USUPhilosophy

Gosh.

Jonah Lehrer has an article in a recent New Yorker about what can be called “the decline effect.” (I would link to the article, but it’s available by subscription only, and the available abstract is worthless.) Anyway, here’s the idea. Scientists from across the spectrum are finding that many of the correlations they’ve discovered seem to be “wearing off” over time. But why should this be? Lehrer suggests that it’s a matter of making big news over careful but flukey studies. So imagine this: scientists are always running all kinds of experiments and studies in many directions. Just as a matter of chance, some of them once in a while will “luck out” and examine a population which shows an especially strong correlation. Big news! Publication in Nature! Goes into textbooks! New nugget of knowledge! Then, as scientists try to replicate the study, they find weaker and weaker correlations. Hmm. The “decline effect” is especially troublesome in pharmaceutical research, where we’re finding that some of the fancy new drugs, despite initial appearances, aren’t all that more effective than drugs being used in the 50s.

But it’s hard to get these facts known, since journals are rarely interested in articles which report that scientists were unable to find some strong correlation. Somebody needs to go back and read some Popper, I think.

Then here are some FAQs for you, courtesy of Michael Huemer at UC-Boulder. I think most of what Huemer says is true, though the picture he paints is a bit too bleak. What he leaves out is just how much fun it is to go to grad school in philosophy (at least, if you’re a philosophy geek): all of the classes, the late-night conversations, the stories you build up about goofy, smart professors and the trials they put you through, etc. Also, it’s a fact that there’s no better job in the world than helping students think through philosophical problems. (I am of course setting aside jobs requiring the operation of minisubs by remote control.)

I never really get the chance to teach Rawls in my classes, since I’m usually teaching either history or metaphysics and epistemology. But if I did, I think I would assign students to create Rawls’ version of the Monopoly board game.

I think you don’t have to change the game at all to get Nozick’s view of economic justice. Each player has the freedom to invest or not invest, and so individuals have maximal economic freedom. But Rawls suggests that, if everyone starts in an equal position, the outcomes will be just only if the players agree to a difference principle: there can be a change in the economic distribution only if the change makes the worst-off player better off (roughly). So how would the Monopoly game rules change? One idea would be to tax every transaction so that some amount goes to the poorest player. There probably are other more creative changes that could work too.

When I express this idea to folks, they complain, “But then no one would ever win!” Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Is an economic system just if it allows there to be losers? Especially: losers who lose due to the luck of the dice, and luck of the draw?

Peter Railton in the NYT:

So, are the optimistic Darwinians wrong, and impartial morality beyond the reach of those monkeys we call humans? Does thoroughly logical evolutionary thinking force us to the conclusion that our love, loyalty, commitment, empathy, and concern for justice and fairness are always at bottom a mixture of selfish opportunism and us-ish clannishness? Indeed, is it only a sign of the effectiveness of the moral camouflage that we ourselves are so often taken in by it?