pacific culture and French culture, with respect to Jason's points, is that rice replaces bread. There are other somewhat more subtle differences, in some areas, having to do with tribal cultures and the effects they have on the availability of food (those in hunter-gatherer societies tend to have hunted stuff and gathered stuff, e.g.), but for the most part, we don't eat hunter-gatherer dishes, because "hunter gatherer dishes" is borderline nonsensical.
At least, this is what I gather from the couple people I know who are historians of the far East.
On “Ask a Simple Question”
@Zach, you're aware of the potential solutions the actors involved are and are not discussing? You must have some serious connections.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.