Category: Best Read

I’m in a state of flux right now. It really irking me.

Julian Sanchez Wins for All Time…

I bow before my master:

Grasping Reality With Our Gelatinous Meatsacks: Will Wilkinson is a little snarky about it, but basically right: Freddie DeBoer’s post on naturalism and the skeptical conclusions that follow from it is fuzzy philosophy. (The Sam Harris TED talk he’s riffing on is worse, but that’s another story.)  Regular readers will recognize this as one of my minor obsessions, an instance of theorizing “in the shadow of God.” I’ve applied the phrase in the past to describe worries that a naturalistic worldview—lacking space for deities or radically autonomous immaterial selves—creates all sorts of dire problems for morality or meaning. In most cases, I argue, the apparent problem actually stems from some hand-me-down conceptual furniture left over from the theological worldview.  And usually the way to untangle the knot is to make a Euthyphro move.  That is, you might worry that morality is in trouble without God until you grok that morality with God isn’t in any better shape: The deity turns out to be a black box that rather looks like it might do some heavy lifting on a tough philosophical problem, but on closer inspection it turns out not to make any difference…

via Julian Sanchez Wins for All Time… – Grasping Reality with Our Minions, Our Machines, and Our Mental Powers.

Loved reading this, finish the whole thing at the linked site. The comments at Overcoming Bias are really topnotch!!!!!

Praise Polymaths
By Robin Hanson · February 12, 2010 9:15 am · Discuss · « Prev · Next »
Once upon a time folks who traveled far were treated with suspicion. Sure if you were rich and traveled like the rich you weren’t more suspicious than other rich. But those who traveled more than their class were suspected, correctly on average, of being less loyal to their neighbors.
Today travel is mostly celebrated; people love to talk about their trips and admire the well-traveled, even beyond the wealth it signals. But travel today doesn’t much threaten loyalty – intellectual contact with locals is limited, and usually selected to be like-minded. Ooh look, another pretty building. True intellectual travel, where you actually take the time to see things from different perspectives, is rare, more valuable, and yet elicits more suspicion than admiration.
You see, our beliefs are severely distorted by our culture and training, and intellectual travel remains our only remotely reliable remedy. We all know that we would have been inclined toward different beliefs had we been raised in different cultures or disciplines. We see consistent differences between folks trained in West vs. East, science vs. humanities, economics vs. sociology, and in different schools of thought of most any discipline. We like to think that we correct for this, but when we realize how hard that is, we throw up our hands saying “what ya gonna do?”
via Overcoming Bias : Praise Polymaths.