iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 06/09/2023

I suspect I think about the Roman Empire more than your average bear does, yet I also think about cheese vastly more often than I do about Visigoths and what-not.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 05/09/2023

I find the idea that epistemic hedging is somehow _never_ in order just baffling. That we do it too much in analytic philosophy seems a correct observation, but this sort of “off with their heads!” one-size-fits-all rule is simply unjustifiable.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 05/09/2023

I need something like both hedges to convey what seems to me what I want to say: he’s in the gray zone for that supreme category of greats, and if swords were to be crossed on the matter, I’d be offering my blade on the “yes he is” side.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 05/09/2023

Without the “one of the” hedge, it’s just false — I love Cavell but he isn’t even arguably _the_ greatest in that category. And indeed without the “arguably”, I feel like I am too brashly overstating matters, to say he simply _is_ one of the greatest.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 05/09/2023

To see why you really need access to both, consider: “Cavell is arguably one of the greatest American philosophers of the last century.” That seems to me a good & true thing to say. But take away either hedge, and it’s problematic.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 05/09/2023

“arguably” seems to me a perfectly serviceable workaday tool of a word. Nothing fancy but gets the job done economically. But anyway if it’s a problem, then _it_ is the problem, not some violation of a mythical “one hedge only” rule.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 04/09/2023

Well that’s certainly true and we could trade examples from great philosophers all day! But fwiw I just don’t see anything stylistically amiss in the example you quoted. Your stipulation seems to me like saying, like, “one adjective per noun phrase only”or some other under-motivated “rule” of style.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 04/09/2023

I disagree. You are allowed in any such assertions, both one semantic/metaphysical hedge, and one epistemic one. The quoted text is thus permissible.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 03/09/2023

Happy Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone Day, to all who celebrate.

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Reposted by Jonathan Weinberg

A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 03/09/2023

I wrote about a murder in the state where "'woke' goes to die," the people who want to be held innocent of making such things inevitable while insisting we persuade them to stop; about rules of engagement w/supremacists and what it means to find "common ground." armoxon.substack.com/p/the-finger...

armoxon.substack.com

The Finger-Taker's Son

Rules of engagement, and what it means to find "common ground" with supremacists.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 27/08/2023

This seems a great hypothesis, definitely worth some empirical attention!

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 27/08/2023

Perhaps relatedly I was just now teaching my 10yo son some logic and he asked if in addition to true and false, one could have the truth value “bonk!”

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 27/08/2023

I don’t know if that sort of work has been done! there’s a lot of stuff on manipulating judgments of validity but they are mostly content effects, that I know of.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 27/08/2023

Then we’ll treat it as an empirical question! I’ll pound the table and if it persuades you, we’ll know it counts as an aggressive hand gesture for such purposes.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 27/08/2023

Is this distinct from, or a variant of, table thumping?

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 25/08/2023

Is anyone measuring anything like the probability of the various candidates conditional on Trump’s being somehow out of the race?

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 24/08/2023

We already have a Presidio, so it’s like we are halfway there.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 22/08/2023

It’s that last prepositional phrase there that brings it all together.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 22/08/2023

isn’t the trick to think of two other folks whose work you can recommend alongside your own, as a beard?

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Reposted by Jonathan Weinberg

Brandon Polite @politephilosopher.bsky.social · 22/08/2023

Check out my interview with Peg Brand Weiser about Camus's The Plague: Philosophical Perspectives (2023), which she edited for OUP. We discuss pandemics, fighting fascism, modern death, heroism, and solidarity. youtu.be/V0FI7AgiZCE

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 21/08/2023

I’m fairly confident that that is not true of the Ryan Gosling character in the recent flick?

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 19/08/2023

I don’t know that the _phenomenon_ is too complicated, but trying to catch it all in one complicated case probably is. Armchair methods have to do that, bc you have to generate a clear enough intuition one way or the other. but experimental methods can be sneakier.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 18/08/2023

fwiw I bet there are tools in the experimental pragmatics literature that could be put to use here? Would love to see some reaction time work in this area of epistemology!

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 18/08/2023

I’m sorry if I have lost the thread here, but I think you were the one who put things in terms of K ascription? anyhow I’m definitely not wedded to any (or all) of the many variant probes for that. In general you’d want to run such a study w several different probes & hope for consilience.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 18/08/2023

like, we don’t have a lamppost issue if we get better at discerning our keys in the murk and shadow of the moonlight?

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 18/08/2023

well, in general we philosophers need to get savvier about how to bring intuitive evidence to bear on our theories.Our training typically has us look for weird cases that exactly pull different theories apart. But such cases are often going to be really noisy.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 17/08/2023

Sorry, was just going off the first post! I do think tho you are better off finding a simple manipulation to test, than making complicated scenarios; it can be too hard to get subjects to understand what you’re after, and to tell whether they have indeed done so.

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 17/08/2023

Those unworn baby shoes will have to step aside:

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 17/08/2023

Why not just test the more direct manipulation that you hypothesize: that asking “how do you know?” in and of itself lowers ascription rates?

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 14/08/2023

Well you _say_ you’re not a monster but… that’s a lot of books! ;-)

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 14/08/2023

Are y’all using all those in just one undergrad seminar??

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 12/08/2023

I mean, I don’t know who that is, but I am inferring from your tone there that I should be able to easily google him up?

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 12/08/2023

Do we know who this Laquer fellow was?

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 11/08/2023

@cstross.bsky.social A good friend of mine lived less than 200 yards from Arndale Centre before your damn elves blew it to hell, curse you, sir!

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 11/08/2023

posts of yours hits the crucial point: we don’t _generally_ feel that we should back off from our fiction-directed emotional responses merely bc they are fictions; contrasted w emotional responses to real inanimate objects, which we do immediately find a bit silly upon a moment’s reflection. 2/2

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Jonathan Weinberg @jonathanweinberg.bsky.social · 11/08/2023

It surely does in lots of ways. E.g., in a Charlie Stross novel, a giant eldritch explosion destroyed the exact neighborhood in Leeds where a friend of mine lived — surely I would have reacted differently had I thought i was reading a true-to-fact account of such events. But I think some earlier 1/2

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Reposted by Jonathan Weinberg

David Shiffman, Ph.D. 🦈 @whysharksmatter.bsky.social · 11/08/2023

When you see a peer-reviewed scientific journal article, it often says “pay $35 to read this.” Did you know that $0 of that goes to the authors of the article? Just email us and we’ll be happy to send you a copy for free. We’re usually thrilled that anyone cares. 🧪🦑🦈

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Reposted by Jonathan Weinberg

Daniel Drezner @dandrezner.bsky.social · 11/08/2023

Conservative political correctness is injecting ideology into campus hirings and firings across the country. It’s going to eviscerate public higher ed in multiple states. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/conser…

danieldrezner.substack.com

Conservative Political Correctness Is Running Amok on Campus

A brief glimpse at goings-on in Texas and Florida

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