A round of assorted items collected on the web the past few days.
Here’s that item about what universities are for, that I couldn’t find the other day.
The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, 8 May 2024: No One Knows What Universities Are For, subtitled “Bureaucratic bloat has siphoned power away from instructors and researchers.”
Busy with estate matters today. It’s not easy being an executor. So many things to take care of. People who do not respond to your emails. One pic for today, almost full-sized, of books he left behind.
This month I’m working my way through the last ‘big’ Steven Pinker book I’ve never read all the way through — The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, published in 2002. It concerns the existence of an evolutionarily-derived human nature, as opposed to the naive idea, long-held, that the mind is ‘blank’ upon birth and only shaped by experience and education. Just this afternoon I read Chapter 13, “Out of Our Depths,” which deals with the perils of the “intuitive” thinking built into that human nature, which formed to prioritize survival in an environment humans haven’t lived in for millennia. This passage, on pp 235-6, echoes the appeals to education I’ve noted in a couple recent posts. (As well as the distinction between the intuitive and the thoughtful, both in morality and in decision-making, that runs through several recent books.)
The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. Continue reading
More today about science, belief, and epistemology. My favorite topics.
Salon, Rae Hodge, 6 May 2024: Why restoring trust in science starts with art, history and education, subtitled “Partisan furor and COVID-19 highlighted a deadly distrust in science. But a leading scientist sees a path forward”
I think I mentioned this book before. It’s a compilation of rough summaries of twelve general topics, from American Studies to World History, with literature, music, philosophy, religion, science, and others in between, written for people who worry that their general education has been lacking in one area or another. As I always have. I bought the book years ago — it’s copyright 1987! It’s one of those books you glance through from time to time. This past February, I read the 36 page section on philosophy, and took notes.
The book doesn’t pretend to be a set of academic overviews; it’s very biased toward the popular ‘greatest hits’ of each subject, i.e. what ordinary people think of when thinking about those subjects. And the tone is a bit wise-acre, even snarky.
The first section identifies the five major areas of philosophy.
Here’s yet another term to add to the mix of ranges from conservative to liberal, traditional to progressive, tribal to global. Are these all more or less analogous ends of more or less analogous polarities? Or is there something new here? I’m not sure.
NY Times, Steven Hahn, 4 May 2024: The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism [gift link]
The writer just published Illiberal America: A History in March.
I’ll post these without explanation, for now.
Today’s reading is a guest essay in today’s NY Times by Jen Silverman, playwright and author.
NY Times, Jen Silverman, 28 Apr 2024: Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable
The writer discovers a social media account “dedicated to collecting angry reader reviews,” including those of works long regarded as classics. Continue reading
Today’s reading is from Steven Pinker, reflecting in 2002 on the racial prejudice and eugenics policies of the early twentieth century, and how much progress some of us have made since then.
We have come a long way. Though [such attitudes] continue to thrive in much of the world and in parts of our society, they have been driven out of mainstream intellectual life in Western democracies. Today no respectable public figure in the United States, Britain, or Western Europe can casually insult women or sling around invidious stereotypes of other races or ethnic groups. Educated people try to be conscious of their hidden prejudices and to measure them against the facts and against the sensibilities of others. In public life we try to judge people as individuals, not as specimens of a sex or ethnic group. We try to distinguish might from right and our parochial tastes from objective merit, and therefore respect cultures that are different or poorer than ours. We realize that no mandarin is wise enough to be entrusted with directing the evolution of the species, and that it is wrong in any case for the government to interfere with such a personal decision as having a child. The very idea that the members of an ethnic group should be persecuted because of their biology fills us with revulsion.
Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 1 May 2024: Heritage Foundation’s Snarky and Revealing Defense of Project 2025
