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| Made at: https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/ |
A while back I started collecting my random thoughts and putting them on my blog. There have been three parts so far (see here, here, and here). And you are now reading Part 4! Enjoy!
59. A lot of the reason philosophers think people (especially college students) are moral relativists has more to do with philosophers’ level of analysis than anything else. Philosophers look for the deeper structures of morality, structures taken for granted by and invisible to most regular people, who notice differences only against a background of similarities. Pretty much everyone agrees that murder and theft are wrong, but many people disagree about what exactly counts as murder and theft. Ordinary people focus on the relatively small disagreements in definition against a shared background of deeper agreement. Philosophers mistake this for moral relativism and regular people mistake this for a deeper disagreement than it really is.
60. I've been teaching Buddhist arguments against the self for many years and each time students seem to disagree with them more strongly than previous students did. I'm not sure if this means I'm doing a better or worse job teaching these arguments.
61. One difficult thing about teaching philosophy is that you generally don't start doing it until you've been learning about philosophy for a decade or so, and by then you are ipso facto going to be a very weird person trying to explain very weird stuff to mostly normal people.
62. One reason I take social science data based on surveys with a huge grain of salt is that when I fill out such surveys myself I am mostly guessing, going with a whim, or answering for the sake of feeling useful. I’m never sure I’m capable of giving the “real” answer, and I’m even less sure that anybody is capable of accurately reporting their own deeper thoughts or feelings on a scale of “mostly agree” to “mostly disagree.” Human beings are simply more complicated than that. And if human complexity can’t be measured on surveys, so much the worse for surveys.
63. Can Confucian or Aristotelian human flourishing be measured? And if flourishing can’t be measured, does that make it less real or worthy as a goal of human life?
64. Do psychologists measure desire satisfaction because that’s what they really think happiness is, or do they think happiness is desire satisfaction because it can be measured?
65. One reason I’m a philosopher and not a social scientist is that I find the question “What is happiness?” a lot more interesting than “What percentage of random people believe they are happy?”
66. There is no reason that “data-driven” should by itself necessarily be a good thing. We are drowning in data. Figuring out what any of it means is the hard and interesting part.
67. I think the end of Game of Thrones, the main Marvel movies, and the Skywalker-focused Star Wars movies could be a good thing for nerds after 2019, especially if creators have the courage to make genuinely new things and nerds are open-minded enough to give them a chance. Otherwise get ready for endless reboots and re-reboots of every Marvel movie ever made. Ugh. (There are also always going to be lots more different kinds of stories, settings, and characters in the written word, so I implore my fellow nerds to read novels and short stories).
68. A lot of this will also depend on whether fandom can exorcise itself of the sheer hate some part of it turns on itself (see especially a particularly nasty subset of Star Wars “fans”). The future of fandom depends on learning to love new things. Otherwise fandom will be reduced to mindless nostalgia guarded by small-minded gate-keepers.
69. I enjoy being a bit of an academic weirdo, using unpopular methods to work on an unpopular part of an unpopular sub-discipline. I’ve been lucky it has worked out so far (being an agreeable white man in a very white and male discipline filled with prickly people probably doesn’t hurt, either, and I always try to balance the outré with respectable citations). If the only path in academia were an R1 job doing respectable work in a respectable field, I wouldn’t be here. Few, however, are as lucky as I have been. I’d like to see more paths for academic weirdos.
70. I’m going to keep talking about philosophy as if it’s a cross-cultural discipline until it is.
71. I’ve always found the phrase “strong women” to be odd, because I’ve never known any other kind.
72. Now that the result of a literal horse race has been blamed on "political correctness" can we admit that the phrase "political correctness" doesn't really mean anything?
73. Is US Presidential politics really the place to look for things like grassroots systemic change, a complete overhaul of our society’s institutions, the overthrowing of capitalism, etc.? I’m not entirely sure where to look for such things, but it’s odd to me that anyone would expect such changes to be top-down.
74. Authenticity is not always a good thing.
75. The internet seems to encourage a performative hyper-authenticity that is ironically quite inauthentic; we are pretending to be people we don’t really want to be.
76. My concern with phrases like “political correctness,” “SJWs,” and “identity politics” isn’t with what these phrases mean, because they don’t really mean anything if you examine them for more than two seconds. My concern is the effect these phrases have on discourse: who is the focus of our discourse, whose concerns and points of view are taken seriously, whose concerns and points of view are ignored or downplayed, who is given cognitive and political authority, whose stories are told, whose stories are heard.
77. Two things can explain a lot about contemporary American politics: the selective fetishization of personal freedom as well as an unreasonable fear of people perceived as other.
78. Reading Stephen King’s Misery during the week in which hundreds of thousands of “fans” of HBO’s Game of Thrones signed a petition to have the last season rewritten seems … appropriate.
79. Men, white people, straight people, cis people… anybody in any power-dominant social position: when someone from a marginalized group tells you about their experience, try to not do the things we have been trained to do: “That can’t really be your experience. It can’t be that bad. You’re over-reacting. You must be overlooking something. I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way. Let me tell you what the real problem is.” If we can re-train ourselves to stop doing these things (and this is something I personally struggle with daily), we just might learn something valuable. It might make our lives and the lives of our fellow human beings a lot better.
80. The day you become an adult is the day you realize that adults are also only guessing and nobody really knows what they’re doing.
60. I've been teaching Buddhist arguments against the self for many years and each time students seem to disagree with them more strongly than previous students did. I'm not sure if this means I'm doing a better or worse job teaching these arguments.
61. One difficult thing about teaching philosophy is that you generally don't start doing it until you've been learning about philosophy for a decade or so, and by then you are ipso facto going to be a very weird person trying to explain very weird stuff to mostly normal people.
62. One reason I take social science data based on surveys with a huge grain of salt is that when I fill out such surveys myself I am mostly guessing, going with a whim, or answering for the sake of feeling useful. I’m never sure I’m capable of giving the “real” answer, and I’m even less sure that anybody is capable of accurately reporting their own deeper thoughts or feelings on a scale of “mostly agree” to “mostly disagree.” Human beings are simply more complicated than that. And if human complexity can’t be measured on surveys, so much the worse for surveys.
63. Can Confucian or Aristotelian human flourishing be measured? And if flourishing can’t be measured, does that make it less real or worthy as a goal of human life?
64. Do psychologists measure desire satisfaction because that’s what they really think happiness is, or do they think happiness is desire satisfaction because it can be measured?
65. One reason I’m a philosopher and not a social scientist is that I find the question “What is happiness?” a lot more interesting than “What percentage of random people believe they are happy?”
66. There is no reason that “data-driven” should by itself necessarily be a good thing. We are drowning in data. Figuring out what any of it means is the hard and interesting part.
67. I think the end of Game of Thrones, the main Marvel movies, and the Skywalker-focused Star Wars movies could be a good thing for nerds after 2019, especially if creators have the courage to make genuinely new things and nerds are open-minded enough to give them a chance. Otherwise get ready for endless reboots and re-reboots of every Marvel movie ever made. Ugh. (There are also always going to be lots more different kinds of stories, settings, and characters in the written word, so I implore my fellow nerds to read novels and short stories).
68. A lot of this will also depend on whether fandom can exorcise itself of the sheer hate some part of it turns on itself (see especially a particularly nasty subset of Star Wars “fans”). The future of fandom depends on learning to love new things. Otherwise fandom will be reduced to mindless nostalgia guarded by small-minded gate-keepers.
69. I enjoy being a bit of an academic weirdo, using unpopular methods to work on an unpopular part of an unpopular sub-discipline. I’ve been lucky it has worked out so far (being an agreeable white man in a very white and male discipline filled with prickly people probably doesn’t hurt, either, and I always try to balance the outré with respectable citations). If the only path in academia were an R1 job doing respectable work in a respectable field, I wouldn’t be here. Few, however, are as lucky as I have been. I’d like to see more paths for academic weirdos.
70. I’m going to keep talking about philosophy as if it’s a cross-cultural discipline until it is.
71. I’ve always found the phrase “strong women” to be odd, because I’ve never known any other kind.
72. Now that the result of a literal horse race has been blamed on "political correctness" can we admit that the phrase "political correctness" doesn't really mean anything?
73. Is US Presidential politics really the place to look for things like grassroots systemic change, a complete overhaul of our society’s institutions, the overthrowing of capitalism, etc.? I’m not entirely sure where to look for such things, but it’s odd to me that anyone would expect such changes to be top-down.
74. Authenticity is not always a good thing.
75. The internet seems to encourage a performative hyper-authenticity that is ironically quite inauthentic; we are pretending to be people we don’t really want to be.
76. My concern with phrases like “political correctness,” “SJWs,” and “identity politics” isn’t with what these phrases mean, because they don’t really mean anything if you examine them for more than two seconds. My concern is the effect these phrases have on discourse: who is the focus of our discourse, whose concerns and points of view are taken seriously, whose concerns and points of view are ignored or downplayed, who is given cognitive and political authority, whose stories are told, whose stories are heard.
77. Two things can explain a lot about contemporary American politics: the selective fetishization of personal freedom as well as an unreasonable fear of people perceived as other.
78. Reading Stephen King’s Misery during the week in which hundreds of thousands of “fans” of HBO’s Game of Thrones signed a petition to have the last season rewritten seems … appropriate.
79. Men, white people, straight people, cis people… anybody in any power-dominant social position: when someone from a marginalized group tells you about their experience, try to not do the things we have been trained to do: “That can’t really be your experience. It can’t be that bad. You’re over-reacting. You must be overlooking something. I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way. Let me tell you what the real problem is.” If we can re-train ourselves to stop doing these things (and this is something I personally struggle with daily), we just might learn something valuable. It might make our lives and the lives of our fellow human beings a lot better.
80. The day you become an adult is the day you realize that adults are also only guessing and nobody really knows what they’re doing.
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