Philosophy events next week

Wednesday, March 31

3-4 p.m. — Panel Presentation. The topic of this event is Ethics in the Future. The speakers are:

Dr. Paul Neiman “Defining Refugeehood in a Changing World”
Dr. Rachel Robison-Greene “Emerging Technology and Conceptual Shift”

This event will be held via Zoom. You can register here: https://weber.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUkcuGgrzouG9Lxktw8aBekx-D9oq3lOhXJ

Thursday, April 1

6:00-7:30 p.m. — Ethics Slam! The topic is Radical Solutions to Environmental Problems.

This event will be held via Zoom. You can register here: https://weber.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwvf-qsqz8jHtZaFhaDJUgX54xn2YSUJHox

Discussion: do you want to go to grad school in philosophy?

Huenemann will be doing his utmost to persuade you the answer is “no”: Thursday, March 11th, 4:30 pm.

Zoom link:

Topic: Grad school in philosophy
Time: Mar 11, 2021 04:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://usu-edu.zoom.us/j/84910453634?pwd=YUpBMXpobUpnYzlpUzluTGo1N2hRQT09

Meeting ID: 849 1045 3634
Passcode: 583910

Philosophy Club Talk by Dr. Megan Fritts, “Gamified Pedagogy and The Crowd: Can Easy Learning Erase the Individual?”

We hope that you’ll join us on Thursday, March 18th at 4:30 p.m. on Zoom for a USU Philosophy Club Talk by our Visiting Assistant Professor, Dr. Megan Fritts. Zoom Link and Talk Description Below.

https://usu-edu.zoom.us/j/85881794026?pwd=Q3JoWkx4NHZPWXRZcnFDa2N1bFdrQT09

“In Thi Nguyen’s paper “How Twitter Gamifies Communication” (forthcoming), he argues that the algorithmic features of the social networking site Twitter make the site popular and addictive largely because it “gamifies” how we communicate with one another. This gamification occurs by providing users with artificial incentives and goals (e.g. likes and retweets), resulting in “value clarity”—namely, unlikely in real life, in games we have clarity about what to value, because the game designers tells us what to value. Nguyen argues that the artificiality of this value-clarity poses a problem for how we communicate with others. The problem is that, when users accept the “seduction” of value-clarity, we trade our original, complex goals of discourse for different, simplistic ends.In this paper, I build on Nguyen’s critique, shifting the focus to “gamified” pedagogy, and argue that his critique is similar to one offered by Kierkegaard against “the crowd” in the work The Point of View. Specifically, I argue that Kierkegaard’s description of crowds as “untruth” is similar to Nguyen’s description of gamification. Individual values, for both Kierkegaard and Nguyen, are too opaque and complex to be utilized by a collective. “Crowds”, therefore, involve group acceptance of a simplistic set of values that no individual in the group originally held. For both thinkers, accepting a simplified set of values can be dangerous, though they disagree on what this danger consists in. I further argue that this should make us wary of efforts to “gamify” pedagogy, despite the appeal of doing so.”