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Friday, November 29, 2013

Massimo's Picks


* Two new books on the science and philosophy of trolleology.





* Wall Street just isn't worth it.

* Viral journalism and the Valley of Ambiguity.


  1. Re Novella's list, for comparison here's Irving Langmuir's list:
    Claims of great accuracy.
    Fantastic theories contrary to experience.

  2. Per the Harris piece, the biggest problem with utilitarianism is that none of us are omniscient. We have no way of knowing how many people an action of ours will benefit. Plus, we really can't step into the "view from nowhere" enough to know if an action of ours is even a benefit as much as we think it is.

    The trolley problem, per the NYT piece, illustrates that. What if, per the old discussion on abortion, the "one," or one of the "five," is Hitler or Stalin? Or, their father? Or great-grandmother?

    1. I had the very same thought when considering the Singer podcast (which I didn't listen to yet). In fiction Consequentialism often seems to have the obvious ethical answer - of course you can torture the terrorist to find the bomb/the child/... because for the reader (and the author) the facts and consequences are clear cut. In RL, you mostly don't even know whether the guy in the chair committed the crime...

      Actively harming others aside, I wonder whether in many (fictional or real) cases Virtue Ethics or Consequentialism would arrive at different actions at all. Wrath of Khan vs. Into Darkness illustrates the point - Spock and Kirk act the same way coming from different ethical directions (Spock C, Kirk VE).

    2. Good point on Singer. I, then, tie this back to Harris on scientism. Another issue I have with it is that it seems to consider members of H. sapiens as Vulcan-like automatons. The NYT piece pointed out male-female differences on the trolley as one obvious counterexample.

      It's also funny that the least scientific social science, economics, had the most scientism-like presentation of, and understanding of, its own self until the one actually scientific wing of economics, behavioral economics, upset the applecart by showing how emotion-driving H. economicus actually is.

      That all said, I do give Singer credit for being unflinching in following out the conclusions of his own thought processes.

    3. I do have to defend economics here - you are talking about Micro (although Homo Oeconomicus never made sense to me even in University a long time ago). Macro, for the most part, does not fall into this trap. Good post on Wonkblog last week related to that: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/30/colleges-are-teaching-economics-backwards/

